When I look around in the day to day bustle of human activity, I sometimes find myself marveling at how organized and ordered everything moves. But also. How limited. I think of my body, how privileged I am to be able to move all of these limbs so freely. And how I don’t do that enough.
One of my favorite activities in this world is going out dancing. For something I love as much as I love dancing, it’s surprising how little it actually happens. To be clear, this is not about dancing “well” or having some slick choreography, this is also not about the gaze of another. This is about feeeeeeeling the music. I love the deep melancholic techno beats, the psychedelic electronica, and the ancient rhythms from all over the world just the same. If there is any depth to the sound, it invites us to dive into it. And once you’re in it, once you have shed the inhibitions and boundaries of your strangely conditioned mind, you just feeeeeel it. It just moves in you and you in it. You become one with the music. At its best, dancing is an entirely sensual and spiritual experience.
While dancing, I have been asked this question by an interrupting stranger on several occasions: “What are you on?” And I have replied: “A glass of water”. It is pretty obvious that more and more people have come to this false conclusion that the liberating experience of dancing can only be achieved through the use of substances, with jittering jaws and horrible hangovers. I have seen so many people standing awkwardly on the sidelines until they were wasted enough to let go of their inhibiting self-sabotage and finally free to move their bodies.
Now, I am no stranger to that feeling of shame or shyness. But I am here to say that it’s a waste of life to feel bound by some elusive social contract that instructs you to constrain yourself lest you can blame some external additive for your wildness. It’s a total sham. If you have a body that is able to move in one way or another, the only thing standing in the way of the meditative ecstasy of dancing is your own mind. You don’t need anything to reach that state. You just need to silence that thinking brain, breathe, and feeeeeeel. There have been many times that my sober body was way more energetic and alive at 5 in the morning than all of the drugged up bodies running on empty around me. That’s because dancing actually generates energy, whereas synthetic substances drive you to peak and then drain your energy. For the record, I am not anti-drug in principle, I am just pro-vital-life-force-energy. And you have that running up and down your spine by default. It’s yours to use.
You see, the music wants to move you. It’s what she’s here for. And when you let her, when you relax your body, close your eyes, and allow the music to guide you into her gorgeous mysteries, you learn what freedom means, what pure joy feels like, and when the music is exceptionally good, you might even get glimpses of God.
Yvet Youssef 