When in nature, we often feel interconnected and touched by our surroundings. This relationship also exists between our body and mind. In fact, there is no distinction between the observer and what is being viewed, and the body and mind are not separate entities. Through movement improvisation, we can explore this connection in greater depth.
Movement meditation is a practice that explores the "nature of being" through movement and meditation. This practice combines dance and Buddhism to help us open our awareness of ourselves and our environment to deeper questions and reflections about what it means to be "me" and what it means to be in the world.
Movement meditation is fundamentally an art form that continues to challenge "being defined". Like the Zen state, it cannot be captured or explained in words. It is a state of freedom, creativity and awareness.
Meditation is a practice of embracing change, and meditation in movement is about letting go of the rules of movement and discovering the most attuned expression for each moment. It is therefore a dance of choice.
What does it mean to dance with choice? It means that we must first become aware of the rules and blind spots we carry. Only then can we truly improvise. If we don't, we become less and less able to improvise with choice. But at the same time, in a larger perspective, we are practicing becoming able to choose "not to choose," to act without doing, and to surrender to Life. At this point, improvisation will always be misunderstood by some people as the art of randomness. But in fact, there is a big difference between the two.
I often observe people improvising. Most of what I see is a state of "self". Practicing in this way leads to a separation of the sense of self from the environment. The truth is, whether you realize it or not, everyone and everything is an expression of the whole. We are practicing to embody this connection, so that the parts and facets of the whole no longer exist as separate from the whole.
We can imagine the world as a giant body. Just as the cells, organs and systems within our bodies interact to form a whole being, so everything in the universe interacts with each other. Each individual is part of this whole, just as each cell in our body is part of the overall body.
This analogy is not just a figure of speech, but an idea that is very important in Zen Buddhism. Zen practice aims to make us realize the connection between ourselves and the whole universe, and the interdependence between our inner and outer being. Through meditation, we can gradually transcend our ego-identification and separation and recognize this interdependence. Such a shift in consciousness can help us to better understand our life experience and to integrate our actions with the flow of events.
Thus, the core of the practice of movement meditation also lies in allowing us to discover, through the movement of our bodies, that we are no longer isolated individuals, but rather part of an interplay and intertwining with our surroundings.
In practicing Movement meditation, I became less and less in need of "special" rituals, venues, or external conditions. I start from the context of life, so that dance can become a way of life, and life can become a dance. Many people may still have fixed ideas of dance. These are our traditions, given by our culture, and the formed by impressions we see on stage performances. If someone who has never danced before is asked to dance, they usually say "I don't know how" or "I can't." These impressions set a standard for dance that leads to patterns that can easily be taken as the full range of possibilities for what is "right". These perceptions limit our ability to truly improvise. In practice, we can slowly grow our own movement language from our own life experiences, a language that is more humane and more suitable for expressing and understanding our lives.
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