Dance Life First-Hand

“Live the present intensely and fully, do not let the past be a burden,

and let the future be an incentive.”

_Carlos Slim Helu

Biodanza privileges lived experience over conceptual understanding. Much of what we know about life comes from elsewhere, books, social media, and the experiences of others. While this knowledge may be useful there is a profound difference between understanding something intellectually and living it directly. When we engage with life through unity of mind, body and heart, we live life first-hand and then knowledge becomes more real and personal.

Biodanza offers us this opportunity through the Vivencia. Each session becomes a laboratory for life where we dance to experience directly in the moment. The Vivencia is a snippet of reality lived authentically and with intensity in the moment. The Vivencia is neither symbolic nor representational but a direct encounter with ourselves, others, and life.

Through dance we connect physically through the body, integrate emotion and movement, while focus of mind brings intention. This is direct experience not analysing life from a distance. These lived experiences are beyond concepts – they are the lived moments in which we come to know joy and connection. Meaning is not the ideas of philosophers but a knowing that becomes part of our lives.

_Christos Daskalakos

the E X P A N D I N G dance

“Movement is life. Life is a process.

Improve the quality of the process

and you improve the quality of life itself.”

_Moshe Feldenkrais

The movements available to our bodies often relate to the possibilities available to our lives. How we move and interact in the world shapes our experiences, including our sense of self, our self-image, and identity. We all develop our own unique and familiar ways of moving, which are patterns we are hardly aware of, but which shape our individual picture of the world. This range of movements reflects the range of our lived experience.

One of the most powerful and rewarding invitations of Biodanza is to quietly extend this range with positive reinforcement of accessing of our potential for joy and meaningful connection to life. Sometimes this is done by letting go of control where we allow the body to discover movements that we could never have planned. And sometimes the invitation is to intensify our movements, not necessarily by always making them bigger but by infusing them with vitality, presence, and feeling.

As the movement vocabulary expands our dances so does our capacity to experience life. Biodanza invites us to discover new ways of feeling, relating, and expressing ourselves. Through our dances we have the embodied experience of realising that every new movement brings with it a new possibility for becoming. Identity in Biodanza is not static it is an ever-evolving integration of our physical, emotional, and cognitive experiences – the integration of mind, body, and soul.

_Christos Daskalakos

Dancing to INHABIT the body

“We do not have a body – we are our body.”

When we see our bodies as objects, something we possess rather than inhabit we lose touch with the reality that every emotion, memory, and experience is lived through our bodies. Our bodies are a sensing presence through which we live in constant relationship with ourselves, others, and the environment. Our bodies are not objects to be managed but the place where we experience life fully.

Through dance we begin to sense this wholeness when we realise that mind and body are really one. When we surrender completely to our dances the illusion we live with of separation between our mind and body dissolves. The movements of our bodies when we dance are not just physical but rather infused with emotion, feeling, and meaning. This stimulates our innate creativity, where, instead of being spectators of our lives we actively participate in shaping them.

The act of shaping doesn’t come from conscious action but rather from a willingness to surrender and fully inhabit our bodies. In Biodanza we work with the notion that identity is an embodied process, so that we are not simply living in a body – the ghost in a machine – but we are continually forming and creating a continual expression of who we are becoming. When we fully inhabit the body, Life inhabits us. In the Vivencia we get to experience this as joy, bliss and ecstasy when our dance moves beyond simply being an action or activity.

_Christos Daskalakos

The FREE BODY - structure without limitations

“Freedom is not the absence of structure. 

It is the absence of unnecessary limitation.”

Biodanza is not “free dance”. It has a clear methodology and theoretical model that participants to discover the freedom of being authentically themselves by encouraging movements that are not governed by habit or the need to perform. True freedom arises when our dances reach that place within the body where we release patterns of tension, inhibition and self-consciousness that quietly shape our lives.

The Free Body is not without structure or direction. Rather, it responds authentically to the present moment instead of being confined by habitual patterns and expectations. The Biodanza facilitator suggests, guides, and invites, not to dictate, but to encourage us to surrender into new experiences that become the path to expressing who we really are.

Our tendency to “doing what I want” is often driven by the Western ideal of individualism and the Ego. When we shift away from this paradigm we enter the vulnerability of not being in control. However as we explore new movements and experiences through dance, we find that the more we surrender and the less we hold on, the more we awaken something much deeper expressing an innate freedom that has always existing within us.

_Christos Daskalakos

The Listening Body - active participation of presence

“If you listen to your body when it whispers to you,

you won’t have to hear it scream.”

_Deborah Jane Sutton

Often we are quick to speak and perform. When we do this we lose the power and wisdom that can be found in “listening”. Underneath the constant chatter of our thoughts our bodies are always listening tuning into emotions, sensations, and the subtle currents of life that flow beneath consciousness. Dance has a beautiful way of helping us rediscover this innate capacity when we let go trying to control our dances and instead learn to sense into them.

Listening is not passive. It becomes an active participation with the present moment when we pay attention with our bodies to the music, the subtlety of our connections to our dance partners and the collective energy of the group. In Biodanza there is an additional voice through the enunciations of the facilitator who sets the intentions for a vivencia, an experience. Deep listening to all of these our dances transcend habitual patterns of movement so that our response opens us a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.

The Listening Body also teaches us to trust what we feel. Dance becomes an opportunity to connect with our own inner world through proprioception (our ability to sense our movements through space), and interoception (our ability to read our bodies’ inner messages). By setting aside all preconceptions to listen more deeply, we discover through our dances the inner wisdom of the body that extends beyond the limits of a thinking mind.

“You need to listen to your body because your body is listening to you”

_Phil McGraw

_Christos Daskalakos

The Creative Body – dancing beyond habit

“What you believe about the universe shapes 

what you think is possible in the universe.”

_River Higginbotham

Creativity is a fundamental expression of life itself. Through our dancing body we connect to and rediscover that creativity lies within the body in a place beyond all habitual patterns.

There are many faces of creativity. Sometimes it appears as a forging force, moving with strength, direction, and clear intention. This is the masculine/yang expression of creativity. At other times it emerges through surrender, shaping and forming in response to the moment, allowing movement to unfold naturally without needing to know where it will lead. This is the feminine/yin expression of creativity.

What unites these expressions is when we improvise in our dances. When we transcend all the limitations of movement allowing our dances to emerge spontaneously, movement becomes a conversation with the unknown. Tapping into the body’s intelligence these dances allow us to feel and think in a more expansive and divergent way, revealing possibilities, insights and ways of being that could never be reached through reason alone. Improvisation is not necessarily “making movements up” but rather the body’s capacity to respond authentically to the present moment.

In Biodanza language creativity is often described as the ability to innovate one’s existence. This links the dances of our creative body directly to everyday life. As we become more creative in our movement so we become more creative in how we relate, solve problems and shape our lives.

_Christos Daskalakos

THE PLAYFUL BODY - dancing into Joy

“The curious beauty about African music is that it uplifts

even as it tells a sad story.”

_Nelson Mandela

Joy is not something we think ourselves into nor is it something we reach outside of us to bring into our lives. Joy is something we awaken from inside. These feelings are directly linked to our level of participation in life which becomes possible when our vitality increases and we have more energy available for spontaneity, curiosity, and play. In these moments creativity awakens and life becomes less predictable and more engaging.

Dance is able to change the way we feel. This is very much dependant on the nature of the movement and the selection of movement. A carefully curated Biodanza Vivencia can lift our spirits and bring us into spontaneous encounters with joy. Nothing is planned and nothing is prescribed. The creative muse that lives in each of us simply emerges allowing us to release the things that sometimes obscure the path to joy and fun.

Playfulness is not childish but rather those instinctive moments in which we allow our movements to emerge spontaneously and without agenda or filters. To connect to the Playful Body we simple immerse ourselves in magical moments of creation that appear as dances full of vitality, creativity, and joy allowing us to experience the immediacy of being alive.

_Christos Daskalakos