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Dance Ecstacy

By Peggy La Cerra

From Spirituality & Health magazine * January-February 2012

We humans have been “dancing with our gods” as long as we have had a conception of the divine. Our moving prayers manifest as lyrical expressions of the Gospels, the Vedas, and the Mahabharata, and they take the form of whirling, shaking, and walking on fire. We dance to summon aid in our plights, to give thanks for our blessings, and some of us — like the Hindi of Kerala, India — dance to actually become gods ourselves. Even as Western society is becoming increasingly secular, and attendance at traditional services has fallen off, a spiritual dance movement known as “ecstatic dance” is gaining momentum on the world stage.

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The primary ecstatic dance service for the week is typically about 90 minutes on Sunday morning (my favorite is called “Sweat Your Prayers” in Marin, California), but in many communities tribal members practice almost every night. Most often, the practice is a solo experience — a moving expression of what one is feeling in the moment — but some tribes involve contact improvisation, a dance form in which the connection between two or more individuals guides the exploration. Contact dance can evolve into an organized multi-person expression of sensing and touching instantaneously — where nothing is planned and yet the dance happens as if the participants have been rehearsing their entire lives. Or it can dissolve into a “puppy pile.”

While ecstatic dance practices vary from tribe to tribe, most participants share the belief that dance has the power to transport us from earthly planes into ethereal realms, and every tribe has its own tale to tell about why that’s so. Most are some variation on Teilhard de Chardin’s theme — “We’re not human beings having a spiritual experience but rather spiritual beings having a human experience” — with the coda, “dance just reminds us.” But beyond this colorful-if-vague philosophical quip is a perhaps more radical — and profound — message about dance and reality from Gabrielle Roth, 70, the grandmother of the contemporary ecstatic dance movement.

As a teenager Roth found that that she could easily dance into a timeless trance, experiencing “a tidal wave that knocked the ‘I’ out of me.” The experience was addictive, and she put herself through college teaching movement to teens and elders and people in rehab centers. Then a ski accident prevented her own dancing, and Gestalt psychiatrist Fritz Perls invited her to Esalen Institute to teach dance to his groups. As it turned out, Esalen became a research laboratory for Roth’s dance. The goal was to find a structure or scaffolding to achieve a transformative state through dance in much the same way that a satisfying play or movie typically has three acts. The result was Roth’s now famous “Wave” of five rhythms, a transformation in five acts. The Wave began to spread because it works.

Roth’s official tribe, the 5Rhythms community, is now an international group centered in New York that describes itself as “a twenty-first century tribe unbound by history, culture, race, religion, gender or politics.” Instead, this tribe is “bound by the beat, following our feet on a dancing path to freedom.”

Roth says her dance sequence is a “moving meditation” that “forms a map to your innermost being.” She believes: “There is a billion miles of unexplored wilderness between the head and feet of any given person … and when you go into that wilderness, when you put the psyche in motion, it heals itself.” She teaches: “Energy moves in waves. Waves move in patterns. Patterns move in rhythms. A human being is just that: energy, waves, patterns, and rhythms. Nothing more. Nothing less. A dance.” From the perspective of an evolutionary neuroscientist (as well as an avid dancer), my views are surprisingly similar to Roth’s. We are materialized energy beings — and dance is perhaps the best way to radically shift our energy states and even to transform our experience of self. Put another way, if you are depressed or feel stuck in a rut, ecstatic dance can provide an immediate and sometimes profound experience of renewal. Let me briefly explain the neuroscience … from the very beginning.

A Living Wave of Energy

In a cascade of creative energetic manifestation that began some 13.7 billion years ago, the big bang birthed the stars. Then stars exploded, birthing atoms; atoms energetically bonded forming molecules; and molecules energetically merged creating life. This universal energetic impulse is still manifesting today, in the far reaches of space and deep within each of us.

In every moment, currents of energetic information are coursing through our intelligence systems, resulting in the creation of neural networks that represent our experiences in the world. The most basic of neural representation is a network that, when activated, gives us a specific psychological experience, like the perception of “green” or the feeling of “love.” These coded sensations, perceptions, motivations, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors constantly are being created and then neurally “knit together” into complex representations of meaningful experiences.

Our “experiential representations” are a pinnacle of evolution. Each one represents a moment in time when our behavior, or the impact of someone or some thing upon us, shifted our energetic state in some way that contributed to our lives or detracted from it. When we are conscious of these shifts in energetic states, we call them memories. For example, the joy that we felt when our love smiled at us and the pride we felt when we did something well — in the language of our intelligence system — are the emotional signals of an actual or a predicted gain in energy. Likewise, the anger we felt when we were mistreated, and the envy we felt when someone else acquired what we desired are the emotional readouts of an energetic loss.

Experiential representations are the launching pad between the physical realm of the brain and body and the metaphysical realm of the mind. They are links of the mind/body connection, the fundamental units of our intelligence, the building blocks of our perception of reality, and the scaffolding that creates our sense of self. At our most fundamental, a self can be described as the archives and accounts of our energetic interactions in the world. Why? Because life requires energy — lots of it — to stay alive, and so capturing and using energy well is our intelligence system’s highest priority.

How We Get Stuck

We behave in order to acquire and manage energetic resources, but behavior itself is energetically expensive. In others words, we have to use energy in order to even think about attempting to get more of it. Nature’s solution to this power paradox is a behavioral intelligence system that acts as an energetic cost/benefit analysis and prediction system — a system that “remembers” previous situations and uses these memories to make good guesses about what to do in a novel set of circumstances.

One of the most important functions of experience networks is that they enable our intelligence system to answer the question “Was my behavior worth it?” In other words, did the precious energy I expended actually get me the goods — the food or shelter, the friend or lover — I was seeking? We feel the answer in terms of our emotional state: if the answer is yes, we feel good; if it’s no — or worse, if we incur harm in the process — we feel bad, and this option gets downgraded or completely eliminated from our repertoire.

While this behavioral-blocking feature keeps us safe, it also energetically constricts us and restricts our future behavioral options, because in addition to blocking the behavior that hurt us, it blocks everything remotely similar to it. For example, as we become more sedentary, we not only become more afraid of movement, but we also cut ourselves off from the memories that hold all the related joys of movement.

The extreme of this behavioral blocking is what we call depression, a state in which positive, motivating feelings are non-existent. Depression is not a disease. It is an adaptation, designed to keep us alive when resources are scarce. Here’s what happens: When the energetic tally across the networks representing our recent experiences is low and remains low for too long — especially now in the dark days of winter — a built-in “thrive-o-meter,” located in the basal ganglia of the mid-brain, starts shutting us down. This prevents us from squandering more energy on a dead-end path of life.

Depression is life devoid of the motivating principle: pleasure. The antidote is to reconnect with pleasure, and the fastest way to do that is movement. For a quick example, skip across the room. Better still, grab a friend and go for a wild, leg-swinging walk, like Dorothy did with her friends in The Wizard of Oz. You’ll probably feel things you haven’t experienced in years. For a regular practice, just dance, especially ecstatic dance with the tribe of your choice. And if you’re new to ecstatic dance, find a 5Rhythms class — it’s the ideal inroad to dance as a spiritual practice.

Dancing to Nirvana

Nudging ourselves to consciously dance is one the wisest moves we can make, even if we can only move a small part of our being. When we dance, our movement activates its related network territories, lighting up all of our associated memories, readying them to be changed, to be updated to this new time and place. Of course, any dance is good. The beauty of the Wave of 5 Rhythms is that it’s created to take us through a series of different and distinct rhythms that elicit very different kinds of movement and different associations, all on a path to an experience of selflessness. Roth says that her rhythms incorporate cycles of birth, death, and rebirth and that she knows that’s true because she experienced the rhythms during the birth of her child. From the standpoint of neuroscience, the experience of rebirth is more than a metaphor.

As we begin to brush up against our edges and feel the restrictions etched into us by old, painful experiences, these networks giving rise to our reality and our self begin to change in response to the present moment, their meaning rewritten in the energy of music, our tribal family’s love, and our internal intent to blossom and flourish. One by one, as we bend and extend, leap and bound, neural networks representing all of our old injuries — psychic, physical, emotional, spiritual — are reformed in the exquisite wealth of the present moment, freeing up living territory that had been lost to us and claiming new, uncharted territory for exploration. In a matter of moments, our mid-brain thrive-o-meter gets the signal that life has suddenly exploded with possibilities, and we feel the rush of released energy — bliss! Larger, freer, joyful, and exploratory, we’re now prepared to enter the ethereal realms in which self is no longer relevant.

My own best-loved inroad to the trance realm is whirling, but other venerated shortcuts to nirvana are shaking and head spinning to music. These ancient practices radically alter our intelligence system’s internal processing — our thoughts and feelings and images — which were sustaining our inner reality, and they alter or obliterate completely our ability to process sensory signals coming into our system from the outside world. Unable to interpret our external or internal network reality (and, as a result, unable to locate an associated self-representation), our intelligence system moves toward a state of nirvana, and we begin moving into annata, or “no self.” Achieving that experience opens a window for creative change.

Maybe we’re human beings having a spiritual experience, or maybe we’re spiritual beings having a human experience. What I know is that we are energetic beings having an energetic experience in an energetic universe. Let’s dance!

Peggy La Cerra, PhD is an evolutionary neuroscientist and co-author of The Origins of Minds. She writes the column “Our Evolving Selves.”

The Five Rhythms of the Wave

“God is the dance for me,” says Gabrielle Roth. “When I surrender to the dance, I feel myself at my most vulnerable — and most powerful.” Roth’s path to God is expressed in the five rhythms created at Esalen Institute. The language has evolved over the years, but the essential structure remains as follows:

Flowing: fluid continuous motion

Staccato: short, sharp, percussive stops and starts

Chaos: wild, abandoned, and free — totally surrendered

Lyrical: airy and light

Stillness: the still point of your moving center

To experience the Wave, the most reliable source is to find a group led a certified teacher of 5Rhythms (see gabrielleroth.com). There are also children and grandchildren of the original 5Rhythms community that provide transformative dance experiences. There are many tribes from which to choose. The key is to find the one that feels right for you.

To Touch or Not to Touch

by Carola Marashi

First, a little history (or “her-story”): My first “Sweat Your Prayers” dance was in Houston, Texas, in 1989. We danced Gabrielle Roth’s five rhythms — Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness — evoking the prescribed emotions of fear, anger, grief, hope, and compassion. We danced in Spandex and running shoes. More important, we danced vertically, not rolling horizontally on the floor, and we rarely touched one another.

In 1994, three of us moved to Austin and started a new kind of dance. With Gabrielle Roth’s blessing, we borrowed her 5Rhythms, but our goal was to expand the boundaries of touch and intimacy. We wore cotton and danced barefoot. Our guidelines were to “bare your soul,” be nonverbal to hear each other’s heartbeat and breath, and keep your eyes open to witness authenticity. Often, we all ended up in a heap.

In 1996, we changed the name of our dance from Sweat Your Prayers to Body Choir. Our dance expanded from 90 minutes to two hours, to include a warm-up, opening circle, and closing share-back with community announcements. Our goal was to build community through dance. We touched and partnered as a primary dance expression, rather than dancing the five rhythms. To touch or not to touch, and to partner or not to partner, became a great divide in ecstatic dance.

Beyond History, Mystery - My Story Emerges

Today, Conscious Dancer magazine lists 134 variations of ecstatic/freestyle dances offered throughout North America, Europe, Latin America, and Australia. The dance now integrates Hula-Hoops, hip-hop, and Acro yoga with Contact Improvisation and Authentic Movement. Music varies from electronic mixes, kirtan chants, and tribal drums to tango and classical ballet. I like to think that ecstatic dance, in all its forms, is popping up to slow down human soul erosion — in all its forms. To find the right ecstatic dance tribe for you, you just have to know the ABC’s:

A. Be Aware of the Dance Agreements. Is it a Dance Jam? Barefoot Boogie? Sweat Your Prayers? Dance Jams and Boogies are usually social and improvisational, and they embrace a diversity of expressive movement that includes Hula-Hoops, Contact Improvisation, and/or Sufi spinning. Sweat Your Prayers more likely is a solo class that dances the five rhythms, specifically guided by a certified 5Rhythms teacher. This usually means no touch or Contact Improvisation and specifically follows a Wave with guided dance movements.

B. Boundaries. No matter where you dance, take care of your own boundaries. Definitely stretch your boundaries and find how elastic they are. Remember, you are your primary partner for life. In Body Choir, we say, “Our boundaries are elastic, just like our hearts, giving and receiving love. Stretch your capacity to share love.”

C. Follow Your Center. Whether you’re alone or partnered, know your center. In Contact Improvisation, the “small dance” is feeling your center move. In psychotherapy, it’s called having choices in how you respond to your world. In art, it’s called creativity. The point is to express yourself from the inside out — and discover your “awe-thenticity.”

Carola Marashi is the co-founder of Body Choir in Austin, Texas, and Ashland, Oregon.

10 Rules for an Ecstatic Dance/Dinner

These guidelines are adapted from a weekly potluck dance invitation sent to members of the Ashland, Oregon, dance community.

1. Come on time. If you must come late, please enter the space quietly and respectfully.

2. Know the duration. We will be playing music and dancing for at least two hours before dinner. (Have a snack before arriving.)

3. Stay non-verbal. If verbal communication has to take place, please do it outside or wait until dinner. If someone else is talking, please give him or her a friendly, loving, non-verbal reminder to be quiet.

4. Check-in. We will have a brief (20 second per person) check-in at the beginning for anyone who desires to express a positive intention/affirmation. Stories may be shared at dinner.

5. Listen. Remember to be aware of (and thus play with and explore) the ranges of space, tone, volume, and rhythm in harmony with the collective consciousness of the group.

6. By invitation only. If you would like us to include someone else, please contact the hosts.

7. “Real” food. It is important that we all bring real, good food to share.

8. Instruments. Bring instruments to share. Be responsible and respectful of any instruments that you play and the environment as a whole.

9. Help with set-up/clean-up. Just do it.

10. Co-creation. We ask that everyone do his or her part in supporting and remembering these guidelines.