Arawana Hayashi in dialogue with Elizabeth Debold

„The dance is more than the dancers,“ says Arawana Hayashi, creator of Social Presencing Theater at the Presencing Institute. Hayashi has worked with systems change catalyst Otto Scharmer to bring together her experience as a dancer with his work with organizations. What does it mean that the dance is more than the dancers? The dance has its own energy and coherence beyond, but not separate from, the dancers. In other words, the fields of connection between us hold wisdom that our bodies can sense. Social fields—the energy and knowledge implicit between us—can open pathways to understanding and response that the rational mind cannot see.

The Art of Making a True Move is the title of Hayashi’s book. She has developed a practice that brings meditation and movement together that enable new shared potentials to be revealed. Working with the „stuckness“ that often gets in our way individually and collectively, Hayashi teaches us to respond from a deeper, embodied place that opens up ways to truly move through and beyond being stuck. A greater whole is tapped into that is accessed through the social field.

“When we relax a little bit, then a gesture emerges that is not planned or thought about. That's what we call the true move. It comes out of nothing or a gap between discursiveness or conceptual frameworks. An openness that ties with genuineness and simplicity. And it can open completely new possibilities that we cannot access by thinking or individual insight.”

In this conversation from an evolve LIVE event in 2025, Arawana Hayashi and Elizabeth Debold engage in an inquiry into the embodied knowing that leads to a true move: How can our embodiment become a pathway to wisdom? Why does an awareness of the social field open up the potential of our togetherness.

More Info on Arawana Hayshi: www.arawanahayashi.com

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