Translation by Paula Jardim (1st draft, unedited)
These are answers to questions posed after this talk, which you might want to read first.
Biodanza, emotions, anger and depression
Darwin spoke of emotions in humans and animals. He proposed that emotions evolved and were adapted over time, coming to be in the process of adaptation. The more you express an emotion the stronger it gets, so when you propose expressions of anger you will be reinforcing it. Expressing anger can generate a feeling of catharsis and liberation. “I got rid of this anger. How wonderful! I’m free!” But that doesn’t last long. In reality anger is being reinforced. That’s why Biodanza doesn’t have dances to express anger. But it has dances of transmutation, personal power and other dances that use this yang energy. Accumulated anger can be seen in the body. The body reveals it all. So what do we do in Biodanza? We liberate anger through dances of expression, dances in which through integrative movements of power and potency expressed from the guts, you tap into the same energy but in a constructive way, and use your strength and potency to transform this energy of anger into action and creativity.
Some people seem to walk with a dark cloud above their heads day after day. Some feel very sad and start to cry during a dance in Biodanza. They need to carry on dancing instead of drowning in their tears. Otherwise they’ll just be reinforcing their feelings of depression. They need to feel the pain, the suffering, and carry on dancing. Emotions are fleeting. They last seconds or minutes and then they pass. In Biodanza we don't reinforce negative emotions. If you feel real sadness please express it and then let it go. Then you have an encounter with someone who looks at you with tenderness and you receive love, attention and the smiles of your friends, and your pattern begins to change. If you had an angry character you begin to change, if you had a depressive character you begin to change, and you become happier. The defences structure the body, the level of corporal representation. If I have to be strong I put my chest up. This is the armour. The repetition of patterns creates a character. So for anger, for suffering, for hatred, let’s do a dance of strength. Let’s dance, and when the emotions come we live them and let them go. Afterwards other emotions will come, like friendship, tenderness and solidarity.
Death and dying
This is a fundamental theme. Death is not the opposite of life. Death is part of life. What we do in Biodanza is give meaning to life and add intensity to it. The meaning of life is not outside of life. The meaning of life is life itself. In Biodanza we value life. We want to rescue the intensity of life. The meaning of life is to life intensely, to love, create, have friends, children, create beauty, meet people, experience bliss and ecstasy, write poems and care for others, so that when death comes we are happy because we have lived a lot and we can die happily and experience death as the final vivencia of total surrender. “I’m going. Where to I don't know.” When we live life with intensity, totally in love with life, we’re not afraid to die because we’re too busy living to think about death. There is, however, a very good purpose of contemplating death - to realise that there’s no time to waste. We can’t waste time intellectualizing, we need to live, to act, to tell people we love them, to seek love, make babies, tell our parents we love them, and do our creative work, because there is no time to waste, because time is running out. We’re all mortal. We’re all going to end. We’re all closer to death each day. Nobody escapes this. We can create metaphysics, religions, other worlds, other lives, parallel universes, but there is a life to be lived right now. We need to live all that there is to be lived now, with heartfulness and passion. The time is now. Don't wait until tomorrow because death is always around the corner. Be aware of death but be busy with life.
Other forms of organic movement work
Biodanza has a very sophisticated theoretical model that brings together all human sciences, from cosmology to chaos theory to philosophy. But Biodanza is not just intellectual. We can dance it all. We can dance our participation in a creative universe. We can dance the gods. The difference is this. Intellectual or vivencial understanding. Sometimes we don't understand something intellectually. “I don't believe in the unity of the universe,” for example. And then we dance and feel the universe as an amplification of our body and from the vivencia we understand it. The vivencia is the source of knowledge. That's why we talk about an epistemological inversion. Instead of intellectualizing we need to feel it in our bodies first. This is the proposal of Biodanza. Biodanza schools offer a 4-year training precisely because there are so many themes to know and dance.
The importance of the group
Biodanza is always a group process. There is no individual Biodanza. We need the group because our identity reveals itself and expresses itself in the presence of others. This is very important. Our human identity needs another human identity to express itself. If we spend all the time with machines we’ll become very good machines. If we spend all our time with wolves we’ll become good wolves. The process of humanization occurs in the presence of other human beings. That's why Biodanza is always practiced in a group, because each person gives us pieces of information about who we are and opportunities to express our identity. So the group is the therapist. The facilitator just creates the conditions. The facilitator creates the class, organises the space, prepares the music, and makes poetic proposals. But the therapist is the group. So the process occurs in the group. The facilitator is like a gardener who looks after the soil so that the seeds can flourish. If a person begins to cry during a dance the invitation is to carry on dancing. And if she needs more support then the facilitator or a person in the group will look after her so that she can express her emotion and then continue the class. But the group plays the main role. Music, dance, vivencia, group, trance, expansion of consciousness, and contact - this is Biodanza. So the group is fundamental.
Biodanza is about daily life
After Biodanza we don't live, we super-live! We incorporate more life in our life. Of course, we can carry on living with the neurosis of normality, doing things mechanically, never discovering its meaning, like in the myth de Sisyphus, rolling an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and repeating this action for eternity. So Biodanza invites us to a super-life, to overcome our fears of living. And we’re meant to take it into our daily life. We rehearse in the class and take it into our daily lives. We learn how to set boundaries in the class, and then when people don't respect our space in our daily lives we know how to set our limits. If we find it hard to express our emotions in our daily life, we learn to express them in Biodanza and then we take that to our families. The aim is to do Biodanza outside of the class, in the real world. Some have the tendency to only want to live during the class, so we keep on emphasising the need to take it to daily life. Biodanza does a re-tribalization. We learn to belong to a group, to create a pro-life culture where there is friendship, pleasure and contact. We practice in a small tribe but we need to take what we learn to our everyday life.
Loneliness and social action
Biodanza is specially needed in places like big cities where there are lots of crowds, because people are lonely in crowds, in the metro, the streets, in their little worlds, on their mobile phones and computers. So everybody is needing intimacy and humanity. We’re all orphans. We all have needs. Sometimes we say, “I don't need that, I’m not needy.” But we all need a gentle embrace. However, we need to be careful to not give or receive contact when we don't feel like it. Let people know that you don’t want it. Don't let them pressurise you into unwanted contact.
Biodanza is now everywhere. It’s in orphanages and in hospitals. In Portugal and Brazil there is a lot of social action. Contact is very therapeutic. Skin diseases and psychosomatic illnesses have an emotional source and when people feel loved their bodies reorganise themselves. So we can take Biodanza into hospitals, children’s homes, care homes for older people, and so on.
Individual Biodanza
We don't do one-to-one Biodanza sessions because we need the presence of many people to stimulate our identity. If you do Biodanza with one person it gets too intense. Each person needs to dance with many people in the group otherwise it becomes limited. And counter transference can become too strong, i.e. the feelings of your patient towards you will become so strong that you’ll fall in love immediately. But you can work that out in therapy! We need the group. The bigger the better and the more you’ll discover yourself. But you need the process. For Biodanza to work, just going to one class here and there is not enough. Biodanza is a group process where the facilitator prepares a sequence of classes and people enter a developmental path. And sometimes you might not like it very much because your armour will dissolve and you’ll feel vulnerable and fragile. So it's a path, a process. Some people do Biodanza here and there. It doesn't work. It’s good but it’s not a process. Biodanza requires continuity. You can do some dances in your therapy but that's not Biodanza. And contact improvisation is wonderful but is a variation of contact dance. Biodanza is a system, not a technique. It has a set of theories, books, ideas, methods, and much more.
Clinical Biodanza
Some facilitators specialize in Clinical Biodanza. There is basic Biodanza for groups like ours, and there are applications in education, organizations, and clinical settings. Nowadays the proposal is always inclusion. In Portugal some facilitators are forming specific groups for people with different psychopathologies like psychosis to dance together with people who don't have any dysfunctions. Clinical Biodanza is an application that requires further training. So we have Biocentric Education in schools, Clinical Biodanza in hospitals, and also Biodanza in the corporate world. Biodanza can be applied to all.
What are the prerequisites to become a facilitator?
There are no prerequisites. In Portugal a student did the training in a wheelchair. She developed her expression and embodiment in the Biodanza School. There are no limitations. Biodanza can be for everyone. You don't need to know how to dance.
Life Changes
We need to change gradually. If we go to a Biodanza class and experience expansion, openness and freedom, and then go home to people who are closed and rigid… we need to enter a gradual life-changing path. We talk about toxic relationships. There are no toxic people, only toxic relationships. We can try to solve oppressive relationships that are not good for us. But if they really don't work we need to go and move on with our lives. We don't need to stay in toxic relationships, we can create the right conditions to enable us to move on with our lives. It's our journey. We might need to gain strength and trust that we can walk on our feet. And afterwards we can be grateful for the time we spent together and acknowledge all that we have learned. We don’t need to stay with toxic relationships that poison us. And we can separate with beauty. We don't need to fight. “I can’t stand you anymore! It’s all your fault!” We don't need to transfer our guilt to the other. The other tends to be the best excuse we have. “If it wasn't you I’d be free surfing in Hawaii! But you forced me to work and now look at me!” We can drop the victim position. We’re not victims. We can assume our desire and our power. We are free. We can conquer our freedom. Nobody needs to give us permission. We are our own authority. So, if we feel depressed after the Biodanza class we can decide to grab life in our hands and not let others decide for us. It can take years, but we can start with the first step.