FrikUnik | Breathwork & mindset coaching

Last weekend we went to watch A Night Called Quest in De Studio in Antwerp, an evening-long programme with various performances from young and upcoming artists, including our youngest daughter. It was her first production as an independent choreographer and dancer and what a production it was!

As a parent, it is of course always a special moment to bear witness to your children spreading their wings and doing their own thing. And if they manage in the process to move and touch other people, that makes it all that extra special bit magic.

Emotion is vibration

Afterall, magic is, along with expression, what art is all about, right? Stimulating emotions in the audience, the spectator, the listener, the reader,… Ensuring that they don’t passively sit by but are actively involved in the experience and engaged in the emotion. Even without the ‘intellectual brain’ fully understanding the exact message, the ‘emotional brain’ will recognise the vibration of the emotion and draw you into it.

Because that is what emotions do, they draw you in, submerge you, engulf you. Oftentimes even through physical manifestations in the body that act as an instrument in deciphering emotional information. Incidentally, the word emotion is derived from the Latin word ‘emovere’. It literally means to move outward. An emotion is therefore a vibration, an energy which exists in our body and which wants to get out.

Whenever you experience emotions as part of an art experience and are touched by it, you can usually tolerate these emotions. You accept that it is the artist’s intention to shake something loose and to convey a message. You’re probably even impressed when the artist manages to do this. It’s often a completely different story when you experience emotions in your day-to-day life.

Fear, sadness, anger,… are often difficult to tolerate. It’s no easy feat to just let these kinds of emotions work their way out of the body. You’ll be sooner be inclined to ignore them, to suppress them and to try and escape them. Or your Frik Unik comes up with stories and you get stuck in a web of thoughts that prevent you from taking the right course of action.

The message behind the emotion

Emotions are a navigation system that reports on the state of your deepest needs and requirements. They are messengers that provide information about how you are doing. It requires skill to accept and acknowledge these emotions, to listen to them and understand what they are trying to tell you. A skill that is grossly underestimated and underused in our society. And one that far too few people have mastered, not least because we haven’t learned how it works exactly.

I’m also still learning how to decipher what my emotions mean, which requirements they represent or which boundaries they indicate. With the help of mindset work and breathwork, I’m making progress in untangling this knot.

When I see how my daughter manages to effortlessly use the magic of emotions to play to the audience, I’m completely in awe of her. My daughter, the magician.

Art is about emotion. If art needs to be explained it is no longer art.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

inner peace via mindset work and breathwork

Emotion is vibration

The message behind the emotion

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