Praying while dancing and the process of writing the book

It is 14:12 and of course it's the perfect time to start my 26th Blog. After a long pause during the summer that stretched into the first weeks of autumn, I found again the motivation and energy to focus my thoughts not only on the book but also on writing the blog. Today as I did previously I would like to share with you an album that I find very beautiful. I have been listening to it the whole weekend and also right now I will start playing it.

https://music.apple.com/cz/album/chapter-ii-how-dark-it-is-before-dawn-ep/1730708123

Anoushka Shankar, Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before Dawn - EP

Danced Prayers for Health, Love and Peace

This evening I hold a free event online, to which I invite everyone to connect for 30 minutes to concentrate the intention and energy on Health, Love and Peace in us and around us. We have been organizing these prayers for some time now and we will continue organizing them as we feel it is very necessary to remember to consciously pray. 

Why Pray?

Well, praying is an action where you keep an intention in order to feel the connection to God. Usually we pray in order to get something, or to ask for something. 

I call it prayers because in Somatic Dialogue the first warm-up improvisations transformed to Prayers. I call them Prayers because they help to connect: it is a time when the person gets into connection with themselves, their body and the floor. Just like in religious prayers, where the person connects with God in a special place.

The Somatic Dialogue Prayers are not related or connected to any religion, and have no aim other than connecting the mind, heart and body together in the very moment. My desire has always been to dance to feel that connection with “God” - which I prefer to use as a poetic notion - simply dance to stay in connection with life.

I believe that when a person is in connection like that in a prayer in which they move, they cannot do any harm:)

I also believe that when people connect at the same time with the intention for something, that this really works! Therefore the invitation is to dance prayers for Health (so that the human mind recovers from its sickness, perversion and horror), for Love (so that in spite of all the hatred that is being nourished through ignorance, hypocrisy and arrogance Love grows in the souls of all humans) and for Peace (in spite of all wars, the insatiable greed, the genocides and injustices for peace to be).

So tonight and also in the future we will have these events and you can find the link and all the other dates here. Allow yourself to be inspired 🙂

The book…the process…the present

Over the past few weeks I have been writing as much as I could. A paragraph here and there, not really finding the time to sit and let my fingers dance on the keyboard for hours at end. But my mind is full of the book and the themes. Constantly I am thinking and the phrases, notions, words appear, and even when I walk I find myself writing in my mind, it is as if another voice, an inner voice is whispering to me. And then I sit for an hour or even sometimes less and the whispers transform into phrases. I have never felt so ready in my life before. I guess this is what we call maturity, when the fruit is ripe it just falls off the branch. 

Today however instead of continuing to write I had the need to read what I have been writing all along. It is an interesting feeling to read my own work-to-be. The feeling is one of completeness. My judging voice is quiet. My questions are present but they don’t feel intimidating, or they do not stop me from writing and re-writing. I recognise my voice and the tone of my voice in the written form. It is clear, and simple, something between written and conversation forms.

Being pleased? Well I can’t say I am pleased with myself, but I have stopped doubting what I am doing. I think that this is related to the fact that I am writing, no matter the outcome, and the continuous writing started a parallel process in me, where it just flows. For example, the passages that I was reading today were talking about the notions of sincerity, neutrality and innocence. These are three notions that the Somatic Dialogue facilitator must work on continuously in their paths of facilitation. I will not write or quote from the book, but when I think about these notions now, considering our normal lives, I believe that these notions are equally important in the way we relate to ourselves and to others.

Trying to be as sincere as possible is a very layered activity. Sincerity according to what? Right? But when we work with the body we can start feeling how something feels sincere and how other things are strange, foreign or even fake. I believe that being sincere towards ourselves is one of the most difficult and painful tasks. Because we are so full of ideas. Full of convictions of how we are and how we appear. And only when encountering unpleasant events, or strong people who mirror things we don’t like seeing in ourselves, do we take the time to reflect on the sincerity we have towards our own lives. It is a path we need to be willing to go… and it is not easy at times. But in time it makes everything flow and down to earth. 

Being Neutral? Well in today’s world situation it is very difficult to stay neutral. But neutrality is neither good nor bad, it is just very difficult and nearly impossible. Because we are full of our standing points, our cultural heritage, our judgements, our will and resistances. However, to cultivate and practice neutrality in our lives allows us to see the other better, to hear different opinions, and to create a space in our perception, where we can distinguish between emotional reactions and intellectual convictions. We can find calmness in order to listen truly, without being pushed by our emotional reactions. We do not need to be colourless, or opinionless, but just have a freer relationship to what we believe in, what we think and what we know, so that we can have the space to change, to dialogue and be able to receive others’ point of views and realities.

Being innocent? No adult is innocent. We all contribute to everything that is happening in our world, directly or indirectly. But the feeling of innocence is in us, we can remember how it felt to be free from all shame, reason and conviction and just connect to nature, to a toy or to a loved one. And when we make space and time to connect to this innocence we can allow ourselves to play, during a game, during an encounter or during a danced improvisation. The capacity of being in the moment like a child and allowing playfulness to emerge from our depths is a very relieving experience and it can change the quality of what we feel.

Do we discover sincerity, neutrality and innocence while we work with Somatic Dialogue?

Yes we do. But only when we invest our presence and our time in practicing. These notions are known notions for all of us, we all know what they are and we all have our personal reflections and experiences of them. However it is not often that we can actually touch these notions in the physical realm of our being. The body has a memory of these notions and we must give the body the time and space to liberate certain things, so that we can be touched by our own sincerity and innocence and we can reflect and feel how being neutral is, for a short time.

I will stop for now, dear reader, and let you reflect on this: What is sincerity for you? How neutral can you be when you encounter your own reactions or the reactions of others? And how much are you able to forget what you know and connect with a moment of dance like a child who hears stimulating music, and just is.

Just be, and be in love.

Because Love must B.

Berrak