“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
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