Someone designed an experiment to study empathy.
They took 2 people and put them into separate rooms.
Person A is put into a deprivation room
Person b is put into a different room and given random electric shocks.
Both are wired for brain waves, skin resistance, pulse and breathing changes. They are wired into polygraphs.
A is asked to quess when B is given electric shocks. At first A's quessing has nothing to do with B's electric shocks.
However, B's polygrpah shows dignificant psycholgocial changes---at the exact moments in which A--was given electric shocks.
Now you might say well A wasn't not consicous of B's electric shocks but he was on a more fundamenntal biologal level, according to thepoloygrah---his body was conscious even if his mind brain was not.
How many of you have seen the movie THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS. They do something similiar to plants. They hook them up to poloygraph tests and then do several experiments---measuring the waves they emit---one test involves taking a head of lettuche, a big knife and chopping it in front of the plant---its poloygraph goes heywire!!! Another experiment involved taking live shrimp---and throwing them into a boiling pot of water---again, the plants polygraph goes heywire at the moment that the shrimp hit the boiling water.
And the plants do not have a brain stem or supposedly nervous system.
When we dance, the dance becomes a polygraph---the dance measures many significant changes---both inside our own bodies and those of our friends and perfect strangers dancing around us.
When we imagine ourselves being able to filter out any of the realities that might create psychological changes in our bodies---it doesn't mean, they're not getting registered. Many of us build walls, resistance and disassociation to convince ourselves---that we see nothing, we hear nothing when in truth---it all gets registered---
there's a profound Tibetan practice that upon meeting someone, who might be a pain, the prayer becomes---I take your pain and give you my joy. What happens if we know that our walls, our prejudices to protect ourselves from pain or fear are a waste of very good energy? What happens instead, if we surrender to it all---it gets in anyway, what if we're conscious---and awake to it? The dance is the perfect practice to begin---that awareness.
Thank you for showing up to dance together where take our fears, our pains, our resistance and give each other the courage to dance with it all---stripped of anything but our hearts.