Sean Ross unravels judgment and comparison over years of mindful dancing.
In a dark forest, a family of raccoons watches as a man slowly expands and breathes into his body. Conscious movement and groovy tunes help him peel away self-judgment to create space for authenticity. Eight small eyes witness this early iteration of Sean’s transformative ritual.
Now, Sean has become a regular Sunday dancer at the San Francisco church. We got to chat about his winding journey over lunch in a cozy Mission cafe. From dance-dance revolution and college clubbing to solo nature outings and ecstatic community, he’s finding his rhythm.
For the last six years, Sean has leaned into movement as a way to surrender and connect with a wise inner voice.
“I realized dance was a really powerful tool for me to reconnect with joy in the present. Getting better at dance as a form of self-expression is just a process of trusting yourself,” he shared.
He’s been creating with the ecstatic dance community for nearly two years.
“Ecstatic dance to me is like the perfect gymnasium to work out exactly the muscles that I want to grow stronger in all aspects of my life,” he said.
I first met Sean in a moment of synchronicity at Dolores Park a few months ago. “You go to ecstatic dance, right?” he said. He shared how partner dancing terrified him. I sensed how much he cares about bringing intention to each connection.
Since then, we’ve shared several beautiful dances. I enjoy witnessing his evolution process.
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AC: You said dance feels like a form of meditation. Tell me about that.
SR: My goal with meditation has been to be present and not judge my thoughts. But my mind is a noisy place, and it can be really hard. The thoughts that come to my head have a lot of pull, and before I notice, I’ve gone down some stressy thought chain for like 30 seconds.
But dance, it’s demanding moment-to-moment presence in a way that meditation doesn’t quite for me. Especially music I’ve never heard of before is my favorite to dance to. I try to capture as much of the song in my dance as possible.
I need to be in a surrendered state, letting my body move to what is coming with almost no thinking time at all. That has been a really important practice for me, and I’d been doing it about once a week for years before discovering ecstatic dance.
AC: Tell me about your dance journey. How did it start?
SR: It started like five or six years ago. I always enjoyed dancing, like up in the club or wherever there were opportunities to dance. There was a lot of self-consciousness. I felt a strong pull from the music, always asking me to surrender and express myself. But there were also external forces of fear, like looking weird or being different.
Not feeling confident in how I look would stop me from fully expressing myself.
At some point, I just danced a few times alone, somewhere private outdoors. Nature inspires me to dance a lot.
At first, there was a lot of pressure I’d experienced to not fully express myself because people will think I’m weird. Those were even present in nature; I was too shy to fully do what my body wanted. I felt judgment about how it would look, even with no one looking.
Over time, that loosened up more and more. I’d get 10% less self-conscious each time. I became more and more free that way.
AC: How did it feel to be in a group when you started going to ecstatic dance?
SR: The first time I went I was pretty in my shell. The first 10 to 15 times, it was always a very difficult place for me to be – a beautiful place but always challenging. I would see other people being so free in their dance, and I just wasn’t there yet.
I would judge myself and compare myself to them. I saw people partner dancing, and that was a whole other league of like, “No way could I touch that.” It’s horrifying.
I’d have brief moments of being lost in movement and confidence, then looking up and comparing myself.
AC: What kept you coming back?
SR: I knew the work was so crucial and clearly growing me in a way that felt appropriate. Every time I loved it more and more.
There are two muscles that I really want to get stronger at, and ecstatic dance is the perfect opportunity for both.
First, I want to believe there’s a lot of wisdom inside me buried beneath a bunch of junk. If I can listen deeply enough and trust, there’s something there that is worthy of my trust. I can let it take the reins and push fear aside. I find when I do that in life, I like how I move through the world much better. I feel like a better person in every way to myself and other people.
Ecstatic dance is just a game that so immediately and deeply rewards doing exactly that. If I try to dance and I’m in my head, judging or calculating, it’s so obvious to me. It feels very different, and how it looks is probably different.
Trust in myself sometimes feels like I am on a downward escalator a little bit. If I don’t keep pushing myself, I’m kind of sliding down and will get more in my head.
Dance is an opportunity to climb the escalator and rebuild trust in myself. I can show myself that when I trust, something in me does know how to move and act, how to integrate and play with other people. That keeps me coming back, to keep growing the muscle of self-trust.
The other muscle – kind of a solution to the comparison plaguing me in the early stages – is just deciding that me and those other people I’m comparing myself to, actually, we’re on the same team. I can celebrate their amazing dancing just as much as I would my own if I could dance like them.
I can celebrate the fact that they’re laughing and so free. I can actually become joyful from that. Once I started recognizing that, it really changed ecstatic dance for me.
What would it feel like to be happy for this person and really see them and celebrate what they’re doing and how they’re moving? It would change how I saw the beauty in their dance, from threatening to feeling so grateful. That would purify my system. I’d be suddenly excited to jump into dance from an energy of celebration as opposed to performance or competition. That was powerfully liberating.
That muscle of seeing other people and celebrating their joy is one of the most important muscles. If I can live my life constantly using that muscle and really taking joy from other people’s joy. That’s how I want to live. It really incentivizes me to bring joy into other people’s lives. I can receive joy from their joy; it becomes such a beautiful, virtuous cycle.
Ecstatic dance is a powerful place to grow that muscle.
AC: What advice do you have for beginners?
SR: My encouragement to people who are thinking about it would be two things. One, you could go in there with the goal of being the weirdest person there and getting everyone to think you’re weird. Even if you have that as an explicit intention, I doubt you’d be able to.
People are self-expressing in every manner of way. Some people are just lying down in the middle of the dance floor. One person is meditating in the middle. Other people are rolling around – all sorts of weird stuff. No one will notice you. You could stand still in the middle of the dance floor the entire time, and no one would bat an eye.
Judgment will come from yourself, not anyone else. There’s no shame in having that. Eroding self-judgment is part of the process.
Then, if it sounds really intimidating to go, make a deal with yourself. I’ll go, but if I sat there and didn’t dance the whole time, that would be totally okay. Make it more manageable. There’s a lot of value in going and watching other people. That’s what I do 20% of the time, is watch other people. I love it. Sometimes it’s my favorite part.
Being okay with the fact that we all self-judge, and that’s part of why we’re all there to work on it. We’re all in different stages of that journey.
Ecstatic dance is a place where we can support each other on that journey. I hope to see you there. Come say, “Hi” to Sean.
It’s a great community. You could or could not plug into it. Plenty of people go and are totally anonymous.
AC: What are you most looking forward to in your practice?
SR: Partner dancing has been a new edge for me. It’s been very scary and very exciting. No matter how many dances I have, I feel scared at least a little bit. My confidence will disappear very quickly while I’m dictating someone else’s experience.
I’m very hyper-aware if I feel like I’m stealing someone’s autonomy in any sort of way. That feels very alive when I partner dance. I’m dancing with this person, and their experience is being, at least in part, directed by what I’m doing.
That leads to a lot of fear. That’s part of what makes partner dancing so fun for me, is the opportunity to meet those fears head-on, not just prove to myself that they’re not well-founded. I can address those fears by having a really good dance and being like, see, I’m really good at this and that person had a great time. That’s one way to address the fear.
The more powerful way is if I have a dance that seems bad, whatever that means. Those fears grow and are like “Oh, you directed that person’s experience poorly.” That is where the real opportunity is to look at those fears and be like, that may be true, and that’s okay. Being able to do that and telling the fear, “Even if you are right, that’s okay,” is the powerful work of addressing the underlying thing.
Partner dancing for that reason is so valuable and fun and connecting with other people. So I’m really excited to dive into that more. I have no formal training whatsoever, and I’m starting to get that piece by piece. I’m going to some zouk and swing classes. I’m really excited to lean into that. I have some internal hesitance because I don’t like the structure those things impose. But I’ll figure out what works for me.
I’m looking forward to picking up more tools to bring to partner dancing and contact improv.
AC: Anything else you’d like to add?
SR: Dance can be an intimidating thing because there are people who train in it all their lives. I’d categorize dance into two forms. One is like the skill of dance or the technical dance that people train to do. Then, there’s dance as a form of art and self-expression.
When watching people do either of the two, you’re watching very different things. One is how good this person is technically and how much they’ve trained to be tight in all these movements. You get to see how much time they’ve put into it, and that can be really cool and beautiful.
But people dancing as a form of self-expression and art looks pretty different. To me, it looks even more beautiful and has nothing to do with how much training they have. It has everything to do with how much they’re giving themselves permission. That is what inspires and impresses me.
What’s beautiful is that everyone has a masterful self-expression dancer within them. Getting better at dance as a form of self-expression is just a process of trusting yourself. There’s nothing that needs to be learned. If anything, it’s unlearning all the fears that stop you from letting it out.
For anyone intimidated by all this dance stuff, you’re already an expert. You just need to listen to yourself, trust yourself, and have fun. Truly. What feels good is what is right.
What I want to see when people are dancing, is show me what feels best to your body. That’s what inspires and liberates me to do the same. We liberate each other by doing that; it’s a gift we give one another.
Don’t be intimidated. It is scary, but there’s nothing you need to learn before you can join. It’s a process of listening inward and following what feels good. Follow those little breadcrumbs and watch as you trust yourself more and more in dance and in life as a result.
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Sean’s perspectives felt so wholesome and heart-warming to me. I love witnessing others’ dance and inner journeys over time at ecstatic.
Outside of dance, Sean does data science work, enjoys being in nature, hangs out with friends, and waits a long time for his food to cool down.
Gather more dance inspiration from my previous articles:
- Heal Your Soul in Dance With 5 Rhythms
- How Ecstatic Dance Supports My Healing Journey
- How One Dance Guide Inspires My Ecstatic Journey
Photo courtesy of Sean Ross
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