Ecstatic Energy Dance: WAVES BASIC Prequisite for Heartbeat 5Rhythms® 5/17-5/18

Waves:Basics

It will be held Thursday evening, May 15th.
Waves:Basics is open to all.
Advance registration for Waves:Basics is required by April 30th.
Waves: Basics, $35.

Lisa DeLand
ldeland@earthlink.net
512.444.0443

Read Maps to Ecstasy, by Gabrielle Roth to learn about the maps of 5Rhythms® practice.

Click Here To View Gabrielle Roth Books\CD's\DVD's in our bookstore

Terrence McKenna defines ecstasy as a complex emotion containing elements of joy, fear, terror, triumph, surrender and empathy. It derives from the Greek word ekstasis, meaning "displacement, trance, to take flight, to drive out of one's senses." The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets defines it as "standing forth naked." Einstein referred to it as the "ultimate religious feeling state," while author Chris Griscom views it as "the higher self in action."

Ecstatic experience is the oldest form of healing and spiritual practice known with evidence of it dating back over 30,000 years to ancient traditions of shamanism. It is believed that shamans were the first to discover and codify the use and power of rhythm through drumming, dancing, and chanting to carry them on their journeys into a world beyond the ordinary.

Ecstatic dance, which is sometimes referred to as trance dance, is based on the tenets of shamanism and has been used for eons as a method for dream change. It's a multi-layered experience that takes the dancer on an inner journey to connect him to other sources of guidance, activate abilities to re-invent him, or invite spirit or life force energy to embody and heal him. Actually, the term 'embody' is a bit misleading, because this life force energy is within each of us, already. The demands, addictions, and over-rational beliefs of the modern world, however, have served to impede its flow and fragment this awareness away from us, taking with it other vital aspects of the self. Ecstatic dance helps restore this vital flow of life force and recover lost parts of the soul in the process. It is a way to re-member and activate the inherent shamanic archetype we each carry within our body-mind complex an archetype that reveals our interconnections within the greater web of life and seeks to identify and consciously change the dreams that no longer serve our well-being.

Ecstatic dance is a form of active meditation or prayer where music, movement, and the breath are used to shift brain wave patterns from the day-to-day cognitive beta state, to the more meditative and insightful alpha state. The terms trance and altered state of consciousness refer to brain waves resonating at this alpha state, as well as theta and delta. Michael Harner has coined the term shamanic state of consciousness (SSC) to describe this level of awareness. The SSC is what the ecstatic dancer seeks, as well as the shaman, to initiate the dream change process.

Before entering an ecstatic dance journey, the dancer forms an intention for a particular dream change. When the dancer enters an SSC through the dance, the veils that appeared to separate the self into mind, body, and soul in ordinary reality are pulled away so that the dancer can experience herself and her intention at another level. In the landscape of the SSC, she feels an expanded sense of herself in communication with a greater source of being. She may experience her intention as already existing. This is because the SSC connects us with a more transcendent reality beyond the bounds of time and linear existence, as we know it. Not only do the veils that separate aspects of the self fall away, but also those that clearly differentiate past, present, and future. In ecstatic dance, the dream change we desire can be conceived as a pattern of energy that already exists which we then allow ourselves to entrain or resonate with.

Ecstatic dance sees the body as a holy vessel of the spirit, a sacred kiva where we can awaken our greatest talents, healing, and dream change abilities, oftentimes hidden from our sight for years. The dance then becomes a source of revelation and renewal. From this experience our whole being: body, mind, and soul, is honored as sacred and the work of beauty it is. There is a sense of profound sense of sovereignty and sanctity that comes when the body has a time and place to genuinely express this deeper wisdom of the self, without having our socialized sensibilities reprimand or censor its expression. This in itself can be incredibly transformational.

To dance then, is to pray, to meditate, to enter into communion with the larger dance, which is the universe.
-- Jean Houston