The weekend of March 4, 2022, on a whim (you’re gonna learn that this is a common thing for me), I attended a 3 day retreat called ‘vibecamp’. It was mad weird, and there’s a lot I still have to unpack about it, but there’s one experience that stood out as really profound and worthy of a story. On Saturday night, a woman who goes by Aella (twitter.com/Aella_Girl) held a 90 minute dance container called ‘Descent Into Dance Hell’, and it was going to be an exploration of movement basics followed by a dance… I had planned on attending a dance scheduled at the same time around dancing with loving-kindness, but this had me way too intrigued. I ain’t a stranger to dance by the way. I get the fuck down, so I wasn’t particularly interested in learning basics, but the whole…vibe just drew me in.
I was right to choose that one. We started out with just some basic postural exercises to help us get used to moving in alignment with our hips/pelvis/core, and it ended up being pretty fun even for me. I guess it never hurts to return to the fundamentals.
But who gives a fuck about that, what happened next is what this story is all about.
After we went over the fundamentals, she threw on some music, and started giving us prompts, challenging us to fully respond to the music from a place of non-doing. To really enter into conversation with our bodies and the music, and just see what happens.
Yooooooooo I ain’t EVER danced like that before in the 5 years I’ve been on my own personal dance journey.
We started out with ‘bad guy’ by billie eilish, and it was a good warm up, i found myself responding to the song with a bit of classiness in my vibe, some stutter steps, I was grooving hard.
It just got darker and weirder from there. We got into some pretty wild EDM next, and from this place of truly responding to the music, I found myself walking like a zombie, stuttering and shaking like a puppet, and doing a lot of popping style movements, which frankly I never have felt called to do before but that was how my body responded to it, and who the fuck am I to argue with this dope ass body of mine?
Eventually, we moved on to this song called ‘Death Is The Door To Awe’ from this movie called The Fountain (which I never saw, but whatever). That was when this shit went to the next level for me personally.
I’d already found myself starting to bring my imagination into the space, summoning wind and lightning in the palms of my hands, and making birdlike movements…but once that song got going, this EPIC orchestral piece with guitar and these intense pauses…I entered a whole new dimension personally.
I’m…I’m going to struggle to describe what happened next. I could try to describe how I was moving, but it wouldn’t make any sense in words. Let’s just say I was in my full grandiosity, raising my hands to the sky to call lightning down into my soul, burning sigils into the ground, and generally shaking like I was possessed by some lightning demon.
What struck me about this experience was…
- The FEELING. I felt SO ALIVE. I had become lightning, I had become ecstasy. It wasn’t like a sexual pleasure, I was just so embodied, and out of my ego that my whole experience was just pure sensation.
- The images that passed through me: at its peak, I saw (in my mind’s eye) a giant, screaming thunderbird with lightning shooting out of its eyes. It was fucking MAGNIFICENT. I saw myself as this red eyed, handsome demon-spider-man. Wrapping up victims in my web to do with and dominate and torture as I will. I saw the souls of the dead and damned rising up from dance floor and swirling and coagulating into a giant tornado of spirits under a cloudy dark sky.
Y’all, I was ENTHRALLLED.
The song peaked, I collapsed, some people started crying in the room…
Just unbelievable.
I rushed up to the facilitator and basically gushed about it being one of the best dance experiences I’ve ever had, and then I walked out into the night with a lot of questions and one huge takeaway.
I NEED Ecstasy in my life. I have been starving for it. Starving for opportunities to completely lose my ‘self’ in aliveness, electricity, borderline madness. Chances to play in the dark corners of being that are so turned on and live. One very positive thing I’m left with is: this portal, through which I go into this creative, spontaneous ecstasy, it’s open, and awaits my return. I’ll let y’all know where this goes.
Till next time.
With Love, Genius, and Ecstasy,
anansi, the soul director
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