Why I DJ Conscious Dance Events

Twice a month, I get the blessed opportunity to DJ a conscious (aka ecstatic) dance at Clearing House Savannah. My aim with these dances is to provide a container for people (including myself) to come together, connect with each other and with ourselves, and let our bodies sing songs of joy and pain and whatever else we need to move through.

Growing up, I never danced. My white suburban friends and family never danced. It never crossed my mind to dance.

At the beginning of my senior year in high school, my friend’s mom was going through a mid-life crisis and had started hanging out with people who threw raves. This is 1994, Scottsdale, Arizona we’re talking about, so to our friend group, the only association we had with raves was that they’d be a good place for us to smoke weed and mess around.

So, we learn where the next rave is from my friend’s mom and we show up pretty stoned, not knowing what we were getting into. I remember us (maybe four or five of us, 17 year-old boys), standing at the back wondering what the hell was happening. Thumping, monotonous techno and carefree, colorful dancers left us totally confused. This was NOT a good place to hang and smoke weed, so we left pretty quickly.

We figured that to really “rave” we’d have to be on something a little stronger than weed, so a few weeks later we showed up at the next rave in a warehouse in downtown Phoenix with a bunch of psychedelic mushrooms. I don’t remember how much I ate, but I remember a light switched on in my heart and body. I suddenly knew how to dance.

There we were, a group of stupid 17 year-old boys who had never danced a step in their lives, just completely cutting loose until the sun came up.

It wasn’t until a few years later that I learned that I could dance without any outside chemical enhancement. And it wasn’t until decades later that I learned that free-form dancing wasn’t just an act of joy but it was also an important emotional health practice.

As I began my own emotional and spiritual health journey, I learned that I had an enormous amount of tension and grief stored in my body. And while I was able to release a lot of it in therapy, there was something unique and necessary about releasing it through dancing freely. As a grown-ass adult, it became clear to me that I didn’t need to just release my pain and joy through dancing, but I need to release ancestors’ pain and joy.

About 5 years ago, I had a therapeutic psychedelic session where I could see and feel how my ancient European ancestors had their own rhythmic, tribal beats and danced freely and passionately. But I saw that these were “pagan” rhythms and movements and thus were suppressed first by the Romans and later by the Catholic Church and even later by various Protestant movements.

So, when I saw the above Tweet (yes, “Tweet”), I recognized that Rosalind and I had the same soul download: ancestral trauma blocks our ability to dance freely. And because of the inexorable spread of Western modernity, this European ancestral trauma has been inflicted on countless non-European people.

Is it too grandiose to say that I DJ conscious events to heal globally inflicted European ancestral trauma? Yeah, probably. So maybe I’ll just say, I do it to heal my own ancestral trauma. And I invite you to join me 🙏