No way to do it wrong
On ecstatic dance
I go ecstatic dancing every single week. Ecstatic dancing has changed my life and is the most powerful consistent recovery tool that I use. For most of my life I was not comfortable with dancing, was chronically stuck in a freeze response, couldn’t get over the internalized objectification of misogyny, and did not like to acknowledge the reality of my body. I never in a million years would think of myself as someone who’s into ecstatic dance. And yet — here I am. I fucking love ecstatic dance.
My first experience of ecstatic dance was totally random. I was travelling and someone I met through instagram offered to let me crash at her place. I ended up arriving a day earlier than I thought and asked if it was still cool for me to crash. She said yes but “there would be ecstatic dancing happening that night.” I was welcome to join or could just hang in my room. I’m the type to notice and seize opportunities presented to me by the universe. I knew that this was way way outside my comfort zone, but it was random, and my position as a traveller and outsider from the community offered me some anonymity to explore with. I decided to take part.
A group of women in a basement shared ceremonial cacao and set our intentions. I can’t remember what my intention was but I was definitely into setting it. Then after a bit of guided movement, they played a playlist and we danced — for hours. What struck me was that all the women around me were doing different things. Some were dancing in more standard club ways, some were doing very abstract experimental movements, some were stretching, some were jumping, some were swaying, some were curled up or crawling around on the floor. Watching everyone else do whatever they wanted gave me the courage to step out of the objectifying gaze and into my body.
I tuned into the sensations and impulses in my body, the way my body felt and desired to move under the influence of the music. I felt myself moving in response to the flows of sensation that moved through me. Listening to feedback from my body I moved in response. Some of the movements were in response to physical sensations: tight muscles and a sore back find these movements satisfying and pleasurable. Some of the movements were expressions of emotional flows: anger and sadness and gratitude and grief pulsed through me. Some of the movements came from memory flows and the movements unlocked even more images, stories, and buried pains. The fact that it went on for hours meant that any resistance I had was melted away as time disappeared and I trusted what was happening in the present.
The next day I was shocked. I felt like traumas had moved and processed through my body in ways that had never been accessible before. I even have a somatics therapist, but I have always felt stiff and frozen and awkward in attempting to do somatic exercises. I have never been able to let go and just listen to my body. Ecstatic dance unlocked an entire world of sensation that I was able to relate to, process, and express in a conscious, embodied way. I felt like I achieved more in one random ecstatic dance session that I usually did in many therapy sessions.
A couple years passed before I found a local, weekly ecstatic dance event in my city. One I heard about it I went, and I have now been going every week, for months. Doing ecstatic dance as a weekly, regular practice has opened deeper aspects of the practice. Like all regular consistent practices, I show up whether or not I feel like it. I do it regardless of the mood I’m in or what’s on my mind. And the practice itself is different every time, sometimes I stay closer to the surface with more awareness of the space and other people, sometimes I have a hard time letting go or turning toward my experience, sometimes a little of the objectifying gaze sneaks in. Sometimes I have experiences that are so deep and profound I can only call it a trance and compare it to my experiences with psychedelics. For this reason I highly recommend ecstatic dance to anyone who wants the benefits of psychedelics without using plant medicine.
Sometimes I literally sob on the dance floor. Sometimes I laugh and shout with joy. Sometimes I feel playful and lighthearted. Sometimes I connect with my eroticism. Sometimes I shake dramatically. Sometimes I feel rage. All sort of emotions, sensations, memories, stories, hopes, dreams, secret fears, and things I’m afraid to say to myself rise to the surface and move through me. My body takes many shapes and moves through many speeds and types of movement. Ecstatic dance generally follows a pattern of starting with slow tempo music, moving to high energy fast tempo music and coming back down, closing out with slow and quiet. This energetic journey allows me to experience emotion and sensation across the spectrum and to move my body in a wide range of ways.
I always feel more alive, more present, and more myself after ecstatic dance. I am often filled with deep feelings of love and gratitude and connection, in a similar way to psychedelics. I come to profound understandings about things that are happening in my life, connect with my intuition, and make big life decisions on the dance floor. I feel more capable of authenticity and vulnerability. And I feel the deep full body pleasure of my animal body being listened to and spoken to in her own language: movement. No tool I have found on my entire recovery journey has been such a consistent and powerful support. I really can’t recommend ecstatic dance enough.
I think a lot of people feel intimidated by ecstatic dance because they only know how to look at their body from the outside and aren’t used to expressing their internal experience in a totally uninhibited way. I think the trick to letting go is to see it as an experiment. The goal is to tune into the impulses of your body and to do that, whatever that looks like. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. It matters how it feels. When you look around the room and see everyone else moving in wildly unique and authentic ways, let that be permission to return to yourself and your practice of curiosity about how your body wants to move.
There is no way to do it wrong.
Clementine Morrigan is a writer and public intellectual based in Montréal, Canada. She writes popular and controversial essays about culture, politics, ethics, relationships, sexuality, and trauma. A passionate believer in independent media, she’s been making zines since the year 2000 and is the author of several books. She’s known for her iconic white-text-on-a-black-background mini-essays on Instagram. One of the leading voices on the Canadian Left and one half of the Fucking Cancelled podcast, Clementine is an outspoken critic of cancel culture and a proponent of building solidarity across difference. She is a socialist, a feminist, and a vegan for the animals and the earth.
Browse her shop, listen to her podcast, book a one on one session with her, or peruse her list of resources and further reading.
Yesterday I did ecstatic dance for the first time because of this piece and your previous mentions of it. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for spreading the word about this healing practice!! I have PTSD and I believe this has helped shift some of that. I am so grateful for you and for this practice.
I love this! I also discovered ecstatic dance when I moved to Seattle last year. I completely agree with everything you've said about it. It's the most wonderful liberating practice.
"I think a lot of people feel intimidated by ecstatic dance because they only know how to look at their body from the outside and aren’t used to expressing their internal experience in a totally uninhibited way" - this is very true. I used to have an eating disorder for 10 years, and it was only after an ego death experience that I realised that I had been "thinking about myself the third person", looking at myself as if from outside. It was so normal to me I didn't realise I was doing it, and so I would spend ages looking at myself in the mirror, not out of vanity but trying to bridge the gap between this "outside" concept of myself that I had internalised as "me", and my sense of subjectivity. But when I had the ego death experience I realised that I was not an image, and the idea that I could be was ridiculous. All the concepts about myself, all the images, all the ways I think I am perceived - that's not me. I am first person consciousness, I am experience itself. In that moment I also realised that first person consciousness was the nature of the universe. That I am a manifestation of universal consciousness in a particular place and time. And in that moment the eating disorder went away, and never came back. It's been over 3 years since then and it's still gone.
Getting back to ecstatic dance, I had always had a hankering to dance but I only felt comfortable doing so in my room alone. One time my mother caught me stamping and spinning to Florence + the Machine's "Strangeness and Charm" and berated me because it was "too loud". Before moving to Seattle I would dance in my apartment alone while stoned.
And then when I joined ecstatic dance in Seattle it instantly felt like home. I was in a state of flow, I was uninhibited. I was able to connect to people. I also joined raves, and I find raves are the same kind of experience as ecstatic dance - a flow state of dance where everyone is doing their own thing.
I try to recommend it to everyone I can now!