The dance of life - part One
por Sônia Imenes em STUM WORLDAtualizado em 20/11/2005 14:22:45
Translated by Nancy Juozapavicius - [email protected]
Objectively, life is a dance because everything that happens in nature is through the movement, the rhythm, the continuous transformation in an eternal flow. Subjectively, the dance is the source of vitality. Vitality is energy, power, movement, expression, creative capacity, conscience. We need to learn how to dance-live in harmony with this cosmic life-dance.
Through the spontaneous dance we propose a way so the person can deal with his own body, his own rhythm, his emotions and expressions. Several techniques are integrated to provide the development of self-perception, of body conscience and its expressive manifestation, in a process of involvement of the person with him/herself, with the other and with what surrounds her, through the dance.
We start from the subjective body language, which can become objective, conscious, while the person is going deeper in this process, searching what she has inside of herself. We start from an integrated conception of man, on which body, mind, feelings, gestures constitute different interdependent aspects of one’s individuality.
Only from this point, the concept of man as an integral being, within the holistic notion of reality, of interdependence among the phenomena, we can understand the importance of those ‘new’ proposals that take to the path of self-knowledge and bring great contribution to the field of human healing.
The meaning of this search, this increasing dissemination of ‘new’ techniques to approach health problems, psychological-physical unbalance, emotional perturbations, stress, etc., all of them enhancing the work with the body, is larger than it seems at first sight. Mainly because of the fear involving frauds and charlatanism, consequence of the vulgarization they are subjected when treated superficially.
The mirror of the crisis
We can say this search is the mirror of a crisis. A very spread crisis, involving all aspects of life. Today no human being is able to be free of it.
We live together more or less tuned with the enormous potential of collective self-destruction (huge war arsenals and nuclear weapons); amid a strong process of social disintegration (crime, violence, suicide, alcoholism, drugs, etc); among economical and political instability; with life and health always threatened by environmental conditions (air pollution, water pollution, food pollution; bad conditions of living, sanitation, etc); with the dissemination of several diseases (in the Third World, most of them of nutritional and infectious nature; in the First World, chronic and degenerative diseases) and an increasing dose of neurotic, depressed, schizophrenic people, etc.
The technological and scientific developments, allied to the power of the media, have created a pattern, a certain way of thinking and behave, and we all live deeply immersed, consciously or not, in this global world.
We live with all this and still we consider ourselves ‘normal’. It is necessary to revise this criterion of normality. It is certain that, individually, we feel impotent to change something of such a dimension. Yet, it is necessary to be aware that it is not possible to be accomplice with the social disease and not get sick with it.
To be accomplice means to know, to be aware of, live with the problems and not interfere. But is possible, indeed, to interfere, at least in a range of influence within our reach, starting with ourselves. It is necessary to rely upon our conscience. All starts by self-awareness.
In order for to adjust us to social life, to the dominant cultural pattern, we had to abandon many of our personal desires. We had to stand apart from our inner wishes. We disconnected from ourselves. Few are the people that do or work with something they like, or that can express, in what they do, their intimate potential of fulfillment.
We know that the non-personal-fulfillment, the inability to express oneself, to create, to produce, is a big source, if not the main source, of psychological, emotional and mental disturbances. It is important to understand how we are absorbed by the social and cultural dominant values. Certain values are so rooted socially in our life dynamics that we neither realize how they interfere in our daily lives, nor we know of their origins.
