IMAGICAL DANCES

 

“The dance is strong magic. The dance is a spirit.

It turns the body to liquid steel. It makes it vibrate like a guitar. 

The body can fly without wings. It can sing without voice. 

The dance is strong magic: The dance is life.”

— Pearl Primus

When last did you use your imagination to conjure up something magical?  So often in life we waste our capacity to dream by focusing in drama, fear and generally the negative.  How much more amazing would it be if we used our imagination to dream up some magic in our life?  It may seem difficult especially when we are surrounded by the media, friends and well-wishers who think they are looking after our best interest by drawing our attention to all that is going wrong around us.  Like the chorus in a Greek tragedy they form a chanting ring that has the unfortunate outcome of breaking the spirit. 

A universal principle that is commonly accepted nowadays is that what we focus on expands.  When we only focus on the drama we lose our sense of balance and perspective.  The stories of human kindness that speak to our resilient spirit are lost in the noise.  But it is hard to stop the voices around us and the voices in our head.  This is where dance steps in - excuse the pun.

Dance gives us the space to re-connect, re-integrate and be re-minded of the magic in life.  Magic, not so much about illusion and trickery but magic as in awe and wonder in the beauty and wonder that we easily overlook when the chorus is overshadowing our perspective and connection to life.  We need to distract the voices around us and quieten the voices in our head.  We do this by dropping into the body.  Not in a quiet contemplative way that only opens up for space for thought and feeling but in a dynamic and powerful way that provides a holistic experience - thinking, feeling AND action.  Through the dance we learn that instead of being the passive bystander in life we can move into action to create something alternative, something new, something magical.

These are our imagical dances.

 _Christos Daskalakos

Divine Mother Prayer Dance

HEART of the DANCER

Wednesday 21st July 2021

"Open your heart, it's beautiful inside."

Can anyone be a dancer?

Inspired by the song ‘Heart of the Dancer’ by Johnny Clegg & Juluka I wondered if it was a special person that becomes the dancer? Is there a heart of the dancer different and special from others? There is no doubt that once the music starts and we begin dancing there is a magic that emerges. It’s very few people that will not be moved by the music. For some, to dance comes naturally as if there is already an inbuilt system of dance. For others it is a challenge.

The challenges that prevent us from dancing are many. For some, it is the self-image we hold about the body – when negative, it’s something to hide, not display and celebrate. For others there are ideas of inadequacy – I am not creative enough, I don’t know how, etc. And for others it may be a disconnection from life that comes about through various challenges that lead us to withdraw.

The truth is that music, movement and dance are hardwired into our brain. These are early evolutionary systems that have served us for aeons. Maybe all it takes is to find our own heart, listen to the truth about our self instead of the stories we imagine or conjure up. Gently we move out of the way and let the heart speak through the gentleness of our breath. That is where movement began and will carry on regardless. Maybe we follow that breath with gentle
movements so the like a seed that emerges from the ground, our dance grows and flowers. And when in full bloom, we realise that everyone has the heart of a dancer.

DANCE without LIMITS

Wednesday 14th July 2021
    

“The shaman no longer looks for meaning in life, 

but brings meaning to every situation. 

The shaman stops looking for truth and instead 

brings truth to every encounter.”

—Alberto Villoldo, PhD

There are so many corners of life that get short-changed when it comes to our attention. The things we think are important take precedence and if that's not enough, the things other people think are important are positioned for our attention. Somewhere on the outskirts lies a whole world to be explored, appreciated and cherished. These far horizons usually belong to our heart. Maybe they are the things that give us joy, that make our heart sing and give meaning to the greater purpose of life.

Dance is a great trickster. It takes attention away from the everyday and shifts it into spaces of feeling and experiences that open up broader possibilities. Through the dance we can expand our boundaries. We can take away the limits of perception that keep us trapped in the mundane. In fact we can just do away with them outright. And then?

And then we enter into a direct relationship with life where we make decisions based on a greater scope of choices. We move from black and white to technicolour! When we have more information about ourselves, our feelings our thoughts we can then call the tune. Without limits is where we dance our happiness, our bliss and life without any restrictions.

Christos Daskalakos

REVERSE DANCE

Wednesday 7th July 2021

“It is not consciousness that determines life, 

but life that determines consciousness.”

_Karl Marx

Coming across this quote by Karl Marx was intriguing and although I don’t really resonate with a materialist view of consciousness it did make me think about the relationship between mind and body. Most people are comfortable with a top (mind) down (body) relationship and we more readily can accept the idea of psychosomatic illness – that is that physical conditions are caused through mental factors. This reinforces the notion that the body is subservient to the mind and therefore somatic experience is secondary to rational or imaginal thought. That the body can be a source of knowledge is hard to comprehend because ironically we try to rationalise and understand this using the mind. If we would like to understand, we need to experience it through the body. To embody knowledge is to feel into it and assimilate it directly – bypassing the rational mind. The key is to connect with the body, to experience the body, and to listen with the body.

Dance is one of the ways in which we can connect with the body and generate knowledge that both serves and enriches our life. However, this dance has its own unique characteristics. When we engage in performance or take a technical dance class we seek to direct the movements we make by directing through the mind. The well-disciplined Ballet dancer is a model for this process of creating dance that has its origins externally. Conscious Dance on the other hand is a modality that generally seeks to allow the dance to emerge from internal feelings and stimuli. This is Reverse Dance. We dance without choreographing. We dance without the mirrors of self-judgement. We dance without filtering. We create dances not as performance but as life rituals that connect us not only to self but can also connect us to an expanded cosmic transcendent of self. Through this process we find the wisdom and knowledge to heal and evolve.

Often we are immobilised because we try to think into our dance. We may feel that to create the dance we have to use our mind either through direct instruction or processes of imagination. Reverse Dance seeks to turn this on its head and proposes that the dance can emerge directly from the body. That with mindful attention, we are able to let movements emerge that would intrinsically have they own logic and their own messages. By feeling into these dances the body feeds and nourishes the mind. We have insight and we create new knowledge through direct experience.

Although this discussion is embedded in a dualist paradigm, we would ultimately like to dance into the transcendent space where mind-body is not experienced as separate.

_Christos Daskalakos

Embodied learning | Camille Litalien | TEDxUSU