I have loved dancing ever since I was five years old, a mini-ballerina dressed in a butterfly tutu. I’ve tried a few styles – from ballet and ballroom to barn dancing – but most of all I like moving to music in whatever way the mood takes me.
I’ve cut a few rugs on quite a few dancefloors in my time, I can tell you. But as I got older, I guess dancing for the hell of it seemed, well, a bit frivolous and the sort of thing only young people did. So, after the age of 45, I rarely even danced round my handbag in the living room.
It was only relatively recently – about four years ago – that I rediscovered the joy of dance and realised what I’d been missing. I was working at the Sunday Express at the time, and the travel editor asked if I would be interested in joining a group of belly dancers to write a piece about a camping (and dancing) trip to the Tunisian Sahara. I’d never been camping before, not even in Dorset, and knew nothing about belly dancing, but I said yes anyway.
And I’m so glad I did. My travelling companions told me I had a natural aptitude for the belly dance and I had such fun learning moves on rippling dunes and joining in the communal fun around the Berber camp fire.
I definitely accessed my inner desert princess but belly-dancing back in south-east London didn’t quite work for me, so I searched for a different way to feed the need.
Then I discovered 5Rhythms – a movement meditation practice created by Gabrielle Roth. She describes the practice as a soul journey, and says that by moving the body, releasing the heart and freeing the mind, one can connect to the essence of the soul.
Now I must confess I have never had a 5Rhythms lesson in my life. But I did experience a version of it at a workshop I attended and absolutely loved how it encourages you to follow the wisdom of your body and move in any way you choose, with the five rhythms – flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness – in mind.
I’ve adapted it to suit my needs and now, most mornings, I dance a 5Rhythms-inspired wave. Not only does it set me up for the day energetically, it also gives me a workout and clears my mind.
There have been many studies into the benefits of dancing which have established that it helps to reduce stress and increase serotonin levels. But now another benefit has been revealed – apparently it makes us smarter. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine discovered that, of all physical activities, frequent dancing was the one that encouraged mental acuity and offered protection against dementia.
It seems the best type of dance when it comes to improving mental acuity is one that requires split-second, rapid-fire decision-making as opposed to learning steps by rote. If you’re dancing with a partner and following their lead, you will be making plenty of split-second decisions. And it occurs to me that when you’re dancing the 5Rhythms you are doing the same, because there is no pre-set form to your movements.
This is encouraging. I’ll carry on dancing, then, and at the same time I might be building my cognitive reserves for the Third Act.
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