the dance is the dance

“Everyone speaks the same silence.”

_xos

We have all traveled a path drawn from a common human experience. At some level, we share one collective story. Yet in our lives, this story plays out individually. Each of our journeys is contained within a specific context which makes the expression of our particular life unique to each of us. In this regard, this individual story is your truth, your story is real. It’s hard to subscribe to the abstract philosophic-religious view that life is an illusion. What IS an illusion, what is not real is believing that we are our individual stories. We hold onto them in memory and speech repeating them over and over to confirm to ourselves that they are real. And through this repetition, we identify and become our stories.

There is a part of the human journey that is our own individual aspect yet there is also a part that is universal. There are seven billion stories across the world, yet they are all experienced and felt within a common and universal range of human emotions. There is no separate “happiness” for you and another for me, as much as there is no separate “sadness”. The experience that gets us to either of these or any other emotion is unique, but the emotions themselves are universal. This is why as humans we have the capacity to connect to empathy.

This is where the power of dance steps, leaps and glides into the picture. Dance modalities such as Biodanza are therapeutic not because they engage with the individual stories. They are therapeutic because they connect with the universal emotional part. These emotions are held in the body as invariants – holding patterns that give rise to a particular emotion. When this expression or experience of an emotion is blocked or suppressed the body too becomes stiff, rigid, and lifeless. The scientific fact is that the more we hold on to real trauma, for example, the more dissociated we are from our bodies. The same applies to all emotional experiences. Dance works because it is an integrative process of music that evokes emotion - and movements that shift, transform or transmutes the physical holding patterns of these emotions. Dance is not a symbolic representation of our life experience; in the dance, we embody our life experiences in an integrative manner in real time and space. Dance is living life itself. This is why when we dance healing takes place at a fundamental level that brings a moment of transtasis in our lives - we emerge into a totally different experience of ourselves either through this healing process of release or the transformative magic of personal self-development.

_Christos Daskalakos