Lying fully dressed on my bed in the middle of the day, eyes closed, Donna Summer’s 1970s disco hit
Public Group active 3 years, 1 month agoLying fully dressed on my bed in the middle of the day, eyes closed, Donna Summer’s 1970s disco hit I Feel Love blasting through my headphones, is an unexpected consequence of life in .But here I am, 68 years old, doing ‘homework’ set under the genial direction of one Peter Lovatt, otherwise known as Dr Dance.The goal of my homework, being executed from a prone position, is to ‘find my groove’ and report back to Dr Dance when we next meet on Zoom.
Will I get a gold star if I do find my groove, I wonder. Or will this G-spot prove as elusive as the one we are all more familiar with?I open one eye (this is cheating) and spy my partner, Ronny, lying on the chaise longue beneath the window in our bedroom.
He, too, has his ear pieces in, listening to music of his own choosing, head bobbing, a smile on his face. Linda Kelsey, 68, and her partner of 12 years Ronny, 66, (pictured) tested Peter Lovatt’s The Dance Cure programmeHow we came to enrol ourselves on The Dance Cure programme, as it is called, is a tale that will be familiar to many couples in lockdown. You and your partner may have vowed to love one another for as long as you both shall live, but that doesn’t mean your relationship hasn’t been sorely tested by a year of seemingly endless separation from family and friends, and way too much other half proximity.The first lockdown was pleasant enough.
There were glorious sunny days when we could be outdoors for hours at a stretch, and balmy evenings for entertaining up to six at a distance in the garden.Ronny, a 66-year-old osteopath, was anxious about not earning money — I carried on as usual working as a freelance writer — but we counted ourselves lucky to be living in comfortable circumstances and managed to be cheery enough around one another.Over time, though, the petty irritations mounted and, by this third lockdown, we were spending more time snapping than chatting. RELATED ARTICLES
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A touchy-feely couple as a rule, we were avoiding our usual, easy intimacy and, instead, resentment began to set in, with rows breaking out over the most trivial things.A three-day battle was fought over the washing-up.
I carped that when he did it, the mugs remained tea-stained. I sneaked the mugs into the dishwasher; he surreptitiously took them out, telling me it wasn’t worth putting on when he could do it by hand. And so it went on until we were having several spats a day, squabbling over everything from where best to go walking to who left the lights on.One evening, Ronny suggested we put on some music and dance in the kitchen to lighten things up.
I said I wasn’t in the mood. He said he wasn’t either, come to think of it.That night I couldn’t sleep. I remembered how much fun Ronny and I used to have in the early days of our 12-year relationship — dancing included — and realised we needed to break a pattern. Linda said she and Ronny (pictured) began spending more time snapping than chatting by the third lockdown in the UK What we desperately wanted was some joy and laughter to get us through the difficult months ahead.
We weren’t at the stage where we needed couples counselling, but we did need something.And so we find ourselves meeting Dr Dance on Zoom for three taster sessions of his programme.SESSION ONE: CHART YOUR ROMANCE THROUGH DANCEI’ve read his book, The Dance Cure, in advance.
Billed as ‘The Surprising Science to Being Smarter, Stronger, Happier’, it turns out that Peter Lovatt is neither a dance therapist nor a psychotherapist, but a former professional dancer and now professor of dance psychology at the Royal Ballet School, and co-founder of the Movement in Practice Academy.At first glance, 50-something Dr Dance, decked out in large spectacles, smart-casual white shirt and dark trousers, with unruly lockdown locks, looks more of an academic than a dancer.
But that impression changes as soon as he starts to move with a gleeful lack of inhibition and a natural sense of rhythm.The aim of our sessions, he explains, is to see how we can use dance to have an impact on our relationship. He has spent the past 20 years in university laboratories working to understand the impacts of movement on a wide range of human characteristics.
These include our social relationships, thinking and problem-solving, as well as how movement and dance can help us to communicate emotionally or unblock emotions within us.He also investigates the impact of movement on us physically, how it affects everything from hormones to our ability to withstand pain. Linda and Ronny (pictured) began the programme by reflecting on significant ‘dance moments’ in their lives Working with people with Parkinson’s disease, for example, he observed how dancing can help sufferers with both their physical and cognitive symptoms.Our first task is to tackle the Doctor Dance Lifeline.
This is a simple tool to find out the role of dance in our lives, and whether it has been used positively or negatively.All that’s needed to get started is a piece of paper and some coloured pencils on which we map along a central timeline significant ‘dance moments’ in our lives and whether they were good or bad experiences.Ronny and I end up talking about the first time, several months into our relationship, healthtopical.com we got to dance together properly at a friend’s 60th birthday party.
The music was irresistible and the champagne glasses were filled over and over again.I say how I have never regarded myself as a natural, but that dancing, an approximation of a jive with Ronny who’s far better than me, made me feel energised and at ease.<div class="art-ins mol-factbox floatRHS femail" data-version="2" id="mol-d8a49e90-8a86-11eb-8cfa-a94f2875dda3" website to boogie your way back into each other's arms
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