Science, Art & Love
Article
We all now know that physical and emotional trauma lodges in the body and that most illness has an emotional and psychosomatic basis. What we are now faced with is the possibility that joy, happiness and well-being can also be deeply embedded at a cellular level by the very same biological pathways. Biodanza, meaning to dance with life, is a method for doing just that. Dr Padraic Churba-Doyle reports.
The biological science behind Biodanza is only now reaching the public domain. The Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert and The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton (see pg 28 of the February/March 2008 edition of Odyssey magazine, South Africa) provide the biological understanding and hard science of what Biodanza is about. Rolando Toro, the founder of Biodanza, had a deep understanding of this cutting-edge biology decades ago. His genius was to create a means by which everyone can tap into their genetic potential and re-programme their biology to create chronic states of joy and well being – known as vivencia. Biodanza’s use of music and exercises evokes deep autonomic nervous system and hormonal change. Like many other health methods, such as yoga, the autonomic nervous system is brought into balance. This is designed to reduce the chronic levels of stress we all live under. But it then goes further and works with deep seated hormonal change that has the capacity to create change at a genetic level. You can imprint your cells with positive messages of affection, love and well-being. In academic research literature, this biological pathway has been known for over 20 years.
The steroid hormone mechanism is as follows:
ART & EMOTIONS
Biodanza uses music, movement and creativity to access your emotional world. According to Rolando Toro: ‘The emotional world is less understood by psychotherapy and better explored through music, dance, literature and poetry. Those who work with emotions should know more about Shakespeare, Kafka or Virginia Woolf than psychotherapy.’
Music is the language of the soul. It can evoke the strongest, joyous experiences and can elevate you into transcendent states of ecstasy, joy and well-being – all aiming to imprint at a deep cellular level.
How someone walks and moves is a reflection of their state of mind and well-being. Biodanza uses very simple exercises and movement to open your posture, to get you to move more freely, to meet people openly. This in itself has profound changes on how you feel about yourself, how you communicate and how you relate with others.
Human life can be viewed as a daily creative act – like a tree that, arising from a seed, becomes strong and fertile, nurtured by the sap of love. When nurtured sufficiently, it flourishes and bears fruit, so generously that its branches are broken under the weight of its fruit. Biodanza’s intent is to facilitate your natural creative impulses until they flow into your daily life and you change your life for you and those around you.
A coherent life is not based around feeling one thing, doing another and thinking something else. But how many of us live this way? Biodanza’s intent is to increase emotional coherence in your life.
Toro says: ‘Emotions can be expressed through healthy or pathological biological pathways. Without a doubt, healthy individuals spontaneously express their emotions in concrete circumstances, while dissociated persons stop them, disguise them, hide them, or discharge them onto innocent victims. The healthy way would then be that the individual has the spontaneity and necessary sincerity to react to each situation with the appropriate emotions.’
‘Emotions that are not expressed accumulate in the vital organs. Many people are unable to express happiness, rage, sadness, eroticism or tenderness. Those chronically repressed emotions end up attacking the nervous system and the immune defenses. Learning how to express our own emotions in a healthy way is necessary to maintain internal biological equilibrium.’
Biodanza exercises induce the emotions of happiness, kindness, tenderness, affection and many more. Just as a person can learn rage, fear, aggressiveness, and the tendency toward depression, he or she can also learn altruism, eroticism, and kindness. Learning does not only take place at a conscious level. There is also learning on the affective, emotional and visceral levels.
Biodanza works to reinforce positive emotions and, through coherent expression of emotions, to progressively achieve emotional coherence in your life.
LOVE
We all have a need for affection, to be held, to be loved. It is basically what makes us human. But its biological necessity for our very survival and personal development has been grossly underestimated.
As far back as the 1940s, the psychologist Renée Spitz studied human babies isolated from their mothers in institutional homes. Hygiene was impeccable. But without being held and loved, the immune resistance of these babies was lowered. Thirty-four out of 91 died. In other foundling homes, the death rate was even higher. In some, it climbed to a devastating 90%. A host of other studies have shown similar results. Babies can be given food, shelter, warmth and hygiene. But if they are not held and loved, they have an abnormal tendency to die.
Sue Gerhardt’s Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes A Baby’s Brain (2004) gives us the science behind how our very neurological development is also deeply influenced by how we have been held, touched and loved in our early development.
Says Carolina Churba-Doyle: ‘People need affection, contact, and love in their lives as much as they need water. Rolando Toro again took this basic biological necessity of life and created a system to bring affection, contact and love back into our lives.’
From affection, we have the basis for ethical behaviour. If you can relate to someone and connect with them, you will tend to be ethical in your relationship with them. If you do not have a capacity to connect and have no affinity for another, you will not be ethical towards them. At this fundamental level, we have the root source of dishonesty, crime and war – people without affection for their fellow humanity.
THE BIG PICTURE
Toro’s objective was not small. In his view, we have suffered enough. It is time to replace these old patterns with new ones of affection, connection and pleasure. His intent is to assist humanity to reach higher levels of human evolution based on methods derived from the biological sciences. In his view, you have an opportunity to determine or influence your own human evolution and those around you. From affection, we have the basis for ethical behaviour. If you can relate to someone and connect with them, you will tend to be ethical in your relationship with them. If you do not have a capacity to connect and have no affinity for another, you will not be ethical towards them. At this fundamental level, we have the root source of dishonesty, crime and war – people without affection for their fellow humanity. Biodanza’s answer is to get everyone evolving, relating, truly seeing each other, building affection and connection. Which route will win out – survival by tooth and claw or survival through affection, connection and love?
The choice is ours.
article reprinted with permission by Padraic Churba-Doyle
The biological science behind Biodanza is only now reaching the public domain. The Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert and The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton (see pg 28 of the February/March 2008 edition of Odyssey magazine, South Africa) provide the biological understanding and hard science of what Biodanza is about. Rolando Toro, the founder of Biodanza, had a deep understanding of this cutting-edge biology decades ago. His genius was to create a means by which everyone can tap into their genetic potential and re-programme their biology to create chronic states of joy and well being – known as vivencia. Biodanza’s use of music and exercises evokes deep autonomic nervous system and hormonal change. Like many other health methods, such as yoga, the autonomic nervous system is brought into balance. This is designed to reduce the chronic levels of stress we all live under. But it then goes further and works with deep seated hormonal change that has the capacity to create change at a genetic level. You can imprint your cells with positive messages of affection, love and well-being. In academic research literature, this biological pathway has been known for over 20 years.
The steroid hormone mechanism is as follows:
- The music and exercises evoke hormonal change releasing, for example, steroid hormones;
- The steroids penetrate to the cells and they unite to a receptor protein in the nucleus of the cell;
- The activated steroid-receiver can then unite with the Y chromosome in order to act on specific sequences of DNA;
- These specific sequences of the DNA contain glucocorticoide regulatory elements (GCRE);
- RNA polymers then unite with the GCRE;
- These new RNA molecules are then transcribed with the new message or experience;
- New proteins are synthesized from this.
ART & EMOTIONS
Biodanza uses music, movement and creativity to access your emotional world. According to Rolando Toro: ‘The emotional world is less understood by psychotherapy and better explored through music, dance, literature and poetry. Those who work with emotions should know more about Shakespeare, Kafka or Virginia Woolf than psychotherapy.’
Music is the language of the soul. It can evoke the strongest, joyous experiences and can elevate you into transcendent states of ecstasy, joy and well-being – all aiming to imprint at a deep cellular level.
How someone walks and moves is a reflection of their state of mind and well-being. Biodanza uses very simple exercises and movement to open your posture, to get you to move more freely, to meet people openly. This in itself has profound changes on how you feel about yourself, how you communicate and how you relate with others.
Human life can be viewed as a daily creative act – like a tree that, arising from a seed, becomes strong and fertile, nurtured by the sap of love. When nurtured sufficiently, it flourishes and bears fruit, so generously that its branches are broken under the weight of its fruit. Biodanza’s intent is to facilitate your natural creative impulses until they flow into your daily life and you change your life for you and those around you.
A coherent life is not based around feeling one thing, doing another and thinking something else. But how many of us live this way? Biodanza’s intent is to increase emotional coherence in your life.
Toro says: ‘Emotions can be expressed through healthy or pathological biological pathways. Without a doubt, healthy individuals spontaneously express their emotions in concrete circumstances, while dissociated persons stop them, disguise them, hide them, or discharge them onto innocent victims. The healthy way would then be that the individual has the spontaneity and necessary sincerity to react to each situation with the appropriate emotions.’
‘Emotions that are not expressed accumulate in the vital organs. Many people are unable to express happiness, rage, sadness, eroticism or tenderness. Those chronically repressed emotions end up attacking the nervous system and the immune defenses. Learning how to express our own emotions in a healthy way is necessary to maintain internal biological equilibrium.’
Biodanza exercises induce the emotions of happiness, kindness, tenderness, affection and many more. Just as a person can learn rage, fear, aggressiveness, and the tendency toward depression, he or she can also learn altruism, eroticism, and kindness. Learning does not only take place at a conscious level. There is also learning on the affective, emotional and visceral levels.
Biodanza works to reinforce positive emotions and, through coherent expression of emotions, to progressively achieve emotional coherence in your life.
LOVE
We all have a need for affection, to be held, to be loved. It is basically what makes us human. But its biological necessity for our very survival and personal development has been grossly underestimated.
As far back as the 1940s, the psychologist Renée Spitz studied human babies isolated from their mothers in institutional homes. Hygiene was impeccable. But without being held and loved, the immune resistance of these babies was lowered. Thirty-four out of 91 died. In other foundling homes, the death rate was even higher. In some, it climbed to a devastating 90%. A host of other studies have shown similar results. Babies can be given food, shelter, warmth and hygiene. But if they are not held and loved, they have an abnormal tendency to die.
Sue Gerhardt’s Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes A Baby’s Brain (2004) gives us the science behind how our very neurological development is also deeply influenced by how we have been held, touched and loved in our early development.
Says Carolina Churba-Doyle: ‘People need affection, contact, and love in their lives as much as they need water. Rolando Toro again took this basic biological necessity of life and created a system to bring affection, contact and love back into our lives.’
From affection, we have the basis for ethical behaviour. If you can relate to someone and connect with them, you will tend to be ethical in your relationship with them. If you do not have a capacity to connect and have no affinity for another, you will not be ethical towards them. At this fundamental level, we have the root source of dishonesty, crime and war – people without affection for their fellow humanity.
THE BIG PICTURE
Toro’s objective was not small. In his view, we have suffered enough. It is time to replace these old patterns with new ones of affection, connection and pleasure. His intent is to assist humanity to reach higher levels of human evolution based on methods derived from the biological sciences. In his view, you have an opportunity to determine or influence your own human evolution and those around you. From affection, we have the basis for ethical behaviour. If you can relate to someone and connect with them, you will tend to be ethical in your relationship with them. If you do not have a capacity to connect and have no affinity for another, you will not be ethical towards them. At this fundamental level, we have the root source of dishonesty, crime and war – people without affection for their fellow humanity. Biodanza’s answer is to get everyone evolving, relating, truly seeing each other, building affection and connection. Which route will win out – survival by tooth and claw or survival through affection, connection and love?
The choice is ours.
article reprinted with permission by Padraic Churba-Doyle
You are extraordinary!
"Every human being is miraculous and extraordinary with many possibilities in the cosmos." R. Toro
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You are love and loved!
"Affectivity is the poetry of encounter."
R. Toro |
Life in the Center
"Life is absolute, not questionable, not discussible. It is the most important of all realities that we are living." R. Toro
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