Ancient cultures have used dance rituals for vision questing, honoring deities, affecting weather patterns, celebrating birth, grieving the dead, and seeking answers to complex community dilemmas.

It is difficult to explain what truly happens during a dance ritual, but it is not difficult to observe the positive effects that participants experience.  Profound insights, visions, healings or feelings of release are what people regularly experience during their journey through this type of event.

The combination of carefully crafted musical programs, a setting of intentions and an invocation of spirits by participants, creates an energy field that often affects dancers in beneficial ways.  As the dancers’ hearts open, and their judgments and self-consciousness decrease, the ritual space becomes more activated and can easily transport participants into ecstatic states.

Bradford Keeney, Ph.D., a cultural anthropologist at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, CA, author of Bushman Shaman: Awakening the Spirit through Ecstatic Dance, states that “a healing context is one where you create a swirling of the life force, an amplification, a movement, a transmission, an energy field so that when another person steps into it, an awakening of their own inner healing sources is encouraged”.

In addition, as if the community was performing Earth acupuncture, the sense of joy, hope and well-being that is generated through the ritual can be used constructively to alleviate the suffering experienced on our Planet.

Dance rituals have been used as community medicine by all indigenous cultures.  We now have a precious opportunity to rekindle such environments in ways that nourish and inspire our current culture.  Non-dogmatic rituals are an easily accessible remedy for our times.