Translation by Paula Jardim (1st draft, unedited)
The quest to understand the human spirit, the human soul, and the human mind and emotions has been going on for millions of years. And there are many types of psychologies. Some study human behaviour. Others look at the depths of the human soul. Others look for information about the mind in the body and find that trauma is located in the body. Sigmund Freud created the great work of psychoanalysis but his follower Wilhelm Reich said that the soul is the body, that everything is in the body, that everything is visible in the body. The greatest error of traditional psychology was to not look at the body. Now, this has been solved. But sometimes the body is still looked at as a place of defences, traumas, pain, and suffering. And Biodanza proposes to rescue the celebration of the body, the joy and pleasure of having a body capable of moving.
So how can we do dancing therapy? What can dance offer to therapies? Not just as an occupation, “oh when we dance we relax,” but much more than this, dancing to express our potentials, not just as a pastime to relax and make friends, which is already great, but to express our identity. All of us have an identity, a genetic inheritance that gives us our human potentials, our multiple intelligences, e.g. motor, social, affective, musical and artistic. How can we promote these multiple intelligences? How can we release these potentials from inside? And why would dance be able to do this? Because when we dance we are completely in the present moment experience. We call it vivencia. The word vivencia comes from German and it refers to a moment when we are totally in the experience. Our body, emotions, thoughts, consciousness, everything is fully there, and we experience our wholeness. We all know that.
When we hold our child in our arms for the first time, when we tell someone how much we love them, when we meet a dear friend, we have a fabulous vivencia. This type of experience is complete. Our emotions, our thoughts, our body, our soul, everything is there. This is the vivencia. And Biodanza is a source of vivencias. Biodanza is an environment that generates vivencias. We use music as a tool that reaches our emotional centre directly. You don't perceive music through our intellect. We feel the music. That’s why we use the inductive power of music and propose movements that are coherent with that music. It could be movements of strength, tenderness, bliss, joy or happiness. And we manifest our expression and express our potentials.
What therapeutic effect does this have? When we express our potential and our identity all of our systems are involved and the neurotic symptoms diminish. “How are you?” “Oh my body is just pain. Every day.” Next day. “How are you?” “So so. Headache, tummy ache. The tummy is better but now shoulder ache.” So the body is seen as a source of pain, the tomb of the soul. Our soul wants to fly but our heavy bodies don’t let our soul free. It’s a view of the body as source of pain and suffering. For centuries our culture has negated the body and seen it as sinful, impure, heavy. And Biodanza rescues the body and its beauty and sacredness. The body is life itself. Where does consciousness come from? The body. From the first cell, life has been evolving and creating ever more complex systems for thousands of years, until we are here, a life form capable of saying, “I am alive, I am aware of my existence.” We are life aware of its existence.
The first way of perceiving reality is through the body. Babies don’t have language, biological maturity or abstract thought, but they live in the world of the body. We need to rescue this source of sensory information, which was negated by Descartes. Descartes said don’t trust the body or the senses because they will trick you. One day you are happy then you have depressing news. Next day you are happy, then you lose your lover. So don’t trust your emotions, senses and passions. But what shall we trust? Reason? Look the monsters that reason has created! So in Biodanza we recover our faith and trust in the body, emotions, feelings, passions, and instincts.
First of all let’s be a good animal. “Oh no, I don’t want to be an animal. I am human.” But we can discover that our humanity has its roots in our animal nature. The more instincts we have, the more human we are, the more we love, the more we seek for what we need, the more friends we have, the more we protect our family. Our animal nature is what’s most precious in us. In Biodanza we dance the instincts, we recover the vitality of the instincts. Do you want health? Eat good food! Not junk or fast food but food that is alive. Eat with pleasure, get plenty of rest, make love for hours, have many friends, live life to the full, not from a mental decision, but from an inner feeling of connection to life, and you will have health. I feel fully alive, and I’m passionate about life. I love life, I want to see people, embrace my friends, travel, and meet new people. This is what Biodanza offers you, an existential rehab.
Why rehab? Because bursting aliveness is our natural way of being. As children we all had the urge to live, to discover, to feel from our bodies. As children we didn’t think about life but we lived it by experiencing its sensations. So first we need to feel. Thinking comes later. Thoughts come from sensations. If you want to have good sensations evoke good feelings. Don’t trust in thoughts you can elaborate whilst sitting down. You need to move. I trust the feelings I have when I am passionately in love, moved by my feelings, e-motioned somebody’s eyes. From there good thoughts come, thoughts that are pro-life, pro-friendship. So consciousness is a consequence of the body.
Our body has all wisdom. It’s not just a repository for traumas. I could interpret your liver pain as anger towards your father and your sore throat as a sign that you’re silencing what needs to be expressed. Of course interpretation is good. Psychoanalysis is a beautiful and fundamental work that is complementary to Biodanza. I am Brazilian and used to live in Rio de Janeiro. For many years I saw clients three times a week and had two Biodanza weekly groups. Then I decided to see the world so I stopped seeing my clients. Instead I started to travel. Now I have a school in Portugal and I teach all over the world. It was an existential decision. Instead of just reading about different cultures, I decided to experience them directly, to meet people from many different countries, to embrace my brothers and sisters throughout the world and enrich my identity. So these two things are complementary. Biodanza and psychotherapy are not antagonistic. You don't need to opt for one. You can choose both. And now we have many different types of therapy. Therapy is no longer distancing and rational like it used to be in the days of Freud. Today there are many humanistic existential therapists that consider how you feel in the world, like gestalt and the humanistic therapies.
Biodanza uses a little bit of all of them. Biodanza has a behavioural aspect because it invites you into action, e.g. it invites you to dance. You might arrive at a class thinking, “I can’t dance.” We put a music on. Your behaviour quickly changes. “I am afraid of people.” Soon you learn how to make eye contact and get closer, and your behaviour changes. It’s also existential because what matters is how you feel in the world. “I feel depressed, worthless.” Then the people in the Biodanza group look at you with friendship, tenderness and love. And you begin to see your humanity and realize your innate worth. “People like me, so I must be worthy.” So you change through relationships. The most important thing for human change is our relationships with other human beings. Nothing is more important for our identity than our relationships. Our life is our relationships. Do you want to change? Start relating. Find new ways of relating with people. It’s the people that will show you the way.
We do all of this work in Biodanza. Biodanza invites you to dance your power, impetus, vitality, inspiration, and self-confidence. And you rediscover your vital expression. You gain vital expression and pleasure. Our body is not just a source of suffering. It’s also a source of pleasure. We feel pleasure from little things, from eating, resting, having a bath, receiving a caress. Creativity, the capacity to change, travel, meet new people, change house, country, work. That’s creativity. Then affectivity. Being able to give and receive love, not being afraid to express love and let others love you. This can save your life. And finally transcendence, to feel connected to totality, to the mystery of life. There is a mystery that no one understands but we realise that we are part of this work. We are not alone. We have 5 channels - vitality, sexuality, creativity, affectivity and transcendence.
But there’s more. There are animals in us. We have the inheritance of life. All the animals are in us. There is a wild fauna inside of us. We don’t just need to rescue the whales. We need to rescue all the wild fauna. There is a tiger, a hippopotamus, a serpent and a heron. And many more. There are gods as well e.g. the warrior gods, the protector gods. And the archetype of the nourishing and protecting grandmother. As Jung said, the archetypes are in us. The gods are in us. There is the wise man giving blessing, the gods of beauty and seduction. They’re all inside us. We have all the history of humanity within us, and all the human passions. We don’t create anything new. In reality, when we love, suffer, restart our life, have hope, we are actualizing all these human stories. We are not alone. With us is the history of life. We have the strength of life in us. And we can dance.
Continues here.