Dance Your Life is a barefoot dance with therapeutic effects. While you dance, you can be having new experiences in a mindful state and change your inner world. As the Eastern philosophies say “So within, as without.” When your internal world changes, your life outside the dance can start to change to.

The dance has a musical wave with six differentiated stages: birth, relationships, ego faces, social norms, community and death. In each of these stages, different aspects of our reality will be danced and experienced. The dance was created based on psychological theories of development, new scientific understandings, and dance movement therapy techniques. You don’t need to follow a choreography of movements or a lead teacher dancing; rather, you will have to find your own movement/dance in the space guided by your inner sensations. Exercises will be suggested for you to focus on a particular aspect, to connect to other people, or to simply experience yourself in a different way. The exercises are individual, in pairs and in groups.

At the end of the dance, participants usually report they had a different way of looking at themselves or life, were challenged, and had fun.

In this particular event, The Dark Side of Love, despite its dark title, you will explore themes very common to loving relationships, intimate or other: jealousy, triangular relationships, fears and anxieties, abandonment, supportive love, joy and creative partnership, and anything that might emerge at the time.

The facilitator, Mª Alda, is a psychotherapist with private practice in Exeter for the last 8 years. She has experienced different forms of therapeutic dance and is a Dance of Awareness facilitator.