Photos, Ed Waller
They have had no meat, wine, caffeine, sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, or tango for four days. Very little social contact.
They spent most of their waking hours from 4 a.m. til 9 p.m. sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at a wall. They smile because sensory deprivation is marvelous medicine, salve for the over stimulated mind––and lives of certain tango dancers who get over milongated.
Is your tango dancing suffering from fatigue? Has your dance gone flat? Lost that lovin’ feeling? Are your ochos at sixes and nines? Your voleos lost their kick?
This may be just remedy you need: Nothing.
Oh, the mind is a terrible thing. You know this.
Fifteen of us who believe that went to Vicente Casares, the country retreat outside of Buenos Aires, to not-think. Lovely vegetarian (mostly vegan) cuisine sustained us.
In tango as in meditation you must hold your own axis, or posture, straight up. And let go of thought, of past and future—in other words, of all illusion and delusion.
The essence of happiness, whether sitting still or dancing tango, is from within. It’s all too easy to forget that.
This is not to say that during this fiercely still period the mind is not like a dog (or pony) chewing on the bone (or grass) of the past, panting for the future. It is only to say that during this time, the Great Observer, the god-mind, the awareness that is you before you got conditioned and shaped according to your genetic material and your parents’/teachers’ ways and whims, the you that is not yet or ever Screwed Up, gets a bit of space and sees that there is a beyond, a mas alla, a green pasture, right now and here in this momentito.
Guided depression, sensory deprivations, getting a grip on real time is what it’s about.