What you can not discover in your body,
you will not be able to discover anywhere else in the world…
For several years, one of the most wanted topics in the trainings I used to deliver was “Time Management”. Then they started talking about how time can not be managed. You can only manage yourself in the construction of the human mind, called time…
And then in 2001, two Harvard professors, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, wrote an excellent article “Corporate Athlets” in which they tried to draw a parallel between the preparation and “work” of top athletes and managers and leaders in business.
In the article, the authors describe something they called the “Pyramid of Performance”. It looks like there is something at the bottom that they called the “Physical Capacity”, on the next level there is “Emotional Capacity”, then the “Mental Capacity” and at the top of the pyramid is the “Spiritual Capacity”.
The paper discusses that one should not think about time management (nor oneself at that time), but that it is actually necessary to manage energy. On all four levels defined in the pyramid. A healthy body is the basis for healthy emotions, it is the basis for a healthy mind, and it is all the basis for a healthy spirit (In a healthy body, a healthy spirit, isn’t it?).
I think that dance/movement is the most elegant and pleasant way to strengthen the energy of the body that is the basis of everything and to “connect” all parts of the pyramid.
The importance of dance for development, spiritual, was written long ago, long before the Harvard Business Review 😊 My favorite author on that topic was certainly George Gurdjieff. His dances, movements, represent work on self-knowledge.
Gurdjieff said that there is knowledge in movements that is passed from generation to generation: movements can represent a cosmic truth that the observer can understand. These movements can lead to another level of understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
On that path to the awakening of the soul, in these dances, we work on each level of the mentioned pyramid, in a connected way.
Sources:
https://hbr.org/2001/01/the-making-of-a-corporate-athlete
