What is Soul Motion
Soul Motion
Soul Motion is a practice of conscious dance and movement meditation. By conscious dance we mean a way of moving through music and sometimes through silence, while receiving, observing and listening to what moves inside: feelings, sensations, instincts, intuitions.
By meditation, we mean the state where we suspend our non-stop thinking and we enter a space where are present in the moment just the way it is. Through the search for this presence in free movement, we enable a gradual process of liberation from the mind’s control and we learn how to better dance through life with a greater sense of joy and lightness and yet with intensity and wisdom.
In Soul Motion we dance through 4 main relational landscapes and at the same time we take constant inspiration from 3 primary platforms.
4 Relational Landscapes
- Dance Intimate – we move alone. Solo dance.
- Dance Communion – we move with one another. Duet.
- Dance Community – we move with everyone. Community
- Dance Infinity – We move with everything. We sense the Universal connection.
3 Main Concepts
- Pause presence – A conscious reconnection with our own center from where everything starts in movement and in stilness.
- Orbit orientation– 360° awareness. Space is all over around us.
- Eco inspiration – Everything and everyone around us informs and inspires our movement and our life dance.
CONSCIOUS DANCE: What it is and where it comes from.
Conscious dance is a practice born in the United States, in the 1970s, thanks to the avant-garde experimentation of the American dancer, philosopher, musician and artist Gabrielle Roth.
It is thanks to her that dance has been rediscovered as a powerful practice to loosen the mental dominance over the body. A body that has a lot to tell when we listen to its language.
Anthropologists, ethnologists, as well as historians remind us that in different cultures, dance has always represented the most immediate way to pause the mind from its common functions and invite individual and collective consciousness to connect with the Spirit of Creation.
Over time, especially in our obessively performing culture, dance is generally referred to as an artistic and/or sportive practice, reserved for the so-called “dancers” whether they are amateurs of professionals.
Fortunately, times are slowly changing and a growing movement of somatic body-mind rebalancing pratices are taking hold. Free dance, meditative dance or, as we call it, conscious dance is gaining the intuitive and joyful acceptance of more and more people including some attention form the scientific communitiy.
Dance for me for a minute and I’ll tell you who you are.
(Michail Baryshnikov)
The phrase of the famous dancer is very significant: “when a body moves”, he said, “it’s the most revealing thing.”
When a human being listens to music, a whole series of chemical messengers are activated in his brain which primarily involve the dopaminergic centers of pleasure and reward, and at the same time, some neural bundles of the cerebellum are activated. That’s why we can’t help but tap our foot on the floor or nod our head to mark the rhythm when a catchy piece comes to our ears. If the rhythm of the melody changes, so does our foot-tapping and it has been shown that the rhythm of our mental connections also changes
We are wired to respond to music with spontaneous movement.
We are wired to dance, beyond any rational control.
This is true for every human being.
Faced with the defensive objection “it’s not for me”, or “I don’t know how to dance”, Gabrielle Roth – the great researcher of free movement, answered clearly: “if you have a body, you are a dancer!”
Awareness in motion
Many of us have a rather thoughtless and superficial relationship with our body: we become aware of it only when there is some hitch in its functionality, when we feel pain in our body, or a part of our body no longer performs as we expect. Too often we continue to experience the body as a biological machine – at our service. Either it works as expected and we almost forget we have it, or it breaks, and then we want it to be fixed as soon as possible.
Yet our body is far from being a simple biological machine steeped as it is in our life, filled with our experiences, emotions, memories, traumas and electromagnetic vibrations. Even in the most complex space of the billions of atoms that compose us, the body represents pure energy held together in a human design thanks to an endless movement which could be defined as a marvelous dance of intricate and entangled information.
In summary, when we speak of “conscious dance” we are referring to that set of movements and dynamic forms that emerge from the body and through the body, in resonance to a musical vibration or stimulus. Where the observer is the dancer himself…in a state of relaxed presence, attention, observation and listening to oneself and one’s inner world.
