Let Your Yoga Dance

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Let Your Yoga Dance is a dynamic holistic experience of inner rhythm and expressive movement grounded in awareness-based practices, designed to let your essential self evolve to a higher awareness.  Based on moving energy through the Chakras,  this practice will open you to flow with your innate joyfulness, awaken your inner dancer, and find balance and peace to take into everyday life.   Guided movement, spontaneity, and improvisation facilitate deep opening and healing.  This playful, inspiring experience is about having fun and creating space for your spirit to dance. Set your own pace, creating a gentle to a high impact aerobic experience. Laugh, learn, dance, explore our energy, heal, create community, and relax into our bodies.  Whether you love to move and dance or you are a hesitant toe-tapper, this class will leave you feeling confident and energized.

Dancing increases cognitive acuity at all ages. Dancing integrates several brain functions at once — kinesthetic, rational, musical, and emotional — further increasing your neural connectivity. A 21-year study of senior citizens, 75 and older, was led by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, funded by the National Institute on Aging, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.  Their method for objectively measuring mental acuity in aging was to monitor rates of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease.  They studied cognitive activities such as reading books, writing for pleasure, doing crossword puzzles, playing cards and playing musical instruments.  And they studied physical activities like playing tennis or golf, swimming, bicycling, dancing, walking for exercise and doing housework. One of the surprises of the study was that almost none of the physical activities appeared to offer any protection against dementia.  There can be cardiovascular benefits of course, but the focus of this study was the mind. There was one important exception: the only physical activity to offer protection against dementia was frequent dancing:  Reading: 35% reduced risk of dementia, Bicycling/swimming: 0%, Crossword puzzles at least 4 d/wk :47%, Golf: 0%, Dancing frequently: 76%.