The Dance That Reconnects

Ecstatic dance, the practice of moving together in community to experience unison and ecstasy, is an age-old folk tradition, practiced across diverse cultures throughout history. Ecstatic practices in rituals, carnivals, music festivals, and raves play a crucial role in bringing people together, merging groups into communities, and inspiring transformational spiritual experiences. This chapter reviews the benefits of ecstatic dance and raves in the context of well-being, positive psychology, healing, and social justice activism. It suggests the utopian impulse and altered social spaces we find in raves and ecstatic practices allow participants to experience and imagine new and better ways of being in the world.