The Breathing Dance Troupe is a new approach to meditation, fitness, and creativity I have created. This method offers you a unique synthesis of bioenergetics, breath work, and a wide variety of dance exercises and processes which support your path of deepening self-exploration and awareness, as well as an avenue for releasing tension and having fun. This troupe also offers performances twice a year in which we bring together the season's experiences and share our transformation process with an interactive audience.
The blending of breathing and dance techniques makes the Breathing Dance Troupe different from other dance or exercise classes or going to a club to dance. First of all, there is a conscious emphasis on experiencing breath work as a precursor to dancing, with the purpose of bringing to your awareness what is going on inside your body: how you are feeling mentally and emotionally, and how you feel physically. In this way you quickly become aware of where you hold tension or block emotions in your body, and you begin to understand the connection between your breath patterns and how open and fluid - or not - your body feels.
As you go further into the breath techniques, you begin to loosen up, you let emotions come up to the surface to be seen, felt, and released, and you surrender deeper into insights, self-understanding and self-trust. Furthermore, you soon begin to approach the way you dance, and the way you move about in your every day life, from a breathing standpoint: fully breathing life in, and fully breathing life out, rather than holding your breath, resisting, and just bearing it through life. Your creativity and natural joy starts to flow and open up more and more.
Most dance classes do not teach a way to breathe while moving, yet learning techniques such as Trance Energetic Breathing (deep, connected breath through your mouth) are invaluable for pacing your self in workouts, athletics, and dance performances. At clubs you dance for fun and for community. In the Breathing Dance Troupe you get to breathe consciously and celebrate through dance as well as build community.
Just take a moment right now to close your eyes and notice your breath. Is it deep and open, or is it shallow and restricted? Take a few deep, slow breaths through your mouth now and notice the difference!
Bioenergetics and active meditation are the other indispensable components in this program. Bioenergetics include a variety of vigorous and sometimes intense body exercises which build power and grounding in your legs, as well as help you break through layers of body armoring and tension. One popular exercise we use is that of full body shaking, which helps you tap into unlimited energy available in your spine, pelvis, and legs. Another fun exercise of the many weuse is the dragon exercise in which you crouch low to the ground, scoop up fire energy, and then direct your breath straight ahead of you as if you were a dragon spitting fire. The active meditations we utilize are OSHO Active Meditations; each meditation has its own soundtrack, and includes breathing, dancing, and silent sitting or standing.
Once we have warmed up with breath and bioenergetics techniques, we then go into infinite possibilities through dance. We dance to all kinds of music, dance together, alone, eyes open or closed, try on different moods and alternate realities, to name a few of the structures. Each dance experience is a journey, and in each session we dance for over an hour straight. Of course we continue to breathe as we dance; in fact, the way we dance following breathing comes from an internal, grounded, meditative and expressive space, rather than from a space of mental analysis, trying to look good, thinking too much, conditioning or technique.
What unfolds from Breathing Dance Troupe is your most blissful authentic expression of your self.
For further information on how you can practice breath and dance at home, or to join/create a breathing dance troupe near you, contact: