Ecstatic Dance is perhaps the practice that I've written about the least while simultaneously having the most significant impact on my spiritual journey. Dance is the essential feminine practice. Ecstatic Dance where all movement is welcome while substances, talking, and phones are unwelcome revealed to me how I could lose myself, to find myself in the ecstasy of flow without needing alcohol. Prior to Ecstatic Dance, I was a regular at the Bollywood Club in midtown Manhattan but relied on large doses of alcohol and Red Bull to fuel me till 4 a.m. Post Ecstatic Dance, I completely stopped alcohol, to eventually settle on occasional red wine consumed in a nice candlelit celebratory ambience and my preferred dance time switched to 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

Ecstatic Dance is an opportunity for me to practice stillness till I feel stirred by the music into movement to come back to stillness again. This theme of stillness stirred gradually into movement crescendoing into an ecstasy to collapse back into stillness is prevalent in the myth of Shiva in Hinduism. Ecstatic Dance is where I practice embodying this archetypal theme.

A key guiding principle of Ecstatic Dance is the notion of Participation as contrasted with Spectatorship. Compared to other common dance containers like music concerts, raves, even hippier dance concepts like Daybreaker, Ecstatic Dance DJs are not above the dancers, both physically and hierarchically. Unlike, say, a Kanye West concert where you are a spectator devoting your attention to the star who's singing hymns in praise of their own self or in a kirtan where you are devoting your attention to hymns sung in praise of a deity separate from you (unless you're lucky enough to connect with the deity inside you) in Ecstatic Dance, your body is the deity, your body is your temple and you're surrounded by other deities in their own body temple. The music is there for you. For you to move. Rather for you to let go so that you may be moved. While others do the same for themselves. By themselves. Sometimes, consensually, with you.

Alone. Together. Alone. Till there is no you or them.

You are a participant in life, as is everyone around you. We are all participating instead of spectating. I've personally found great aliveness by applying this principle of participation to all aspects of my life.

Here, I'll speak about one of the most significant aspects where I've noticed the fruit of applying this principle.

I was introduced to pornography in 11th grade. I still vividly remember that moment, the guys I was with, the excitement accompanied by a fear of revealing the excitement. Fear of being seen as a sexual being. The scenes themselves are etched clearly in my memory. A curvaceous woman sitting at a breakfast table wearing a blue sundress and her thighs spread apart. Blonde. The episode belonged to a series called MILF Hunter. It was an initiation of sorts into being a spectator in a state of arousal. Frozen in erection.

My porn consumption skyrocketed once I entered undergrad. The hallmark of the technologically advanced engineering institute I studied at was the high-speed internet, a local area network for sharing files, and kids diligently torrenting the latest and greatest pornography and offering it up categorized in servers. Masturbating to porn became a regular routine—daily, twice a day, multiple times a day. Humor, as always, played a role in normalizing it.

“The doctor has prescribed, once in the morning, once after lunch, once before going to bed at night”

Once in the morning after waking up, once after lunch, and once before going to sleep at night.

Till this point, I had hardly spoken to women in my life and did not have any female friends. My inability to make actual direct conversational contact with women I felt attraction towards worsened as my porn consumption increased. I would just freeze when I had the opportunity to talk to an actual woman.

Back then, I couldn't put two and two together. That's the nature of unconscious, compulsive behavior patterns. In hindsight of having overcome a particular pattern, it is plainly obvious how it contributes to trouble in your life. But while you're caught up in it, it's impossible to see the link.

The more porn I watched, the more I was training myself to be an invisible spectator in the moment of arousal of sexual desire. It cultivated disconnected, numbed out spectatorship in me as opposed to alive participation in the arena of life. And then in a profound moment, during an Ayahuasca ceremony, I touched my penis for the very first time without any intention of extracting the pleasure of ejaculatory release. And a flood of repressed sexual abuse memories emerged, as I held my penis, just gently cupping it with kind, caring hands.

As I integrated that experience, I realized how much of my sexual arousal was rooted in trauma. Thus far, I had responded to it with jerking off in hunt of the ephemeral bliss of sexual release. That phrase, “jerking off”, as puerile as it may sound, accurately describes the harsh energy with which I was accustomed to masturbating. It's been three months now, perhaps more, since I last watched any porn or masturbated to ejaculation. The last nail in the coffin was paying $97 to join a November cohort of men quitting pornography run by a lovely brother, Tyson Adams. The act of paying that money somehow sufficed. A soul contract of sorts established.

There are still many ways I touch myself. That phrase lives more broadly in my awareness now than it used to.

I often hug myself, holding my shoulders.

I often hold my stomach when I feel anxious or feel shame and breathe into it.

I often do a self-oil massage in the morning, warming up some coconut oil and adding a few drops of lavender essential oil to it. Commencing the massage by letting the warm oil drip and land softly on my chest, feeling my entire body gasp in pleasure as it trickles down, and then massaging it into all parts of my physique, including my penis, under the skin, tugging the muscle left, right, up, down. Gentle firm strokes of my palm from the perineum up the shaft, feeling it engorge, knowing that I don't have to do something about my erection. For so long in my life, I thought every erection needed a release. I vaguely remember joking about it with my college friends. “If it's erect, might as well masturbate”

Now instead, I practice breathing the erection up and spreading the energy, the aliveness, through my spine, out the wings of my arm.

Lust is like a broken, scared Dragon crouched in my loins. Breath uplifts it and reminds it that it can fly.

Through this journey, I've been grateful to participate in beautiful, intimate encounters with many women who, in a prior life, would be subconsciously bookmarked; that desire later fulfilled in a porn binge. A validation of the real shift I've experienced in going from spectatorship to participation in this particular aspect of my life.

What is it that you spectate in your life, where you could participate instead?