CONNECT Conference | Day 2

A whole room full of people who barely know each other, dancing, staring each other in the eyes, running around like crazy and giggling. Everyone in their own little world, doing things. What's going on? No, we are not some lunatics (or are we?) That was just an insight of what was happening on the second day of the Common Senses conference. That all was an unique way of expressing our emotions and thoughts through non-verbal methods.

So, what did we do and why? Believe it or not, everything had a purpose and everybody contributed with what they had to offer. These days people are becoming more and more tense in relation to others and less connected in their interactions. We start behaving, moving and acting like we believe we should do what society is expecting from us. But why? For the sake of being considered "normal". However, this only creates distance from each other and distance from our true selves.

We experience discomfort within ourselves and within the interactions that we take part in. An internal conflict between what we do and what we truly are. This leads to superficial connections and beliefs that are not serving us in creating the life that we truly desire.

It all started with some warm-up activities such as jumping and dancing in order to bring the focus on the body. Most of the time, our bodies know more about ourselves than what our mind believes. A little experiment involving guessing how many jumps we could do in a given time was held, and everyone did more jumps than they anticipated. This shows us that often, the results we expect are different from the results we achieve once we actually take action. Through dancing we had the chance to become more connected with each other by imitating other people's dance moves.

Afterwards, the need to talk and communicate thoughts became less and less important. This presented the opportunity in which everyone could express their emotions through a group drawing. Splitting up in pairs, we began dancing, playing around and interacting with each other using scarves. This gave everybody the chance to get a feel of and stretch outside their comfort zone.

As the day came to an end, we learned what different interactions, while maintaining eye contact created within us.

Finally, we shared our thoughts on how we felt, what we took out of the day, and thanked each other.

Authors: Patricia Vlatkovic, Alex Florescu