Introduction
This post might be of interest to
- Person-centred therapists who are curious about Biodanza
- Biodanza facilitators who are curious about the person-centred approach
As a gifted teacher he wanted to create an environment that encouraged self-initiated and self-directed learning. Trusting that all human beings have the capacity to fulfil their potential, he developed a non-directive, empathic way of being, relating, and working.
His approach has been adopted by different disciplines and is now being used in a variety of fields. For educators, it is all about student-centred learning. For organisations, a way of creating positive change. And for health and community care professionals, key principles behind personalised treatment or support enabling people to live a fulfilling life.
Toro developed Biodanza in the 1960s as a system of human development oriented towards the strengthening of the expression of human potentials through music, group communication exercises, and integrative experiences.
In 1965 he began his first dance trials with mental patients at the Psychiatric Hospital of Santiago. At that time, he was teaching at the Centre for the Study of Medical Anthropology at the School of Medicine of the University of Chile. The aim was to trial various techniques to humanise medicine, such as group psychotherapies following Rogers approach, art therapy, psychodrama, and so forth.
Rogers and Toro were both on a quest to help bring about greater integration, and convinced that constructive change needs time. That is why Biodanza was conceived as a process. A flowing process for ever-changing beings with a continuously shifting set of potentialities.
Rogers´ Six Conditions for Growth in Biodanza
Likewise, Toro was certain that contact was key. When authentic encounter occurs, he said, real modification of the identity starts to take place. This is one of the reasons why Biodanza encourages interpersonal contact and emphasises the creative quality of the human encounter.
For Toro, “the only healthy relationship between people is the affective relationship, through which individuals have the opportunity, not only to know themselves, but essentially to be themselves.” Thus, he encouraged Biodanza facilitators to reveal their natural human qualities as a way of encouraging the people in their groups to be spontaneous in their expression and connection. He saw each of them as actively participating not only in their own healing but also in the healing of others, each becoming a therapist or health agent. In parallel, Rogers encouraged therapists to be themselves even in ways which are not regarded as ideal for psychotherapy. For him, genuineness, authenticity, congruency were essential for a relationship to become a real space of growth. |
Rogers also identified unconditional positive regard, by which he meant a non-judgmental warm acceptance of people´s experience and emotional expression, as another crucial requirement for a growth-enabling relationship. In similar fashion, Toro talked about undifferentiated Eros as the unconditional acceptance of contact with all human beings without discrimination of any kind. |
According to Rogers, “the third facilitative aspect of the relationship is empathic understanding. This means that the therapist senses accurately the feelings and personal meanings that the client is experiencing and communicates this understanding to the client." Through the dance connection, people can come to sense each other´s inner world as if their own. |
“The person needs to listen to the body of the other, and to become receptive to the information that comes from the movement the other. Sharing the same rhythm means reaching a level of body empathy.”
Toro, who was inspired by Theodor Lipps´s concept of empathy, described it as a profound identification and a total understanding of the essence of a person, together with associated feelings of warmth and a spirit of fraternity.
Rogers pointed out that unless people sense the acceptance and empathy that others experience for them, that unless these are communicated, they will not receive them and their process of healing and growth will not start. To help people learn to communicate their personal experiences and emotions Toro included various expressive communication exercises in the Biodanza system. |
The Power of Presence
Although presence is not one of the six conditions, Rogers (in Baldwin, 1987) said that when he was intensely focused on a client, his mere presence seemed to be healing. Toro also wrote about the impact of presence and of its absence. The following quote can be found in his Biodanza teacher-traning booklets. |
For Toro, tenderness is the quality that grants presence. What people need, he said, is a feeling of intimacy, of transcendence, of joyful connection and of invigorating happiness. Therefore, he created dance-movement exercises to enable people to meet these natural needs. Many of these celebrate the presence of the other in the joy of the human encounter, which he urged us to savour, to celebrate, and to take delight in.