Over the years, ecstatic dance has become a practice for me.
When I first started, I looked at it mostly as an opportunity to dance with my friends. As the years went on, I saw more deeply how I was being transformed and how the community was being knitted together by the dance.
I started thinking of it as a tribal shamanic ritual, a liminal space where humans could meet their need to drop the mundane world and interact with each other differently than in their day-to-day lives.
The chance to experience others directly, without words, created an intimacy that was a wholly unique experience for me. I felt that I was experiencing the essence of people, rather than the content of their lives, by sharing dancing together, while learning almost nothing about them through words.
Over time, I also started to notice that I liked certain kinds of music better than other kinds of music. This, then, was where the practice aspect came in: I reasoned that if I liked certain kinds of music better than other kinds, then my body must have certain zones of comfort and relative freedom of movement (the music I liked) and other zones of discomfort, where my body didn’t have the neural pathways developed to feel ease of movement (the music I didn’t like dancing to as much).
I reckoned that as much as I loved dancing to music I liked, that dancing to music I didn’t like would help me grow and develop as a person, because it would help me explore those areas of my life I was less in tune with, or even blocked off from.
Historically, if I hadn’t liked the music, I might go outside for a bit, or even go home. I resolved to change that, and to keep present in my body no matter what.
My two biggest musical and body challenges were pounding unbroken-beat music, like techno, and very slow music.
I’m still not very good at dancing to unbroken-beat music — my body loves to do asymmetrical things on broken beats, and it cracks me up how hard it is for me to put my feet down left-right-left-right over and over. Little syncopated hops sneak in, which is fine; I make a practice out of sticking with symmetry as much as possible during those songs, though, because I want to have the brain pathways that allow me to keep following a pattern without changing it up.
Practicing moving to slow music has been somewhat easier. There the challenge for me is not to feel foolish or to know what my body wants to do. I often have to close my eyes to drop self-consciousness and really feel my body’s desire in how it wants to move.
The great thing about ecstatic dance is that I don’t have to care how it looks, so I can go deep in my self-discovery. Any time my brain offers me the information that what I am doing doesn’t look good, I reassure it that that’s ok and continue to keep my focused attention on how things feel, following the energy as it moves through my body.
Slowly and surely, my areas of comfort are taking over territory from my areas of discomfort. Things that started out feeling awkward are becoming more natural. I sometimes even have fun dancing to music that I would have walked out on a few years ago.
It reminds me of when I first learned to drive. I was stressed out and nervous, and it wasn’t really fun for months, if not years. Now I enjoy driving, and I’m so grateful I stuck with it and not only learned how to do it, but became proficient at it.
One of my favorite things about any practice is that it allows me to explore an arena through all the different phases I have: when I’m feeling it, when I’m not feeling it, when I’m tired, when I’m exuberant, when I’m self-conscious, when I’m in the flow. It helps me to get to know myself better at the same time it helps me to get to know what I’m practicing better.
One way I look at it is like being in the dark on a moving, revolving platform, and every time I do my practice I am shining a light. Depending on where the platform is situated, and what direction it’s facing, I see a different slice of scenery. The more I practice, the more of my surroundings I get to know intimately.
