An amazing ballet adventure with some unexpected connections to Buddhist philosophy

 I am writing this on the way back from ballet camp: nine days of dancing with amateur adult ballet dancers from across the globe. It was such an amazing experience that I want to try to capture some of it by writing it down in a blog. The adventure started with a quite disastrous train journey from the French Alps (see my previous blog) to Morlaix, in Bretagne (France), since my train from Geneva to Paris had more than one hour delay, which caused me to miss my connection in Paris, and hence I was two hours delayed and missed the welcome party of the ballet camp. Thankfully the people in Morlaix are very nice, and my bed & breakfast host was willing to welcome me more than an hour after the check-in time ended, and the ballet camp people came to pick me up by car from the train station. It was such a warm bath after such an exhausting journey. Nevertheless, it was already very exciting to meet people from across the globe who all had been making their way to ballet camp. 

a view of beautiful Morlaix

The next day, after enjoying the delicious breakfast made by my B&B host Nicholas (which included crepes and all kinds of cakes), we were called to go to different studios in the city of Morlaix, where we did our first class, and then different people started to learn their first pieces of the ballet. This part was a bit disorienting as some people seemed to already know variations, and it was a lot of sitting around. Nevertheless, this was also a great moment to chat with the fellow dancers and get to know them. And before I knew it, I had learnt my first pieces, so in the time that others were learning I could work on practising my own variations or chat with the others. It was so interesting to hear everyone's stories! It was also beautiful to see how everyone was helping one another. In this ballet camp, we were also accompanied by two professional dancers who were dancing the lead roles, and they were so incredibly nice and welcoming. They were curious to talk to us, were clearly helping with rehearsing and dancing alongside us, as well as spending time with us. It was so heart-warming to feel this spirit of everyone being welcome, no matter their level of ballet experience.

The place where we were practising was a fascinating place: an old tobacco factory that had been turned into an arts space with lots of performances and other happenings (and a ballet school). The only challenge at this time was the floor, which was very slippery, at both of the studios where we were practising (more on this later). At the end of the first day I was so nice to come all together for a class with the organizer, Julie Dupas, who led us in a sequence of ball rolling exercises to massage our muscles, and then it was time for dinner. I mostly walked everywhere during the week, which was a great warming up at the beginning of the day, and cooling down at the end.

As the week progressed, learning got more intense, and in the 2nd and 3rd day, it became quite stressful, as I felt like I was not remembering anything. Thankfully the teachers, Alex Negron and Laura Poikolainen, were very patient with us, despite us messing up for the hundredth time. But slowly, slowly the ballet became more and more familiar. Having said that, the days were pretty intense, starting at 9:15 in the morning on most days with a ballet class, then launching straight into rehearsals, which lasted until lunch around 1 pm, after which rehearsals continued until the muscle relaxation class at 17:00. Sometimes we had a break in the middle when we had to change studios with a short walk through the lovely city of Morlaix. We avoided doing pointe work since the floors were so incredibly slippery. After a few days, we started to rehearse in the actual theatre where the show would take place, and this had an actual marley floor, which made us so happy since it was slippery. However, after only about one day, disaster started to strike as also the marley floor became slippery! It became scary to dance, so rehearsals and classes were very nerve-wrecking... (even more than they already were anyway because it was such a challenge to memorize all the steps...). Amazingly enough, I did not have major muscle ache--maybe the tough zhemfit classes I had been doing were paying off!

Then came the day of the dress rehearsal. Everyone was freaking out, but the teachers went to their last resort: spraying the stage with 7up. And yes: that worked! We had a squaky and sticky stage (of course squaky was not intended, but at least it allowed us to dance without being afraid to break our legs). It was quite nerve-wrecking to do a full performance after having rehearsed it only for a week, but somehow magically I made it through without major mistakes. At times I had to pinch myself that I was there: for the first time of my life learning an actual ballet from the classical repertoire, surrounded by dancers, wearing a tutu and pointe shoes! And then the next day, we had the actual show! I was quite nervous, but also so excited to dance this happy ballet with my new ballet friends. Although this vacation was clearly not stressfree, it feels so good having done it and created this beautiful piece of work together! (see my instagram for some pictures).

For the regular readers of my blog, you know that I am working through the Lojong challege. Lojong is a set of slogans for training the mind from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. In the Lojong challenge, I go through each of these slogans and see how they apply to my life. We are now at slogan 45: Take on the three principal causes. This means that we are encouraged to take on the three principal causes for enlightenment, which are working with a good teacher, cultivating a pliable mind, and creating life circumstances conducive to training our mind. I think that when applied to ballet, this post shows how in the past week, I definitely experienced all three conditions. However, I think the learning process of the past week was to some extent also a mind training in the sense of Lojong, because the kindness of people encouraged me to also practise kindness, and the performance process itself was a great invitation to let go of all judgment and simply be in the moment, like for my last performance. Moreover, ballet performances are also a moment where it is important to let go of your own bubble and to open up yourself to the full interdependent circumstances that create the performance together. If you are in your own bubble, it does not work, because you will then easily end up being in the way of others, or failing to react to what is going on on stage, including unplan

the whole group

ned things. So the Buddhist views of interdependence and selflessness are very helpful here. Sometimes ballet training and Buddhist mind training have quite some overlaps!

Inter-subjectively exploring intersubjectivity in the French Alps

 In the last week, I had the good fortune to be part of Mind & Life Europe's ENCECON meeting. In this meeting, philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, meditators and more get together to discuss how we can study first-person experience and bring this full experience together with objective, third-person methods. This year's theme was "inter-subjectivity", which we explored through a series of meditation exercises, interviews and discussions. The interviews were not any interviews, but ==microphenomenological interviews, which is a method to explore experience in a very detailed way, trying to focus on the experience itself, leaving out our habitual theorizing. Another important characteristic of microphenomenological interviews is that they invite us to slow down, and repeatedly relive our past experience, so we become more aware of the details of these experiences, using more of our senses than we typically report on. What i found really interesting as a scientist was to observe the so-called evocation state, in which people show signs of being disengaged from the current context, something which we in the mind-wandering literature term "perceptual decoupling". The interviewees at this point slow down their speech, may close their eyes and sometimes repeat gestures from their past experience. What is challenging about this method, is that to explore a few minutes, or even less, of experience, you typically have an interview that lasts 30-60 minutes. At the same time, this is a state of pure contemplation--engaging in a reliving without judgment. Yet, this makes it very difficult to combine with other methods of research such as neuroimaging, because for most of these experiments, we need many repetitions of the same instance of experience. So, we had a lot of discussions about this.

What amazed me during this meeting is the profundity of the experiences that could be evoked by very simple meditations. On the first day, we were asked to simply bring to mind a person whom we felt grateful to. I kind of missed this instruction because I was so tired that I fell asleep during the meditation! On the second day, we sat next to one other person, and were asked to open ourselves up to the presence of the other person. It was fascinating to see how many people reported sensations of profound connection or even merging with the other person, as if they had a single body. On the third day, we were sitting together with the full group, and first we were asked to open ourselves up to the presence of the others, and then to hold each other's hands. In this moment, many people felt completely connected to the others, and lost a bit of their sense of self.

Many of our discussions revolved around the topics of how these practices helped to melt down the boundary between self and other. This was profoundly effected by the meditation practices we did, and of course by the fact we were staying together in a beautiful place in the French Alps. What this reminded me of is how helpful these simple practices could also be for reducing our destructive emotions, something that the next Lojong slogan talks about, which says "Train in the 3 difficulties". What this refers to is first the difficulty of becoming aware of your negative emotions, then secondly the difficulty of applying antidites to these negative emotions, and thirdly the difficulty of making the first two a habit so they change the way you are. Now when you are as profoundly connected as we were during the practices, the interesting thing is that negative emotions such as anger, jealousy and craving do not have even a chance to arise--they simply dissolve in the void. How wonderful would it be to do these practices together more often!

We also reflected on the role of the body in all this, because we found that touching each other's hands during the meditation practice had a profound effect. It dramatically amplified the feeling of having a single body with each other. Interestingly, this mirrors my findings from a dance experiment that I hope to write up soon, in which we found through working with dancers that the most powerful ways we can connect through movement is not by synchronizing our movement with another, but rather by moving as if we have a single body, or by engaging in a movement dialogue. So, it may be quite interesting to study more about how moving together can affect our thinking, and how such simple instructions ask bringing to mind the presence of others can do so. I am also curious whether we can use the perceptual decoupling state to better determine when microphenomenological interview information is reliable, and when it is less reliable (because people are not actually reliving their past experience, but rather theorizing about it). Finally, I am curious whether we can apply the experience of microphenomenology in zooming in on lived experience, and staying away from our theories about what's going on, to improve our societal discourses, which are so often stranded in these theories and stories, rather than simply being present with the facts. And the stories are what we know results in so many destructive emotions...