Love is what I think of when I think of ecstatic dance.
This is my ten-year “danciversary.” Yes, I’ve been dancing like a nut, wiggling like a worm, and hooting like an owl, for ten years now, on various ecstatic dance floors around the world.
Ecstatic dance has truly changed my life.
Most of those dances have been right here where I live, in Puna, the ecstatic dance capital of the world, and where the movement literally began over twenty years ago, at Kalani’s Rainbow Room.
The Blue Moon Room dances, still at Kalani, where they now take place, are still the most amazing, intimate, silly, fun, wild, and, yes, ecstatic dances I’ve ever been to. It’s a huge part of why I choose to live in this jungle paradise.
For those who haven’t tried ecstatic dance yet, if you’re at all curious, I urge you to go as soon as you can and put your toe tentatively on the dance floor and let the music move you. It might just change you as much as it has changed me.
That’s what I did ten years ago this month, at Kalani in lower Puna, and it was my first time as an adult dancing without being drunk. What a journey it’s been.
I dance regularly now with no alcohol, no drugs, and just the high from music and the beauty of the people around me. It’s the best kind of high.
And thanks to Jana and her team for creating these amazing flower altars at the Blue Moon Room every week. The pic I’ve included is the flower mandala part of a much larger altar every week that is created anew and then torn down.
(I don’t include pictures of people actually dancing because one of the traditional requests at ecstatic dances around the world is to turn off your phone or leave it behind, to not take pics or video, in order to let people be as free as possible from worries about how they’re being seen or how the world outside might see them.)
Finally, thanks to the team at Kalani who organize and hold the dances each week, and ditto for those at Hawaiian Sanctuary, Garden Temple, Kumukahi, and Sundari, the other dance venues in Puna.
You are all amazing and the work you do is rippling, crawling, and wiggling around the world.
