Ecstatic dance

Woo level: 4/5

I was at an Ecstatic Dance event on Halloween at Bhakti Lounge, and this woman there appeared to be absolutely entranced with herself. You know when people are on MDMA and they touch themselves like they’re the most amazing tactile experience the world has ever known? Well, think of that, but with a kind of slow, profound sense of wonder and bliss. 

We started all sitting on the floor, and she looked more or less like the rest of the hippies in the room; albeit wearing tights and a leotard, rather than the long skirts, harem pants and flowy tops that tend to dominate. (Among those not wearing Halloween costumes, that is, which quite a few were. It was a fun crowd – we had a Day of the Dead makeup situation, a sprinkling of fairies of various kinds, and a hag or crone; and the DJ was, rather adorably, dressed as Peter Pan, a choice you only make as a man when you’re young enough not to feel self-conscious about the narrative connotations.) 

As the music picked up and people started to get to their feet and dance, this woman stayed sitting at the back, tracing the soles of her feet and her ankles with her fingertips for ages like she was decoding some kind of magical truth. Then touching her face, eyes, jawline, neck, shoulders. Slowly, lovingly and tenderly. High as a kite, clearly. 

When she finally got slowly to her feet, she still didn’t dance. All these energetic, drum-impelled figures were whirling and leaping around her, hair flying, feet stamping, fanned out around the DJ at the front of the room; and she turned to the back wall like she was in her own world. It was painted white and had a beautiful light show projected on it, and she was standing directly between the projector and the wall. She was therefore silhouetted sharply on the wall, and she stood very still at an angle that made her hair and dangling earrings and even her individual eyelashes stand out in crisp shadow. And with her forefinger she slowly traced every millimetre of her silhouette for as far as she could reach, around her head and down her neck and shoulder and arm. Then she swapped hands and traced the other way. She brushed along the sharp shadow of her eyelashes - sweep, sweep, sweep, as though her fingertip could feel something other than plaster and paint. She outlined the many falling drops of her earrings one by one.

And the whole time she was murmuring to herself. Or possibly talking aloud to herself, to be honest. The music was loud; identifying her words would have been impossible unless she was yelling. But it was obvious that she was speaking a love song of some kind to herself. A poem of adoration and devotion and worship to the divine that dwelled within her. 

We were all in ecstasy in that room, we were all feeling joy and giving thanks through our bodies, through dance and drumming and clapping and occasional whoops and yells. And she was, apparently, accepting all of it as part of her sacred hymn to herself.

What must it feel like to love yourself like that?

As I’m sure you’ve guessed, I know exactly what it feels like, because it was me. I was the strange middle-aged woman at the back of the room having the sublime experience of being utterly entranced with herself. I was high as a kite, yes, but not on anything I’d taken. I was just – as I often have been lately – really high on experiencing myself as being a loved part of a beautiful, unified, divine energetic entity of cosmic scale.

Yeah, I know how that sounds. If you have better words to capture this experience, I’d love to hear them. 

As I sat at the back of the room, I thought to myself (and let’s face it, probably said out loud to myself, I don’t actually remember): Dance and music are, have always been, a means of worship for the Divine Mother, for the Goddess, Source, the ultimate generative force in all things. They are an offering. And we are all part of her. She is in me, and I am of her; I am one of the ways she looks at herself, thinks about herself, experiences herself, loves herself. In this moment I can choose to accept all this dance and music as being for the part of her that is in me. For the divine in me. I can choose to accept all this beautiful living energy as being for me, understanding that I am of her. 

And I said to myself and to her, over and over: This is all for you, and it is all for me. You are so beautiful, my darling. You are perfect. You are extraordinary, you are a wonder to behold, my love. Feel the softness of your skin. Feel how amazing it is just to touch the soles of your lithe and living feet. Trace the bones of your ankles under the skin, are they not astonishing? And look, look at how beautiful you are. Look at your shadow on the wall. Look at your earlobes, your eyelashes. Every millimetre of you is breathtaking.

It didn’t feel hubristic or arrogant or inappropriate or even strange to give myself this. It felt like the most natural thing in the world. It felt prayerful and respectful.

And if you’re anything like I was my whole life until a couple of months ago, you’ll be rolling your eyes so hard at this point that you’re at risk of an optic injury. Hear me out. 

I’ve written a lot on this blog about healing my inner child, making a commitment to her to love and care for her consistently, realising I had being doing self-care all wrong, learning how to do it right, coming to terms with my femininity, stepping into my power, and so on and so forth. I've been doing the work.

Well, sometimes it all just comes together and there’s a seismic shift inside me. That happened on Halloween. 

On that Friday morning I looked in the mirror and, thanks to a new influx of morning sunshine as spring has advanced, really noticed my greying hair. I briefly contemplated dying it, and then I thought, hell no! I’ve earned every one of those silver strands. I’m 43, I’m not a young woman anymore and I don’t want to be. I love being me, and if I want to attract an age-appropriate partner (no rush, but ultimately I do) then I need to look my age. It was a great empowered “fuck yeah!” moment. (Perhaps undermined slightly by the fact that a woman I met last weekend, in broad daylight I hasten to add, thought I was in my late 20s or early 30s. Which is also the age of my current lover. But look, I can’t help being quite a young-looking 43. I don’t even wear sunscreen. And it's not like I intend to marry him.)

At lunchtime on Friday I had my final (for now) somatic bodywork session and it was very full on and wonderful. As with the last couple of sessions, I really strongly and clearly experienced the sense of connection and power and resource that is now available to me.

I also for the first time felt some anger that I needed to feel at someone who had hurt me. It was a healthy and cauterising flash of indignation that I had been repressing, and which I needed to process through my body – and I did, I’d say within ten seconds, maybe even less. By the time I had started to describe the sensation of anger to my therapist, it was already gone. I have found no trace of it since.

In that session I stepped, I hope and believe permanently, out of some long-held limiting beliefs about what I needed to be happy. It was a profound transformation, and the sense of freedom and possibility was almost intoxicating. (And tiring – I needed a lie-down when I finished work.)

And in the evening I went and worshipped myself – in strictly context-appropriate ways, mind – at Ecstatic Dance. 

Who even is this person I have become? 

In a way, I’ve always been her. I’ve always loved being in love. A state of entranced, devoted, worshipful admiration and adoration feels like one of my most natural and authentic expressions of self, and I have leant into it time and again. It doesn’t involve exalting or glorifying the object of my affection, or seeing them as anything more or less than a flawed human being. It just involves loving the heck out of them, with my big warm heart, exactly as they are. Sometimes platonically, sometimes not, but always romantically – for what is true love, even platonic or indeed maternal love, if not deeply romantic? I'm a diehard.

And it’s a big, big feeling. You know how some musicians describe the experience of making music as feeling like they are a channel through which some divine creative force from the Great Beyond is expressing itself? Well, that’s how it feels to me when I fall in love with someone – and I expect a lot of people feel the same way. 

I think the reason is that this is literally what is happening. 

I have always been somewhat mindful of how I am one of a laughably miniscule proportion of human beings throughout space and time to be born and raised in a secular environment. One of a tiny handful, really, to be taught that the world is largely inanimate, that as an entity I am fundamentally separate from others, that existence roughly comprises “me” and “everything else”.

I have tended to be grateful for this, a proud child of the Enlightenment. Now, I think: what a confusing and impoverished inheritance for a sensitive and intuitive human being. I love and believe in science, but what a tragic jettisoning of babies with bathwater. 

Fortunately despite my alleged rationalist commitments I’ve always blithely gone ahead and hugged trees, stroked flowers, walked barefoot, surrounded myself with beautiful things and spoken to them like they’re alive, and so on. My instincts have often been animist and I've given them quite a lot of expression one way or another, generally without realising.

But I have felt so much more alone than I needed to, and I’ve profoundly misunderstood the nature and purpose of my deep capacity to love. Now I see that whatever is alive in me is alive in everything that exists, and that it wants to be worshipped, and we want to worship it. Not necessarily with idolatry, but with prayer and praise and ritual and sacrifice. With offerings of dance and music and song and drums, of painting and sculpture and gardens and words. With blood, sometimes. With reverent touch.

Humankind has always done this. Our developmental environment has been richly animist right up until, in evolutionary timescales, the present moment. We are homo religiosus, and some of us are just built for devotion. Our hearts were made to love, even to breaking point, and we know it.

I’ve often described falling in love as a kind of homecoming. Being in the company of someone I’m in love with can bestow on me a quietly radiant peace. Any desire to be anywhere else, doing anything else, falls away – I feel in my bones that I am where I am supposed to be. Home at last, my body says to me. Look at him, this man you love; with him, you are safe, you are home at last. 

It’s a bioregulatory high I’ve chased all my life, sometimes to my temporary destruction. 

This new falling in love I am doing feels so familiar and so different. The state of entrancement is deeply familiar. The slightly giggly girlish excitement, the dreamy peace. But to fall in love with myself at the age of 43? To do so recognising that I am not an isolated entity, but part of the living web of the universe, and to be falling in love with all of that? With the whole universe as it looks out at itself through my eyes? 

This is a homecoming like no other. I have no fear that a broken heart awaits me at the end of this affair. I hope this is one ecstasy I will dance for the rest of my life.