ECSTASY IS ESSENTIALLY A SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

These are some of my favorite passages in “The Ecstatic Experience: Healing Postures for Spirit Journeys” by Belinda Gore.

 

— We have a collective longing for ecstasy, a hunger as fundamental and persistent as the need for food. How interesting that our bodies are designed—“hardwired”—for the experience of ecstasy and yet, for so many people in the contemporary world, the condition of ecstasy deprivation creates so much suffering. It was Felicitas’s theory that ecstasy deprivation is the underlying cause of all addictions. As a psychologist who has treated alcoholism, eating disorders, and other addictive behaviors for many years, I wholeheartedly agree. Even though addictions are related to genetic predisposition and faulty neurology, the basic biology that produces the physical experience of ecstasy has gone haywire in a culture that does not teach us how to achieve it naturally.

Ecstasy is essentially a spiritual experience. We are ecstatic when our conscious awareness transcends the ego but at the same time aligns with the body, allowing us to be fully aware physically but without the inner dialogue of the mind. That is why sex is the form of ecstasy that many people can recognize. The physical experience of sexual pleasure overcomes the mind’s incessant thinking and we are relieved, for the moment, of our brooding about the past and anticipation of the future. Among the ancient Egyptians there were specific rituals for using the ecstatic states awakened through sex to nourish the energy of the subtle body, known to the Egyptians as the ka. The hunger for ecstasy was acknowledged as a real hunger because ecstasy is food for the ka body, giving it vitality and potency. The ka not only sustains the physical cells and tissue, but also provides for the capacity to experience and express the conceptual reality, the Logos, that enlivens the physical tissue. Curiously, it is taught that shame is poison to the ka and that ecstasy is needed to detoxify the bodies from the negative effects of shame.

Other options for ecstasy are, of course, available. Drugs, alcohol, chocolate, and adrenaline rushes—from fear or extreme sports—can all provide the same initial experience but without long-lasting effect. Alternatively, native people around the world used to have a complex system of ritual body positions that make it easy to have an ecstatic experience. The use of a specific sacred pose accompanied by drumming or rattling can engage the body’s natural ability to heighten brain activity and activate a state of consciousness that lies dormant during ordinary daily life. To experience that state is to experience ecstasy.

— Spiritual initiation is a process of learning, step-by-step, how to die and be reborn. How wise these ancient cultures and civilizations were to have a well-developed method for teaching everyone this essential skill that puts all the rest of living into a meaningful context. For many years I have thought about ways to incorporate initiation postures, and the skill of learning how to die and be reborn, into contemporary workshops. Helping people to know what to expect can only assist in learning to easily let go at the time of death, and understanding what is occurring is a wonderful support for the friends and families of those who are dying.

A decade ago we organized a workshop in Missoula, Montana, on death and dying. Missoula is the home of the Chalice of Repose project in which musicians are taught how to accompany people in their dying process, using music to ease the transition into death. Graduates of the Chalice of Repose project as well as the local hospice organization attended the workshop and were very enthusiastic about the valuable addition of initiation trances to assist those who are dying. A board member of the hospice organization said that every staff member and volunteer of every hospice program should have this training, but at the time we did not have the resources to follow through with this vision. A few years later two of us offered workshops for cancer patients and their families using initiation postures; the group members loved it but the hospital staff was uneasy about our unorthodox method. We were not invited to continue.

Most recently I returned to Santiago, Chile, last winter to continue teaching ecstatic postures. We designed a workshop called Buen Morir, or Good Dying, to teach people how to learn about dying through trance and then to become “midwives” to the dying. While hospice is a program of palliative care for people at the end of life, Buen Morir gives their friends and families the tools and resources they need to support this end-of-life process in a loving and meaningful way through under- standing the losses experienced by the person who is dying, how to talk about dying, completing end-of-life tasks such as saying good-bye, clarifying one’s legacy and making meaning of one’s life, making plans for rituals, and managing pain through healing postures. We teach breathing exercises and go through an experiential process to replicate the loss of roles and identity that causes so much anxiety when people approach death. Through the trance experiences, workshop participants began to discover what Kathleen Dowling Singh identified, that “dying, remarkably, is a process of natural enlightenment.”1 My colleague, Paula Olivares, has facilitated another Buen Morir training for a hospital staff in Santiago and we hope the program will continue.

The first time I experienced dying through an ecstatic trance posture, I found myself traveling down into the Realm of the Dead, falling like a rag doll down a steep bank. Later I learned that this was like a spirit journey to the Lower World and I came to anticipate going down, sometimes as a skier or maybe diving off a high cliff into the sea. When I came to a fire, I entered it willingly and felt the muscles on my bones grow slack and then drop away until I was only a skeleton. Oddly enough, I observed all of this dispassionately because the essence of “me” was not in the muscles or bones, but was simply a curious wit- ness. Supported by the posture and the sound of the rattle, I waited quietly as my bones were placed in the fire, the final release of the molecules and atoms I had borrowed to make a physical body. It was quite dark and there was nothing to do but wait. My spirit began rising above the earth, into pink and blue clouds, then upward toward the red disk of the sun. The sadness of saying good-bye was replaced by tears of joy. Elated, I knew I was going home.

This group of initiation postures is in female forms and all of them come from the Middle East and Egypt. The first one, the Inanna Posture, supports a journey of descent similar to Inanna’s journey as told in Sumerian myth. The experience facilitated by the Ishtar Posture focuses on sensuality, sex, and fertility. This is the stage in birth, death, and rebirth in which we take on a physical body and learn to enjoy it. The Sekhmet Posture teaches us to be awake in death and rebirth, and to learn the dance of coming into form, landing in newly acquired bodies, and then leaving form. Finally, the Shawabty Posture seems to focus on how to die and often takes us into experiences of funerals and simi- lar ceremonies, so that we become familiar with this part of the process and do not hold back from it. Paradoxically, learning how to die helps us to appreciate what it means to be alive and how to fully live.

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