Where are you dancing?

“Whatever music you beat on your drum 

there is somebody who can dance to it.”

_Chinua Achebe

You may think you dance in a space defined by a floor, walls, and a ceiling. You may think that your dance takes place at a particular moment in time.

The truth is that dance takes place elsewhere. Dance has its own time and space. When we say that we ‘lose our self’ in the dance, what we are really saying, is that we are entering the special space-time created by dance. Outside of our ordinary state of linear time, beyond the confines of our physical space, dance creates a place in which there is only the dance.

We have been connecting to the dance online for the past 19 months and what really strikes me is the ongoing and loving connection we create through our dance even when we are not in the same room. There is an energetic connection that transcends space and time, made possible by the fact that we are dancing together to the same music. The computer and the screen are not in the way of our experience. We connect through sharing. Our capacity to empathise is heightened by the dance. All this can be explained scientifically…

But for now, we are dancing the magic together.

_Christos Daskalakos

Remember your Dance...

Blessed We Are

_Lyrics by Peia Luzzi

Blessed we are to dance on this ground
With the rhythm of saints to carry the sound
We hold a prayer for the Earth
For the ones yet to come
May you walk in beauty
And remember your song

When did you start dancing?

Why did you start dancing?

Dance is a passion so deep that it is almost unnameable. Dance is never a rational decision. Dance emerges when we feel a stirring deep within. This stirring is really the soul expressing itself. It becomes a beautiful expression of life itself.

This is quite natural – quite instinctual. Babies love a beat – study after study has shown how naturally infants move to rhythm. And even more interesting are studies that show how when children dance they become more affective opening up to others. The innate ability to dance demonstrates an evolutionary necessity for us to connect, with self, with the other. This is why dance is literally found in every culture and society that has lived on this planet.

When life becomes overwhelming, the body shuts down. Rigidity and lack of movement are defence mechanisms against intense negative emotions. Sadly as the body stiffens to brace itself against the world it not only defends, but also shuts out the beauty and positive side of life as well. When we are shut down, dance becomes a challenge and feels uncomfortable. But when we gently let go into the dance, we find that we can navigate, feel and transmute emotion leaving us free to connect to life with joy.

Let’s dance gently – and remember our song, as Peia’s beautiful lyrics remind us.

_Christos Daskalakos

Born to Dance!

“May you be true to yourself and dance to the beat of your own soul.”

_Gail Alexander

When I watch toddlers moving and giggling to the rhythms of music I can’t help feeling that deep down in our human psyche we are all dancers. The greatest sorrow is to witness the frozen body, the one that does not move, that cannot move because of trauma, repressive beliefs or sometimes sheer terror. It is our natural state to move, to explore and experience the world through our senses, including proprioception (the sense which informs us about the shape and location of our body in space).

Movement is located in our language. We say things like; moving forward, jumping with joy, slowing down the pace etc. This is because we make sense of the world through movement. Stuck in a dark room without that ability to move – we go crazy. We also learn through movement from the first time we reached out into the world as toddler. Most of our learning is embodied through movement. And we delight in moving through spaces, forests and water.

Dance has been around since time immemorial. And the connection of movement and dance makes it the ideal medium through which we can explore and expand our connection with the world and life around us – including relationships to self, other and the entire universe! If we can only remember and connect to what it was like to dance spontaneously, as we did as toddlers, we can access a the world of dance, full of wonder, full of fun, and full of life.

_Christos Daskalakos

Dancer's Heart

“Love softens the heart and then you live longer.”

Softening the heart is not all wishy-washy touchy-feely…. as some may presume. A soft heart is actually very powerful as it is open adaptable and can interact with the world out there. The hard heart is weak as it spends all its energies protecting and defending …. what?

The heart of the dance is soft, open and connected. In the dance we experience such range of what it means to be human through emotion, sensation, creativity and imagination. We learn to recognise these in our self as we dance. Once we embody something through the dance it is possible to empathise, or see it in others. Dance opens up these lines of connection and communication building strong and stable networks.

_Christos Daskalakos

Let's Keep Dancing!

“Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass,

it’s about learning to dance in the storm.”

_Vivian Greene

As the pandemic has pressed on, we have found innovative ways to come together and dance. There have been dances of gratitude, dances of support, dances that connect, as a way of encouraging people to dance the blues of this pandemic away.

At VisVita we have always strived to introduce everyone to dance. I am totally committed to this DANCE PROJECT as I believe it has the power to sustain, grow our life, but more importantly is a powerful way to combat the enemies of our time; separation, stress and fatigue.

It is hard to keep dancing when life throws us a curved ball – but it is in times like these that it is better not to insulate and keep away. Dance, music and especially the social connections that we enjoy bring us together to celebrate life, to feel ourselves in our body, and to feel the joy of life.

My message this week is – KEEP DANCING not matter what!
- Stay connected
- Stay in the flow of living

_Christos Daskalakos

Equinox Dance

"Whatever you can do ,or dream you can do begin it.

Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.."

- Goethe

Equinox speaks of the inevitable cycle of existence. It speaks of balance and the natural progression, and introspection. This is a time of the change of seasons heralding in a new phase. Summer is on its way and nature begins to grow and blossom again. The ultimate creation of nature expressing itself.

Conscious dance is also about creativity - the ability to continuously create and recreate our life. We discard the old, conserve what is valuable and create the new.

In the dance we embody this change without having to rationalise it. Each dance movement we make opens up possibilities and in that moment we instinctively move to create our next dance movement, then the next and then the next. Without planning or thinking our body know instinctively where to dance next. This way we enter the flow of life without planning, thinking or judgement. Dance stimulates our natural instincts and wisdom to conserve life and to keep evolving. Being in the dance, is to experience the cycles of life by being present in the dance, enjoying the dance and detaching our self from any outcome or expectation. Dance is being in the being.

_Christos Daskalakos

dancing at the CENTER

 

“There are shortcuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.”

_Vicki Baum

How often do we become distracted by life? Not LIFE but the everyday goings on around us. We get drawn into the details which sometimes turn out not to have been as important as we thought. We usually treat our issues and problems in a similar way – that is we blow them out of proportion; they dominate our emotions and thoughts and often lead to paralysis – a freeze on life. That is because we can’t always know the answers and as much as we try very often it is simply impossible to figure things out in a rational and logical way. When we engage in that kind of thinking we are really using linear thinking which is comparable to computer programming. If we haven’t fed the data in, it’s not going to appear miraculously.

BUT, luckily for us there is a way to access deeper intelligence and knowledge. The wealth of knowledge held in our subconscious based on a lifetime of experience. And, the wealth of knowledge we have access to in our world, but which for whatever reason, we don’t seem to notice.

To gain access, we need to stop the mind. We need to shift our focus from the periphery of life and dance towards the core of our being. When we dance at the centre, we bypass the logical and rational parts of our mind. What that means is that we are able to disconnect from any beliefs we may hold, memories of the past, or old and reliable habits. Dance brings us into the present moment where our mind, body and heart are interacting with our experience in the here and now. Our reaction to what is required in the moment of the dance is based on real time creativity. Moment by moment as we move we sense what comes next without directing or planning the dance. This capacity we have allows us to release new possibilities for life. And sometimes in the moment, we have an AHA! We gain insight, and we can approach life differently. Often these insights come from deep understanding and allow us to relook at the issues and problems around us in a new way. And sometimes they even just go away as we connect with joy and ecstasy in the dance.

_Christos Daskalakos