Biodanza is a therapeutic system that believes we can change our lives by dancing. This system emerged in the 60s with R. Toro, a Chilean psychologist and anthropologist who wanted to widen the traditional methods of health promotion. He was moving away from systems that focused on personal problems, whether emotional or physiological, and embracing new ways of encouraging the expression of our identity as human beings. He was looking for a preventive learning process capable of moving us beyond our existential limitations towards a deeply connected state that truly celebrated life.
We are integrated whole beings, much more than brain-carrying bodies, and our intelligence has both conscious and unconscious aspects. Thinking of our autonomic nervous system and its perfect control of our heart, lungs and hormonal mechanisms is usually enough to remind us of this intelligence.
R. Toro saw the need to create a movement-based system that could enhance these levels of integration so that our living organism's tendency towards growth and homeostasis could be strengthened. The key word here is integration, i.e. to help the parts to function interdependently as a single system.
For this to happen, talking wasn’t enough. We needed to dance and move in natural and meaningful ways that would easily be done by all. Dance has held the power to celebrate, communicate, and create bonds since the dawn of our civilization. Life itself is movement.
Every moment of our existence gets directly imprinted in our bodies and minds in ways that bypass intellectual understanding. Biodanza facilitators are trained to lead us through a gradual process of integration by using a selection of carefully chosen music and inviting us to dance movement sequences aimed at inducing specific experiences.
Why integration? Integration is seen as a path to health because when we function as an integrated whole we are better able to express our potentials. On the other hand, when our wholeness is broken, the tendency is for us to get sick, blocked and cut off from the world. Biodanza is an integrative system that helps us to express our potentials.
R. Toro observed in many people a lack of coherence between thoughts, feelings and actions. He believed that thinking one thing, feeling another and doing something else was the result of living in a dissociative culture that teaches us to overvalue rationality. Forced into fast-paced urban lifestyles, many of us end up struggling to listen to our selves, our organic rhythms, each other, and nature. These dissociations get imprinted in our bodies and minds and are the main cause of our modern diseases.
The use of music, dance, and the group’s affective containment promotes integrative present-moment experiences of living life to the full that enable our system to work as an integrated whole. Weekly access to these integrative experiences lead to new imprints of wellbeing, belonging, love and wholeness.
The best thing we can do for our health is to fully express our genetic potentials, i.e. to achieve optimum capability in the different dimensions of our human life.
Biodanza sessions - Each Biodanza session is composed by a set of exercises with specific objectives that assist the integration process. Classes follow a step-by-step approach, first focusing on reclaiming the natural grace of our movements and gestures, and on the dissolution of chronic muscular tension. Afterwards we move on to affective-motor integration, reclaiming the consistency between affect and our body language.
In order to strengthen our ability to act in the world in an authentic way, we also focus on integration with others and learn how to communicate and connect to other human beings, and overcome fears and prejudices. In addition, we also focus on expanding our awareness and opening up to a direct experience of our oneness with nature with the accompanying realization that we are co-responsible for its balance.
The exercises used in Biodanza have been carefully developed by R. Toro and his collaborators over the last 40 years after an in-depth study of the power of music to trigger specific emotions and inner experiences, and the power of universal archetypal gestures to restore our humanity.
Biodanza in the world - Biodanza is rapidly expanding. It is present in Europe, USA, Japan, Africa, Central and South America. There are more than 170 schools training facilitators around the world.
Biodanza is for everyone - Biodanza is open to people of all ages, cultures, and beliefs. Children, adults, and older people of all nationalities come together in festivals, gatherings and conferences. The system has a profound impact wherever it goes. Regardless of where they come from, people enter a state of deep communion with themselves, with others and with life itself, a state can only promote life, health and human flourishing.
Regular groups - Biodanza is done in weekly regular groups. Sessions last up to 2.5 hours and include an initial verbal sharing where everyone sits in a circle and those who want to share what they felt in the previous class have the opportunity to do so. Everyone communicates in I-messages and only about themselves while the rest of the group listens attentively. Biodanza facilitators will sometimes give a short theoretical context and explain a little about the process. After the initial sharing people stand up and come together in a circle dance, which is the starting point of the nonverbal part of the session. From then on there is no more talking.
Source: Biodanza - An innovative proposal by Danielle Tavares