Life-1A is an online platform that helps to integrate the immersions, projects and dialogues hosted by Maia Earth Village in Palawan, Philippines alongside some active innerdance communities from around the world.
Earth is our Studio, from which we draw the Stories that uncover the pathways to co-create new structures of seeing Life. Through intensive research and project-based learning activities, we are interested in open journeys that look for ways of integrating and applying spiritual and scientific insights on the human experience to happy ecological living on the planet. For the last years, the work in the earth village has been to serve as resource and research center to support the global innerdance movement hoping to access study materials relevant to the study of the energy process.
what is innerdance?
SINCE 2007, INNERDANCE HAS GIVEN PEOPLE FROM ALL AROUND THE GLOBE THAT RARE TIME TO LAY DOWN AND SURRENDER TO THEIR INNER WISDOM. IN THE PROCESS, THE ONLY INSTRUCTION GIVEN BY FACILITATORS IS TO TRUST AND LISTEN TO WHAT WISDOM MAY WHISPER AT ANY MOMENT. Originally, the innerdance began 14 years ago as a group journey where people gather in a circle. After a brief opening that establishes we are safe to explore our inner selves, participants lay down to a carefully constructed playlist that might be 60 to 120 minutes long.
The innerdance was initially founded in Palawan by a young Filipino man who was called to leave his city life to live an ascetic hermit lifestyle on an island consuming mostly coconuts. After a series of spiritual experiences in different parts of the US and the Philippines, he walked as a penniless pilgrim throughout Mindanao in 2005 until he chose at the age of 28, that he would live in solitude for two years. At this time, very powerful experiences in altered states took place in him, signifying great shifts in body and mind.
During this time, he experienced powerful body movements that took hold of him, accompanied by messages that this is something he must share with others around the world.
At the age of 30, Pi Villaraza began to travel to different places, carefully sharing from 2008 onwards, an energy with all those who might be curious, open and ready to be reminded of an innate movement that lives within us all.
This energy eventually came to be known as the innerdance.
the experience
The innerdance can bring about regression into childhood memories, primal states, explorations of dream visions, emotional release, a journey into different dimensions of consciousness and most often, a recognition that something has been altered, a healing has occurred. Here are few of the early testimonials that were published in magazines and newspapers or sent to Palawan when the process was first starting:
"I went into a trance and fell from my chair to the floor ... into a journey from my present adult life to childhood and then birth. I saw inside the womb of my mother, then went forward in time until I reached my present age. This was an inner rebirth, a powerful experience I could not forget." - Jaime Licauco, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 2009
"It is a kind of trance state in which one feels out profoundly one's own normal persona, yet not completely dissociated from oneself or reality. As a Reiki practitioner, I can say the quality of the channeled innate energy goes beyond in both scope and intensity the vibrational energy even of Shamballah Reiki. The innerdance seems like the next step to energy healing. It represents the missing aspect of practical spirituality to help elevate mass human consciousness above petty materialism, a universally accessible raising of awareness that can embrace the ecology of our planet, a potential and actual force to help us return to simplicity, basic goodness and our authentic individual beauty.” - Dr. Nick Smith, BSc (Hons) MBBS MRCPsych MBA ASM, England, 2008
“All I could comprehend in this in-between state was that something had opened up within that allowed me to see into another dimension of myself, one that acknowledged an inner life force that had long been dormant.” – Katrina, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 2010
“Once the blockages are released, the initiate often proceeds into a trance-like dance that can be equivalent to the crumbling away of one’s masks which allows a freedom from personal blockages.” – Chichi, Vision Magazine, California, 2010
“To date, I still have not found an acceptable, rational explanation. What I do know is that I felt and continue to feel God’s presence more acutely after I experienced the Inner Dance. I guess this outcome is more important than finding the cause.” – Kay, The Freeman Newspaper, Cebu
“Simplicity is at the heart of it all, enabling us to stay connected to our inner self as we continue the dance. In the weeks that followed the experience, the pain became non-existent and even the scoliosis curve on my back straightened out. There have been reports from many other people about being healed of glaucoma, cysts, migraine, psoriasis, depression.” – Agnes, Town and Country Magazine
“Doubt was forgotten and fear was never felt. There was an overflowing feeling of bliss, an unexplainable force that was comforting and assuring that everything will be alright. And I ended with a strange feeling of lightness.” – Jeff, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Mindanao page
"In the process, I saw linear time expressed as a single viewpoint as if it was possible to take in the expanded perspective of All-That-Is, to have access to everything at once. I could feel the innate balance of everything in my life, how all the people that I’d ever interacted with were drawn to me in complete balance and harmony. This showed and reflected some things within myself that I needed to see or feel. This whole experience was a conversation with myself. I was doing both the asking and the answering. As I would ponder a question, I am somehow guided into an experience that explores that thought, providing me answers to questions beyond what I could have ever conceived in a beautiful flowing dance of energy. - Jacqui Blayney, Australia, 2018
LOVING AND LEARNING
After all these years, the innerdance is not just a spiritual workshop. Many people coming out of the deep inner experience share how their beliefs, behaviors and life choices are changed forever.
Innerdance is a doorway to Whole Systems. Whether the true experience of it takes place in an hour, a day, a year or a lifetime, it has something to offer those who feel called to explore what it is.
Today, the innerdance arrives on a life-long study process where we are all classmates in an open space where energy itself is the teacher, the student and the classroom.
In this process, there are no healers. There are only the conditions where healing happens independently, without reliance on an external agent. The process may last from 60 to 120 minutes and any expression is allowed and held to be authentic manifestations belonging to a person's total being.
Many participants eventually requested that a training process be organized so that they may begin to share this gift to others in their communities across Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australia and across Asia. This training process has undergone many incarnations, sustained mostly as the innerdance energy school. The energy school is not so much a training, as much as it is a long-term learning exchange where participants and facilitators both focus on what the innerdance has to share regarding the nature of consciousness.
In the year prior to COVID, the innerdance Palawan community has been holding online support work. Since August 2020, two-month online energy schools have been held, the last of which finishes on the fourth week of July 2021. The online energy school gave us a year to prepare the frameworks and necessary structure for holding the ongoing 6-month Inner Intensives which was first initiated in July 1, 2021.