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