THE DANCE ALIVE SYSTEM
Dance Alive® is an integrative, practical and natural body mind system that trains you how to move through your body, through relationships and through life. Practicing this discipline benefits you with increased vitality, spontaneity and function in every area of your life.? ?As you change the way you move, you change the way you live.? ?Dance Alive accelerates the function of the individual as a whole. Physically, it trains you how to activate and harmonize every system, utilizing all fluids, tissues, muscles, bones, nerves, organs and glands. Emotionally, it trains you how to allow, fully experience and manage feeling. Mentally, it trains you how to develop your intelligence, focus, clarity, creativity and problem solving skills. In relationship, it trains you how to engage, respond and co-operate with others so you can enjoy healthy, balanced relationships.? ?This comprehensive system is based on the natural human design and on the laws of Nature. Everything in nature works together and in balance. Nature creates anew in every moment. Every season has its own temperature, timing and rhythm. One movement is connected to the next. Dance Alive guides you through 5 movement forms that take you into sourcing, experiencing and reawakening your memory of your natural design and aligning with your own unique system. The movement forms develop your ability to navigate through life by first harmonizing internally, and then harmonizing externally with other people and environment.?
Dance Alive is a fluid educational model where the joy of learning is cultivated in and out of class. Dance Alive trains you to become a more responsive, receptive and resilient student of life as well as a leader of yourself, others and any situation. Dance Alive has practical application through your entire life, as it is drawn from the natural order of Life itself.
FLOW EASY
?“The less effort you exert, the more fluid you become. Less is More.”
Flow Easy is the movement form in which you practice listening to
and embracing what is already occurring.
?Flow Easy accesses the fluid system, guiding you into receiving as you move within the natural design of your body. The body is approximately 80% water. As one movement flows into the next, the fluid motion activates your entire being to heal and balance itself organically, and function as a unified whole. There is no push or pull in fluid movement. Like water, which moves around all obstacles and adapts itself with complete ease, you can learn to move around all tension, pain and density through the pathways of least resistance. Sourcing and moving with this continuous flow is deeply healing and regenerating. It is the foundation of all the subsequent movement forms and the formation of life itself.? ?In relationship, Flow Easy allows your defenses to soften and your sense of separation to dissolve as you learn to harmonize with another. It cultivates your ability to adapt to another person’s rhythm and to navigate with ease around conflict, creating harmonious rapport. You learn to respect and honor your own pace, timing and rhythm while in relationship with others.
WORDS OF WISDOM
?The soft gentle caress of our breath touching us from the inside is always occurring, yet often goes unnoticed. In the center of every movement is a point of stillness; in the center of every cell is space. It is from this stillness and space that each movement originates and then flows into the next.? ?In life, we often attempt to fill this space with activity that merely clutters our experience with drama and reactive emotional states (i.e. explosive anger, paralyzing fear, hysteria, anxiety, apathy, depression, etc.) These reactive emotional states are the result of not being able to allow feeling to flow through the body. When sensation is allowed and experienced fully, the body moves with tremendous ease and the emotional state is full with the flow of feeling. Flowing through open pathways rewires the system to move, learn and process in a relaxed and efficient manner.? ?When we watch babies and young children, we can see the ease with which they move, feel and think. Nothing is impaired. In the process of survival, this natural ability gets diminished and learning becomes a difficult struggle. Also, we often attempt to learn in a stressful, highly pressured and competitive environment, which actually impedes the process of education.? ?Dance Alive creates a learning environment where you can learn at your own pace, sense yourself completely, and take on the next step only as you are ready. As you develop the ability to shift your brain wave state and cultivate an ease of movement throughout your body and mind, you increase your capacity to do any action, deliver any communication and receive what any place, person or thing has to offer with ease. As you begin to take the pressure off yourself, release judgments, and return to acceptance, your natural flow of motion can be remembered. Flowing with ease is our natural state. Receptivity can only occur as you feel safe. This is why Dance Alive creates a safe, non-judgmental learning environment.
BENEFITS:
?Flow Easy…
~ Calms, regenerates and balances all systems in the body??~ Releases held emotion stored in the cells and heals old trauma??~ Develops the ability to alter brain wave frequency from beta, alpha, theta, to delta??~ Cultivates acceptance, compassion, receptivity and adaptability in relationship
REACH OUT
“As opposing forces are connected, balance is created.”
Reach Out is the movement form in which you practice expanding
and extending in every direction.
Reach Out is the movement form which creates links and bridges polarities. In nature, opposites always exist to maintain balance. As movement continues to occur, the balance is constantly shifting, generating a new balance point every second. Reach Out is practical training for creating and maintaining balance in a world of shifting change. In Reach Out, you create bridges inside your body and into the world – connecting the inner to the outer, fluid to tissues, tissues to bone, the me to you –unfolding and unwinding internally as you reach out externally. By moving incrementally in opposing directions simultaneously, you expand on balanced pathways. This creates tremendous fluid stretching throughout the entire body.? ?In relationship, Reach Out guides you into reaching simultaneously into yourself and out to another, creating connection. This cultivates the ability to meet another and reach into their world while remaining centered and present in your self.
WORDS OF WISDOM
?Reach Out is the process of bridging allowing and extending. By letting one movement naturally unfold and initiating lengthening into the next, you venture out further with curiosity, bridging ease and challenge. As you inspire yourself to take the next step and move somewhere beyond where you are now, your trust in yourself increases and your willingness to reach into new uncharted territory expands.? ?Reach Out develops equalized tension based on continual unwinding and spiraling motion. It connects the fluid system, where everything is soft and open, with the muscular system, where everything is firm and engaged. This tension and engagement naturally occurs when you reach in opposing directions. Opposing reaching creates greater polarities, which in turn generate enormous energy for movement. In your life, this polarity of equalized tension creates an opportunity for you to take your next step out into the world while reaching more deeply into yourself. This develops your capacity to balance opposites of all kinds, such as: forward/back, up/ down, right/left, light/heavy, strong/weak, small/big, acceptance/judgment, confidence/doubt, etc.? ?When we are babies, there is a tremendous amount of internal movement occurring, but very little externally visible. As we develop, we very naturally begin to reach out into the world with our fingers and toes, exploring with great curiosity what our bodies can and will do. Before long, the innate desire to hold up our heads, roll over, crawl, walk and run spurs us on to further discovery. The natural development that we see so easily in babies continues throughout every stage in life. However, the curiosity and motivation for discovery often gets shut down in the process of growing up. In order to survive, we adapt to patterns of movement that limit that reaching into unknown territories. That is why it is so important to be guided to once again reawaken your natural curiosity and reach further, not only through our bodies, but also into relationships and every aspect of life. Having this encouragement to move further than what is familiar is absolutely necessary to enter places that have been previously shut down and avoided. Dance Alive provides a safe and encouraging learning environment to take you from the cocoon within to the world beyond with confidence and security, inspiring you to move into greater action!
BENEFITS:
?Reach Out …
~ Creates more elastic, pliable and flexible tissues, muscles and joints?~ Helps link internal and external awareness and the ability to hold opposites?~ Develops your ability to self manage; physically, emotionally and mentally?~ Cultivates the capacity to stay connected to yourself as you responsively relate with another
POWER UP
“Strength is built by meeting challenge.”
Power Up is the movement form in which you practice
focusing, engaging, and strengthening.
Power Up primarily accesses the muscular system. It enables you to move with strength as you utilize resistance internally and externally. The use of resistance increases your ability to define structure and maintain contact. Through the incremental movement of contraction and release, you learn how to gracefully utilize your structure as a natural support system for generating action. This trains you to be self-reliant as you increase the effort you are exerting.? ?In relationship, Power Up guides you to create harmonious resistance appropriate to the power levels between you so that no one is dominating or being dominated. It increases your ability to meet confrontation and to create and maintain separation from another person’s experience. In addition, it teaches you how to be respectful of and work within structure so that you can fit into systems and team play.
WORDS OF WISDOM
?Until there’s a mountain to climb and you climb it, you can’t feel your power. Until you face resistance and move through it, you don’t build strength. What Dance Alive teaches is how to develop the capacity to meet challenge without hurting yourself or another and how to exert an appropriate amount of energy for your unique system, physically, emotionally and mentally. When you enter into a situation with the idea of powering through it (using will power and force), you end up damaging yourself or someone else. Will power and force, based on domination and control, always backfire. The power you are being guided to access in Dance Alive comes from being aware of and connected to your essence and knowing your strength and limitations. The way you discover your strength and limitations is by testing them out and receiving feedback. When you evaluate the feedback, you can then choose to back off or exert more. Power Up teaches you to be able to stay with an action even when you don’t feel like it. When you give up and say, “I can’t do it,” you’ve let a situation take over. Instead, Power Up trains you to be able to say, “I don’t know how I can do this, however, I know I can learn to do it with practice, if I’m willing to pay the full price.” The price is the investment and effort it will require to learn to do the action. This empowers you to take yourself further and include discomfort, boredom or fatigue as part of the process of building strength. Maintaining your focus when you are bored builds focus; engaging more as you’re tired builds endurance; allowing yourself to feel uncomfortable and continue to move builds confidence. You are being trained to develop power by continuing to open, feel, and move fluidly as you engage your core muscles and build your core strength.? ?Power Up trains you to identify, bridge and strengthen where you are strong and weak. This connection between your strengths and weaknesses enables you to create more balance across board and through your whole system.? ?In relationship, the same is true. Strength in relationship manifests as stability, consistency, and dependability. Where someone is strong, they are reliable and their word is backed by action. Power Up builds your ability to work with strength and limitation in relationship. Only then do you have the power to transform, grow and endure challenge within a relationship.
BENEFITS:
?Power Up …
~ Develops core conditioning, strength and stamina?~ Increases your ability to manage your emotions?~ Hones your ability to focus and maintain in any area?~ Strengthens your capacity to define boundaries and maintain structure in relationship.
GOTTA MOVE
“Change is inevitable. Flow with it or fight it. The choice is yours.”
Gotta Move is the movement form in which you practice
activating and responding.
?Gotta Move expands your capacity to change. It accesses the skeletal and nervous systems as you are guided to move with the stream of impulses that are constantly flowing through you. In Gotta Move, you are either allowing or initiating change. Change always creates varying degrees of chaos because the structure you once held as stable is being reorganized. This disruptive process trains you to become more flexible and adaptable to change with a continually moving center as your base. Thus your system becomes increasingly capable of being responsive, alert and interactive.? ?Gotta Move inspires the body to fully reorganize and rebalance by breaking up rigid, impeding patterns and creating more fluid, spontaneous connections. This creates new neural pathways, thus opening more opportunities for increased intelligence and freedom of movement on all levels. In relationship, Gotta Move increases your natural expression, vitality and passion for life. It expands your ability to allow and initiate change and enter into new domains. It activates your ability to be spontaneously responsive and interactive with another, and to give a relationship room to move and grow. This is needed for health, freshness and vitality in any relationship.
WORDS OF WISDOM
?Movement creates change.? ?In Gotta Move, you are constantly being encouraged to move out of the familiar. Once a structure is established, it must be shifted in order for a new, updated structure to be created. This capacity to change is naturally active in young people. As people age, they usually become increasingly rigid in their mind and body and afraid of change. Gotta Move trains you to maintain a youthful vibrancy and exuberance for life. The “fountain of youth” is your body’s ability to be responsive and adaptable to what is inside of you and around you.? ?Whenever you’re off balance, you’re in the process of moving back into balance. You’re not meant to be in a static state of balance all the time. The way we are all physically designed to move through the world is that, with every single footstep we take, we go off-balance and come back into balance. The more we move, the more we activate being off-balance; the less we move, the less off-balance we will go. It is important to understand this so you don’t think that something is wrong when your balance is lost. Health is measured by your recovery rate. How quickly can you recover from being off balance? Will you give yourself permission to go off balance? Going off balance is essential to growth and is also usually very uncomfortable, because you don’t know where you are. When you are in a state of balance, there is a real sense of security, stability and knowing– all of which is lost when you go off balance again. This is all part of the journey.? ?The Dance Alive system is based on the natural design. Our body contains the same elements and actions as the earth and the entire universe. The Earth experiences movement of night and day, seasons, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc. All natural calamities are part of keeping the Earth in balance. Change is a constant and everything is constantly changing. Practicing Gotta Move increases your ability to enter into the shifting balance of Evolution within your own body and any given environment, and to participate with all the movement that exists.
BENEFITS:
?Gotta Move…
~ Increases energy and vitality??~ Moves stagnant emotion??~ Develops mental dexterity and creative problem solving??~ Increases spontaneity, vibrancy and playfulness in relationship
RIDE THE WAVE
“Say “Yes!” to Life, with all its gifts, challenges and opportunities.”
Ride the Wave is the movement form in which you practice
connecting and relating.
?Ride the Wave integrates all the other movement forms and guides you to balance all aspects of your nature. As you do this, you learn to move through your life with ease and power and play as a team within the Greater Whole. Through exploring Ride the Wave, you integrate how you move, relate and live. This expands your capacity to be joyful and playful as you explore the full range of your own unique dance. Ride the Wave accesses the space from which all movement, thought and feeling emerge. It integrates all systems of the body, emotions, and mind into one harmonious flow of motion. Ride the Wave invites you to experience the life force within you.? ?In relationship, Ride the Wave trains how to recognize where you naturally align with others and to find the pathways of connection between you. By learning how to interact with all different systems and structures, you open many doors and possibilities. There are resources all around you once you become available to receive them. In Ride the Wave, you cultivate your ability to appreciate and respect your individual path as you team play within all relationships.
WORDS OF WISDOM
?Ride the Wave is about remembering what we already know, but have forgotten.? ?To varying degrees, we’ve forgotten what is speaking to us all the time: the language of the body, which is intelligent and speaking through every cell, continually vibrating with information. In Dance Alive, you learn this language. This allows you to access and increase your intelligence as you expand your knowledge of how to navigate through life with ease and power.? ?In Ride the Wave, you combine feeling with function. As you learn to manage feeling, you are able to function and perform task while feeling tremendous amounts of feeling. When you are young at learning to manage, you have to either feel or function and can’t do both together well. The development of being able to manage your feeling and function without shutting down or acting out comes with much practice, effort and training. In Ride the Wave you are learning to commit fully and move into greater levels of self-management and non-interference. It’s all about how you do whatever you do.? ?We have learned that “being” and “doing” are separated; therefore, we either be or do. However, any young infant or child does not separate doing from being. It’s completely natural for both to occur together. In Ride the Wave, you are returning to what is natural to you, because the Dance Alive system accesses the whole. When you access the whole, “be” and “do” are happening at the same time, and you can live in a state of being as you do whatever you do. You’re already connected to power. You’re already connected to wanting to do in the world. Everyone has the desire to live and create, and the connection to that desire empowers you into action. When you’re lined up with your desire, there’s nothing to fight and everything flows! This is the beauty of what the Dance Alive system is all about; it’s not just studying the physical system, it’s bridging how you live in everyday life. How you move is how you live. Change how you move, and that change occurs everywhere in your life.?
BENEFITS:
?Ride the Wave…
~ Increases your self-confidence and respect for your path and all paths in life?~ Expands your capacity to remain centered in yourself as you relate to others?~ Develops your ability to be more efficient, effective, and joyful in your life
BREATH
BREATH? ?Breath is essential to life.?Dance Alive maps out an entire system of breathing which retrains the body to breathe in a manner that relaxes and energizes, cultivating a smooth, easy flow of vital energy.? ?How we breathe is a direct reflection of how we live and interact with our world. Each inhale reflects how we receive and each exhale reflects how we give. The space between the inhale and the exhale reflects how we contain and the space between the exhale and the inhale reflects how we pause.? ?These breathing exercises have tremendous physical, emotional, mental and spiritual benefits: generating vitality, a natural flow of emotion, increased concentration, and alignment with your spirit. Each movement form has a corresponding breath that accompanies it, as well as corresponding variations.? ?For the Flow Easy movement form, there is the “Listening” Breath. This breath is practiced by listening to natural flow of breath, without doing anything at all to change how you are breathing, and embracing what you are aware of and feel. The basic technique is practiced by placing your focus on the Pause, the space between the exhale and the inhale. The variations of all other breath forms can be done with the Listening Breath as the base.? ?For the Reach Out movement form, there is the “Expanding” Breath. The basic Expanding breath is practiced by expanding and extending the length, width and depth of each inhale and exhale. The variations of all other breath forms can be done with the Expanding Breath as the base.? ?For the Power Up movement form, there is the “Gathering” Breath. The basic Gathering breath is practiced by focusing and engaging each breath. This is done by suspending the breath between the inhale and exhale and breathing through your nose into the body with the mouth closed. The variations of all other breath forms can be done with the Gathering Breath as the base.? ?For the Gotta Move movement form, there is the “Activating” Breath. The basic Activating breath is practiced by activating and responding to each breath. This is done by breathing quickly, in a random manner, while shaping the mouth in various shapes as you breath in and out the mouth. The variations of all other breath forms can be done with the Activating Breath as the base.? ?For the Ride the Wave movement form, there is the “Connecting” Breath. The basic Connecting breath is practiced by relating inside of each breath by allowing and initiating variety through the mouth or nose and shifting between all the various breath forms. All variations are included.
SOUND
SOUND? ?Sound is audible breath. We give shape to a sound. The Dance Alive System is a map to retrain your voice how to naturally express itself. In Dance Alive, voice can be used in conjunction with each movement form. By allowing your voice to become audible with each movement form, you produce a specific quality of sound.? ?For Flow Easy there is the “Listening” Sound, where you listen and receive the sound as you exhale.? ?For Reach Out, there is the “Expanding” sound, where you extend and amplify the sound as you exhale.? ?For Power Up, there is the “Gathering” sound, where you send the sound down and into your body as you exhale.? ?For Gotta Move, there is the “Activating” sound, where you play with the various shapes of sound in a random manner as you exhale.? ?For Ride the Wave, there is the “Connecting” sound, where you explore and discover all the varieties of your sound as you exhale.? ?There are a multitude of various sound shapes that can be explored, as well as the basic sound shapes of A, AH, E, I, O and OU. Your Voice is a powerful instrument. Your tone of voice is made up of Feeling, Attitude, Volume and Rhythm. Your tone of voice reflects your internal experience; your attitude (mental state), your feelings (emotional state), and internal rhythm (tempo) and your volume (internal/external relationship). In the Dance Alive System, you are trained to master and remember how to use your voice.
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