Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Sex, Love, and SuperPowers podcast show. I’m your host, Tatiana Berindei, and I have with me a returning guest, my dear sister Chaya Leia Aronson. Today we are going to be discussing dancing with the depths of desire. This is going to be a really fun topic.
Let me tell you a little bit about Chaya before we get started. She is a registered nurse. She’s a bodyworker, health and sexuality coach, dancer, lover, and mother. Chaya believes that we source our creative life force expression through our pelvic bowls, and if the energy is blocked there, it greatly affects our capacity to be our full authentic selves in the world.
Her passion is to support pelvic and abdominal health and healing. The main forms of body work she practices are the Arvigo Techniques of Maya Abdominal Therapy and holistic pelvic care. Belly dance, contact improvisation, and yoga have been the central core of her spiritual and physical practice for over 20 years. She weaves the knowledge she’s gained about movement patterns and body structure into her work to assist clients in actively healing their own bodies and spirits. I’m so happy to have you back on the show again, Chaya.
Thank you. Happy to be here with you again.
Yeah. So, before we dive into this really juicy topic of dancing with the depths of desire, will you please indulge our listeners by sharing with us some of your super powers?
Gosh, my super powers? Well, I think I have a fierce and gentle way of holding presence, whether it’s with an individual or in the Dancing with Eros event that I’ve been hosting with my partner every month. Yeah, there’s just a beautiful, sweet way that that container has offered just a little bit more freedom and openness, and I feel like one of my super powers is the playful, deep, and present way that I’ve held that space for people to share their authentic selves.
Yeah, I would definitely attest to that fierce presence. I think you put it really beautifully. For anyone who doesn’t know Chaya, she absolutely holds that space, and it’s very powerful.
The intention of Touch and Play was to explore the edges of where contact improvisation, which is a dance that is intended to be based entirely on physics.
So, tell us a little bit about Dancing with Eros. Tell us what it is and how it came to be and how it currently exists in form.
It sort of arises from two different places. One is an inspiration from a festival that I’ve participated in for the last three or four years called Touch and Play, which is coming up at Earth Dance in July. The intention of Touch and Play was to explore the edges of where contact improvisation, which is a dance that is intended to be based entirely on physics. So it’s to explore where that dance actually is influenced by chemistry and where does contact improve meet sensuality, sexuality, BDSM, tantra, and the conscious communication.
It’s been a really beautiful experience, and all kinds of interesting and amazing things, growthful things happen at Touch and Play, but there hasn’t been actually a whole lot of dancing.
Just a lot of touching and playing?
There’s a lot of touching and a lot of playing. There’s also a joke that Touch and Play is T&P, trigger and process. There’s a lot of growth in there. It’s a really beautiful experience. I really wanted to create a container around exploring this in the dance and really create a strong container for that. So that’s one piece.
Then the other piece is really an inspiration from the Me Too movement and how, I could say a lot more about that, but how do we want to respond to that, and how do we want to heal on both sides of the wounding that’s come through in all the voices. How do we want to create safer spaces? How do we want to connect? How do we want to create our boundaries? When do we want to soften our boundaries to have a conscious practice around that that’s fun and playful at the same time?
Yeah. I have not had the good fortune of experiencing one of your Dancing with Eros workshops because I moved out of the area before you really started to put that out there, but I love the concept of it. Something that you said when you were explaining contact improve really perked my ears up because you said it’s originally designed to be a dance that’s exploring physics, which has pretty much never been my experience of it, because there’s all of this chemistry and sexual energy and just really, if I’m honest, a lot of messiness that can come into play when you’re in a space with a bunch of people that you don’t really know very well and are exploring touch in that intimate of a way. I would love to, I really pinged on that, when you said that it’s really originally a dance designed to explore physics.
Yeah. Is there a specific question around that or do you want me to just speak to it a little bit more?
Yeah. What’s your experience been, I guess? I mean, from conversations that we’ve had and from what I know of things that I’ve seen moving through the dance community, it seems to me like Dancing with Eros is kind of born from this exploration of how do we explore and navigate those boundaries in a healthy way and I’m just curious how that’s paired with this dance that’s based on the laws of physics.
Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of questions in there. That’s so interesting.
I know.
There’s a lot.
I started doing contact improve a long time ago and I actually left because I felt that there were so many unclear boundaries.
It’s not a specific question.
Yeah. I think I’m going to start with my experience of contact improve outside of Dancing with Eros. It’s been long. I started doing contact improve a long time ago and I actually left because I felt that there were so many unclear boundaries. As a really young woman in the scene, I was one of the women that a lot of older men wanted to dance with, which is exactly the struggle that many dance communities have been having all around the country.
As I got older and then went back, I won’t go away into the story of what brought me back to the community, but I felt really called back to contact improve and was older, am older, right? That’s how life goes. We get older.
It happens.
I am clearer. As a younger woman, I wasn’t as clear in my own boundaries. I don’t think it should be necessarily on the younger women to be as clear, and that’s something that I’m really looking at in the dance communities and how to create more safety in all the dances. I don’t want other young women to leave the community for so many years like I did because of that.
Yeah. I walked away, also.
Yeah, I know. Within that, I feel like my own boundaries feel really good, so I have great dances and great experiences. For me, it really mostly is about physics. We’re human, so we have chemistry. There are some people that my chemistry resonates with more than others, so I’ll have more interesting dances with them. That still doesn’t necessarily mean it’s about sensuality or sexuality, but to say that there is no chemistry in there, for me, isn’t accurate. Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does.
With this person on a kinesthetic plane, so we can have these really beautiful dances together.
There are layers of chemistry, right? There’s “Oh, I have chemistry. I have resonance,” maybe is a better word for me in that way, “With this person on a kinesthetic plane, so we can have these really beautiful dances together.“
Totally.
It’s like why would you want to dance with someone you didn’t have some level of chemistry with?
Right. Exactly.
Okay. Hold your thought because we do have to go to a quick break, and we’re going to dive more into this because there’s obviously so much to explore in this topic, and we have the time to do it. Before we go to break, will you tell our listeners where they can go to find out more about you and this work, this Dancing with Eros?
Sure. Yeah, my website is YourSacredPelvis.com, and to find Dancing with Eros, you can go to YourSacredPelvis.com/Dancing-With-Eros.
Awesome. We’re talking with Chaya Leia Aronson about dancing with the depths of desire, and this conversation is about to explode, so stay tuned because it’s going to get really good. I can tell.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Music Credit: All instruments played by Amanda Turk. Engineered and produced by Tatiana Berindei and Daniel Plane reelcello.com
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