“The fastest, cleanest, most joyful way to break out of your own box is by dancing. I’m not talking about doing the stand and sway. I’m talking about dancing so deep, so hard, so full of the beat, that you are nothing but the dance and the beat and the sweat and the heat. Surrendering to the movement practice teaches us to trust.” GABRIELLE ROTH
It is interesting for me to see how the topics of workshops that I teach in some way mirror what I am learning myself at the moment, how they reflect what is currently going on in myself and in my life. When I plan them ahead, arranging dates, locations, and themes, I don’t really know what prompts me to choose specific topics, but in the end everything fits together and is connected. Very soon I will be teaching two workshops on the topic of “Surrender”, one in Leuven and the other in Vienna, so I am going to go deeper here into this subject.
My first intention with this workshop was to provide many different gateways into the Chaos, because I know that it can cause strong “allergic response” within us and sometimes in our environment. Nevertheless, this is an extremely important rhythm as it holds a place in the middle of the wave and the rhythms that follow it depend on it. In its essence it calls us to surrender to it 100%, with all we have, it is not satisfied with any less. When I mention many gateways into the Chaos, I mean that it can be entered from Flowing, and from Staccato as well as from Lyrical, or Stillness. Of course, I’m also referring to the pure, unadulterated, primordial Chaos, which has existed long before we came into existence, the source from which everything was created. For me, every one of us is actually a fruit of Chaos’s creativity, a unique union of opposites. While we were being created no one knew what exactly we would be in spite of their plan and desire. Even today we are still in the creative process of creating ourselves through falling and rising, pulling back and pushing, losing and finding ourselves. When we resist Chaos, this natural phenomenon, and when we stubbornly try to control it, we can end up destroying ourselves and those around us or driving both us and them mad. Chaos demands that we completely surrender to it, that we throw in its powerful alchemist process all that we carry on our backs, shoulders, heart, stomach, all that we cling to and hold so tight. Chaos receives that which is ours and that which isn’t, whatever we can offer. So much of what we think does not belong to us at all, much less has it anything to do with the present moment. In this dance we practice how to shake ourselves in a way that is soft, and relaxed, and isn’t so much tilting at windmills or fighting with life, we are shaking ourselves from our roots to our very essence. So that we can be ready when life throws us off the rails, or we lose our footing, in these times when we can no longer rely even on the changing seasons not to mention our country’s leaders – we are ready for what we did not know was coming, ready for the unknown, ready to surrender to the immeasurable emptiness. As Chaos calls to us to let go with every drum beat, in that process of surrendering completely, we find our own freedom, and sometimes we receive that “amazing grace” and can see the collateral beauty.
I wish us all a sufficient dose of dancing towards and for freedom, and you can find some good opportunities in our program.
Try, what have you really got to lose?
With love, Silvija