“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
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