Drop In, Dance Out: My Five-Year Love Affair with Ecstatic Dance
The ecstatic dance movement is a movement meditation like no other
I stumbled into ecstatic dance (ED) around five years ago, right before COVID hit. For the last year, I’ve volunteered at a London dance, EDUK in Hackney Wick. It’s a great dance, with lots of international DJs each coming with their own vibe. What’s the music like? It’s a wild ride across all genres. Slow ambient openers help you to connect to yourself more deeply. Tribal house groovers get you moving. Then it explodes into drum ‘n’ bass or psytrance, to really push you to your limits. You come out sweaty, smiling, and happy. There are no judgments on how you dance, what you look like, or if you like dancing alone or with others. Just pure, open exploration.
Card number 020 is Dance. It’s a yang card, which encourages you to put energy out into your environment. It’s also primarily associated with body, health, and svadhisthana (the 2nd chakra, water, and creativity). All the cards have different associations, and you can take whatever meaning you want as you read the cards. On the back of every card are carefully designed workshops to help you feel and express the card by doing something yourself. The Dance card workshop encourages you to go and try an ecstatic dance.
ED’s Core Rules: Barefoot, Sober, Silent
Dancing is really your body expressing itself. It works best when the mind chills out. It’s much easier for your mind to switch off when you stop using words. Words excite the mind. There are really three main rules in ED: “No Shoes, No Booze, No Chit-Chat.” It takes a while to appreciate each one, but they all serve a purpose.
Firstly, when we dance with no shoes, somehow we’re more connected with the earth and space. We’re a little quieter, we’re less clumsy, we get to feel more directly from our toes. I love walking barefoot; I’ve not given up shoes outside, but in my home I walk barefoot all day, and at the dance I am always barefoot. When you dance and everyone is barefoot you’re all quieter and more nimble, it adds to the connected state all dancers start to feel.
The second rule of No Booze (which extends to all other drugs too) ensures you have no distractions or modifications to your true self. This is really tough at first; we all find it difficult to express ourselves if we don’t have an excuse or intoxicant providing a little Dutch courage. Being sober forces us to face ourselves, face our own critical judgment, this is difficult. We all find facing ourselves, humbiling and shameful. We need to learn to let go of our own judgement on us. When we dance sober we prove to ourselves just how much pleasure and fun we can have just being ourselves. If everyone is sober, we feel more connected and close as a group. We’re all on the same page.
The third rule, which is probably the most important, is no chit-chat. We talk to each other all the time. Socialising is sharing with words how we feel. What if our bodies did the talking for us? That’s a dance! By making it a rule, the dance itself becomes a special and sacred container. We respect that container for others by saving our words for after.
If we all stick to these rules we help those around us, and the better we hold the container as a safe space, we can get deeper.
Dropping In: Let the body overcome brain
After a year of dancing, the idea of “dropping in” finally made sense to me. At first, it sounded bizarre. Drop where? I am deep enough already, thank you very much?! But over time, it felt clear: it was switching off the chatter in my head and getting into the body. We often stay up in our heads, it literally feels like we’re in our head. We are forgetting to feel our body. So when you drop in, your body takes over, your head switches off and your awareness drops down, perhaps into your heart or into your root.
Dropping in takes a lot of time. Especially during the first few dances. Whenever something is new or unknown, we’re all particularly aware of what everyone else is doing. To really drop in, you must focus on yourself. Your present state and whatever your body feels like today. The music helps to switch off our chatter, it gives us a rhythm to all move to. The music lets everyone get onto the same page. Then your awareness drops in to wherever your body wants it today.
Consent, Connect and Sync
After two years of dancing, I felt that I nailed the drop in. I was able to find me, the real me of today, each and every time. There’s still more to explore!
The next phase—a truthful, deep connection with another dancer, pushes you in different ways. Other people dance differently, in fact everyone is a unique dancer, it’s wonderful to watch. So when you dance together it’s always another level of fun. You get to share an experience with someone else that’s truly unique to this moment. We react in real time and learn from each other. It pushes us to move and act differently. We grow.
Imagine a 3-minute dance with a partner. It starts with a look; your eyes lock, a slight smile registers, and an open hand evokes a touch. From there you flow; your arms grow snakelike together, the beat deepens. Exploring each other’s balance, you push and pull slightly, playing with each other’s weight and positioning. This leads to some form of role: one takes the lead, the other follows. Each unusual position you’re thrown in together brings a smile to you and your partner’s face. You find out that you both enjoy spins, so you go there; you do not 1 but 10 back-to-back spins. You’re dizzy; your head’s spinning; you stumble to the floor, and your partner jumps down, encouraging you to find a yoga balance. Now you’re in down dog together, laughing!
A huge part of connecting is doing it safely. This is the practice of consent (card 010). We ensure that both people consent to what’s happening. This starts to become second nature on the ecstatic dancefloor, but it does take some practice and emotional resilience to welcome someones’s No.
In life we love to build ourselves up; we want to be loved, appreciated, accepted by others. We also often make stories up about each other. Consent is really about respect. You both respect each other’s wishes at all times even as they change. We first check for consent with our eyes. If you both hold each others gaze it can be an invitation to start to dance together. From there we may connect with some simple hand-to-hand touch. If either dancer doesn’t feel like dancing more then we communicates our No. A simple hand gesture of a prayer allows us to do this with no words. It can feel a little painful if you receive a No right when you want a full YES! But consent must always be respected. The more frequently you enter into a consent based interaction and receive more No’s the more you learn it’s not about you. Consent is clear communication that you want to continue. So building your resilience up to receive No’s helps you move on to find someone who’s a YES today!
Raves, Presence, and the art of DJing
Music’s gripped me since I was 16. Hauling speakers in Mum’s VW Golf to student house parties, or head-banging to heavy metal. I started with Slayer mosh pits even shaking Lemmy’s from Motorhead’s hand. I then shifted to hip-hop, with Dre and Biggie teaching me about the American black subculture, then moved over to reggae and found my chilltime. At 18, I started clubbing, and my first DnB rave was called Stepback Vs Spellbound and was incredible. Teeth-rattling drops, parties till dawn, friendly love bubbles, insane bass. I still get goosebumps feeling it now.
However, now that I’m no longer doing the late nights, I tend to prefer sober raving. I can chase those same highs through meditation and yoga. The one thing that’s stuck in my life is a love of music. If anything, I’m more into music now. I still buy tunes; I often dig in record shops and I grab music with Shazam on a daily basis. Music medicates the soul. I learned that the reason music works so well is that it’s a state of pure presence. A track brings the whole room into the same state of presence together and when you listen intensely life takes a pause.
The DJ is the selecta! I’ve always loved trying to pick the right tune for the right space. It’s a huge art form. Most newer DJs focus on their tastes. They like their tunes, and they want to play them. But a great DJ works around their tastes, picking the right tune for the moment. The time when people whip their fingers out, start a little headnod or pull a bass face because an unexpected drop hits, gives me pure joy! Nothing matters when the DJ gets the selection right, and in Ecstatic Dance that selection comes from a huge range of music! I feel excited when a deep southern drawl soul tune can blend neatly into a UKG lyrical banger. Keeping people guessing and moving across and around genres is where I feel happiest. I like that unknown element. I like to feel everything from rage to sorrow and try to express that in my sets.
So perhaps I’m a little biased, but I believe dancing is the medicine we all need. Whether it’s a Ceilidh dance or an Ecstatic dance or even a Ballroom dance. Get moving, get grooving, and get back into your bodies!