Feature Story


Movers & Shakers Unite!


ORIGIN COLUMNIST | Shiva Rea, M.A. Photography By Jenay Martin


Movers and Shakers Unite Feet, fingers, tapping toes


Move your bones as the rhythm goes Dance your dreams Love your woes


Discover what your body knows -from Slap by John de Kadt


W


e are born with a capacity to respond to rhythm with movement. Elaborate studies


monitoring 3-6 month old babies held by their intentionally still parents, show again and again, that we have an innate response system to rhythm and we move our whole body to its propelling beat: head, torso, fingers, tapping toes. While scientists are puzzled as to why we are born as natural dancers, anybody who loves music knows why the Universal Conductor put rhythm in our genes.


My theory is that the music-movement complex connects us to our innate source of


12 OriginMagazine.com September/October 2011


creative power – the energy that generates ideas, new neural pathways, our greatest joy, and high states of energetic coherence – all for free! Like the healing power of love, movement and music bring our heart rhythms into collective resonance with our brains and each other. Our ancestors, sages, healers and yogis throughout time and space have revered this positive effect of music and movement.


“Like the healing power of love, movement and music bring our heart rhythms into collective resonance with our brains and each other.”


This innate power as movers and shakers, however,


has also been systematically


repressed for over 2,000 years in the little known global history of dance. Thousands of people have died for dancing, artistic traditions abolished, as in the end of the thousands


of years old temple dancing


tradition in India during colonial rule. All over the world drumming has been illegal in the past century and still exists in a myriad of forms today where dance is illegal, banned,


suppressed or controlled to subdue this innate personal power.


Whatever the barrier to our innate flow is– cultural, past conditioning, self- conciousness, awkwardness, lost connection to inner spontaneity– when it dissolves, we see its power — the geyser of nature moving through us.


There are so many benefits to creative movement that there are too many to name. Just take all of the life-enhancing aspects of


exercise, yoga, bonding: increased


circulation, endorphins, greater oxygen, lower cortisol levels, etc. Add the power of creativity which stimulates us at the highest level of our flow and functioning and we begin to see how the music-movement complex is a yoga that connects us with the creative power of being alive.


Children are reflections of the ever-flowing creative fountain that gets activated through music and dance. We can look to their natural movement to get inspired to contemplate why we are born dancers and why it is a great idea to tap into this inborn ability as movers and shakers. Here are my top three reasons:


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