I’ve seen all kinds of dancing in my time. As a kid, I took ballet, jazz, and tap lessons (and no, I will not be demonstrating). During my bartending days, I worked line dancing nights, swing dance parties, and even polka Sundays—not to mention the countless evenings with live music that packed the dance floor. There’s interpretive dance, salsa, the fox trot, and, of course, the Macarena.
Though I thought I’d seen it all, I had never heard of ecstatic dancing—a movement that helps people improve their mental health through dancing.
“Ecstatic dance is like free movement,” explained Jamy Rae Stanczyk. “It’s allowing your body to take over and move to the rhythm or its own rhythm.”
Stanczyk, a family and couples counselor in Two Harbors, is passionate about both ecstatic dancing and building community through movement. She leads ecstatic dance sessions at Lagom, the local boutique and wellness center, and hopes to inspire more people to join in and experience the benefits of dance.
Ecstatic dance is no passing trend—it’s been around for centuries, woven into spiritual and religious traditions throughout history.
“Our earliest ancestors, all of ours, danced for ritual and for ceremony, to call in the rain, and to process things,” Stanczyk said.
What sets ecstatic dance apart from other forms of dance is that it has no set form. Participants might crawl on the floor, curl into a ball, or flap their arms like wings—moving freely rather than following structured steps.
“When we think about dancing, we think there are prescribed steps and there are these ways our body has to move to be fluid or to be rhythmic or to be beautiful or to be cool,” Stanczyk explained. “This way of being really allows you to just let your body take over and letting it move in whatever wild ways or whatever ways that it wants to without judgment.”
Stanczyk didn’t seek out ecstatic dance—it found her when she needed it most. After a traumatic divorce filled with feelings of abandonment, betrayal, and grief, dance became a path to healing.
“It felt like there was nothing I could do,” she remembered. “I could talk about it, but it wasn’t enough. I didn’t know how to process it. It felt too big for my body.”
According to Stanczyk, while listening to music one night during this difficult time, “I felt like my body took over and said, ‘I know how to do this.’ I started to dance, and I would dance for hours at a time until I couldn’t move anymore, and I would sort of dance myself into my bed. Then I found out that there was ecstatic dance out there and it was a way for people to move through all of those hard emotions without having to think about them or talk about them or understand them.”
Before this experience, Stanczyk wasn’t a dancer—far from it. The thought of dancing, even alone, made her cringe. Embarrassed by the idea of not being “good” at it, she avoided dance altogether. But as she discovered the therapeutic power of ecstatic dance, she not only embraced it but also set out to build a community of dancers.
“Ecstatic dance is really about getting people together to collectively move,” Stanczyk, who builds 90-minute playlists for her sessions. “It starts out just grounding into your body and starting out really mellow, then it builds to a peek, and it slowly brings you back down into your body again.”
For those who believe they aren’t dancers, Stanczyk would disagree. “We are all dancers. Dancing is in our blood. Our bodies were created for dancing. Even before all the chaos of the modern world, we danced— and somewhere along the way, we lost our connection to that.”
When I confessed to Stanczyk that I wasn’t sure I could let go of my self-consciousness to join in ecstatic dance, she reassured me that many people feel the same way— even herself at first.
“Once my body started to dance, what I heard inside of me was ‘I can’t do this, it’s too scary, I can’t trust my body, we don’t look cool, this isn’t how anyone else moves.’ Part of my work is helping people work through that,” she said.
Just a few weeks ago, Stanczyk hosted a workshop where four participants were new to ecstatic dance. Initially, they were apprehensive, but as they began to move alongside others, they started to feel more comfortable and open to the experience.
“People start to notice that other people are letting loose, and others are allowing themselves to look goofy, or be silly, or be sitting up against a wall and just observing,” she said. “There is so much energy in it, it’s contagious. We start to see it’s okay that other people do it and that they’re safe. We start to notice the room is judgement free.”
Those newbies who were nervous about trying ecstatic dance? They left with smiles on their faces, remarking that it was the most fun they’d had in a long time.
“As people we don’t play and we don’t have fun anymore,” she said. “This is such a playful and fun way to move your body and away to do it in community. What happens if there is one person there who is judgement free and moving their body freely, it starts to leak out to other people. That energy itself is sort of what feeds the others and then everyone is flowing in that state. That’s why I so believe that this is world changing.”
Stanczyk believes that without an outlet for pent-up emotions, people can develop depression, anxiety, and even physical illnesses like cancer and autoimmune diseases.
“We take in all this stress and this anxiety and this chaos that is happening in our world, and we’re all talking about therapy and how great that is but can only talk about things for so long,” she said. “Our bodies have this really beautiful innate wisdom, and they actually know how to move that energy through and get those things flowing. Emotions are just energy. Our bodies naturally know.”
She went on to say, “We can go to the gym, or we can walk, and we can do all these things but there is something primal, something familiar about dancing.”
Stanczyk’s next ecstatic dance session will be on February 15th at the Two Harbors Community Center from 7-9 PM. Those who arrive early can enjoy some art supplies to write valentines to their bodies. A suggested donation of $5 to $10 helps care for the space, though Stanczyk assures that no one will be turned away.
Things have turned around for Stanczyk since she began her ecstatic dance journey, especially after the tough times she faced two years ago.
“My body knew exactly what to do and it was so beautiful. There’s no way I can’t believe in that anymore. I believe in it so strongly,” she said. “I think that’s the most powerful thing that I’ve learned. I felt like this kind of called to me. I didn’t seek this out. It came to me and now I’m like ‘oh man we need to dance’. I’m a therapist and I probably know how to process my emotions or talk about things, but it wasn’t enough. Dancing was the way that it just made sense.”
For more information on local ecstatic dance sessions, visit Jamy Rae Stanczyk‘s website.
