Dancing the Moment that Moves

“Life is like a river, it keeps on flowing, ever-changing.”

_Buddha

Dance offers us different ways of organising our experience. We are so used to the way we live that we never question how this impacts our understanding and meaning of life. For example, we experience time as linear, and life as a sequence of self-contained events. In this paradigm, the past becomes the events that have happened, the present is what is happening, and the future what will happen. Instead, what if we encounter the ancient Greek god, Kairos and start seeing life as continuous process of becoming?

The gurus advise us to live in the present, which is often mistaken for a point between past and future. Instead, what if we saw it more as transition through which the past becomes something new? Dance offers us a way to experience this liberation from the shackles of time! Each of our movements creates the conditions and possibilities from which the next movement can emerge. We don’t find meaning contained in any one movement waiting to be interpreted. Instead meaning comes from continuous movement where what came before gives this moment meaning, and at the same time what comes after may transform what the moment meant.

Life is experienced as dynamic, ever changing, in constant transformation. We can free ourselves from the debilitating emotions of guilt, regret, knowing that in the flow there is never a finished moment, a “present”, but continuous experience. Dance is a lived demonstration of this. A movement is never entirely finished, because it changes our position, our sensation, and exposes the possibilities available for what can come next. The freedom that comes from improvisation in dance comes from the freedom to stop holding onto any one movement but to immerse ourselves in the movement itself. In Biodanza this is the Vivencia of emergence and becoming. We don’t stay fixated on our identity or life as it is, but surrender completely to the dance that is the flow of life itself.

_Christos Daskalakos

Dances of Plenitude

“He who cannot dance will say, the drum is bad.”

_Ashanti Proverb

Often we approach personal development and other life challenges as if we need to acquire something from outside of us to change. Biodanza flips this around and proposes that everything we ever need is already inside of us and that our dances become a way of recognition rather than acquisition. A powerful example of this is recognising our own power through the Dance of the Tiger.

The Vivencia creates a space in which we move beyond our habitual ways of being and encounter different possibilities in us. This includes stories of lack or judgements that prompt us to seek to change ourselves from the outside in. Creative dances open up the space in which we connect with new possibilities including the way we perceive ourselves.

Each Vivencia offers us an opportunity to experience and embody many more dimensions of ourselves. Dances of vitality can connect us with our own inner strength. Our capacity to give and receive love can become evident through dances of affective interaction with another and the group. In Biodanza our dances become more than just physical movement. Through embodying feeling they become the avenues through which our ever emerging identities expand beyond any limitations. The more we explore and expand our dances, the more emergent we become so that we stop seeing ourselves as a finished object but rather as a fluid, dynamic, and ever changing stream of life itself.

_Christos Daskalakos

SOCIAL DANCE

“The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.”

_Mata Hari

Biodanza is different from many other social interactions in this world. Often this difference exists as a gap between what we are experiencing inside and who we show to the world. Sometimes by necessity this becomes a negative experience as who we present is determined by expectations, fear or being defensive. And sometimes quite innocently we are simply wanting to impress or project a particular persona.

Biodanza offers us a beautiful invitation. This is to enter the dance without any sense of performance or concerns about doing the right movements. The music, movement and intentions for each exercise or dance is carefully constructed to create conditions of affective trust in which we are free to let our guard down. In these dances we surrender any social roles and projections and meet each other in our naked humanity. Through the dances we start to discover a form of social dancing that is full of meaning and the vitality of life.

In this respect our dances in Biodanza are empowering. We encounter ourselves. We drop habits, expectations, fear, or looking good so that our experiences feel honest and liberating. In this sense Biodanza becomes the space where our dances become the open heart in which we meet each and value each other, and more importantly ourselves.

_Christos Daskalakos