What is Biodanza
Biodanza is a system of human development. Its aim is human integration. Rolando Toro and other authors have found that humans were dissociated in multiple parts. He has proposed a process of integrating the body, mind, spirit, emotion, and belief systems. The path which has been chosen for this integration is the vivencia.
This is possible because of the way a part of the brain works, the limbic system, which functions as a crossroads that can connect both with emotions and the organs, the body, the viscera. This part of the brain is activated by inducing vivencias through music, communication, encounters, group dynamics, embraces, laughter, and trance, all from this affective nucleus of integration that generates unity. |
Talking about this ineffable experience, Mircea Eliade called it hierophany, by which he meant the discovery of the presence of the sacred in all that exists, in all that lives, and especially in your self. Because the discovery of the identity can not be done alone, you can not do it by yourself. It happens in the presence of the other. This means that you can discover the sacred essence of life, the mystery of life, this fascinating, tremendous, mystery of life in the encounter with the other, in the eyes of the other, in the eyes of all your brothers and sisters. It is the other that gives you the vision of who you are, because nothing is illuminated in isolation, only in the presence of the other. We need to ask not “who am I”, but “who are we?” And what is our relation with the whole of totality?
The four keys to the human soul
What is the path? What are the elements that give us access to these fundamental keys to the human soul? Rolando Toro has given us four basic elements.
1. Love
The first key is love, which refers to all the experiences that allow you to approach, defend, care, and protect life. Rolando Toro talked about the biocentric principle through which we could approach life to conserve it, protect it, defend it, and look after it. This deep affinity for life is what drives us to care for ourselves, to protect others, our natural environment and all living beings. All experiences of solidarity, friendship, compassion, tenderness, and intense action in defence of life correspond to the experience which Rolando Toro called love. For Rolando Toro love is a universal force that makes it possible for life to exist. The biocentric principle proposes that the universe exists because life exists, and not the other way around.
If we are part of our environment, of this living universe, then we share the same energy. What makes it possible for us to have lucidity, illumination and consciousness is the same energy that makes it possible for the stars to illuminate the sky. If we are a part of this nature that contains us, and a creature of this universe that embraces us, then the spirit of brotherhood and solidarity between the multiple species is natural. What is not natural is the cultural message that mind and body are two separate things, and that spirit takes priority over the body, when in reality both are integrated and form an identity.
For Rolando Toro this body-mind split is alarming because it implies that the sacred only belongs to a liturgical space-time and that everything and everyone outside of this liturgical space-time is profane.
It is time to let go of the anthropocentric paradigm of human beings as the culmination of evolution exploiting other species. According to the biocentric principle we are co-participating and cooperating with our surrounding environment, and all time is sacred. To state that sacredness only happens within a specific space-time would make our daily life and daily acts profane.
Love is therefore the first experience that opens us to the numinous. Many are interested but don’t know how to love. Two thousand years ago Jesus told us to love one another, yet we are still making wars. We still don't know how to love. Rolando Toro said there must be a way of opening people’s hearts, and a path is urgently needed. We can all access the experience of a loving heart and make it stable. We just need a method for this. Biodanza has a methodology that enables us to learn a series of exercises that help us to gradually approach one another, look at each other, embrace, qualify and value each other, exalt each other's greatness, inner value, and implicit value, the value we have merely because we are living beings in this mysterious universe, each one of us an inexplicable life form, as mysterious and fascinating as what surrounds us.
2. Bringing our shadow into light
Another experience that leads to the numinous is throwing light on the shadow. As Jung said, it’s important to discover its transforming power, and to have enough energy to illuminate it. This will allow us to change. In this path it’s important to experience their unity. Therein one finds the transforming power. The most important thing in this process of illumination is embracing our own darkness.
3. Courage
The third step or experience to access the numinous dimension is courage, i.e. learning to face what is paralysing us, what is stopping us from being ourselves. This courage refers to the intrinsic value that we all have that allows us to dare to overcome obstacles, to persevere, to activate our potentials, including the numinous potential, which is perhaps the most repressed of all. So far it hasn’t been valued by society. Instead of wanting to tap into the numinous unconscious, our psychiatry, psychology and medicine have become experts in perceiving the human darkness. Instead of developing the potential for health and wellbeing, our experts have focused instead on suffering and pain. Illuminating our shadow requires the courage to evoke the inner strength and the will power to dare to face our fears.
Biodanza has studied these paralysing fears and has found 140 fears that were grouped into four categories. 1) The fear of love, e.g. to give oneself, to share, the fear of sexuality, 2) the fear to exercise our vital force to be able to move forth in life, to be determined and decisive about getting what we need to live and survive, 3) the fear of expressing ourselves, our feelings, our potentials and our true identity, and finally 4) the fear of the primordial, of nature, of chaos and madness. We may have some or all of these fears and we need the courage to challenge them, so that we can get closer to the essence of liberation.
4. Intasis
The fourth step to access the numinous is to find the divine within, the entheogenic experience, which can be induced by psychoactive substances, but which we already have within us. Inside each of our cells we have this ancestral information. Each one of our cells contains the information of our whole body. We can find sacredness within ourselves. And this experience of awakening goes with this inner capacity to create, to join life’s process of continuous creation.
If we combine these four elements, the experiences of love, courage, realisation of our intrinsic value, illumination of the shadow, and access to the hierophanic experience in daily life, in each act, in each gesture, in each encounter with each element of our environment, then we will access the glory of living, the numinous experience. And Rolando Toro has elaborated a methodology for this that impacts not only the body but the totality of our being.
Music, as vibration, impacts not just the ear but the whole being. Music is vibration, sound and light. It doesn’t just touch the ear. It reaches each cell and each organ. And the harmony of this vibration is light. It helps us to harmonise the body’s inner functioning and to recover its lost balance. It’s the healing experience per excellence, an experience that arises in the presence of the other, in total connection with our potentials.
Spirituality in the 3rd millennium is graceful, joyful, and pleasurable. The same applies to creativity and all other human potentials. We can enjoy the process of growth and the fruits of our work. We can enjoy life, affection and tenderness. We can enjoy breathing, moving, loving and living.
This is a summary of how the numinous experience can be reached in Biodanza, which is a vivencial path, where this numinous experience is induced through music, movement, dance, contact, caress, playfulness, laughter, embrace, trance, regression, and expanded states of consciousness, all of which are therapeutic in their own right. Biodanza brings them together according to a theoretical model using organic music, coherent movement, and contact in reciprocity and feedback.
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Rolando Toro believed that we could access many unconscious parts of the mind. He has referred to Freud’s personal unconscious, which tapped into our personal history. The personal unconscious is one level of the unconscious. Later came the collective unconscious, with the archetypes and symbols of all members of humanity, a kind of memory of the species that can be accessed through dreams, the expressive arts, and so forth.
Rolando Toro believed that we could access many unconscious parts of the mind. He has referred to Freud’s personal unconscious, which tapped into our personal history. The personal unconscious is one level of the unconscious. Later came the collective unconscious, with the archetypes and symbols of all members of humanity, a kind of memory of the species that can be accessed through dreams, the expressive arts, and so forth.
Rolando Toro then proposed a third unconscious, the vital unconscious, which referred to the body’s intelligence, the cellular cognition that enables the processes of life, cellular cooperation, immune defence, and everything we know about the phenomenon of life. The way to access this vital unconscious is not through free association but through the vivencia, e.g. through vivencias of contact, of connection with the earth, water, the elements, embraces, etc. These are direct ways of accessing this vital unconscious, which is responsible for our moods, and the harmony and homeostasis that is characteristic of living beings.
The numinous unconscious
Around 2010, towards the end of his life, Rolando Toro proposed the numinous unconscious, which he considered to be another layer of the human being. He said that it would be there that we could find the living strength of humanity, the seat of human greatness, and the keys to the human soul. He believed that we could all access this numinous unconscious. Numen means sacred, referring to the miraculous ineffable experience of connection with life and with all that surrounds us and that we are a part of.