Yarixa Ferrao, a 42-year-old in Los Angeles, was working as a personal trainer when she injured her back while lifting weights and suffered from herniated disks. The typical physical therapy exercises recommended for her condition didn’t help. Then, on her birthday, a sudden intuition inspired her to fly to Miami, put on red heels (something not recommended for someone with herniated disks), and go out dancing. “When I woke up the next morning, my back had completely healed,” she recalls. Such miraculous healing is certainly not guaranteed, but for many advocates, ecstatic dance is freeing in a way that can be hard to come by in daily life.
“Dance just allows you to liberate yourself…it brings you a level of joy, and people that are joyful heal faster,” Ferrao says. “My soul knew that my movements were too rigid, too linear, and that just was not the life that I was meant to be living.” Ferrao’s awakening led her to dedicate herself to ecstatic dance, which embodies the flowy, unstructured way of being she felt called toward.
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Hathaway appreciates that ecstatic dance can help people connect without words. “You’re creating a closeness and an understanding that is kind of primal and basic,” she says. “You’re meeting in this simple way that I think can create a bridge of connection. That led me to be able to create connection in other ways because that opened me.”
“I love that ecstatic dance provides a space for nonverbal self-expression,” Anna agrees. “Participating in ecstatic dances has helped me get in touch with my body and has allowed me to observe, in a nonjudgmental way, how other people want to experience embodiment. Whenever I attend a dance, I leave feeling more connected to myself and others—even when I haven’t spoken to anyone.”
When people feel free to express themselves in all their weirdness around others, they also may gain reassurance that they can show up as their full selves and be accepted, says Meyer. “When ecstatic dance is practiced among a community of others participating, it can create a sense of belonging as our most authentically expressed selves.”
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