Biodanza was conceived and organised as an educational system of personal development by Rolando Toro Araneda, a Chilean anthropologist who was interested in the effects of music and dance on states of consciousness. His first experiments were done in a psychiatric hospital, where he observed that some types of music led to an increase in hallucinations whereas other musical styles increased the sense of reality in people with the tendency to dissociate, e.g. with psychosis or schizophrenia. |
2. SEXUALITY People also identified the desire to experience pleasure, and to give pleasure its due place in their lives. Here they were talking about all the pleasures that life can offer, including the pleasure of eroticism, which involved knowing how we want to connect with our natural biological and physiological need for pleasure, and identifying who we want to share it with. |
3. CREATIVITY The third cluster of potentials that R. Toro identified was related to the need to feel that we are unique beings, and that we have the freedom to have our own responses to what life brings us. Creativity is not just a mental phenomenon. It is a phenomenon of Life, which is always creating a variety of ways of expressing itself. |
4. AFFECTIVITY The fourth was the importance of having good relationships, good friendships, finding love, having good relationships with our children and our parents, being genuine and authentic, having deep and meaningful conversations with others. Affectivity is the set of potentials that made us evolve from human animals to human beings. R. Toro believed that they were specific to humans. |
5. TRANSCENDENCE Finally, people also shared their need to find meaning in life, to find answers to questions such as why are we here, where did we come from, what is the origin of all things, where does life come from. People felt that there must be something bigger than their selves, something that can´t be perceived with the 5 senses. The capacity to ask these questions was called transcendence. |
After identifying these 5 sets, R. Toro began to reflect on how to stimulate the expression of these 5 sets of potentials, which are the expression of our identity, through dance, music, and connection with self and others.
POSITIVE ECO-FACTORS
R. Toro thought of identity as containing these 5 sets of potentials since birth. He was aware that the environment can either encourage or inhibit human potential. Therefore, he needed positive environmental factors capable of unleashing the expression of human potential. His focus then became how to conceive a methodology that facilitates the expression of human potentials so that they can be integrated in their full expression.
THE VIVENCIA
R. Toro concluded that the vivencia was the path to the realisation of these potentials. The vivencia, or lived experience, was not his invention. He was inspired by several philosophers, like the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, who emphasised the body as the primary site of knowing the world, and maintained that the body and that which it perceived could not be disentangled from each other. R. Toro was also influenced by pre-socratic philosophers like Heraclitus, who valued experience as the capacity to be totally present - present in terms of body, awareness, emotion, physiology, perception, memory, everything - a type of concentrated presence in the here and now. The transforming key was not rational thought but the lived experience because the vivencia is the capacity to live in the here and now in a concentrated and intense way integrating all of who we are, from the more archaic structures of our personality, which are the instincts, to the most elaborated, like symbolic thought and language - and doing so not in a pyramidal but in a systemic way.
Life has deposited in our cells 6 billion years of evolution. The instincts are the language of evolution, a language that is revealed in these 5 sets of potentials until the appearance of conscious self-awareness.
INSTINCTS
R. Toro´s methodology is not to go from conscious awareness to instinct but to strengthen our instinctive expression in order to increase the light of awareness – he called it a process of integrating what we think, feel, and do in a coherent integrated way.
The culture that we have created is not the result of integration but of dissociation because at a certain moment humans began to think of themselves as superior in the creation, and as superior to creation, and created a culture where they cut themselves off from much needed vital information. When humanity cut itself off from its instinctual intelligence it lost its knowledge about how to move through life. The result was that humans are now struggling with addictions, letting themselves be manipulated, and accepting the unacceptable. Humanity is feeling disoriented because it has lost the connection with its origin.
Biodanza aims to recue the intelligence of life by reawakening the instincts. For that to happen we need to overcome the fear of this language. It´s not about returning to an animal state but assuming that we have our animal part but that as humans we are affective animals.
BIOCENTRIC PRINCIPLE
The biocentric principle makes life our priority, our greatest value. It sees Life not as the result of the evolution of the universe – but rather as what makes the universe manifest in the first place from the initial chaos to today´s multiple expressions of life. The biocentric principle is a vision that could guide our cultural, economic, spiritual, legal choices… Imagine a society that organises itself by making Life a priority!
With Biodanza, R. Toro wanted to help us recover our love for live and for living together.
This text is a rough translation of an interview with Helene Levy Benseft