December 2022

10am Monday 5 to Late on Thursday 8 December
Please arrive on Sunday 4 December

A Unique Module

Theory – Methodology – Vivencias

Designed for

Biodanza Facilitators

Students in Biodanza Training Methodology Level IV

Identity and Self-esteem

Identity and Self-esteem is one of the most
important and significant workshops one deserves to
experience. A real turning point.

On this page you will find information about:

• Identity and Self-esteem
• Who can do the training.
• Start and Finish Times of the Training.
• Pricing.
• Reserving your Room.
• Payment Methods.
• Travel and transfers from the airport for local and International visitors.
• Detailed Training Programme – A MUST READ

Identity and Self-esteem:

Identity and Self-esteem, is a workshop designed to deepen – by means of the experience – the understanding on how Biodanza can support the healthy strengthening of our identity.

Many people live a whole life with a low self-esteem, the feeling of not being good enough, of not having value or even being in a situation where they do not have contact with whom they are, where they are too exposed to other’s opinions. In such cases, they may not have the resources to stand for themselves, their deep needs, desires and even opinions. The result is the difficulty in being able to choose “from the bottom or their hearts” and act accordingly in the different fields of human existence.

When self-esteem is very high it also may cause the person to be too rigid and difficult to live with. Therefore, both low and high self-esteem present aspects to be nourished and amplified or transformed.

“On the evolutionary path of any person practicing Biodanza, there are some kinds of milestones or stages which are as many invitations to deepen the self-knowledge that the weekly group work proposes. These are part of the deepening training courses.

They constitute a kind of unit of progressive deepening of the exploration and expansion of identity.

“SELF IDENTITY AND SELF ESTIMATE” is one of the known and acknowledged extensions of Biodanza. This extension tackles, in an accessible way for people at the beginning of the process, important questions related to the vivencia of FREEDOM and VALUE.

Before leaving us, Rolando Toro Araneda gave us his final message: there is, within us, an innate ability to perceive the luminous and sacred essence of the world. He placed the courage to live and love as an axis, as the trunk of the tree of what he called the “numinous” unconscious. Self-esteem is an approach to amplifying the courage to live and love oneself, to do good for oneself, to be a good friend to oneself and to make choices based on the desire to live rather than to fear.

This approach allows the facilitator to accompany people in a process of deepening the expression and integration of identity. It provides a solid foundation for approaches such as fluidity, courage, expression, acceptance of self and others, deep connection to life as an intrinsic value, emotional contact, valuing pleasure and one’s own desires.

The training for this extension has been designed to offer the theory and methodology that respond to this. It is the fruit of long experience and meditation on the theme. But, above all, it is the result of an intense practice in offering it.”

Hélène Jeanne Lévy Benseft

Who can do the training:

Training for the Extension is available to Biodanza teachers, facilitators, student facilitators under supervision and students in their third year of training.

This is a unique opportunity, especially for South African facilitators to be trained in a Biodanza Extension that will immediately impact your weekly classes and, being on home ground there are no costly flights or ‘adverse’ rates of exchange to contend with.

This training will allow the facilitator to present the weekend of Identity and Self-esteem to your groups of Biodanza participants. You are not, however, entitled to teach facilitators to do the Extension.

A certificate will be provided on completion of the Extension training programme at the venue.

Join us Monday 5 to Friday 9  December, 2022

We would like to encourage you  to let us know of your intention to join us as soon as possible.

Welcome to a week of true community as we immerse ourselves into a journey of expansive transformation.

Start and Finish times of the Training:

Scroll down to the end of this web-page for the detailed training programme.

Trainees are asked to arrive at The Nest on Sunday 4 December so that we may begin on Monday Morning. Several evening sessions will be necessary to achieve the target of 5 days of training (in 4 days). The final session will be on Thursday 8 December, leaving most of Friday free.

The African Encounter is to begin at 17:00 on Friday.

The Price:

The price of the Extension Training Programme and the African Encounter Vivencias combined, is R4850 to be paid by 15 November, unless a payment schedule is agreed in advance. 

Reserve Your Room Now:

Please arrange your room bookings through LINDI:

Or call +27 (0)36-468 1068

Arrangements should be made directly with The Nest for accommodation including all meals, which will range from R995 per person per day sharing for the Garden Rondhavels (R6965 for the seven days) to R1200 for the family Mountain View rooms.  

Payment Methods for the Training including the Encounter:

Bank details:
Account name:  Biodanza African Enc
Account number: 058 1099 43
All branches code: 051001
Swift code: SBZA ZA JJ

Secure Credit Card Payment:
A Secure PayFast Credit Card payment of an amount other than the African Encounter weekend can be made on request – contact us by email and you will be directed via return email to a specified payment option on the website for the required amount.

Extension Training

An EFT or Bank Transfer would, however, be the simpler payment solution.

Travel for regional and international visitors flying into Johannesburg and residents of Gauteng:

All travelers arriving in South Africa or arriving from locations within South Africa, at OR Tambo airport Johannesburg and those in the Gauteng area, will have access to a bus leaving Sandton Gautrain Station at 10am on both the 4th (for trainees) and 9th December for African Encounter participants which will then collect and depart from the airport at 11am, arriving at The Nest by about 4pm. (The first Vivencia will begin at 5pm).

Return transport to OR Tambo will leave The Nest at 13:30 Monday 12 December arriving at 18:30 and then on to Sandton Gautrain station.

If you would like more freedom, a wide variety of car hire options are available at OR Tambo or King Shaka airport in Durban – but we cannot offer bus services from King Shaka airport.

Detailed Training Programme – a must read:

INTRODUCTION
Who am I when, freed from the constraints of a tyrannical ideal, I accept myself as I am?

Who am I when I do not force myself anymore to please (or displease) at all costs, to be acknowledged?

Who am I when I impregnate the space of my existence with my loving presence?

Who am I when I finally arrive at seeing something else, around me, than the mirror of my failures?

Who am I when I acknowledge myself as being the subject of my own life?

Who am I when instead of dissecting my life, I dance it?

The approach of the Identity and of Self-esteem in Biodanza is a powerful invitation to reconnect with our internal forces: those that we can put in service of our achievements, of our existential projects.

To stimulate the expression of these forces, we need the constant help and support of our “secret project”, that is to say of the project that is at the heart of our identity. But we also need to constitute for ourselves a supporting environment and ourselves to be a supporting factor for the esteem of the others.

There is no magic, stratagem, method or system of any sort susceptible of helping us to deploy our identity if we do not arrive at the most important decision perhaps of our lives: to feed our value, to support it, to make it larger, by a new perception of ourselves, by a new vision of the world and of life.

To arrive there, it is necessary to stimulate one of the most important human qualities: the courage to act, to feel and to manifest oneself on the basis of the inner truth. In reference to what is experienced inside us in the relation to the world and not anymore only on the basis of what the others tell us.

To act to make our capacity to live triumph,

To act to learn not to have fear of ourselves anymore,

To act to put aside and transform the toxic mechanism that obstructs the natural flux of our pleasure of living.

To act to unfurl ourselves out of a living center.

To wish ourselves well.

And to reap, when our truth finds its way, the natural force of our inborn talents. To have faith in ourselves with more conviction. To love ourselves.

It is a matter of a literally sacred encounter with oneself for affirming with tenderness and with strength the singular beauty of our identity.

The respect for oneself comes through the recognition of the self, of the interior truth and through the happiness of being.

We also need to have time set aside for establishing an authentic and kind contact with ourselves and with the other in order to express the fruit of that contact, without any order to change, or to be different; to be there where we have no other desire than to be ourselves.

Self-esteem, the value that each person gives her/himself and feels endowed with, depends strongly on the way in which the identity is structured. It is a matter of knowing to perceive oneself, of being able to enter into oneself, of involving oneself and being able to find one’s authentic expression, and of recognizing one’s own qualities, valuing oneself,  and loving oneself.

To wish oneself well

There is a form of perversity of wanting oneself to be perfect and to oppose one’s qualities and one’s “faults”, forgetting the synergy of our facilities and our difficulties with each other.

A fault is, by definition, definitive. However, we only have limits linked to a situation, to a context, and these limits evolve with time, with changes and our own maturity. Certain limits are coupled to our own nature and condition and are therefore unsurpassable. They do not constitute faults. Often it is the thoughts about ourselves that are the most limiting.

To perceive oneself with accuracy

 To perceive oneself, it is important to be sensitive. An insensitive, indifferent, anesthetized person, cannot perceive her/himself. Feelings and emotions are a language through which we have the possibility to receive information about ourselves and about the manner in which we perceive the world that surrounds us. To perceive oneself is thus inseparable from perceiving the world and others.

To express oneself with accuracy

The feeling of accuracy is based on the sensation of manifesting and giving others the right information with respect to what one feels, thinks or desires. Accurate expression opens the way to honesty in encounters that can then be experienced in the richness of infinite nuances, between strength and fragility, between lightness and depth, between fleetingness and permanence.

To find again, through Biodanza, the expressive movement, carrier of emotion, of desire, of tension, of intention (personal contents) allows the perception of one’s own body as a living source: of pleasure, of pain, of information, of sensations, of desires, of emotions, of appetite for life.

PROGRAM
OBJECTIVES OF THIS TRAINING:

Enable the Facilitators of Biodanza to:

 -Propose a deepening of the strengthening of the identity and of the vivencia of one’s own value (worth), in the weekly process.
– Deepen the expression of and the intimacy with oneself in the five lines.
– Offer a containing basis for the transformations generated by the process of Biodanza.
– Support the students in a responsible, sensitive and determined posture.
– Propose the training of Biodanza “The Self-Esteem”, according to the various levels of depth, able to integrate persons that are beginning and others that more experienced in Biodanza.

THIS TRAINING INCLUDES:

1. Moments of the integration of the group
2. A self-evaluation on the basis of a specific questionnaire (Self-image and Self Esteem)

Theoretical development around the following points:

3. Revision of the concept of Identity and of the Theoretical Model of Biodanza;
4. Approach to the mechanisms of (self) depreciation;
5. The feelings and emotions connected to depreciation;
6. The feelings and emotions connected to valorization;
7. The mechanisms of the aptitude for happiness;
8. The importance of the here and now;
9. The importance of the corporality (the body);
10. Self-esteem and pleasure;
11. Self-esteem and the five lines of vivencia;
12. The mechanisms of action of Biodanza in process of the expansion of the identity.

Methodological deepening of the mechanisms of action of Biodanza (points 10 and 11)

13. Choice of exercises and music;
14. Role of the instructions;
15. Structuring of the sessions for the training:

            Theoretical argument,

            Progressive vivencial argument.

Materials made available to the participants in this training:

16. An explanatory theoretical slideshow;
17. A document developing more deeply the elements of the slide-show;
18. A document of all the exercises with the propositions for the instructions;
19. An mp3 file with the indicated music for certain specific exercises*

*Note: the exercises and music come from the repertory of the Biodanza System Rolando Toro. Certain variations to the basic exercises of Biodanza have been introduced to respond in a more specific manner to the argument of this training.

REQUIRED DURATION OF THE TRAINING:
5 FULL DAYS
2 full days with vivencia immersion/experience exclusively
3 full days for theory and methodology (including analysis of the vivencias proposed during the initial 2 days of the training