FLEXIBILITY dancing the elastic mind

“The mind that opens to a new idea never comes back to its original size.”

_Albert Einstein

To dance is to improve balance, coordination and especially flexibility in our bodies. Movement improves muscle tone and strength, builds up bone structures and helps generally with physical well-being. The good news is that this also translates into our mental health. The mind-body connections ensures that the relationship between our physical and mental health means that one influences the other.

The idea of flexibility is intriguing. We have all seen dancers doing amazing movements, stretching their limbs, and amazing us with their effortless dance. All this is available to everyone, not just trained dancers. Each time we enter the dance and explore new movements we gently introduce a new range of experiences to the body. When we reach a little, stretch a little, give way a little, our body becomes more flexible. Flexibility is a product of letting go, releasing and trusting the body. Something everyone who dances knows.

This physical letting go is translated into mental agility. When we dance, we become more creative. As we experience an ever-wider range of movement, we find that our brains connect to divergent thinking – the essence of creativity. Divergent thinking is only possible when we also have a flexible mind, letting go, releasing and trusting ourselves. This is the essence of an elastic mind. It can stretch, explore, and still maintain a secure base. Physical flexibility translates into mental flexibility and as much as we open to a wider range of physical experiences, so do we deepen our mental experience of life. Dance opens up life.

_Christos Daskalakos

dance TRANSMUTATIONS

 

"When we master our emotions, we master our creations.”

_Dr Joe Dispenza

Dance has the capacity to both enrich and transmute our emotional experience. By activating an area of the brain called the somatosensory cortex dance allows us to experience the world around and ourselves more deeply and completely. This enriches our emotional experience and improves our mental health.

Activating the same areas in the brain that deepen our emotional connection also has the capacity to process and modulate them. By connecting to our feelings dance develops the capacity to regulate these. Both feeling deeply and permitting the flow means that we don’t hold onto emotion. Holding and blocking, especially difficult and negative emotions have a detrimental effect both mentally and physically.

Dance works because it uses the entire body to access what we are feeling. When we remain in the head, thinking and mulling over things it’s sometimes difficult to move on. Dance activates our entire sensory awareness which includes the physical markers of emotions such as our breathing and heart rate. This self-awareness provides an opportunity to work through and transmute emotion and feeling through movement, especially in the mindful practices of conscious dance.

_Christos Daskalakos

chance & choice

“The real dance is a spontaneous body movement that is in harmony

with the beats of the music in your heart.”

_Toba Beta

Dance improvisation is an adventure that enters unknown territory. The adventure comes from unfolding your own personal and unique experience of life through movement. To let go into the dance is a leap of faith which bears testament to strength of character. So often we are being told what to do, by all spheres of society that our capacity to explore and create our own experiences is blunted.

Dance can have two aspects. One is the choices we make in the moment. Do I step, do I turn, or am I still? The other is the chance developments that arise spontaneously in the moment of engagement. To improvise dance and allow the creative energies to flow requires a suspension of many things. Suspension of beliefs – can I do this? Suspension of judgements – am I good enough? Suspension of doubt – do I have the creative capacity?

The answer to all three of the above questions is a resounding YES for everyone, if only we would suspend the chattering mind that somehow keeps us trapped in our perpetual stories. And, drop into the body, drop into the movement, drop into the experience.

In dance improvisation we learn that there are no pre-determined solutions to life. Like the dance that unfolds, twists and turns, so does life. The power of dance is that it gives us an embodied experience of a different way of being in the world.

_Christos Daskalakos

dance & RHYTHM

“It’s almost impossible to walk without engaging in rhythm.”

It’s always amusing to me when people say they have no rhythm, then turn around and walk away with a beautiful even step, i.e., rhythm. Rhythm is innate and finds many expressions within our experiences of life. We find rhythm of the heart, breathing, and daily biological cycles such as eating. These are regulated sub-consciously and are related to our survival. Other rhythms such as those related to movement can be initiated by sound and music. The close relationship between the auditory and motor centers of the brain means that our bodies move naturally to rhythm, such as tapping our foot or clapping our hands. This is not a skill we have to learn, as studies show that babies respond to music and rhythm naturally. If anything it is a skill we unlearn as we grow up.

So how does it happen that we can walk naturally with rhythm but become a jumble of arms and legs when we try to dance? This is even more astounding when we know that dance is a natural phenomenon that has existing in all cultures. While a small percentage of people suffer from amusia (the inability to recognise musical tones) the majority just need a little nudge.

This nudge is to shift attention away from the thinking head into the sense-filled body. Both our ‘outer’ senses of sight, touch, and hearing, and our ‘inner’ kinetic sense and proprioception, play a role in how and where we move. Our brains, and bodies, are able to connect to music, through rhythm, pulse and tone. This is strongly connected to the limbic system which gives music its emotional content. Our bodies express emotion naturally, which can translate into dance.

To dance and express ourselves means giving the thinking mind a pause and dropping into the body. We connect to the music and as we respond to the cues it gives us we can unconsciously give expression to not only what we are feeling but even to our very essence. Rhythm is a doorway into this world of magic. Just as we naturally tap our fingers to the beat, so we can gently open the space for our body to respond to music. When we are self-conscious, trying to plan the movement, and concerned about how they are going to be received – we shut down the spontaneity and become that jumble of arms and legs as our mind tries to keep up with the body. Letting go is the key. Find a simple rhythm. Give your mind the day off, and let your body move into the dance.

_Christos Daskalakos

dancing TRANSITION

“In the depths of winter, I finally learned 

there was in me an invincible summer.”

- Albert Camus

When we are dancing, each movement we make is a new creation. Unless we are executing a particular choreography, our movements arise without any previous preparation. What takes place is that our body responds to what is taking place in the moment. We make a movement and automatically we will select an appropriate reaction to that movement - each movement flowing from the other. In that moment our body is selecting, as it subconsciously scanning a whole number of possibilities.

The selection in the moment becomes a creative act. When we allow the body to select subconsciously, we open ourselves to insight and new possibilities. When we consciously guide the movement, we are actively engaging in a process of creativity. Both have their place.

In the dance we are constantly in transition, moving from one posture to another. Paradoxically, each moment in the dance is also a moment of arriving. To be both arriving, that is present, and moving through transition is to be in flow. Dance adds depth to our experience of life, exactly because it is in flow. Movement is the key. Conscious dance is powerful when we engage in movement.

_Christos Daskalakos

Dancing, between HERE and THERE

“At the still point of the turning world.

Neither flesh nor fleshness”

- T. S. Elliot

There are two dances that coexist side by side the one feeding the other. The first is the dance of shape, movement through space and the connection to chronological time. It is a dance that expresses our relationship to the outside world. It often reflects the story we hold about ourselves. For example if we hold a view that we are not creative, it can restrict the dance. In this way the world outside reflects and definitely influences the world inside - the hidden dimensions of being. When I resist the dance, it reinforces that inside of me that resists. When I let go into the dance, it becomes liberating and creates a whole different relationship to self and life.

However, there is another dance, that which emerges from the depth of our being. This dance prefers to dissociate itself from the ordinary experience of life through space and time. This inner dance is without time and exists in a space of atemporality, without edges and boundaries. To uncover this dance we sometimes require a different route. We find ways to still the outside world, to still the mind with its stories and to detach from time and space. Through these dances we begin to create greater sensitivity to our senses and our bodies. The paradox is that this body of boundaries, edges and vitality is also the way into our interior space when we re-engage with the dance in a different way. If we are willing to step aside, still the mind, and let the dance flow, we find a world of expansion, a world of integration, and a world of wonder.

_Christos Daskalakos

who am I - WHEN I DANCE?

“I am a drunkard from another tavern. 

 I dance to a silent tune. 

 I am the symphony of stars.”

_RUMI

When we are open to our experiences of life, inevitably we can turn our attention inwards to start seeing ourselves within the experience – a kind of meta-experience. This is when we are both involved in the story but also detached at the same time as if seeing the story from a distance, objectively and in a different way. This form of inquiry invites a profound and experiential learning about the deepest essence of personhood. Who are you – really? In our familiar surroundings, involved in the day-to-day running of life, we don’t often get the time or luxury to stop and take stock.

Dance is a space that automatically separates us from the normal. It takes us out of conventional operation mode. We don’t walk, we leap, we turn and sometimes expand into unknown movements. This gives us an opportunity to explore qualities within ourselves that are not readily know to us through our familiar, everyday sense of identity.

Dance liberates creativity as we explore effortless the possibilities of becoming someone other than who or what we normally are. Dancing in relationship to others, enhances empathy and compassion so that we form new relationships with the world around us – including ourselves! Dance is ephemeral, transient, and fleeting so that we may not feel the impact immediately. However, as we dance, our awareness shifts to a deeper quality of presence in which a spacious, unencumbered sense of self arises moment by moment out of the deep ocean of being. The miracle of dance is that over time, the me we experience in the dance slowly permeates all illusions of separation and who I am in the dance, becomes who I am.

_Christos Daskalakos