Welcome to WADING, a journey beyond appearances through philosophy and butoh dance. I’m your host, Damiano Fina, and in each episode we will wade through profound questions that challenge the limits of our perception. WADING invites listeners to walk through the metaphorical river that separates worlds, much like the mythic crossings guided by Charon in ancient lore. As we step into these waters, remember: the world is more than what we see. Are you ready to wade in? Let’s begin!
Loneliness has two faces: it can become the suffering of isolation, but also a space for contemplation and self-knowledge.
In this episode of WADING, I introduce the philosophical problem of loneliness, moving from its growing relevance in contemporary society to a much older metaphysical question: what happens when the part believes itself separated from the Whole?
From Anaximander to the experience of suffering and human relationships, we begin a journey through the cursed and blessed faces of solitude, asking a fundamental question: when are we ever truly alone?
24 Sept 2026
Philosophical Counselling and the Generation of Meaning About Death and Dying
In this episode of WADING, I explore how philosophical counselling can help us generate meaning around death, dying and loss.
Philosophy has confronted these questions since its very beginning. From the pre-Socratics to Socrates, it has always asked what it means to appear, disappear, live and die.
Philosophical counselling brings these questions into a helping relationship based on dialogue, listening and reflection. Its aim is not to provide definitive answers, but to help a person recognize the beliefs, assumptions and meanings through which they interpret their own existence.
Loss, illness and death can interrupt the direction we thought our lives were taking. But they can also open deeper questions: How am I living? What gives meaning to my existence? What still matters to me?
In this sense, philosophical counselling becomes a practice of awareness and orientation. A contemporary form of maieutics capable of helping us bring new meaning into the light.
3 Sept 2026
We Inhabit the Houses of the Moon
In this episode of WADING, I explore a radical question: is death truly part of reality, or does it belong to the way reality appears to us?
Through the allegory of Janus, the Sun and the Moon, I imagine two different ways of understanding existence. On one side are the Houses of Night, where birth and death appear as real and existence unfolds between beginning and end. On the other are the Houses of Day, where everything is eternal and death can only appear as an illusion.
Between these two horizons, different philosophical voices emerge: death as finis, death as transitus, mortality, immortality, becoming and eternity.
Perhaps we all inhabit the houses of the Moon, living in reflected light while trying to understand its source.
And this is where philosophy begins again: not with what we want to believe, but with the question of what can actually be true.
27 Aug 2026
Death is Impossible! Witnessing Eternity with Emanuele Severino
What if death doesn’t mean becoming nothing?
In this episode of WADING, I explore the radical philosophy of Italian thinker Emanuele Severino and his claim that every being is eternal. If becoming means that something passes from being into nothingness, then becoming itself contains a contradiction. What disappears from our experience may not therefore be annihilated, but simply leave the horizon of appearance.
Through philosophy, grief, personal memories, Chopin and butoh dance, I reflect on what happens when we begin to question one of our deepest convictions: that we are mortal.
Perhaps we don’t need to become immortal. Perhaps we’ve never been anything other than eternal.
20 Aug 2026
Better Never to Have Been Born! Philosophy as Meditatio Mortis
In this episode of WADING, I explore philosophy as meditatio mortis: an exercise in thinking about death in order to understand existence more deeply.
Starting from the disturbing wisdom of Silenus — that it might have been better never to have been born — I move through Solon, Socrates, Epicurus, Prometheus, Heraclitus and Zen tradition to ask how human beings have tried to confront mortality.
Is death simply something to fear and overcome? Or can it teach us something about life, birth and the meaning of existence itself?
From the calm of Socrates to Epicurus’ attempt to dissolve the fear of death, philosophy offers different ways of facing the same fundamental question.
And beneath all of them lies an even more radical possibility: what if existence were not ultimately suspended between birth and annihilation, but between annihilation and eternity?
13 Aug 2026
Tracing the Remedy Against Grief
In this episode of WADING, I continue my journey through grief by asking a question that has accompanied human beings for centuries: what remedy do we seek when we’re confronted with death?
Grief cannot simply be hidden or annihilated. But it can be listened to. And when we listen to it, it can reveal itself as another face of love: the trace of a presence that continues through memory, even when someone is no longer with us in the same way.
Starting from my personal experience of bereavement, I explore how contemporary society often leaves us unprepared for death and mourning, and how human beings have historically searched for protection from precariousness through relationships, institutions, technology, spirituality, science and knowledge.
But what about philosophy? From the earliest Greek thinkers to Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and Emanuele Severino, philosophy has long confronted the anguish of death by searching for meaning and truth.
This episode is an invitation to rediscover philosophy as a possible practice of preparation: a meditatio mortis capable of helping us think about death before death forces us to.
6 Aug 2026
My Journey of Grieving Through Dance and Philosophy
In this episode of WADING, I share my personal journey through grief after the death of my mother, and the path that led me to explore mourning through philosophy, death education, and butoh dance.
How can we bear the pain of loss? What does death mean when it suddenly enters our lives? And can the body become a place where grief is not only endured, but listened to, transformed, and expressed?
Through memories, philosophical reflection, and my experience of creating Letters to My Mom, I explore grief not as something to overcome or erase, but as a profound transformation of our relationship with life, death, memory, and presence.
A personal episode about loss, dance, philosophy, and the search for a way to continue living without forgetting those who are no longer physically beside us.
11 Oct 2025
Spring of a Dancer (the poem)
Spring of a Dancer is a film, a book, a poem, a theatrical performance, a podcast, and a philosophical lecture on dance.
Wondering what is the point of dancing today is one of the questions that has been close to my heart since I first became involved in dance. Butoh dance invites us to the scandal of the flesh, because it rebels against the rules and norms that claim to tell us what movement is right and wrong, what is beautiful and ugly, to the point of reminding us that even the line between what is alive and what is dead is not so clear.
Spring of a Dancer is a hymn to the timeless rhythm that pulses through all things: the fire that gives birth to the stars. Invoking his prayer to the Sun, indifferent to our questions, the dancer sheds the skin of the mundane, echoing the ancient wisdom of the serpent: “If you remain under your skin, you miss most of what moves the heavens”. As the Great Crow beats its wings and Janus whispers to us to open the door, FÜYA urges us to question the meaning of pain: "Life is hard. All this pain can destroy you. Yet, in dance, grace blossoms like the first flowers of spring, ephemeral and eternal. For this reason, it is worth dancing today."
I invite you to watch the trailer for my film Spring of a Dancer on YouTube (https://youtu.be/SPHPj5SRskE) and read my new book Spring of a Dancer on Amazon Books (https://amzn.to/4aBuDF3).
1 Apr 2025
The dance of the stars
"All things were born from a single fire" say the fragments of the Chaldean Oracles. In fact, without the splendour of the dance of the Sun, not only would there be no light for our planet, but the solar system could not even have formed. The Sun is at the centre of our experience of the rhythm of existence. It distinguishes day from night, brings the fruits of the earth to maturity, controls the cycle of the seasons, and contributes to the water cycle. We can say with certainty that everything that happens on planet Earth depends on its position in relation to the star we call the Sun.
I invite you to watch the trailer for my film Spring of a Dancer on YouTube (https://youtu.be/SPHPj5SRskE) and read my new book Spring of a Dancer on Amazon Books (https://amzn.to/4aBuDF3).
30 Mar 2025
What is the point of dancing today?
Wondering what’s the point of dancing today is one of the questions that has been close to my heart since I started to get involved in dance. Just as butoh dance invites us to desecrate conventions and explore the areas that question the boundaries between masculine and feminine, life and death, grace and vulgarity; so philosophical thought invites us to question our beliefs, preparing us to enjoy questioning and criticising, rather than being satisfied with the answers we are able to provide today or that our ancestors gave us. Only philosophy, in fact, asks itself the question about truth and incessantly continues its critical exercise, without ever being satisfied with the answers that gradually emerge from this research. To avoid remaining imprisoned in our own little world, butoh dance and philosophy call us to go beyond ourselves and ask ourselves those fundamental questions that our ancestors have been asking themselves since the time of the cave: who are we, where do we come from, where are we going?
I invite you to watch the trailer for my film Spring of a Dancer on YouTube (https://youtu.be/SPHPj5SRskE) and read my new book Spring of a Dancer on Amazon Books (https://amzn.to/4aBuDF3).
17 Jan 2025
Spring of a Dancer: a Film and Book of Rebirth
The line between what is alive and what is dead is not so clear. Going through the pain of grief, I have learned that every ending is already a new beginning. None of us wants to grieve, certainly. Life can be difficult. Yet in the midst of the storm, we may surprise ourselves, turning our gaze beyond our skin frame. Like the fatigue of buds, during winter, we can let a new dance bloom when spring comes. From these thoughts my new project was born: Spring of a Dancer (https://www.damianofina.it/en/art/spring-of-a-dancer/). I hope it catches you in a moment of inspiration.
I invite you to watch the trailer for my film Spring of a Dancer (https://youtu.be/SPHPj5SRskE) on YouTube and read my new book Spring of a Dancer on Amazon Books.
27 Nov 2024
Dancing Death: Butoh Dance for Death Education
Host Rina Mika presents a reflection on the transformative power of Butoh dance as a catalyst for death education and existential inquiry.
22 Oct 2024
A Dancing Corpse, Meditating With The Skull
To achieve enlightenment, shamans teach, one must first bury oneself in the cave. In fact, they say, to open our gaze, we must close our eyes in the darkness of the earth.
The shaman, like the butoh dancer, lives straddling the world of the living and the world of the dead, sometimes exchanging favor and sometimes hostility with spirits.
Like alchemists, shamans challenge the boundaries between mortal and immortal things. Guarding the laws that govern the motions of the heavens, they plunge into what most consider “the end” or, rather, “the limit”, to return hermetic messages.
The butoh dancer, for Hijikata Tatsumi, dances like a corpse desperately holding itself up, falling and rising again trespassing between worlds, defying the rules that separate the sacred from the obscene, as in ancient Greek tragedies.
That darkness it passes through is so dark as to be luminous. It takes a journey into the body’s possibilities of connecting in, out, and beyond its own skin frame. Like the ancient ascetics of death, it sees its skeleton glowing with a golden light.
9 Sept 2024
Butoh: Dancing Inside, Outside, Beyond
Dancing taught me that none of us live merely under our own skin. John Dewey, an American philosopher of the 20th century, said that our organs, in fact, are made to connect with what goes beyond our skin. This is why I teach dance.
With my FÜYA method (https://www.damianofina.it/en/fuya-method-the-alchemical-method-of-dance-by-damiano-fina/) I invite my students to reflect on the meaning of dance and on the fact that dance actually allows us to experience our inner world, therefore dancing our inside; to experience what is around us, to dance our outside and also to dance even concepts such as death, and this is all that allows us to dance beyond our bodily frame, beyond our skin.
Dance offers experiences that are completely free and queer, there are no gender or sex limitations, there are no limitations regarding our age, our physical capabilities and our abilities motor. Dance can be absolutely inclusive: there is no right or wrong movement.
Butoh dance allows us to adhere to contexts that we can define as "dance therapy", "art therapy", to develop experiences which are useful for dealing with trauma, for dealing with mourning, and therefore for dealing with those situations in which to see the difference between a before and an after.
1 Sept 2024
A Journey Beyond Appearances Through Philosophy and Butoh Dance
WADING invites listeners to walk through the metaphorical river that separates worlds, much like the mythic crossings guided by Charon in ancient lore.
This podcast is a journey into that very process of transcending what is immediately present.
Through the expressive power of butoh dance — a performance art form that delves deep into the human spirit of ritual rebellion — and the philosophical insights of thinkers like Emanuele Severino, WADING explores how we navigate and understand the layers of reality that lie beyond the surface.
Find out more on the website www.damianofina.it (https://www.damianofina.it/en/)
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