Dancing with our Endogenous Mood

“Don’t be pushed around by the fears in your mind. Be led by the dreams in your heart.”

_Roy T Bennett

Dance can change the way we perceive and experience life. In Biodanza, the Vital Unconscious represents the intelligence of the living body. One of the ways this deep intelligence manifests is through what Rolando Toro calls our endogenous mood. This is more than just feeling any particular emotion but rather is something more basic. It is something ever present, deep, autonomous, and unconscious. Despite fleeting emotions that may come and go our endogenous mood is continuously the way in which our living body is orientating us towards the world.

Psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has explored this underlying dimension of experience, which psychologists call affect. Affect is present throughout our lives, whether or not we are experiencing a recognisable emotion and whether or not we are consciously aware of it. It influences how we perceive the world. Studies in her lab show that what we see, hear and feel is not simply received by the senses, but is shaped by the state of our body. Our endogenous mood therefore becomes part of the lens through which life is experienced.

This is one of the many reasons dance can be so transformative. If the deepest sources of our mood are largely unconscious, we cannot simply think our way into changing them. Dance offers another pathway through the body. In Biodanza, carefully selected music, poetic invitations, and natural movement create positive ecofactors that awaken joy, play, vitality and pleasure. These life affirming experiences can influence this underlying state. We are not trying to control the body or manufacture any particular emotion. Instead we create the conditions in which movement can arise from within. The vivencia, experience, is the incubator in which life is nurtured and affirmed through dance.

_Christos Daskalakos

Dancing the Moment that Moves

“Life is like a river, it keeps on flowing, ever-changing.”

_Buddha

Dance offers us different ways of organising our experience. We are so used to the way we live that we never question how this impacts our understanding and meaning of life. For example, we experience time as linear, and life as a sequence of self-contained events. In this paradigm, the past becomes the events that have happened, the present is what is happening, and the future what will happen. Instead, what if we encounter the ancient Greek god, Kairos and start seeing life as continuous process of becoming?

The gurus advise us to live in the present, which is often mistaken for a point between past and future. Instead, what if we saw it more as transition through which the past becomes something new? Dance offers us a way to experience this liberation from the shackles of time! Each of our movements creates the conditions and possibilities from which the next movement can emerge. We don’t find meaning contained in any one movement waiting to be interpreted. Instead meaning comes from continuous movement where what came before gives this moment meaning, and at the same time what comes after may transform what the moment meant.

Life is experienced as dynamic, ever changing, in constant transformation. We can free ourselves from the debilitating emotions of guilt, regret, knowing that in the flow there is never a finished moment, a “present”, but continuous experience. Dance is a lived demonstration of this. A movement is never entirely finished, because it changes our position, our sensation, and exposes the possibilities available for what can come next. The freedom that comes from improvisation in dance comes from the freedom to stop holding onto any one movement but to immerse ourselves in the movement itself. In Biodanza this is the Vivencia of emergence and becoming. We don’t stay fixated on our identity or life as it is, but surrender completely to the dance that is the flow of life itself.

_Christos Daskalakos

Dances of Plenitude

“He who cannot dance will say, the drum is bad.”

_Ashanti Proverb

Often we approach personal development and other life challenges as if we need to acquire something from outside of us to change. Biodanza flips this around and proposes that everything we ever need is already inside of us and that our dances become a way of recognition rather than acquisition. A powerful example of this is recognising our own power through the Dance of the Tiger.

The Vivencia creates a space in which we move beyond our habitual ways of being and encounter different possibilities in us. This includes stories of lack or judgements that prompt us to seek to change ourselves from the outside in. Creative dances open up the space in which we connect with new possibilities including the way we perceive ourselves.

Each Vivencia offers us an opportunity to experience and embody many more dimensions of ourselves. Dances of vitality can connect us with our own inner strength. Our capacity to give and receive love can become evident through dances of affective interaction with another and the group. In Biodanza our dances become more than just physical movement. Through embodying feeling they become the avenues through which our ever emerging identities expand beyond any limitations. The more we explore and expand our dances, the more emergent we become so that we stop seeing ourselves as a finished object but rather as a fluid, dynamic, and ever changing stream of life itself.

_Christos Daskalakos

SOCIAL DANCE

“The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.”

_Mata Hari

Biodanza is different from many other social interactions in this world. Often this difference exists as a gap between what we are experiencing inside and who we show to the world. Sometimes by necessity this becomes a negative experience as who we present is determined by expectations, fear or being defensive. And sometimes quite innocently we are simply wanting to impress or project a particular persona.

Biodanza offers us a beautiful invitation. This is to enter the dance without any sense of performance or concerns about doing the right movements. The music, movement and intentions for each exercise or dance is carefully constructed to create conditions of affective trust in which we are free to let our guard down. In these dances we surrender any social roles and projections and meet each other in our naked humanity. Through the dances we start to discover a form of social dancing that is full of meaning and the vitality of life.

In this respect our dances in Biodanza are empowering. We encounter ourselves. We drop habits, expectations, fear, or looking good so that our experiences feel honest and liberating. In this sense Biodanza becomes the space where our dances become the open heart in which we meet each and value each other, and more importantly ourselves.

_Christos Daskalakos

INNER DANCE

“It takes an athlete to dance, but an artist to be a dancer.”

_Shanna LeFluer

So often we think of dance as movement of the body through space. However this external dance is mirrored by an inner dance. As our body moves externally so does something shift internally. The first we perceive through our kinetic sense which allows us to experience our movement and position in space. The second is closer to interoception where using internal sensations both physical and emotional we allow an inner landscape to unfold.

This lies at the core of Biodanza where our dances are not about presentation and performance but designed to awaken what we call “a Vivencia”. This is a lived experience through the body that includes the vitality of movement, the affective heart, our creative impulse, and our capacity to transcend all limitations and feel the fullest and most expanded version of ourselves.

This is all built into the structure of the class. Biodanza is not haphazard or random but based on a precise methodology that makes it become a technology for experiencing the ecstasy of life. The dances outside of us change the dances inside of us. Every Biodanza Vivencia becomes a fluid integration and harmony of these two dances, the visible dance of the body, and the invisible dance of what allows us to feel fully present and alive in the moment.

_Christos Daskalakos

When Music becomes Movement

“Music is the shorthand of emotion.”

_Leo Tolstoy

In Biodanza, music is not just background, nor is it included based only on aesthetic appreciation. It lies at the heart of our Vivencias and is one of the main technologies we use to bring the experience to life. Rhythm, for example, works in a remarkable way in the brain, activating motor areas involved in movement. This auditory-motor coupling and entrainment brings together music and movement, which in themselves are already powerful. Together they create dance, an ongoing conversation between mind, body, and heart.

Dance animates the body so that we bring to life and make visible what we are feeling, amplifying the expression of our identity. In Biodanza, the relationship between music, movement, and intention becomes central to the Vivencia. We are not merely moving to the music but rather, as Rolando Toro, creator of Biodanza, encourages us, we become the music.

Music engages a widely distributed network in our brain involving auditory, motor, reward, emotional, and predictive systems. Here lies the power of the Vivencia, where music becomes movement, movement becomes feeling, and feeling becomes a lived experience.

_Christos Daskalakos

The Dance between Us

“If a tree does not know how to dance, 

the wind will teach it.”

_African Proverb

Meaning when we dance in Biodanza doesn’t depend only on my own movements but emerges through relationship, whether we are dancing with another or dancing in the presence of the group. Each dance provides a language rich in communication, sometimes through touch but also distance. The quality of our movements and presence carry information about ourselves and about how we meet another.

A single note does not necessarily make music which usually emerges through the relationship of a series sounds and the intervals between them. In the same way a dance is more than one movement. Dance is created through a continuous conversation where each movement carries the one before it and opens possibilities for what might come next. As we respond to each other we create a shared experience in which the anticipation of is what to come and the pleasure that arises from the resolution and surprise from what emerges starts to give meaning to the dance.

We hold up a mirror for each other in the dance because the way in which we enter into relationship reflects something about how we meet life. As we become comfortable and build trust in the group we see that what once may have begun as distance can become intimacy. If there was any fear it can give way to vulnerability. When we create dances through relationship we find that if we change the way we dance with each other we may also begin to change the way in which we experience ourselves and the world. Biodanza may mean “dancing with life” but its not a rigid life but rather an ever changing and emerging and enriched life full of meaning.

_Christos Daskalakos