Primal Dance: A Reunion with the Meaning of Life

This blog was written by Luz Betancur, a Newfield graduate of the Coaching for Personal & Professional Mastery program. She is a psychologist with 15 years of experience in psychotherapy. She focuses on Humanistic, Gestalt, systemic and transpersonal therapies. She is a family constellations facilitator of and teaches primal dance.

“We do not need to go any further, our body is full of universal information. Millions of years of evolution come together in each human being, producing extraordinary wisdom. It is here, at our disposition. We emerge from the earth like the mountains emerge from the plains, like the apples emerge from the apple tree, like the waves rise from the depths of the sea.” – Daniel Taroppio

As we search for a reunion with the sense of the meaning of life, there are many methods that are available and within our reach. When I was faced with humanity’s eternal questions (“Where do I come from and where am I going?”, “Where does this infinite nostalgia for being — that it is not quenched even when I find the answers to some of my big questions — come from?”) I chose the path of meditation to look for the answers. It is a path that has given me great inner peace and it also gave me a great gift: the encounter with Primal Dance. This dance is a meditative practice in pure movement.

At Newfield, we believe that somatic learning is a necessary territory to explore to live life fully. It is through the body that we contact dimensions of ourselves that are often unexplored. Whether we engage in learning salsa, swing, or primal dance, or a completely different embodiment practice such as martial arts or yoga, there is a richness that presents itself when we bring our awareness to the body.

What is primal dancing? According to its creator, Argentine psychologist Daniel Taroppio, it is a system of bodywork that uses the model of primal interactions (rooted in the profound experience of self-exploration) to awaken and harmonize our healing and creative energies from the cellular level all the way to the level of total transcendence.

From my own experience as a dancing soul, I can tell you that as we dance, we transcend the search for personal development, reunion with self, healing personal wounds, etc. By means of this meditative method, we can access transpersonal spaces of existence. Here, we have the possibility of integrating the feminine and masculine principles of life. As we dance, these two principles make themselves visible in our bodies and in our minds, in our feelings, thoughts, and actions, like a burst of divinity present in our fragile humanity.

Primal dance is an opportunity to reunite with the Universal Father and Universal Mother that are in all of us. They are the breath of life and they show us the way. When we dance, we awaken the Universal energy in ourselves and understand that it is Cosmic Consciousness.

The majority of us, for different reasons, whether they be genetic, familial, sociocultural, etc., have a skewed relationship with one of the two universal principles, whether it be with the embracing mystery of the feminine or the transpersonal witness of the masculine. Being divided brings imbalances in our relationships, physical disease, and even disease of the soul.

Our natural state in life is unity. Our nature as human beings inhabiting a planet is of complete beings, human-divine, with the ability to give, take, love, and create. We are beings in community, we are brother and sister to everyone and everything. Uniting is our life project – both in the present and in the future.

When I dance, I inhale the Universe and exhale all of life.

Primal dance, as it runs through each of the chakras, allows us to understand that each energetic center is the manifestation of a level of consciousness through which we must traverse in this path towards evolution. The dance of each chakra is an awakening to the beauty of our inner world, a return home where we visit each room and every forgotten corner. This primal movement is a reminder that without roots we cannot fly, that the polarity of existence can be integrated, that water purifies us, and that fire transforms us. To dance is to remember that the great desire for love echos in a Cosmos that is pure love.

In primal dance, our body meditates to the music that becomes a single melody to the beat of the universe; when this happens, we no longer feel the universe as distant because it has been and always will be our home.

Come awaken the Universal energy in yourself and dance with us when you join one of our transformational programs here.