Appreciating the Dance

“Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, 

and the life of the candle will not be shortened. 

Happiness never decreases by being shared.”

- Buddha

Appreciation can be an action when it comes out of saying “thank you” in gratitude. We can appreciate ourselves, we can appreciate those around us and we can appreciate life itself. These three levels of appreciation can be expressed in words but even more powerfully through action. The way we can connect with appropriate action is to dance and embody the feelings that arise when we are in gratitude.

How often do we ever take a moment in our dance to appreciate that we are able to move in our bodies, that have the freedom to move unrestricted by repressive societies, and even more important that we have this beautiful planet on which to dance.

Last Saturday we lit the fire and danced in the garden under a sky through which the stars were peeping through. As I danced, I began to notice the exquisite beauty of the tree in front of me. I noticed the shape of the leaves, the geometric patterns, and the beautiful colours. I then turned to dance with everything around me, the grass, the stones, the twigs, the flowers, the clouds, the moon, the stars…everything. And a most amazing feeling of gratitude and appreciation emerged in my dance. My movements became a thousand ways to say “thank you” and through the dance, my heart felt wide open and connected to the entire cosmos.

Dance is able to amplify and extend our feelings. Dance is able to silence the constant and distracting chatter that occupies our minds. Dance offers us an opportunity to immerse ourselves into feelings, relationships and life – through embodiment, that is experiencing through the body – and amplified by the dance.

_Christos Daskalakos

DANCE - Love in Action!

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”

_Blaise Pascal

Love is a universal field beyond time and space, belonging to no one and everyone. We have the capacity to connect into this field when we open our hearts. Love is not an action and we will not find it hiding in a book or under a rock. Love is a state of being and can be experienced through action. Love in action, are the conscious moments when we allow the flow of this energy to pour into and out of our hearts.

Dance is a wonderful opportunity to experience love in action. When I let go and am willing to experience the dance as an expression of me, it provides the space of acknowledgment, acceptance, and self-love. When I am able to access this in myself it is easier to recognise in the other and a natural progression is to find the connection with another in the dance. Romantic love may exist as a focused attachment to someone in particular, however, dance offers us the opportunity to experience undifferentiated love when we are willing to move and engage with every human miracle that presents in front of us. When we do this we experience cosmic love and find it easier to transcend any limitations we may put on ourselves and merge into this field of love beyond time and space.

Connecting to universal love and recognising the other as an expression of this love, is a very subversive act as it takes us beyond the separations, boundaries, and toxic cultures that control by sowing divisions. To invite someone to dance, to receive them in the dance and to dance without judgments or expectations is to recognise the sacred bonds that connect us in our humanity. This is cosmic love, and when it lands, it feels like a LOVE BOMB in your heart.

_Christos Daskalakos

DANCING and EMOTION

 

“We cannot make another person change his or her steps,

to an old dance, but if we change our own steps,

the dance no longer can continue in the same

predictable pattern.”

_Harriet Lerner

It never ceases to amaze me how dance can create a shift and change on so many levels. I have experienced it changing the way I think, the way I feel, and even my outlook on life.

Over the last few decades, it has become part of common knowledge that the mind and body are connected and influence one another. We know that when we are feeling low, it is possible to change our endogenous mood simply by using uplifting music and setting the body into dance. Extreme forms of depression create catatonic states where movement is almost impossible. Trauma creates dissociation from the body as a person retreats into an overactive and negative mental state. These are extreme cases but sometimes even our everyday emotions can create a feedback loop of stuck-ness in us.

Emotion is visceral. Each one has a physical signature in our body. Change of heart rate and breath are two indications. But what is not so obvious is that our muscular and skeletal systems also fall into emotional holding patterns called invariants. The relationship between emotion and movement means that when we are in emotional contraction, holding the emotion, not only is our range of movement, and by implication our experience of life, limited but we can also cause injury to our body.

Sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking that all emotions are bad and that we need to ‘get rid’ of them as quickly as possible. This is not the case. Emotions are an integral part of our experience of life. The problems arise when emotions are blocked, that is we hold onto them, or emotions are suppressed, we don’t even allow them to surface. These are the situations that affect the body in a negative way.

Dance and music are an extremely powerful way to not only connect to what we are feeling but also to induce change. In the dance, we can immerse ourselves in a healthy relationship and experience whatever we are feeling – and that is powerful. But at the same time in the dance, by moving our body and releasing the invariant tensions of emotion we can also allow them to flow naturally when appropriate.

It is possible to know when we have felt and released emotion when our body relaxes and we have peace of mind. Biodanza which has a well-researched methodology has a class structure that facilitates this process. Dance can connect us to a healthy relationship to what we are feeling, simply through appropriate music and movement. This is conscious dance at its best.

_Christos Daskalakos

DANCING the DIALOGUE

“Life is like a mirror, smile at it and it smiles back at you.”

How aware are you of your movement and gestures?

Did you know that every movement and every gesture sends messages to our brain influencing how we feel, how we act and, how we are experiencing life?

According to a study published in the journal Experimental Psychology, researchers found that smiling can have a positive effect on mood. This works EVEN IF THE SMILE IS FAKE! The act of smiling triggers facial muscles that send messages to the brain which releases endorphins that alter our mood. And that is just from a smile!

Imagine what we are telling our brain when we are dancing – which is a whole-body experience involving more than some facial muscles. There are countless studies that show dance to reduce stress, stimulate the immune system and help develop the brain.

Knowing this perhaps it is worthwhile to be mindful of our movement in the dance. When we hold back – what messages are we reinforcing in the brain? When we use only part of our body – what else is frozen?

Active participation where we give our all to the dance ensures a positive change in our emotions, thinking, and relationship to life and others. This doesn’t mean going over the top and exhausting ourselves. It really is quite simple. All we need to do is bring attention to our dance, here, now! Shut out the distractions of a chattering mind. Let go of the inhibiting factors that may influence our dance. And lastly, be willing to try out something new – break the habits of a lifetime.

Imagine what wonderful messages we could then be sending to our brain – that life is wonderful…..let’s dance!

_Christos Daskalakos

DANCING - Reinforcing JOY

“A negative mind will never give you a positive life.”

_Ziad K. Abdelnour

I was listening to the radio. The conversation revolved around how difficult it is to receive compliments. The talk show host asks about the psychological reasons for this. Before there was any discussion or investigation he then proceeded to say how he hates receiving compliments. And the discussion went downhill from there as more people reinforced this view. And so I mused about this, thinking how the world around us is filled with people and situations that reinforce bad behaviour, negative experiences, and lack of questioning.

Socrates did say that the unexamined life is not worth living.

And yet we persist in holding on to so many things that do not serve us just because we don’t give them a second thought.

So thinking is obviously not the answer for change. Then what is?

Yes, you guessed - DANCE!

The way dance changes life is not by engaging in how it is experience in the everyday. Dance offers us an opportunity to create an environment of positivity in which we experience life as it could be. Possibilities of joy, lightness and well-being are presented to us in subtle and something not so subtle ways in the dance.

No one dances in order to feel bad. We may dance to express and shift negative emotions or stories but ultimately the dance is the experience itself is focused on reinforcing positivity. Dance creates an experience where we engage with our own creativity finding that we have the power and agency to change life. Bathed in a positive environment our brain also lets go of some of the stress it is so accustomed to and, we have insights and sometimes entire vision plans of how to go about making things different. Dance changes our endogenous mood, hopefully for the better! This means the more we dance, the more we reinforce positivity. The more we remain positive, the easier it is to create a life that works for us – sometimes blissful, and sometimes ecstatic.

_Christos Daskalakos

OTHER WORLDS DANCING: Why online dancing works ... in part

“I feel life is small unless it has windows into other worlds.”

_Bertrand Russel

While dancing is about joy and living this life to the fullest, it does also offer us a glimpse into other worlds. When the Bushmen talk about their Healing Trance dances they use metaphors about climbing upwards on the Ropes of God or diving into the depths of water. These metaphors describe a journey from ordinary everyday way of being into an experience that feels different. Terms we use to describe these experiences are ‘ecstatic dance’, ‘trance’ or generally, ‘altered states of consciousness’. These terms seem to imply dramatic journeys as described by Shamans when they talk about traveling into the spirit world or reminiscent of the Dionysian rituals where participants experienced possession by the god.

At its most intense, dance can take us over to these extremes. However, even our weekly dip into the dance allows us a taste of these experiences. We are not overcome or overwhelmed but when we let go into the dance inevitably we begin to experience another way of being. To be dancing is not to be engaging with life as we normally do. We move with feeling, not directed by goals. We interact with others from a place of shared humanity, not with expectations. We occupy a time and place without boundaries, not constrained by clocks, schedules and four walls.

These gentle OTHER WORLDS of dance are places with the potential to become a source of new information and insight. As we dance we move and experience self and the world around us differently. As we dance our body shifts from sympathetic to parasympathetic mode – we let go of stress and start to rejuvenate. Our mind shifts from planning and control mode to feeling and integration.

The ability to create my own experience through the dance means that I could be dancing anywhere – online, off-line, on the beach, in my bedroom. The question is, “WHERE am I dancing?” Am I here in this room holding onto everyday reality, or have I created an OTHER WORLD beyond time and space in which letting go inevitably leads to bliss?

Dance is a gift wherever you are!

_Christos Daskalakos

DANCING and SHEDDING

 

“We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, 

so as to have the life that is waiting for us. 

 The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.”

_Joseph Campbell

Shedding is such a strange word yet it has been on my mind for the past week. I have been paying attention to my actions, reactions, and emotional hooks around many aspects of everyday life. It has been interesting to see how many times automatic pilot kicks in without me even noticing. Thoughts feelings and actions seem to be spontaneous and appropriate until I come to notice with a strange feeling of uncomfortable familiarity, that I have been here before.

However, all is not lost. I have also been experimenting with movement and dance with very specific intentions. I noticed that when I felt an uncomfortable emotion that I am able to shift it simply by focusing my dance around my heart. It’s as if there is an entire conspiracy of muscle, skeleton and ligaments that hold the patterns of emotion – almost like a challenge to the psyche. I don’t think we should be repressing or avoiding our emotions and age-old stories but embracing them, acknowledging them, and letting them flow.

There has been many an evening in the stillness of my studio when I let the music gently stir the dance. Without directing the movement or having any preconceived idea, spontaneity emerges and the dance is created. In those moments I am able to physically feel the shift taking place in my body. My heart feels lighter, as it says goodbye to stories and emotions that had somehow been lodged there.

For me, these are shedding dances. Slowly and gently letting go of old patterns and allowing the creative force which is innate in us to lighten and free us into new adventures. As we commence our dance, there are always an infinite number of possibilities as to where it could go. If we are willing to shed a little of our habitual dances, magic occurs, delight emerges and new possibilities are formed.

_Christos Daskalakos