FLEXIBILITY dancing the elastic mind

“The mind that opens to a new idea never comes back to its original size.”

_Albert Einstein

To dance is to improve balance, coordination and especially flexibility in our bodies. Movement improves muscle tone and strength, builds up bone structures and helps generally with physical well-being. The good news is that this also translates into our mental health. The mind-body connections ensures that the relationship between our physical and mental health means that one influences the other.

The idea of flexibility is intriguing. We have all seen dancers doing amazing movements, stretching their limbs, and amazing us with their effortless dance. All this is available to everyone, not just trained dancers. Each time we enter the dance and explore new movements we gently introduce a new range of experiences to the body. When we reach a little, stretch a little, give way a little, our body becomes more flexible. Flexibility is a product of letting go, releasing and trusting the body. Something everyone who dances knows.

This physical letting go is translated into mental agility. When we dance, we become more creative. As we experience an ever-wider range of movement, we find that our brains connect to divergent thinking – the essence of creativity. Divergent thinking is only possible when we also have a flexible mind, letting go, releasing and trusting ourselves. This is the essence of an elastic mind. It can stretch, explore, and still maintain a secure base. Physical flexibility translates into mental flexibility and as much as we open to a wider range of physical experiences, so do we deepen our mental experience of life. Dance opens up life.

_Christos Daskalakos

dance TRANSMUTATIONS

 

"When we master our emotions, we master our creations.”

_Dr Joe Dispenza

Dance has the capacity to both enrich and transmute our emotional experience. By activating an area of the brain called the somatosensory cortex dance allows us to experience the world around and ourselves more deeply and completely. This enriches our emotional experience and improves our mental health.

Activating the same areas in the brain that deepen our emotional connection also has the capacity to process and modulate them. By connecting to our feelings dance develops the capacity to regulate these. Both feeling deeply and permitting the flow means that we don’t hold onto emotion. Holding and blocking, especially difficult and negative emotions have a detrimental effect both mentally and physically.

Dance works because it uses the entire body to access what we are feeling. When we remain in the head, thinking and mulling over things it’s sometimes difficult to move on. Dance activates our entire sensory awareness which includes the physical markers of emotions such as our breathing and heart rate. This self-awareness provides an opportunity to work through and transmute emotion and feeling through movement, especially in the mindful practices of conscious dance.

_Christos Daskalakos

chance & choice

“The real dance is a spontaneous body movement that is in harmony

with the beats of the music in your heart.”

_Toba Beta

Dance improvisation is an adventure that enters unknown territory. The adventure comes from unfolding your own personal and unique experience of life through movement. To let go into the dance is a leap of faith which bears testament to strength of character. So often we are being told what to do, by all spheres of society that our capacity to explore and create our own experiences is blunted.

Dance can have two aspects. One is the choices we make in the moment. Do I step, do I turn, or am I still? The other is the chance developments that arise spontaneously in the moment of engagement. To improvise dance and allow the creative energies to flow requires a suspension of many things. Suspension of beliefs – can I do this? Suspension of judgements – am I good enough? Suspension of doubt – do I have the creative capacity?

The answer to all three of the above questions is a resounding YES for everyone, if only we would suspend the chattering mind that somehow keeps us trapped in our perpetual stories. And, drop into the body, drop into the movement, drop into the experience.

In dance improvisation we learn that there are no pre-determined solutions to life. Like the dance that unfolds, twists and turns, so does life. The power of dance is that it gives us an embodied experience of a different way of being in the world.

_Christos Daskalakos