Breathing is automatic, rhythmic and involuntary. It is also necessary and malleable. It adjusts to your feelings, it modifies them and impacts directly on your brain activity. This process is bidirectional and reciprocal. It affects your muscles and reactive capacity in the same way, so, my question is: do you think your dance is influenced by breathing? Welcome to my personal search. Pranayama: breathing the movement.

I have already talked about Pranayama in previous posts (read here), so I’m not going to focus on explaining what Pranayama is and how to train it, as in this post I want to get straight to the conscious breathing practice (Pranayama) in order to help you achieve your unique, inner, natural, rhythmic and conscious movement.  

I know it sounds like a synonym utopia, but I truly believe that if you take your time to stop and become aware, it is possible, and even better, enjoyable 😉

Pranayama: breathing the movement

What is the meaning of the title?

For all the years I’ve been practicing disciplines such as Yoga, contemporary dance, meditation, Classical Indian Odissi Dance, low pressure fitness, IndOriental® dance, I realized that there is a thread that connects my practice with my physical and emotional body. Breathing is an essential guide of my nature.  

It’s not that I’m unique, we all are. Therefore, the way of understanding, repeating, expressing and breathing the movement is also unique. 

Over the years, when I studied contemporary dance, there was something captivating from the beginning: in order to achieve harmony in the group, we wouldn’t wait for the certain beat in the music, but we would all enter in a state of alert, and in a very obvious way, join our breathing patterns. 

Each movement would come from suspension, an accent, flowing, dance features which were automatically represented by breathing. I would say, automatically and also explicitly.

We would end up performing a choreography with a soundtrack: our breathing.

Ssssssh! Ah, tntntn….ha ha haaaaaa.. Mmmmmm, and so on.

From there on, a base began to develop almost unconsciously, which I understood as the years went by, and nourished with the conscious breathing practice (see here), to this very day. 

I research thoroughly the way my breathing affects the way I move, and the other way around. The way I feel and how each movement feels, and whether I can modify its drive and therefore the aesthetics through breathing. 

Do you want to join me in this research? My proposal is right here:

Dancing breath workshop work in progress

• Explore your movements.

• Enjoy your ability to express yourself through breathing.

• Develop your inner rhythm.

• Find out which movements arise innately from your own musicality.

• Harmonize your vital rhythm with your unique movement.

• Expand your movement and lung range.

• Investigate the movement features and dance from your nature.

• Accents, polyrhythmicity, suspensions, sighs…unleash a physical and emotional language, based on your breathing, which is the engine and the soundtrack of your movement, and therefore, your own nature.

• Specific Pranayama exercises, proprioception and movement exercises. 

• Personal and group work in progress. 

• Technique and creativity in one.

Dancing breath is not just a workshop, but a connector of mind, body and vital spirit.

If you are willing to discover, develop, cherish and re-discover a new dimension of your movement,this is your place, our place.

Register here.

Namaste.