Do Not Fear Your Inner Hippy: Ecstatic Dancing

My previous attempt at ecstatic dancing was foiled by my disorganization. It was before the pandemic. It was a dreary Sunday afternoon before the pandemic. I’d managed to get to the Odd Fellows’ Hall for the last hour. I could hear DJ BRIZE doing his thing while I took my socks and shoes off, I saw my friends on the dance floor and went in for hugs. And then, the music stopped. I had gotten the time wrong and missed it all. That attempt to try ecstatic dancing does not count. 

The real question is: Why did it take me more than 6 years to try ecstatic dancing again? Maybe because I am fundamentally neurotic? Electronic Dance Music has mostly missed me. Sure, I have been to events and had a good time, yes, I love world music and all the mixes it enables, but I typically spend my music fandom going to shows in dives featuring former Ramones or other ancient punks who are amazingly still alive and still touring.  

There’s also the fact that I fear my inner hippy. Not only am I the child of baby boomers, but I read Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem at an impressionable age. Lines from it have haunted me ever since I helped a young man having a drug toxicity event while one of my kids was taking a piano lesson. That single book, while a masterpiece of creative nonfiction, has made me suspicious of all things equated with 60s counterculture. Ecstatic dance, however, is a sober event. No alcohol, no drugs, just good vibes and natural energy. Really, it’s a safe space to confront anti-hippy biases.

Plus, if you’ve over 50 and want to try new things, you have to accept you are going to have to do some of them alone. I think most of my friends would be up to join me, if they didn’t still have kids at home and Ecstatic Dance Toronto’s weekly event wasn’t past 9PM on a school night. 

But, really, becoming braver is one of the points of this entire experiment, so it was time. 

The Church of the Holy Trinity, where the weekly event runs, is a historical landmark the Eaton Centre was built around. It’s beautiful. I have been comfortable in every place of worship I have ever visited and that comfort was important here. Ecstatic dance is a barefoot experience, and starting out lying on the floor to stretch or meditate to music is part of the vibe too. There are frescoes of vines and the dove on the ceiling. There were also green dots floating around that made me nostalgic for my cat and her laser pointer. As appealing as it might be, no single middle-aged woman can stay home with the cat every night. 

A new age altar featuring dried reeds and grasses, incense, candlelight and intention cards was the focal point of the dancefloor. Most people obviously don’t rush into ecstatic dance in their work clothes, but I didn’t feel out of place where everyone else had more of a flowy yoga gear aesthetic happening. The event is officially scent free, but there was one point early on where a woman circled through the room wearing just the right amount of patchouli and as she moved her skirts and sleeves, I think she awakened everyone’s senses to the here and now. I ceased to fear my inner hippy at that point, I think. The fact that there are no cell phones or other cameras helps too. It’s easy to dance like no one’s watching when no one is, in fact, watching. 

There was no talking after the opening ceremony. There was just the beat, ever changing with themes that built and transformed through instruments and languages Spanish lyrics, a didgeridoo, a 50s classic infused with a pan flute, themes from a bouzouki and even an idiophone. Everyone dances alone together. It’s described as a dance journey and, if that is true, then there is no destination and each dancer goes their own way.

I was into it. I swam right before I went dancing, so I was uncertain how much physical energy I’d have at the ready to dance. I needn’t have worried. I just danced. No thinking, no emotional noise, no worries about future plans or tasks unfinished elsewhere in my life. My head was completely and absolutely clear after two hours of dancing by myself in a loving crowd on a Thursday evening. I didn’t have a long night’s sleep, but it was deep and refreshing. 

100% will go ecstatic dancing again.  

Click here to find out what the try new things every week challenge to myself is about. 

Here is what happened when I tried out being a model. 

Trying infrared light therapy inspired me to set some ground rules for the challenge.