Charles Eisenstein did some beautiful writing in his Substack around the benefit of festival, carnival, and other human experiences in which the rules that govern us are temporarily suspended. This shift in reality breaks us free from whatever chattel is clinging to us but ready to fall off with a good shake. Old identities are allowed to fade in the euphoria. It’s best done in a group, and it’s the reason why people follow around The Grateful Dead for 30 years or go visit another country just to experience a 2-day festival. You could argue that the change of scenery alone could do the trick, but throw in a collective energy and you’ve really got potential.
Ecstatic experiences are facilitated by containers with rules that are separate from the way you typically operate in daily life. Being in that space shakes your vision of reality. Suddenly, experimentation becomes freer and more available. Creating containers usually involves having a set time that everyone involved knows it will end, accentuating the sacred energy within and modeling a parallel to life and death itself. The rules inside the timed container can be anything that particular group wants to move through.
People do miniature versions of suspending their reality all the time, and it’s adorable. Watch girls get made-up for a date, or to go out in a group. Watch a street of busy clubs and notice how everyone there approached the act of going out with some intention and ritual.
Types of ecstatic experience
Focusing in on the self
There is a thing called ecstatic dance - you probably have one in your city, if it’s big enough. In San Diego there are a few groups that put them on.
It’s not the silent disco thing where everyone has headphones on and their own separate experience. I’ve never done that so I won’t speak to it.
I’m sure there is variance but in general you can expect a few rules to govern the space, creating the container:
No phones or filming. Be present.
No talking on the dance floor.
Explicit consent is gained via silent body language, and rejected often with prayer hands and a bow signifying “no.”
Better dance experiences will have clear moderators available to hold the space and who you can go to with any troubles you’re having either personally or perhaps with someone who didn’t get the prayer hands, ya know.
Also hopefully a good DJ lol
I’m not sure if this is typical but the last one I went to also explicitly encouraged presence via being sober.
What does all that do? - It frees, funnels, and encourages the attendees to focus in on their own experience. You’ll see people being my kind of little weirdos and beyond my capacity too, rolling around on the floor, making noises (not talking), dancing their tushes off, wearing what they want, being all sexy (or not), contact improv-ing it with one another, and hugging for long periods of time.
You’re encouraged in these containers to explore yourself, dance how you want to, and avoid or interact with everyone on your terms.
I want to add a note to this section on Community. There exists somewhere, for everyone, a community that sits right for them. If you doubt, just know that you don’t know the one for you exists yet. There are people in the world creating what they want all the time. I didn’t know ecstatic dance existed until a few years ago.
I mean in-person community. Not just a Facebook group or faraway Instagram accounts, which can and do serve to help show a person that others exist out there. Somewhere there are people gathering that feel right and good to you. It is possible to go to them.
No desire exists without its match out in the universe.
A group external focal point
Concerts
Religious services
Classes or courses with a teacher
Group meditation practices for a purpose
Group singing
Political rallies (some)
Vipassana meditation and other forms of gathering in groups but in which to focus on the self are a mix
Humans thrive on experiencing a collective will to accomplish something together.
Please, go to a concert regularly that plays music that you love.
Attending an event that thrills you even a couple of times per year is essential to vitality.
On a micro level, this can be created by pursuing new experiences you would like with a partner.
On a macro level, you may find yourself in a room of a few thousand people with all of their focus and attention on a single point.
Shadow Side
There is a shadow side. You can identify it by the lack of container. Riots, group marches with no creative energy roam here. If the only intent of a group is destruction, there is no container. No acknowledgement of growth that comes from destruction. You tear up the earth to plant a flower. You create chaos wantonly you need a Mother or a masculine energy to rein it in.
Chaotic energy is immature. That doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with it, only that it will expand in search of a boundary, and finding none will descend into something dark and restless. Upset needs a mature caring entity around it.
There needs to be a sense of care, of Mother, even if Mother is the purpose itself by which hardship may be borne or reinterpreted. Something that the group wants which creates a new sense of protective energetic order. Not vapid destruction. Not emptiness and shadow.
Listen to the voiceover in the first part of this DJ track in the video below and feel what I mean about the container her voice and her words create, and in this case, a real sense of the Mother for me, who is taking care of the listener with benevolent guidance.
When people come together to create the energy is palpable without feeling dangerous. It is empowering. If what grows is a sense of hate more than a sense of group and personal power, well, the Nazis were the best in the world at rallying a crowd together.
I’ve been to anti-Vax-mandate rallies and Black Lives Matter rallies. BLM existed in shadow. The anti-mandate crowd lifted up.
When you are playing with suspending norms you better have someone capable of holding a boundary to contain it.
False Ecstasy
There is also false ecstasy. You may bring a large group of people together but it doesn’t mean a transformative experience. False ecstasy will cater to spending money more than the group experience. Going to a fair, for example, often is more about spending more money to get prizes and food than anything else. Going to a show like even Medieval Times, for example, or a play, creates an atmosphere that directs the focus to the experience. It plays to our imaginations and possibility and might leave at least children charged with wonder after.
When these letters to you used to write themselves more, I would find they wrapped themselves up through my typing fingers. Recently I’ve been having more trouble finding the neat bow around everything.
I hope you enjoyed this and discuss it with your partner and discover ecstasy in your own way with your own people and rules.