Expanding through Music

It is not only our ears that listen.

Our skin absorbs vibrations of sound and our heart tends to synchronize with the beat of the music we hear.

We can literally expand our embodied consciousness through listening and moving to music that challenges us.

I remember my first experience of spontaneous orgasms on the dancefloor at 19, when I heard Drum’n’Bass music for the first time IN MY LIFE.
Something happened to my whole being, as if it exploded with the pleasure of being alive.

Up until then, I had the urge to LEARN to dance – listen to hiphop, copy certain moves in repetition and then put more and more of my energy into performance of a choreography.

That fateful night – due to the faster-than-I-could-think beat, I scrambled my steps. I saw the people around me ‘lose it’, breaking into chaotic bouncing… and I tried to speed up my learnt dance moves to match that pace… but eventually, my feet gave up, I got punched by an elbow, and some inner pulse inside me said ‘Don’t fight this, surrender to it’.

Have a try if you can keep up the whole time!!

And I did. For about 3 hours. And my life was never the same again.

From that night on, dance became a practice of ‘let go’.
I explored ways to hand over the control of my movements to my body. To eliminate mind as the middle man. That’s how I started swimming in music.

I became the echo chamber of the vibrations around me.

I went deep with music. Sure, the experiments coincided with mind altering substances which were a great benefit in being able to explore even more in depth and for longer time periods.

I also discovered dance improvisation – going beyond external incentives to move, it really focused on finding the inner impulse. It felt more authentic than any other form of human interaction.

“The body never lies” became my guiding light.

I continued to expand my capacity to swim through different styles of music. I went to Africa and fell in love with the culture of challenging each other to crazier and crazier moves.

Dance became a language I could speak fluently – a form of instinctual communication with another.

Here’s to some new moves

Direct body-to-body communication is definitely my favourite language – you can imagine the implications to intimacy 😉
Downside is I don’t really want to talk and ‘get-to-know’ my fellow dancers – we already lived a few lifetimes within the dance: THANK YOU for playing all those roles with me!

So I’ve experimented with being a chameleon – relating to people through their body language. But most of all I love the freak world of experimentation with the limits of what is possible. Not just in physical ability (because everyone’s soul dances different!) but in the music.

I wrote an essay once on how electronic music is actually expanding our ability to understand abstract concepts through embodiment.

So, if you ever get ‘stuck’ in your expression – emotional, artistic or other – it is probably the best time to expand your music palette.

For a time, I hung out with dj’s and musicians exploring the ‘edge’ of sound. Songs that were literally just conceived. They blew my cellular body open in unimaginable ways.

So, keep in mind that as our consciousness expands, sound expands, and especially the realm of computer generated music has the ability to remove us from just this earth plane. The danger in that is of disconnection from the body – but when we bring that strange abstract realm of beats into our bodies… new horizons open up.

I’d like to end with offering few of my favourites that surprise me: