Ecstasy Keeps Saving Me

On women, ecstatic states and the irrepressible gift of an ancient Goddess.

Friends with the Earth, her lover I am,
and the children of Earth are mine own, mine own!
— ELEANOR HEARN SLOAN, my great grandmother

Greetings to the poetry of you, yet to be written~

When I was 19 years old, I packed a bag and traveled the United States for 18 months straight. Car-less but the happy rider in many-a-fellow-pilgrim’s ride, I didn’t plan to go that long. In fact, I didn’t plan at all. I did leave, however, with exactly three longings. If not fully conscious, nevertheless they dripped like honey from the holiest places in me:

To lose myself in the vast wilderness of the American West.

To be dismembered and remembered by music, over and over again.

To find out what it is to play as a grown woman.

I left with $300, earned through pruning the pansies and fluffing the lilacs of rich people’s gardens for a few months before setting sail. I documented the whittling down of this humble treasury by naming in my journal the amount remaining, followed by the number of miles I was from home…

$60, 3,000 miles from home.

$30, 2,700 miles from home.

Out of money, but Bones said I could ride with him and help him sell t-shirts. (Cryptic name notwithstanding, Bones was, in fact, an incredibly sweet, generous and protective friend).

I have journal entries describing a passage of a few weeks where free food boxes and dumpster diving were the only ways we ate. And then there was the epic-most humbling passage within this nearly two year soul-voyage— when two friends and I spare-changed, busked and begged our way from southern California to New Jersey because we literally had no money (or entrepreneurial offers from Bones).

I was so brave, and so stupid in the absolute best and most necessary way one must be in order to come radically alive and encounter something of your place in the world. Not that penniless, vagabond travel is the only way to do this, but embodiment of The Fool is a mythopoetic, archetypal requisite for all seekers.

At least, for boys it is.

There’s a vast, nascent permission and tolerance of boys taking leaps of faith like this, of being reckless, experimental, impulsive, even ascetic and devout in the name of pilgrimage. In the name of finding out who he really is. In the name of touching the wild, throbbing center of what it means to be human.

Not so for women.

At every stage of our lives we are told to be cautious, care-full, well-planned, selfless, poised, thoughtful and “together”. Anything but ecstatic. When women are young, we’re too naive and insecure to risk. If and when we’re mothers, it’s selfish, even reckless, for us to risk. If we choose a solitary life, it’s too dangerous to risk. And when we’re elders, it is pointless to risk and will likely lead to loved ones needing to take care of us (clutch my pearls!). Lucky for me, my parents, while nervous and concerned, never tried to stop me simply because I was a girl.

When I think of myself then, I marvel. When I remember this young woman— small frame, soft features, in a world patriarchy has made so unsafe for women— traveling with no cell phone, hardly any money, wolfish instincts and a loose plan she allowed to evolve at every turn, I’m completely in love with her. I was not unpolitical at this time, but neither did I fully appreciate what a radically subversive, feminist pilgrimage I was on. The mother-me now reading those old journals sees that I was not unafraid, but it’s clear that something deeper moved me. Something too big for fear to ever get its mouth fully around.

What was it?

The simple, noble truth is that I was hungry for the ecstatic state. I’m not referring to that little, white pill of jouissance, though entheogens did adorn many-a-night’s festive adventure those years. I’m speaking about ecstatic union as human birthright, which can be achieved through any number of wide-ranging activities that bring a human more fully alive. I wanted to come alive like never before. I especially longed to experience ecstasy as a woman, as women experience it.

I had become interested in the oppression of women at a very young age, while attending an intensely academic all-women’s high school. By 17, I was done with theory. I wanted experience. Ecstatic union called out to me, one of my first real, adult longings. Feeling back into that time, it’s like The Ecstatic— a whole mythology of eros, really— wanted to live through me, and protect me. Inspire and guide me, woman to woman.

There was a palpable feeling at that time that something ancient permeated my field. That I, and those I rolled with then, had opened ourselves to something deeply human but largely forgotten. Something magical. A whole other way of being that involved a kind of wonder-awareness of the field, one’s own heart and the next, instinctual yes, all at the same time. Something very different than well-planned control, management and disconnected ambition. Something wildly feminine. What’s more, there was this sense back then that this energy, this feeling, this way of being had the power to keep you safe. My instincts sharpened; my wherewithal grew ten-fold. All in the name of some wild joy, some chthonic knowing I’d abandoned reasonable safety to seek out and had, most emphatically, been found by.

Nothing felt more reasonable to me than what I was experiencing. This was not to be the one crazy thing I did before settling down. This was to set the tone for a lifetime of adventure. It became a liberation thesis, rooted in a heartfelt desire to heal and help heal from a cultural system which I could see, as the young so often clearly can, was insane and suffering madly from lack of joy, health, interconnectedness, care and wildness as a result. I wanted freedom, and I have never stopped wanting it. Ecstasy continues to be a doorway to freedom because it shakes up and shakes out everything that’s keeps me from my sovereignty, and sovereignty over one’s life is freedom.

Over those many months of pilgrimage, I was saved by ecstasy again and again. It would come over me the first time I beheld a Sequoia, dancing into the wee hours, tracking synchronicities on the open road, conversing with moonbeams way out on BLM land. One night, we made a fire on an empty beach. The sun set and, as if emerging from out of the darkness itself, beautiful, loving people came walking up, one after another, and we spent the whole night together playing music, dancing in the phosphorescence, eating mushrooms and sharing our secrets in no uncertain terms.

We stirred in the mist-filled dawn, everyone huddled together as if we’d known each other for centuries (we had). We stood up, blessed each other, and walked off into the literal mist, never to see each other again. It was one of the best nights of my life. It was a bejeweled chalice of spontaneous, inexplicable, goal-less, wholesome ecstasy. No numbers exchanged. No email. No Instagram handle. Just the most intimate magic, and the most faithful relinquishment of that particular, never-to-be-seen-again magic, too. It fed us, and without a doubt, fed the world.

Ecstasy came calling again a few years ago, at a volume not heard since those days. It came amidst a years-long initiation into the mystical, healing and druidic traditions of my Celtic ancestral peoples. In answering that call, I’ve let my memory wander back to those times to be taught by my young, brave but not unafraid Self. Indeed, that pilgrimage was initiatory, followed by many years of workings, woundings and wanderings in search of my medicine.

Now, I personally experience the ecstatic state through deep communion with the Otherworld and my more-than-human guides, solitude in the wilderness, ceremony and ritual, writing, poetry and teaching. I also spontaneously enjoy ecstatic union through deep conversation with delightfully subversive people, self- and together-pleasure and of course, dance. Forever, dance.

During these more recent years of deep study and radical magical practice, I’ve developed an intimate relationship with beloved Celtic goddess of ecstatic union, Brigid. Patroness of poets, artists, craftspeople and healers, she imbues the soul with the vitality that brings creative endeavors to life. It is said that in the first days of February, at the holy passage of Imbolc, she moves across the Land with her green mantle, her flame of inspiration and her sacred, life-giving waters, quickening the deep-buried seeds. She is maiden becoming mother. She is eros, kissing everything awake. She is hope that the bleak winter will, in fact, end.

Spring will not be defeated, Brigid whispers, in a tone so loving and kind, you can barely detect the fire-breathing dragon hiding just behind soft eyes.

And when she says Spring will not be defeated, she does not mean only outside your window. She means in your heart, as well. In all that your hands wish to shape into form, in all you know must be made manifest. This flame of inspiration, this divine, visionary energy that we might also call ecstatic union is known and revered by the Irish and Scots as imbas, fire in the head, and awen in Welsh.

Originally attributed to the visionary state that would overcome the Bard or Druid, the imbas is an utmost gift of being human, an essential capacity we all have to bring our visions to life. It is the life force energy and the seed itself quickening. It is what you need now, as the light lengthens, more than all your tidy plans, self-punishing deadlines, and understandable attempts to control what wants to be birthed through you.

Women, especially, must reclaim imbas, awen, ecstasy as holy.

Throughout history, women have been humiliated, harassed, committed, lobotomized, tortured and flat out murdered for experiencing and talking about ecstatic states. The Priestesses of Dionysus. St. Theresa of Avila. Joan of Arc. Jane Avril—the Moulin Rouge dancer who claimed she was cured of her “hysteria” through dancing (aka her non-negotiable need for ecstatic release). The list goes on and is heart-wrenching. How much of our procrastination, hesitancy, self-silencing, anxiety and depression as women is directly connected to staying too-long from (or never encountering) ecstatic union? How much of our art was destroyed or lost because our ecstasy is unsanctified, a threat?

The greatest lie ever told about the ecstatic state in women is that it’s a sign of insanity, hysteria and deep distress. Making conscious space for ecstatic union and talking openly about it is a sign of health, of the holy coming to life in a woman. From that holy health, I do believe anything is possible.

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All February in the Wild Becoming Sanctuary, Brigid’s season, we will be working to bring on the imbas — the divine, creative inspiration, energy, fertile structures and sacred boldness needed to craft the life we most wish to live and the gifts we most wish to give.

• Explore different kinds of ecstatic states + your personal relationship to ecstasy (in safe, slow ways).

• Co-heal with the Land where you live, body-to-body, so that our efforts to come alive also help sing the Land back to Life, as Brigid does.

• Become a Voice of the Well this year~ an ancient term for the oracular women, imbued with imbas, who once guarded sacred wells, nourishing weary travelers, counseling the people and speaking truth to power.

• Ignite a Soul Project for 2025 with the imbas, one designed to help you encounter more of your Deep Self, medicine and joy this year.

• Monthly Classes include: 2hr Live opening class, 2 self-led deepening exercises, Dreamwork Circle & Cauldron Hours to work with what’s being evoked + access to our extensive library of past classes & practices!

If you or a woman you know would love this… join us!

Deep peace of the ecstacy of living be with you~

Journal Prompt:

What most inspires you? What lights you the fk up?