omniharmonicDance To Remember
Somatic Decolonization and Remembrance
What follows is a personal account of somatic liberation through dance, one thread in a much larger tapestry of what it means to remember our wholeness in a time of civilizational transformation.
I want to personally thank all of the people who supported and guided me on this journey of coming home to my body, Brittany Neff, Atasiea Furguson, Sophia Life, Jordan Seigel and Samantha Sweetwater.
In particular, my friend and teacher, Samantha Sweetwater, has spent over three decades developing frameworks and practices that help people navigate the work of coming home to ourselves as Life. Her forthcoming book, True Human: Reimagining Ourselves At The End Of Our World (November 28, 2025), offers a blueprint for what so many of us have been seeking, a map for how to actually embody our way through the collapse of old forms and the emergence of new ones.
If what I share here resonates with you, I encourage you to explore Samantha’s work more deeply. She is one of the rare teachers of our time who has not only made this journey herself but has dedicated her life to creating pathways for others to find their way home.
The journey of decolonization begins with a crack.
For some of us born into the peculiar condition of being from European ancestry or otherwise heir to colonial ideologies, that first fissure in the edifice of our worldview often arrives through entheogens and plant medicines or initial encounters with indigenous cultures. Perhaps its psilocybin offered to us by a friend in a suburban basement, an LSD trip at a festival, a sweat lodge we’re lucky enough to be invited into, or simply the visceral recognition through art or media that the stories we’ve been told about who we are and how the world works are fundamentally incomplete, even deliberately misleading. A slow, then sudden realization that what has been presented as the nature of existence is merely just a story layered atop something vastly more complex and messy and weird and sacred. That no one, not even the people in charge, really know what existence actually is.
These initial openings are profound. They reveal that the reality we’ve taken for granted is not reality itself but a constructed version of it, a worldview that has been systematically encoded into every institution, every transaction, every relationship we participate in. Through the looking glass of plant intelligence, what was once so commonplace it didn’t even register as cultural programming stands out in lucid contrast to a different way of knowing ourselves and reality. Suddenly, we can see how we’ve learned to experience ourselves as fundamentally separate individuals rather than as embedded participants in a living web of relationships. We glimpse how our connections have been reduced to transactions, how our role has been diminished from steward to consumer, how even our internal landscape has been colonized by stories of scarcity, competition, and isolation.
But even as those stories crack and quiver in the shimmering reality of our interbeing, we are not yet fully liberated from them. Colonization is such a totalizing project that the very frameworks we use to understand it are themselves products of it. Even after that initial awakening, even after we’ve begun to see through the illusion, we remain embedded in systems that continuously reinforce a fragmented, transactional, zero-sum worldview.
Groping Towards Post-Colonial Futures
We find ourselves in an odd historical moment, to say the least. Many of us are awakening to the violence of colonization, not just its historical atrocities but its ongoing devastation of psyche, soma, and ecosystem. Yet most of us are doing so as people who have been cut off from our own pre-colonial lineages, our own ancestral ways of knowing, our own initiated pathways of remembering who we are beneath the colonial overlay.
This creates a dangerous condition: we are groping in the dark without cultural figures who can verify the path, without elders who have made this journey themselves and can guide us home. The closest approximations we have in Western lineages are figures like Ram Dass and Joanna Macy, legendary figures of the first generation post-1960s to seriously undertake decolonization and non-duality from within positions of European ancestry and colonial privilege. These are rare beings who found their way to authentic transformation and dedicated their lives to creating bridges for others.
But the scarcity of such elders leaves many of us vulnerable. Without clear guidance, the longing for reconnection, for the wholeness we sense is our birthright, can curdle into fetishization. We see this in how many colonized people relate to indigenous medicines and ceremonies: a kind of spiritual consumption that mirrors the extractive logic of colonization itself. We objectify the plants, we objectify the people who steward them, we recreate the very patterns we’re ostensibly trying to transcend.
Now there are people of European ancestry serving South American indigenous entheogenic plants, holding ceremony, building communities around these practices, with vastly varying degrees of actual blessing from source cultures, varying depths of initiation into the lineages they’re drawing from, varying commitments to reciprocity and right relationship. Some of this work is genuine and beautiful. Some of it is extractive and harmful. Most of it exists in the complicated middle, where good intentions meet the weight of intergenerational trauma and unexamined privilege.
Dance as the Original Medicine
This is where I have to credit Samantha Sweetwater with something that changed my life, though it took me years to fully understand what she was teaching. Samantha says that water is the first medicine and I believe she’d say that dance is the second. Unlike plant medicines that physically enter us from “outside,” dance is always already ours. It cannot be appropriated because it is the birthright of every body. It is how we remember what colonization taught us to forget.
It was actually a teacher named Atasiea, trained in Samantha’s lineage, who first opened this door for me at Ecstatic Dance LA. I want to share the vulnerable truth about what that journey looked like, because I think many people encounter something similar when they begin the work of coming back into their bodies.
When I first started attending Ecstatic Dance, I was extraordinarily early in my own somatic healing. I had internalized layer upon layer of shame and repression around my relationship to my own body, shame that I didn’t even fully recognize as such because it had been encoded so deeply into my sense of who I was. The colonized body learns to distrust itself, to override its signals, to subordinate its wisdom to the supposedly superior rationality of the disembodied mind.
So when I would arrive at the dance floor and witness the freedom that other people were moving with, the unselfconscious joy, the wild expressiveness, the sheer permission to be alive in a body, something in me would shatter. Ten minutes in, twenty minutes in, I would become so emotionally reactive that I would have to leave. The contrast between their freedom and my fear was unbearable. I would watch someone lost in their own ecstasy and I would feel like I was suffocating.
But some part of me knew this was important. Some deeper intelligence recognized that this was the work, that my reactivity was pointing directly at what needed to heal. So I approached it as a practice, with the same kind of discipline I might bring to sitting meditation, but with more gentleness. I wouldn’t punish myself by insisting I stay for the full two hours. Each time, I would simply try to stay a little longer, to meet the parts of myself that were afraid with as much love as I could muster before I ejected.
The Altar as Bridge
One of the most beautiful things about the container Atasiea and their collaborators created was the altar. It wasn’t a token gesture or decorative element, it was given equal importance to the dance floor itself. A low table covered in altar cloths, surrounded by cushions, holding dozens of different oracle decks, books about love and spirituality and healing, candles, stones, flowers, objects that participants had brought as offerings.
When the emotions that arose through dance became too much, when the fear or shame or grief was overwhelming, I could leave the dance floor and go to the altar. I could sit there in the meditation area, surrounded by the muffled thump of the bass and the energy of all those moving bodies, and I could pray. I would pull a card from one of the tarot decks. I would open to a random page in a book. I would simply sit and ask for help.
The altar became my refuge, the place where I could bring what my body was trying to teach me and ask for the wisdom to understand it. Where I could say: I don’t know how to be this afraid and keep moving. Show me. Help me. I want to be free.
And gradually, over months and then years of this practice, showing up, dancing until I hit a wall, sitting at the altar, returning to the dance, slowly expanding my capacity, something shifted. The big emotions didn’t disappear. Instead, I discovered I could move with them, I could let my body express the feeling through movement rather than locking down and fleeing. I learned that shame could be danced out, that grief could be moved through, that rage could be channeled into wild, powerful expression that left me breathless and cleaned out.
After several years of attending Ecstatic Dance LA, I finally arrived at something I can only describe as freedom in my body around the way I moved. Not freedom in an ideal sense, but a functional, lived freedom: the capacity to let my body lead, the muscle memory of how to let go into fully feeling the emotion, to trust its intelligence, to surrender into movement without the constant monitoring and self-censorship that had once defined my relationship to my own flesh and blood and bones.
When Felt Sense Replaces Ideology
This morning, dancing again after having let the practice slip for longer than I care to admit, I found myself reflecting on just how much this somatic liberation is actually the entire point. Not just of dance, but of why people engage with psychedelics, with plant medicines, with any authentic spiritual practice. What we’re all seeking, under the various names and frameworks we give it, is this: freedom to be exactly what we are, in ecstatic union with all that is.
Terence McKenna understood this. He said:
“What I’m talking about is reclaiming experience. This is what’s been taken from us. This is why the new music and dance culture is so important. This is why drug culture is so important. This is all about coming to grips with who you really are and what you really feel and then experiencing it. You are not owned. It is not he or she or them or it that you belong to. And we’ve been told that we have to fit in. We’ve been told we have to make sense.
This is not true.
We are creating a world that celebrates the uniqueness of every person. Science’s inability to make sense of human beings in the world as part of nature, the failure to make sense of this is the failure to come to terms with the transcendental aspect of reality. We are the best evidence there is that something extraordinarily unusual is happening on this planet. It’s a self-advancing, self-expanding, self-defining process…
The world that we are leaving behind, the world that failed us, was a world of ideology and mechanical technology. And the ideologies one by one are going down. They one by one will be discredited. They cannot sustain. And the mechanical technologies cannot be sustained. They pollute, they dehumanize, they wreck the planet.
Replace ideology with the felt presence of the body.”
All ideologies are failing, and ideology must be replaced by the felt sense of the body.
This is a key that unlocks everything. Because you can understand, cognitively, the ways that colonization has affected your worldview. You can read the theory. You can trace how you learned to see yourself as a separate individual rather than as a keystone species, a participating member in a web of relationship. You can analyze how capitalism has trained you to relate to the world primarily as a consumer rather than as a co-creator. You can map every mechanism by which the colonial project has infiltrated your consciousness.
But you cannot think your way out of a colonized mind. That’s part of the trap. The colonized mind tries to use its own tools to deconstruct itself, but those tools were forged in the very fires we’re trying to escape. Cognitive understanding alone cannot liberate us because the colonization we’re dealing with isn’t primarily conceptual, it’s somatic. It lives in the body, in the nervous system, in the very foundations of how we experience being alive.
This is why so much of what passes for decolonization work in academic and activist spaces, while valuable, ultimately falls short of transformation. We write papers about power structures. We analyze discourse. We develop ever more sophisticated frameworks for understanding oppression. All of this is necessary work. But if it remains at the level of ideology, if it doesn’t make its way into the body, it cannot actually set us free.
Dancing as Technology of Remembering
Somatic healing, somatic intelligence, and somatic reprogramming are ultimately the domains where a post-colonial future can actually emerge. Not because intellectual work doesn’t matter, but because intellectual work can only take us to the threshold. To actually cross over requires the body’s participation.
When you’re on the dance floor and you allow yourself to surrender into the innate embodied intelligence of your own body, the deep, ancient knowing that exists before and beneath your conscious mind, something profound happens. You align your sense of self, your will, your individuality with what we might call your organismic reality. Your ecological reality. The fundamental, undeniable fact of your embeddedness.
You remember that you are an animal. That you are here on a planet that orbits a star. That you must drink water and breathe air and eat food. That you have ancestors whose lives and loves and struggles are written into your very cells. That you are responsible for your relationships, not as a moral abstraction but as a material reality, because your wellbeing and everyone else’s are not actually separable.
All of this is innate to the immanent reality of your own embodied experience. You don’t have to believe it or even understand it conceptually. You feel it. Your body knows it with a certainty that the colonized mind can never quite access.
Dance becomes the meditation, the technology, the practice through which we put ourselves into that state of being. And this is why it’s ecstatic. Because to be truly alive, to be awake and in relationship with the miracle of your own existence, your breath, your heartbeat, the extraordinary fact that you can experience this vast range of sensations and emotions, this is the ground of being that philosophers speak of. It’s what we’re all seeking in every spiritual tradition, every mystical practice, every moment of genuine connection.
We have similar experiences with psychedelics and plant medicines, absolutely. These medicines can bring us to this same recognition, can dissolve the artificial boundaries between self and other, can reveal the living intelligence that flows through all things. But precisely because these medicines come from “outside” us, it’s very easy for the colonized mind to objectify them. To turn them into just another thing to consume.
This is the insidious nature of spiritual narcissism and consumer spirituality. When we haven’t done the hard, unglamorous work of actually coming home to our bodies, we remain in a fundamentally extractive relationship to anything that promises transformation. We chase the next ceremony, the next retreat, the next teacher or technique or substance that will finally fix us, finally make us whole.
But wholeness doesn’t work this way. You can’t consume your way to it. You can’t purchase it from indigenous wisdom-keepers, no matter how authentic they are or how much you pay. The longing and desire for wholeness that we once directed toward consumer objects under capitalism simply gets redirected toward the consumption of fetishized indigeneity. It’s the same pattern, the same wound, wearing different clothes.
Dance can’t be objectified in the same way. Yes, you can commodify the space, charge money for the DJ and the venue. You can dance to try and be seen with hot people in exclusive clubs. But the actual embodied practice of dancing, the surrender, the listening, the allowing your body to move you, this cannot be outsourced. It cannot be done to you or for you. The body’s intelligence belongs to you and to you alone.
And this intelligence, the one your body carries, knows things your conscious mind has forgotten or never learned. It knows how to calibrate to the nervous systems around you, how to attune and regulate through proximity and movement. It knows how to process trauma through motion, how to complete stress cycles that get stuck when we freeze or flee. It knows about boundaries and porosity, about when to extend and when to contract, about the rhythms of energy and rest.
Your body knows, in other words, how to be an animal in community with other animals. This is not metaphorical. Before we were colonized into believing ourselves to be disembodied minds trapped in meat machinery, before we were taught to override our instincts and sensations in service of productivity and private property, we knew how to let the body lead. Every indigenous culture understands this, which is why every indigenous culture has its own forms of ceremonial and communal movement.
Sacred Space for Colonized Peoples
Traditions like Ecstatic Dance, Dancing Freedom and 5Rhythms and the broader lineage of conscious dance have created a context where those of us who have been cut off from our ancestral movement practices can begin to remember. Not by appropriating someone else’s ceremonies, but by reclaiming what has always been ours: the capacity to let the body speak, to move without needing a reason or a form, to be witnessed without being evaluated. For those of us from colonized lineages, these spaces function as genuine sacred space in an era when returning to ancestral practices often feels impossibly distant or fraught with gaps we cannot bridge.
While there are many pathways back to connection with the cycles of Earth and sun, many ways to reclaim what colonization severed, creating spaces for dance offers something particular: we can practice a form of decolonization that works through our own bodies, through the universal language that exists within each of us before culture, before story, before the colonial overlay.
What makes this practice both meta-modern and neo-indigenous is precisely how it holds the paradox of individual and collective, self and field, tradition and emergence.
It is neo-indigenous because it represents a stripping away of the colonized mind, a letting go of the programming that taught us we are separate, mechanical, reducible to economic units. Dance becomes the space where we can practice that release, where we reconnect with our animal intelligence, our ancestral knowing, the embodied wisdom that colonization worked so hard to erase. We’re not appropriating someone else’s indigenous practice; we’re remembering our own indigenous nature, the one that exists beneath the colonial scar tissue.
It is meta-modern because it moves beyond both the idealized constructs of modernity and the deconstructive fragmentation of postmodernity. Meta-modernism concerns itself with emergence, with new wholes arising from parts, where each part is itself a whole. This is exactly what happens on the dance floor.
I am having my own experience when I dance. I am fully, entirely myself, perhaps more myself than in any other context. And this radical individuality is actually essential medicine for the colonized mind, because the journey of colonization involved cultivating a very particular, very constrained idea of selfhood. We learned to be individuals in service of systems, individuals defined by our economic function, individuals separate from the web of life.
But now we’ve seen what happens when we create a world based solely on that atomized self. We’ve watched it nearly destroy everything. So the work becomes taking everything we’ve learned about being a unique, sovereign individual and weaving that back into wholeness. We connect to the innate intelligence of our own bodies, our unique movement, our personal prayer, our individual emotional landscape, and yet we’re doing this in a field with other people, to a rhythm, to a beat.
When we’re dancing to music created by peers from our own cultural context rather than appropriating the ceremonial beats of other cultures, we’re able to generate something extraordinary: a field of genuine collective intelligence, collective emotion, collective energy, all while simultaneously engaging in deep personal somatic reprogramming and healing.
This is the sacred paradox these spaces hold. You are completely alone in your experience, moving through your own inner landscape, processing your own trauma and joy and grief. And you are absolutely not alone, you’re part of a living system, an emergent field of consciousness, a collective body moving together.
The More We Embody, The More We Belong
The more we dwell in our bodies, the more we feel safe there, the more we understand interbeing not as a concept but as a lived, somatic reality. When I’m dancing and I feel the bass resonating in my chest, when I notice how my gestures synchronize with the person moving beside me, when I experience the way energy flows through a room full of bodies in motion, I don’t need anyone to explain interbeing to me. I am experiencing it.
Colonization works by severing these connections, between mind and body, between human and nature, between individual and collective. The more thoroughly we can heal those severances in ourselves, the less susceptible we become to the seductions of consumer spirituality, to the bypassing that keeps us chasing external fixes while avoiding the difficult work of genuine transformation.
And make no mistake: it is difficult work. Dancing through fear and shame, meeting the parts of ourselves that we’ve buried, staying present with emotions that our culture has taught us are unacceptable, this takes courage. This takes commitment. There were so many times when I wanted to give up, when the triggers felt too intense, when it seemed easier to go back to the numb comfort of disembodiment.
But eventually, my body began to trust that I would listen. The parts that had been exiled began to return. The shame started to loosen its grip. I found I could move in ways that weren’t calculated or controlled, that came from some deeper place that knew what it was doing even when I didn’t.
Dancing to Remember We Are Earth
When we dance, we participate consciously in the aliveness of the Earth. We become the Earth dancing itself.
Through dance, we reconnect with the animal nature of our own experience. Every creature moves in ways that are specific to its form, its needs, its nature. Birds dance in the air. Whales dance in the ocean. Trees dance in the wind. We mammals dance on the earth, and our dancing is a form of knowing that predates language, that exists in the realm of sensation and rhythm and breath.
Dancing is how we reclaim our childhood innocence and the power of our adulthood simultaneously. Children dance without self-consciousness, moved by pure joy and the delight of embodiment. But as adults who have suffered and survived, who have carried weights and struggled with burdens, our dancing also carries a different quality, still innocent but now consecrated by grief.
Dancing is, quite simply, how we come home to ourselves as Life, the force that animates all beings, the mysterious impulse that yearns to create and heal and grow. When we dance, we declare our allegiance to that force. We say yes to being alive, yes to feeling everything, yes to the terrible beauty and beautiful terror of being a body on a planet in the midst of the sixth mass extinction and the collapse of the civilization that tried to tell us we were machines.
Gratitude and Elderhood
I need to be explicit here about lineage, about who taught me these things and continues to teach me. Everything I’ve shared in this essay, I learned directly or indirectly from Samantha Sweetwater. She has been my core teacher and dearest friend in the work of coming home, of understanding what it means to build cultures of wholeness.
Samantha sits in that awkward period between adulthood and elderhood but is rising into elderhood with a potency and clarity that places her in the same constellation as Ram Dass and Joanna Macy. She offers a blueprint that goes beyond techniques for dance or working with entheogens, beyond any specific practice, to something more fundamental: how to create cultures of what she calls “enlifenment” — the art of being and becoming a True Human.
This is the work of elders: not to give us answers, but to help us remember the questions we should be asking. Not to save us, but to trust us with the right frames of reference and hold space for our becoming. Samantha has done this for thousands of people, has trained dozens of teachers who carry this work into communities around the world, and has built something that will continue to ripple out long after she’s gone.
I want to profoundly thank her for being my teacher and my friend on this journey. For showing me that coming home doesn’t require appropriating anyone else’s ceremonies, that the original medicine has always been here in the body, waiting for us to remember.
Conclusion
We are living through the twilight of one epoch and the dawn of another. The old stories are crumbling. The institutions built on colonial logic are revealing their inability to address the crises they created. In this liminal space, we need guides and practices that can help us navigate not just with our minds but with our whole beings.
Dance is available to all of us, regardless of lineage or training or any other artificial barrier. Your body already knows how to do this. It’s been waiting, patient and faithful, for you to listen.
The work is to show up. To let yourself be moved. To meet what arises with compassion rather than judgment. To remember, one breath and one movement at a time, that you belong here. That you are not separate. That you are, and always have been, an integral thread in the vast, living tapestry of existence.
So dance because it is your birthright. Dance because it is how we remember. Dance because the Earth needs us to come home to our bodies so we can be good ancestors to the children who will inherit whatever world we leave them. Dance because you are alive, and being alive is the only miracle that has ever mattered.
The somatic liberation I’ve described in this essay represents just one dimension of a much vaster transformation that our moment demands.
Samantha Sweetwater’s True Human: Reimagining Ourselves At The End of Our World addresses the full spectrum of what it means to become genuinely human in a time between epochs.
If you’re someone who resonates with the work of figures like Joanna Macy, Charles Eisenstein, or Bayo Akomolafe — someone who understands that personal transformation and systemic change are inseparable — then True Human belongs in your hands.
The book releases November 28, 2024. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.
Available for pre-order or purchase here.