Ecstatic

and becoming embodied.

Until six months ago, I didn’t dance. 

Ask my friends from high school and they’ll tell you that the “Holly dance” was standing in the corner, eyes rolled, shrugging my shoulders up and down. I acted like I was too cool, said I didn’t like it, that I’d rather be having a conversation (or drinking) than trying to shout over a thumping bassline. But the truth is, I couldn’t bear the vulnerability, moving your body like that in front of everybody; letting things jiggle and shake and fall out of place. The thought of being so open and exposed terrified me, so I refrained. 

When you’ve spent your life disconnected from your human animal, how can you possibly imagine the way it wants to move and express, to process what’s epigenetically imprinted and energetically stored? Many of us have spent decades ignoring physical cues, holding in our urine, denying our sexual attractions, stuffing ourselves when we’re not hungry and restricting when we need to fuel. It’s all we can do to keep these physical forms we’ve chosen to inhabit walking and talking, complaining about the weather and moving through space, exchanging the pleasantries and gestures that keep us participating members of society. In this context, moving just for the sake of it feels impossible, unobtainable; a luxury we can’t afford.

But trauma is stored in the body, and the root of my dilemma was lying at the source. In denying the dance, I was, unbeknownst to me for decades, denying my own truth. During the course of the ankle sprain that kept me largely homebound for two months, I became aware that my healing work needed a physical component. I could understand things academically, insights were flooding in constantly, but all that energy buzzed behind my solar plexus like a swarm of bees. 

I needed somatic release, and started working with a practitioner doing distance sessions, but something was still missing. Then a dear friend on a similar healing path described the experience they had at ecstatic dance. They’d felt things raised within and released from their body, safe in a container where others were doing the same. “You have to try it,” they told me, and at first I shrugged it off, said I was too clumsy and self-conscious to dance, but they know me well, and it stuck with me. 

A few weeks later, frustrated by my own re-emerging patterns, I found myself searching the internet for ecstatic dance London, booking a ticket, and following a smattering of people and posted signs toward a sports complex that looked an awful lot like those high school gymnasiums I used to avoid, or drink heavily before entering. My nervous system began to steel itself as memories of overexposure crept in and I started getting self-conscious. Was this outfit even appropriate for dancing? Why didn’t I bring my hairstyling product? I started to worry that this might have been a big mistake.

But immediately upon stepping into the space, relief washed over me. This was no awkward gathering of hypervigilant kids. This was a place I knew: a spiritual, liminal realm in the psychedelic vein. The house lights were off, the space lit by a screen playing nature scenes and a six-foot-tall arrangement of Edison bulbs spelling the word LOVE. Glow-in-the-dark images of animals and geometric designs beamed from the walls. And people were dancing, but not in a way that I was used to. 

They weren’t dancing with or for each other. Nobody was even looking at anyone, apart from a fleeting smile when someone’s gaze briefly drifted from their internal process and eyes accidentally met. In fact, a lot of them weren’t really dancing, either. They were just … moving, in whatever way their bodies wanted to express. They were swaying, prancing, shaking, stomping, and rolling around on the floor; jumping and stretching and pounding their fists. I had never seen anything like it, and suddenly, my body started moving, too. 

Ecstatic dance is essentially a psychedelic experience without substances, though some people certainly combine the two (I might have had a microdose). Many dances also incorporate cacao, the primary ingredient in chocolate, a sacred plant and sacrament throughout Central and South America. DJs typically play organic house and dance-trance, electronic music that samples world beats and instruments along with natural sounds. Set lists tend to mirror a classic psychedelic experience: coming up slowly; going through a darker, slower period; then building to an orgiastic crescendo where people often experience emotional and spiritual release through physical exertion, all before landing gently with a slower song or acoustic finale that might include singing, drums, instruments, singing bowls, or gongs. 

My first experience was indescribable, the freedom of physically expressing without considering how I would be seen, something I didn’t even realize I’d been longing to do ever since I was a child. After a warm-up, we sat encircling the room as exactly the kind of person you’re imagining led us in an opening meditation, then explained the simple rules: no shoes, no talking, no uninvited contact, using simple “yes” and “no” gestures to initiate or end a dance with another person. We were handed paper cups of the viscous, rich, bitter brown liquid I knew and loved and held it to our hearts, infusing it with our intention. Then the music started in earnest, and everyone resumed dancing even more wildly than before.

And suddenly, there I was, dancing right along with them: bouncing and grinding, shimmying and shaking, bounding around the room like a gazelle and balancing on my palms as I kicked my feet to the heavens. Guttural groans and joyous squeals emerged from somewhere in my chest as the music rose and fell. I found my body moving through a force all its own, like a reverse possession, taken from conscious restriction by the spirit of my actual Self. 

I floated, at one point, into a circle of beautiful creatures where we took turns mimicking another’s moves. Certain members, at times, drifted toward each other, tangoing without touching, messages sent through knowing smiles, little relationships starting and ending without saying a word. I had a few of these myself, noting when I started trying to be or do or look like somebody, and then brought it back to nothingness, a moving meditation.

As the music crescendoed and I went deeper within, I tumbled out into a place I realized I had been before: the nonsense realm, where every ayahuasca journey began; where the boundaries of the 3D world dissolved into pure feeling, light, and sound. The childhood place where there was only animal expression, before experience was constrained and constructed by the tyranny of words. And just like in that realm, I found my back curving, arms dangling from their sockets and swinging near the ground like the primate I was; bouncing up and down and pumping my fists now, grunting, the animal just doing what the animal does. Suddenly, something shook loose from deep within my soul, and as I jumped higher and pumped my fists faster, I started to sob.  

By the time we coasted to a stop and collapsed onto the floor into savasana, my face was stained with tears, my clothing soaked in sweat, bare feet grubby and throbbing, and I was grinning like a kid. Just like the first time I did kundalini or drifted back from the ayahuasca world, something had shifted. The body was coming back online.  

The ecstatic dance community spreads across the world like a mycelial network, manifesting in auditoriums and school gyms and yoga studios, event spaces and empty fields and parks, and it has become an anchor for me in my nomadic wanderings. No matter where I go, the details may differ, but the energy is the same: a safe container where we release the form and are embodied; go inward and come out interconnected; let ourselves be animals to have a more human experience. 

And now, I dance.