All Races, All Genders, All Body Types

By Thistle http://www.thistlespace.org/

"If I still lived in LA, I would've had to pay over a hundred dollars for that" remarked an ecstatic dancer after she reached a place of personal growth at her weekly dance spot in Northern California. When I lived for a year in Garberville, I had the privilege of experiencing ecstatic dance led by a young woman from Washington State who had learned it from her community in Maui. For nine months in the rolling hills of rural California, I stepped outside myself and into an ecstatic oneness that was healing to all who attended.

Our only fee was to rent the space in the beautiful community center we used once a week on Sundays. It was octagon-shaped, with a skylight at the center that shed light on native madrone and redwood carved into a big star in the middle of the floor. Bay windows opened up to a deck on the edge of the valley where we gathered. Hawks regularly swooped across the sky, along with jet airplane trails and with them, the reminder of mechanized man.

But our place, out there in the country, took us away from cars and motor sounds for the most part, and into the surrounding sound of Alexa's musical muses and mixes played on a great stereo system. And sometimes, we would have drummers pounding along with the beat, and sometimes we were bare foot and sometimes we had socks on if it was cold.

The first ten minutes when we arrived were spent stretching and meditating, before we gathered into a seated a circle at the center of the room to greet each other before the dance. Alexa, our young leader, would always set up an altar by the bay windows with things she'd found in the woods, or she had made with her crafty hands. She invited each of us to place something on the altar if we wanted to.

Once in the circle at the center of the room, Alexa would read a poem or sing a song or lead us in an ohm or some other thing before or after we introduced ourselves and said, if we so desired, what we were dancing for that day. Answers would vary from "peace and relaxation" to "joy and bliss" to any number of reasons including "gratitude" and "just 'cuz."

The key was that we were all there together in community, supporting each others' healing and emotional/spiritual/physical growth. Or we were there just to move and dance for the sheer fun of it. After a while, we began interacting with each other as we danced in wild and unexpected ways that would leave us pondering the mystery of sound plus spark.

To be continued . . .