Concepts of Biodanza

"Biodanza began inconspicuously in my life. Then it gradually gained momentum, aroused people's interest, brought about surprising changes in some of the participants, and above all, it created a sense of rebirth and hope in life."

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"Each person's life is an act of creation at every moment and thus borders on the extraordinary. Love itself is a creative expression of one's personality."​

 

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Rolando Toro Araneda

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Coming from a family of educators, Toro himself has been teaching for years in schools in various places in Chile. He discovers that in many schools there is no connection between the students and the subject matter offered. Toro's didactic vision focused on new forms of learning based on direct life experience. But the special value of Toro's method was affectivity and the enjoyment of learning and life as an impulse. Here he already touched on the source of intrinsic motivation: enjoying and learning from a human connection about a theme that warms you up.

 

This did not exclude disciplines of an intellectual nature. It was a matter of integrating intelligence with affectivity (respecting oneself and others and working together). This methodology will later lead to what we find in Biodanza as "vivencial or biocentric method" and from which he will develop the concept of Affective Intelligence.

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He also paid attention of developing the creative abilities of his students and he always looked for opportunities to give all the innate talents of children and young people the space to develop.

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The step to psychology followed logically from this. At the end of the 1960s, a time when a wind of innovation is blowing in the service of the humanization of psychiatry, and in the many activities related to his research, he has the opportunity to offer different therapeutic systems to patients. This is how he conducted his first experiments with music, dance, painting, drawing and contact.

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Based on the positive effects that were observed, he lays the first foundations of his system by carefully documenting his observations. Thus, he created the opportunity to apply it in different clinical settings and to groups considered "normal" (such as his students). The whole of exercises, music and application principles is called "Psychodanza". He will later change this to “Biodanza” and will develop it into a coherent system, based on different areas of science, on the basis of continuous research and in collaboration with various collaborators.

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We can therefore say that Biodanza finds its source in Toro's trajectory as a teacher, psychologist and researcher, in an existence marked by challenges, rich encounters and, above all, a human adventure of exceptional intensity.