CENTER HERE AND NOW / WORKSHOPS / April 2023 / 26.04.23 - 03.05.23

"Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames."[Rumi]

Biodanza means Dance of Life. It is a dance of heart and freedom from South America. It's a system that integrates music and movement; it also makes possible to establish an authentic relationship with yourself, with other people and with the environment. Biodanza creates experiences of intense awareness of being alive in the here-and-now.

Celebrating life is a goal of Biodanza. It stimulates community bounds and makes establishing relationships easier, as well as helps participants regain joy and vitality to celebrate the sacredness of life. It makes a way to feel happy, healthy and more confident, with strengthened self-esteem, also improving the ability to make choices.

Biodanza is a delicate but deeply transforming work on consciousness which awakens for universal solidarity, based on working with the body, body movement and dancing.

• Integrates body, mind, emotions and soul.
• Arouses vitality, creativity, sensuality and emotionality.
• Teaches openness, joy, building good relationships and expressing emotions.

Feeling the connection with your body, emotions and energy, makes the transformation occur. These experiences are called "vivencias". They allow access to our primal emotions and help with the most natural expression of true self to emerge through movement.

Biodanza also strengthens the "lineas de vivencia", which are lines of vitality within five specific areas: vitality, sexuality, creativity, affection and transcendence.

The essential pillars of this practice are constituted through the assumption that there is a cosmic intelligence that is expressed in our reality through instincts. Instincts as the Nobel Prize Christian Deduve put it are bio-cosmic mandates, they constitute our biological script and are motivating forces of the psychic process, they emerge from the Great Ocean of the collective unconscious and express themselves through the Movement.

Vitality

“Energy is the principle of change the more energy there is, the more change can be produced”

It is characterized by a good level of health and organic harmony. From an existential point of view, vitality comprises having strong motivations to live and having energy available for action (vital impetus). Feelings of inner joy, exhilaration and existential fullness are found in a vital person. Vitality is linked to endogenous mood, motor integration and neurovegetative balance.

Sexuality

"I have phrases and whole pages memorized, but nothing can be told of love.” Rumi

It alludes to the awakening of the source of desire, increased pleasure, connection with sexual identity and the decrease of sexual repression. In humans, sexuality is associated with pleasure, possibly as a resource of nature to ensure the continuity of the species. Sexuality and life are indissolubly linked. Sexual desire organizes a strong motivation to live.

Creativity

“The most potent muse of all is our own inner child”

It proposes the expansion of the ability to express, renew and build. Creativity is an integral function of cosmic metamorphosis. A path trodden between the footsteps of Chaos and Order. In human beings, it manifests itself as a force of innovation in the face of reality. The creative work organizes a unique and singular language based on personal experience. The noblest aspect of expressing creativity is existential creativity, that which is expressed in everyday gestures.

Affectivity

“Every day is just perfect for love.”Rumi

It narrates the ability to bond with others through love, friendship, and the ability to empathize. Affectivity figured as an expression of identity. Affectivity can have the extension of “differentiated love”, directed to a single person, and that of “undifferentiated love”, directed to humanity as a whole.

Transcendence

“You are not a drop in the ocean, You are the entire ocean in a drop.” Rumi

To transcend is to overcome a limit, it refers to overcoming the strength of the Ego and going beyond self-perception, to identify with the unity of nature and with the essence of people. In Biodanza we propose to express the instinct of totality. Transcendence is “the natural function of the human being of essential bonding with the existing whole: human beings, animals, vegetables, minerals; in short, with the cosmic totality.” (R.Toro)

Transscendence is seeing yourself as a part and expressing yourself as a whole. It assumes moving and crossing the boundaries of oneself, the ability to surrender and at the same time to be completely centered. It is an invitation to open ourselves to the greater whole, including our fellow human beings, the unconscious reality, and the entire universe in all its subtle manifestations, known and unknown. In Biodanza, the connection to the suprasensible is the experiential perception of the body, in the understanding that the divine is not separate from the individualized being, but both express themselves in an integrated continuity.

“Biodanza represents the primordial energy pattern of deep connection and freedom of expression, beauty, enthusiasm and passion. It lives through the original thirst that our species has of health, love, pleasure and well-being. It is translated by the impulse to dive deep into the world of sensations. It is guided by the compass that lives in our heart, connecting us with the need and the desire to give and receive love. It teaches us to recognize that love is an art, just as life.” (Cristiano Martins)

Life as the most Sacred of manifestations constantly asks us to reborn and become whole in
a complete lovingness at every moment of our lives. The first step to take in this experiential Journey is to recognize that love is an art. In the same sense in which life in entire its splendor is an art. If we want to learn how to love, we should do the same things we do when we want to learn any other form of art, such as music or sculpture.

Biodanza is based on psychological and philosophical research, dance anthropology and traditional rituals. One of the teachers explains the origin of the word "biodanza" from the Greek bios meaning life, and from the Spanish danza which means dance. Workshop is based on personal, direct experience - individually, in pairs, subgroups or in a group of all participants. There is music, movement and dance to enable the creation of harmony and closeness in interpersonal relations.

Rolando Toro Biodanza System is a method that works on every human being’s potential.

It reveals various possibilities and forms of expression to us. It is based on the positive resources of each of us, according to the author's method - the creator of the system, prof. Rolando Toro. Her father is a psychologist, anthropologist, poet and artist from Chile. And since the 1960s, system itself has been distributed in over 30 countries around the world as a method of personal development.

Biodanza draws our attention into building relationships and bonds between people through eye contact. An eye contact is considered as the fundamental base of a beautiful and meaningful communication without words. This also helps to open the heart, transform person's needs and desires and to be ready for new experiences.

No dance experience or preparation is necessary to start practicing Biodanza and experience its benefits. The dance is done barefoot.

„A man doesn’t live to dance, but dances to live happier”

Thank you for the opportunity to use beautiful photos from: Agnieszka Cytacka and Magdalena Mogielnicka.

WORKSHOP HELD IN ENGLISH & TRANSLATED INTO POLISH

Details of the workshop