Since 2017 we have been organizing this Biodanza retreats, with people from all over the world dancing together.

We´ve been creating beautiful, powerful, intimate, safe, stimulating, and profound vivencias of deepening the experience of Biodanza. It's a process of personal transformation and a shared adventure.

A retreat is different from a festival, a congress or vacations with Biodanza.

Our retreats are a six days journey, with progressive deepening, where each vivencia is connected to the next, and everybody in the group dances the same vivencias. This process promotes a way of reaching really profound vivencias, and harmonization, supported by the affective bonding amongst the participants. 

And it all happens in connection and synergy to every aspect of the retreat, because we will enjoy meals together, laugh together, share wonderful moments, will have time to rest, and enjoy the beauty of nature and the surroundings… and feel the wonders and the powers of a deep journey of Biodanza.

So, our retreats are meant for people with some experience of Biodanza, so we can all journey together in a deep and meaningful way.

In every retreat our main reference is Rolando Toro, the creator of Biodanza, but we are also inspired by other authors, poets, philosophers, artists, mythologies, etc. to create our themes and vivencias….

In 2024, the theme or our retreat is «Journey to the Source of Bliss» at the marvelous paradise of Suryalila Retreat Center, in Spain.

ABOUT THE THEME OF THE RETREAT:

Mythologist and writer Joseph Campbell introduced the phrase "Follow your bliss" to the public in his 1988 interview with Bill Moyers, that was compiled in the book The Power of Myth.

To follow your bliss means to have the courage to do what you really want to do in life as opposed to choosing a path forced on you by other people.

So, what does it really mean to follow your bliss?

Before writing about that, let´s address what bliss it´s not.

The author Jeff Foster has been writing about the pressure to "be happy, successful and perfect", in our society:

«Be happy, be good, be positive, be optimistic, be successful, (…) be spiritually enlightened.

Consume the perfect diet. Attract a million followers on Instagram. Live your best life! Rise up the career ladder. Be fit and healthy. Be your greatest self! Manifest your life's purpose.

Optimize your body's functioning. Release your pain, fear, anger and sadness. Free yourself from doubt. Fall in love with the person of your dreams and live happily ever after and never feel lonely again.

This dream is beautiful, but it is literally killing us.

(…) the lie of the 'perfect life'; it only makes us depressed, anxious, addicted - and actually feeds our shame and self-loathing and sense of cosmic failure.

Our constant striving eventually exhausts us, brings us to our knees. It's too much work for the poor organism, to be 'positive' all the time. The Unconscious is enraged by the lie. And it wants to (…) rest.

(…) Keep moving at any cost. Never stop. Happiness literally can make us unhappy… this kind of false happiness. …

Until you listen…

(…) Break some taboos. Say the 'wrong' thing. Shatter the false image. Change may scare (…) you. Good. It's supposed to. Nobody has ever awakened without dying over and over again…

There is a bigger Happiness that actually embraces even our deepest unhappiness and does not shame it and this is the true Happiness you have always longed for. The Happiness that strips off the mask, destroys false protections, sees our flaws, our vulnerabilities, our deepest sorrows… and accepts and loves us and embraces us just as we are. […]

Accept it all (…) Bless it all (…) love it all. Open your heart to it all!»

Foster tells us to reject the: «lie of happiness that sends so many to an early grave. » And invites us to love ourselves even when we feel unhappy, lonely, sad, disconnected, like when a child asks the parents:

«Mommy, Daddy, do I have to be happy and perfect for you to love me?"

You can reply, without hesitation:

"Of course not my love. I love you exactly as you are. I love your flaws and imperfections and your vulnerable heart. They are all so beautiful to me. (…)

Now that, my friends, is (…) Happiness. »

Jeff foster was shrewd at identifying one of the big pressures in our society: to be "happy", "successful" and "perfect" all the time, at any cost, sacrificing our true feelings and our Identity. In other words, losing ourselves in the process, and becoming "machines" aiming for performance and consumption. And, most of the times, feeling a deep dissatisfaction, or rage, tiredness, and sadness, underneath it all.

So, what does it mean ""Follow your bliss" for Joseph Campbell? In his own words:

«If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time. »

Finding one's bliss, Campbell tells us, requires what he calls a "sacred space", that profound need for a "bliss station" into which to root ourselves:

«This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don't know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anybody, you don't know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen. (…)

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again. You really don't have a sacred space, a rescue land, until you find somewhere to be that's not a wasteland, some field of action where there is a spring of ambrosia—a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you—a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention and your own wish (…)

Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all we need. Almost anything then becomes a continuous and increasing joy. (…)»

Campbell said that we often lose our way on the path to our bliss because society gives us limiting notions of success, and pressure us into unimaginative and "safe" goals in life:

«Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.»

Opening to those more meaningful dimensions of bliss, Campbell insists, is simply a matter of letting your life speak:

«We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth. […] »

Campbell tells us to find the poetry in life, so we can connect to bliss:

«Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss. Most people are concerned with other things. […]».

And the bliss it´s a vivencia that we can reach in our daily life:

«The religious people tell us we really won't experience bliss until we die and go to heaven. But I believe in having as much as you can of this experience while you are still alive. […]»

And that vivencia of bliss it´s a lighthouse, a guiding star, that can give direction to your journey through life:

« When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.»

But what stops people from following their Bliss? Lacking the courage to let go of the comfort zone, of the know paths that others "made" for us.

The most uncomfortable but essential part of finding your bliss, Campbell argues, is the element of uncertainty — the willingness to, in the timeless words of Rilke, "live the questions" rather than reaching for the ready-made answers:

«The adventure is its own reward — but it's necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control. We are following our own way, not our daddy's or our mother's way… Life can dry up because you're not off on your own adventure. […]

There's something inside you that knows when you're in the center, that knows when you're on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you've lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don't get any money, you still have your bliss.»

To live life as an adventure, that´s the call. To live your adventure, you need courage to live the risks, the challenges, and the uncertainty of the path you are creating for yourself.

Another author, Michael Harrigan, also invites us to live this adventure:

« (…) Have the courage and the heart, the centeredness, to follow your own path, to be who you are and love being who you are, no matter what. Shine out and show us who you are, so that people who are looking for someone exactly like you can find you. Do not allow setbacks or even major betrayals to dampen your shine and your being.

In life's journey you will encounter many narrow paths blocked by avalanches, forks in the road shrouded in fog, deep valleys of darkness and bright sunny days in meadows of golden poppies. (…)

And through it all, the only constant is that you are you, that you have a core of truth within you and a path to walk, and if you allow your core of truth to tell you which fork in the road to take, if you allow that internal compass to tell you which mountain to climb, then you will do well indeed and have a fulfilling, interesting life.

If you go chasing after others, trying to make things be other than how they naturally are, then you will find yourself suddenly awakening in a deep forest without knowing where to turn. You will find yourself lost and confused, because you have lost touch with your own personal truth.

And when this happens, you must just sit down in the forest, become very still, and return to yourself. You must reach down and find yourself again before you continue walking, or else you will simply go around in circles, becoming more desperate and alone and lost.

You are everything you need to be, just as you are, right now. You are the center of your own life. You are the beacon that shines and shows the way.

Be glad when others walk beside you, enjoy their company, connect as closely and deeply as you can, but always, always, shine your own light and walk your own path and allow them to do the same. »

These will be some of the sources of inspiration for creating this retreat, at the stunning paradise of Suryalila Retreat Center, in Spain.