Chaotic libido

September marks a return to the dance floor for the new fall session of the collective I dance with. Seeing everyone again has reminded me to get back to this blog and continue my reflections on the role of the moving body in spiritual development. 

I am very conscious when I dance that I come to share energy with others in the group and I know people appreciate it. When I was injured last year, I know how much I appreciated being surrounded by others who were fully committed to dancing freely. They drew me out and kept me moving.

My first week back I had a lot of energy to share and our DJ had taken some risks to play some unusual music. I really enjoyed the rise from fast flow through to chaos (rhythms in the Five Rhythms approach I have discussed previously) and a few others and I were ready to stir up the room! While I followed my body on its rise to chaos, I started reconnecting with my old reflections on erotic life force. I had read a beautiful text by critical theorist Joe Kinchloe about the radical love needed to change ourselves and the world, and he also talked a lot about libidinous energy. He stated;

     "Knowing and learning are not simply intellectual and scholarly activities but also practical and sensuous activities infused by this sacred notion of radical love ...Educators who want to make a difference in this context, to fuse learning to libidinal energy, and help students connect to the cosmos cannot be intellectual chickens. They must have the knowledge and the guts to stand up to the promoters of stupidification and their pedagogical poison ... With this notion of a life affirming eros wrapped in radical love, we can create a critical pedagogy that speaks more convincingly and meaningfully to a wider audience around the planet." 1

I really felt I was embodying this libidinous energy in my dance tonight; not the libido of Freud's "primitive sex drive", but more of what Jung saw as psychic energy, or what Reich called orgone energy. To me - life force quite simply. I am very committed not only to expressing my life force as it is connected to the cosmos, but also to sharing it with others, on the dance floor, in the classroom, in my writing. When I express it fully in ecstatic dance, I leave the dance floor feeling balanced and aligned. If I only commit half heartedly, I will not leave my rational mind. It is too well fortressed, and buttressed by everyday life. It takes total commitment to leave that plane.

But if I do commit, the goddesses within start to speak, and maybe a few gods :-)

And this is why I dance.

1. Kinchloe, J. (2007). The Vicissitudes of Twenty-First Century Critical Pedagogy: A review of Ilan Gur Ze’ev (ed.) (2005). Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today. Toward a New Critical Language in Education. Haifa: Studies in Education (University of Haifa). Studies in the Philosophy of Education (2008) 27:399–40.