Who else remembers sitting beside the radio with a blank cassette tape, hoping your song would come on? Waiting. Listening. Trying to hit record at exactly the right moment and praying the radio presenter would not start talking halfway through the intro.

The Xennial feeling

This past week I found myself reading about Xennials, the micro-generation born roughly between 1977 and 1983. I was born in 1982, right in that in-between place. Apparently, we are the generation that grew up with one foot in the analog world and one foot in the digital one.

The more I sat with it, the more it made sense. We remember cassette tapes, phone numbers by heart, getting lost without GPS, and a world where information did not arrive every second of the day. We remember life before social media, smartphones, and algorithms shaped what we see and pay attention to. And then we watched the internet, social media, smartphones, and now artificial intelligence completely reshape the world around us.

When the rules changed

Sometimes I wonder whether this is why so many people my age (almost 44 here) feel both deeply equipped and deeply disoriented by this moment in history. We learned one set of “rules”.

Many of us were taught that if we worked hard, gained experience, became skilled at something, and stayed committed, success would eventually follow. Today there are people with a few months of experience earning more than people who have spent twenty years mastering a craft. I find that confronting and fascinating at the same time. (Crazy!!)

Entire industries are being reshaped by artificial intelligence. New forms of communication are emerging almost overnight. The speed at which the world is changing forces many of us to ask questions that always mattered in the first place.

What actually creates value? And who gets to decide?

What money has been teaching me

These questions have led me into a much deeper inquiry about money.

For most of my life, money felt secondary. I wanted to follow what felt meaningful. I wanted to create, dance, write, build community, and trust the call of what felt alive. I carried stories about money that shaped me more than I realised. Money was power. Money was dirty. Money belonged to a world I did not fully want to belong to. Money was something I needed just enough of to survive, while my deeper attention went to passion, purpose, and service.

Lately those ideas have been changing. I am beginning to see money as part of life. Money belongs to relationship, exchange, movement, access, trust, and value. It shows where energy is flowing, where it is held, and where it has become stuck. It also reflects the systems we have created and inherited. Who gets access to resources. Who carries the weight. Which forms of contribution are rewarded. Which forms of care, creativity, and wisdom remain invisible.

I have always felt this. It is probably one of the reasons why I studied psychology and anthropology in the first place. I wanted to understand how people are shaped by the systems they live in. How culture enters the body. How beliefs become normal. How entire societies teach us what to value, what to fear, what to desire, and what to obey.

And still, even after all those years of studying, I am realising how deep the conditioning went.

Our relationship with money has been shaped by industrial and colonial ways of thinking. We were taught to measure, rank, extract, optimise, own, compare, and prove. We learned to assign value through systems that often lost touch with life itself. And even when we know this intellectually, it can take years to feel how much of it still lives inside us.

The strawberries

This morning, while I was picking strawberries, I found myself laughing at how strange some of our ideas about value have become.

Can you imagine strawberries telling each other that one is more valuable than another? That one deserves more sunlight, more space, more attention?

The image is ridiculous, and yet we have built entire systems around measuring, ranking, comparing, and assigning value. We have lived inside these patterns for so long that they now feel “normal”.

I see more and more people beginning to question the ideas we inherited about money, success, work, education, achievement, and what gives a life meaning.

Purpose

Purpose is another one of those words that has become surprisingly heavy. We often speak about purpose as though it has to be one grand mission capable of explaining our entire existence. Yet what I see in my own life is much more simple...

Purpose lives where our aliveness meets the world. It lives in the work that keeps calling us, the contribution that feels honest, and the gifts that want to move through us. Purpose is a relationship. It evolves as we evolve.

And this brings me back to the question that keeps following me around these days:

How do we bring wealth and purpose together?

Because I think we are hungry for this. We are hungry for wealth that serves life. We are hungry for businesses, projects, and creative work that can support families, communities, land, and a bigger dream. We are hungry for money to move from places where it is stuck into places where it can regenerate, nourish, repair, and create real value.

Unschooling ourselves

At the same time, another conversation is unfolding underneath it all. My parents genuinely believed education would prepare me for the future. And in many ways it did. I learned how to study, analyse, think critically, and navigate systems. I am grateful for some of these foundations.

Yet I have also spent so much of my life doing things that, looking back, were not important at all. And now, with the arrival of artificial intelligence combined with growing societal uncertainty, I find myself looking at a world that is changing at a speed that often feels difficult to comprehend.

My answer to this is no longer only embodiment. Embodiment remains essential. It helps us stay connected to our own hearts. But my answer is also returning to the land, returning to relationship, returning to the things that sustain life, and learning just enough skills, tools, and technologies to help us along the way.

Many indigenous cultures have spoken about times of great transition. Times when old ways begin to unravel and new possibilities emerge. Whether we interpret those teachings literally or symbolically, it is difficult to ignore that we are living through profound change.

Learning alongside my children

And then I look at my children and realise that I am learning alongside them. It feels deeply important to watch them grow up with a close relationship to the natural world, and with a way of learning that comes through direct experience. (This is also one of the reasons why we are moving to Spain.)

When I look back at my own childhood, I see how deeply many of us were taught to listen outwardly. We learned to follow instructions, comply, and fit ourselves into systems that promised certainty and success. Along the way, many of us lost touch with our own inner authority, our curiosity, and our direct relationship with life.

I feel this chapter is asking us to learn how to listen again. To question what we inherited. To develop the skills this time requires. To stay close to the body and the land while finding our way through a world that is changing quickly.

Because if there is one thing I keep returning to, it is this: the future is asking us to remember what truly matters, while taking responsibility for the direction we are creating together.

Between two worlds

And this is one of the gifts of being a Xennial. We remember the old world, and we are learning how to navigate the new one.

Somewhere between those two worlds, I feel a very important conversation emerging. A conversation about value, wealth, purpose, attention, and what kind of future we are helping to create. A conversation about where we direct our energy and what we choose to build our lives around.

As I sit with everything I have written here, it all seems to lead back to the same questions... How do we stay connected to what matters? How do we stay connected to the body, to the land, to each other, and to the deeper source of life itself while the world around us continues to change at such a rapid pace?

Perhaps that is what this moment is asking of us. Not to have all the answers, but to remember what is worth giving our attention to. To remember what is worth building our lives around. To remember what truly nourishes life.

That is what I am seeing.

What are you seeing?

Change has shaped my life in many forms.

Over the years, I changed work, homes, countries, wardrobes, communities, dreams, and relationships. I gave away large parts of what I owned more than once. I stepped out of identities that once felt certain and jumped into the abyss before knowing where I would land.

I used to be a writer and photographer, and I studied psychology and dance anthropology. Then music and dance became the centre of my life. I became a DJ, facilitator, teacher, community builder, and mother. I travelled widely and held dance floors for thousands of people.

Change and creativity have always felt alive to me.

When life became my compass

I was five when I first felt I had lost my father.

He went into psychosis and was hospitalised. When he came back home, he did not return as the same person. He stopped taking care of himself, hid his pain behind addictions, and became so medicalised that he could barely feel a thing anymore, let alone move and make the inspiring things he once loved to make.

I mean, he built us an entire house.

Even as a child, I could feel where that road was leading. I knew his self-destructive behaviour could eventually kill him. A few times, he ended up in hospital with internal bleeding. He would stop drinking, go to rehab, and then fall back into it again.

Doctors told us it was five minutes to midnight. They told us this for years.

I grew up with the awareness that I needed to stay close to him, take care of him, and that his life could end in the blink of an eye.

When he died, now more than fifteen years ago, I was given a huge gift in the middle of the letting go and the pain: “I am alive. And I choose life.” His death deepened a truth that had already been living inside me. My life was mine to live. I wanted to meet it fully. I wanted to go where I felt called, listen to my passion, and follow the experiences that made me feel awake.

Living from my heart became my inner compass.

It led me towards writing, photography, music, dance, love, motherhood, community, and the many places we have called home. It led me into the most adventurous journeys and into a life shaped by curiosity and celebration.

Choosing life, again and again

For many years, my husband and I lived in a permaculture community. Our daily lives were connected to some of the larger transitions of our time: how we grow food, share resources, create community, and restore our relationship with the earth.

Our children were born freely, without medical assistance, in our yurts there. It was such a beautiful place to ground myself. It became the base from which my DJ and dance career took off. It gave us so many gifts.

Until the land made it clear our time there was complete, and we took off again. This time, in search of a piece of land we could truly belong to. A place we could care for over time, grow with, and eventually pass on.

We have always homeschooled our children and allowed learning to grow through life herself. We have lived nomadically and questioned many of the structures presented to us as inevitable. We have chosen the path of our heart’s calling again and again.

And now we are preparing to return to the land. We have found our new home. Or did our new home find us? I will definitely share more about that in my upcoming writings.

We are moving to Asturias with the dream of building a regenerative home. We want to care for soil, water, trees, animals, and a place that can hold our family over time. We want our children to know the seasons through direct experience and to grow a deeper relationship with the interconnectedness of life.

This chapter feels connected to everything that came before, while carrying a different movement. Because I have known how to leave. I have known how to begin again. I have known how to release belongings, change direction, and step into the unknown.

Now I want to root more deeply.

A different kind of movement

I want to care for a piece of land long enough to witness her transformation. I want to plant trees knowing that their fullest years may come much later. I want to create a home through attention, repetition, and relationship. I want to build work that can deepen over time and support the life growing around it.

And as I prepare for this new chapter, I can also see the conditioning that travelled with me through every alternative route I chose. I learned to work hard. I learned to stay busy. I learned to measure success through output and progress. I gathered roles and responsibilities. I kept learning, making, organising, guiding, and creating.

I climbed ladders inside worlds that did not look like traditional careers. But there are also ladders in the arts. There are ladders in spiritual communities and alternative movements. There are ladders built from recognition, impact, service, visibility, and the need to become more.

The rat race is so deeply ingrained in our systems. And I feel grateful to finally meet it face to face and say to my inner child: it is okay. You are worthy, even when you do not know.

I inherited a deep feeling that I should always be doing more. And here is the irony: when you care deeply about your work, passion can fill your entire life before you even notice. Meaningful work can still pull you into the same patterns of pressure and exhaustion.

Letting money become part of the vision

For most of my life, I gave very little thought to money. I followed my passion and trusted that the next step would reveal herself. I made art, built gatherings, created communities, and said yes to what felt alive.

And this way of living gave me an extraordinary and rich life.

It also left money floating somewhere outside the deeper vision, as though caring about it would make the work less pure.

Now my dreams are becoming too large for this old way of living.

I want to care for land. I want to build a regenerative home. I want to create artistic and educational projects with real depth and reach. I want to collaborate with people and pay them well. I want to have the capacity to support ideas that serve life.

And yes, these dreams need resources. I can see now that money is part of the regeneration. It restores soil, creates time, supports families, funds art, pays for care, and gives meaningful projects the stability to grow.

So my challenge for the upcoming time is this: I want to understand how to create and hold money without returning to the rhythm of overwork. I want to build structures that allow energy to circulate and replenish. I want my work to support the land, my family, and the larger projects I feel called to bring into the world.

I am learning to imagine work and money in the same way: as structures that can nourish life over time. Just like roots, both can draw in nourishment, feed what is growing, and make new growth possible.I inherited a deep feeling that I should always be doing more. And here is the irony: when you care deeply about your work, passion can fill your entire life before you even notice. Meaningful work can still pull you into overwork.

Falling in love with this phase

I turn 44 this summer, and once again, so much is changing. We just sold our family home. I am selling lots of my old clothes again, while purchasing a few new ones that feel like the new me. We are moving countries this summer. My work is changing shape. My relationship with music is evolving. (And luckily, these days, I find it funny that, as a DJ, I can no longer be in loud spaces for too long.)

My children are growing. A new life is waiting for us. And I am starting to fall in love with this new phase, even though it also means I have no clue. I do not know where it is leading.

But do we ever? We are all simply figuring it out.

Rooted in what comes next

Living fully now also means caring for what takes time. It means building a future for the next seven generations. It means listening to the land. Taking my time. Slowing down.

At 44, I can feel how every season I have already lived has been preparing me for this.

A return to the earth. A deeper relationship with money, work, and care. A home that can hold the size of our dream. And a life rooted deeply enough to nourish what comes next.

This is my midlife reinvention. Or perhaps midlife is reinventing me (lol). And as my inner guidance reminded me, I am simply learning how to listen within the listening.

I have no map for what is to come. I only know that I am alive. And I choose life.

Following my heart is only the beginning. Now, the question becomes: what is it all for?

My dreams have grown beyond my individual journey…

How do I create a life that can support not only my dreams, but also my family, the land I care for, the work I feel called to bring into the world, and the generations that will come after us?

What does enough really mean?

What am I building with the precious years I have been given?

How do I create prosperity without sacrificing presence?

What wants to grow through me if I stop rushing and start listening more deeply?

And what kind of ancestor do I hope to become?

These are the questions I find myself living into now. Perhaps they are questions you are meeting too. If so, I’d love for us to explore them together.

Thank you for being here.

𖦹 𖥧 𓆸

A few nights ago, I woke up with these words:

“In between laughter, that’s where you find your friends.”

People have been asking what my work - and my current offering of PULSE - is really about. And honestly, it has taken me some time to understand how to explain it myself. I often find it easier to write poetry, make music, or create an experience than to describe what I do in a few clear sentences.

Perhaps you recognise this.

❀

So I am starting here.

In between laughter, that’s where you find your friends.

Over time, I have learned to listen to what people reflect back to me. Through their words, I begin to see the ripples of my presence more clearly.

People often tell me that I find the right words at the right moment. They speak about the medicine of my musical and poetic journeys, and about what happens when I use my voice.

It helps me understand that much of my work is about creating spaces where we can listen within and remember who we are.

At the heart of it lives something very simple:

Play as prayer.

My seven-year-old son draws every day. He can spend hours refining his craft, completely absorbed in what he is making. He draws because something inside him wants to draw. His creativity still belongs to him.

That inner sense of authority and autonomy feels more important to me than ever.

Life can become loud. So many responsibilities. The world constantly asks for our attention, and it can become easy to lose contact with the part of us that knows what feels alive.

Still, there is always somewhere we can return to. A sound. A movement. A blank page. A moment of laughter. A circle.

In between laughter, that’s where you find your friends.

Thank you so much for being here.

With warmth,

Caroline

𖦹 𖥧 𓆸

→ Join Pulse here
→ Listen and watch on YouTube

The moment I heard Lizzie speaking these words, I was being reminded - once more - of what is truly essential to me. The dance has never been merely about music or movement anyhow. Dance literally saved my life. It became the place where I go to move through different pieces of my life - where I can dive deeper into my emotional landscapes such as my own intensity, messiness, grief, joy, anger and uncertainty. Because we are “more together than alone,” as Mark Nepo so poignantly says.

Over the years many people have asked me what it means to read a room as a DJ. Often the answer is framed as a technical skill: watch the dance floor closely, notice when energy drops, bring a stronger track, increase the tempo, push the room back into motion.

But for me, reading a room begins somewhere far deeper.

Photo by Harry Oak

Entering the field of a room

When I arrive at a dance, I first tune into the space itself. The people in the room form only one part of what shapes the dance. Every gathering carries a much larger field. The organizer brings a certain intention. Every community has its own story. Every room a unique atmosphere. Even the sound system shapes how the music lands in our bodies. And then of course, the earth herself - the animals, the plants, all our relations - the deepest holders of it all.

People arrive with their own emotional landscapes. Some step in excited. Others bring grief, exhaustion, tenderness, or uncertainty. We also carry the rhythm of the day with us: the conversations we had, the tasks we completed, the thoughts still circling through our minds. A full moon night carries a different atmosphere than an ordinary weekday. Dancing outdoors shifts the whole experience. A storm changes how we feel. News travels through our bodies long before we speak about it.

All of these energies are already present in the room before the first track begins.

When I begin a set, my intention is to meet the dancers exactly where they are. From this meeting point the music begins to flow. When people feel at ease in a space, their bodies soften. They can begin to move more freely again. Because when we gather, dance becomes an ongoing exchange. A field of co-creation.

The dancers shape the music just as much as the music shapes the dancers. Each movement, each breath, each moment of courage or vulnerability feeds back into the field. Slowly the room begins to weave itself together.

Ecstasy moving through us

Ecstasy moves through us, but has nothing to do with intensity.

Our nervous system needs to feel safe before we can actually open up to life - or to any experience at all. This also means that we cannot learn anything when we feel unsafe or in a state of anxiety.

It is quite obvious when you observe a dance floor: once people begin to relax into the space, their movement also begins to look different. When people recognize or feel comfortable with the music being played, they also more easily feel safe and seen. And of course, each culture responds differently to certain sounds, rhythms, and melodies.

So once people feel at ease, the energy in the room can start to ground, rise, soften, gather again, or expand in unexpected directions. Like mycelium underneath, dancers also start to give each other information. People’s heartbeats start to align. And there are many scientific reasons why we now know that simply gathering with people from a place of relaxation gives us many good feelings.

Sometimes the room grows into a powerful shared field. Dancers sense that they move as one organism, breathing and shifting together. At other times the dance remains quiet, inward, intimate. People travel through their own landscapes inside the music. Or through all the layers in between.

Every form of dancing holds its own depth and wisdom - and its own magic.

For me the essential orientation has always remained the same. I stay in service of the co-creative process that unfolds between the dancers, the music, and my own listening. I often think of it as placing our dancing prayers in the center of the room and letting everyone move around them, the way people once gathered and moved around the fire.

Movement on the dance floor

Reading a room also involves paying attention to what visibly unfolds.

For instance, sometimes a large group of dancers starts to move toward the edges of the space. Many DJs interpret this moment as a loss of energy and immediately try to correct it by pushing the music into higher intensity. But our bodies often ask for something different.

A dance floor naturally disperses and gathers again. Energy spreads outward and later returns toward the center. These quieter phases actually allow the dancers to integrate their experiences. They create room for grief, reflection, tenderness, and depth.

In recent months quite a few people have written to me about their experiences on dance floors. Several described how difficult it feels to stay present when intensity rises too quickly — when the music climbs higher and higher while they clearly need space to breathe.

Another example: sometimes people sit at the sides, not moving a lot. But then at the end they come up to me and tell me they went on a huge internal journey. Moving through old ancestral wounds, meeting a voice inside that tells them they can trust, receiving visions of where to go next, and so much more.

These messages made me reflect again on the wider culture that shapes ecstatic dance.

A culture that keeps accelerating

Our broader culture constantly pushes toward stronger stimulation. Faster peaks. Brighter signals. Higher emotional waves. When energy drops we often feel compelled to lift it immediately. When silence appears we rush to fill it.

This rhythm of acceleration has also entered the dance floor. Even dancers now expect the dance to continuously climb upward. Asking for louder music, faster transitions, and more dramatic peaks.

But have you ever truly taken time to observe nature? We belong to her. Nothing in nature moves in straight lines toward greater intensity. After winter must come spring. After summer must come autumn. Without these rhythms, life could not sustain itself.

When a dance floor allows rhythms of expansion and contraction, gathering and dispersing in waves of activation and rest, you will immediately feel it in the atmosphere. It gives people the space to listen more carefully to their own bodies. And deeper layers of emotion and awareness can start to emerge.

The dance floor begins to breathe again.

Learning to read a room

For many years I believed my ability to read rooms came mainly from professional experience.

Later I recognized a deeper layer.

Since childhood my nervous system learned to scan environments carefully. I watched people closely. I sensed subtle changes in mood - and even potential dangers. My body tried to understand what was happening in the room before anyone spoke about it. In many ways this sensitivity developed as a survival skill.

Over time my sensitivity naturally found her way into my work.

But learning to DJ also taught me something important. If I focus only on others while reading a room, I lose my own center. My awareness moves outward and my body begins to adapt and please instead of listening.

The deeper art for me lies in staying connected to my own inner ground while sensing the field of the room. Listening to what unfolds among the dancers while remaining faithful to the thread of music that moves through me.

The real practice happens when these two streams meet.

And of course, this practice extends far beyond DJing. It brings me into the creative flow of life.

The dance floor mirrors life

In many ways the dance floor mirrors the larger challenge of living in the world today. Many people are constantly scaning their environments: trying to adapt, trying to belong, trying to remain safe within complex social fields.

But life asks more of us than endless adaptation.

We are being asked to remain connected to our own center while staying in relationship with others. To listen carefully to the collective field without abandoning the truth of what moves within us.

The dance floor becomes a place of rehearsal for how we maneuver through the world. A place where we practice how to move through intensity without losing ourselves. How to stay present with joy, grief, stillness, and connection at the same time.

We do not simply dance for ecstasy. We dance for life!

For many years I danced for life. But there was also a layer that I discovered underneath it all. I realized I do not need to be a savior. Because life also dances with me, for me, and through me.

So now I find myself dancing through life.

Because the dance is everywhere - in the small moments with my kids, in the spaces between conversations, and in the way I move with the changing rhythms of life.

And somewhere along the way I fell deeply in love with life. As I began to see that the dance floor was never separate from life.

Continuing the exploration

In recent months I have been writing more about these deeper layers of dance culture. A previous article explored how the nervous system shapes what happens on a dance floor. The next reflection will look at what I call beat culture and how our relationship with rhythm and intensity continues to evolve.

For those who feel called to explore these questions more deeply in practice, Léon Beckx and I also work with these themes inside the Conscious Dance DJ Training, where music, awareness, and collective fields meet in the living laboratory of the dance floor.

Because life is our dance floor.
And what a miracle it is to be part of it.

“Oh yes, we know why we have come -
to weave a web of creation,
of storytelling, of sacred truth.”
(Caroline S’Jegers)

Before the dance floor became my workplace, it was my research field.

For many years, I traveled and studied the healing power of dance across cultures, moving between places and practices, listening closely to how movement was used in ceremonies, in grief, in celebration, and in everyday life.

I followed dance into temples, villages, studios, stages, festivals, classes, workshops, and even oceans. From huge gatherings of one million people (happened to me one time, while performing in India with a group of trained classical dancers) to sweaty, packed club nights and small, intimate events. My path eventually led me to graduate as a dance anthropologist, yet more importantly, it taught me how deeply movement is woven into our culture.

Pioneering new movements

Over the past decades of my life, I have served as a catalyst for heart-opening movement. What began in a small room with only a handful of dancers gradually unfolded into an international community, carried by many hands and hearts, touching thousands of lives across continents. And along the way, I became the first female Ecstatic Dance DJ in Europe.

Years of DJing and leading ceremonies on ecstatic and conscious dance floors around the world have shaped what I share here. Along the way, I learned to feel - in my own body - the different intentions co-existing on the same floor at the same time. And the longer I observed, the more I began to recognise patterns. Belief systems. Cultural storytelling. Trends.

It feels vulnerable to speak so directly. For many years, I let my music and poetry express what was alive inside me. Yet in a time marked by division and rapid cultural shifts, I feel called to step forward in new ways. To share my side of the story.

Mycelium and the shaping of culture

I am not sure whether you have ever given it much thought, but the culture we live in is shapeable. It is not fixed. Of course, shaping can be an unconscious, slow and deep process that unfolds over generations. It can also be influenced very deliberately.

When we look at the trees and the underground mycelium, we see that everything exists in constant relationship. Trees feed and communicate deep in the earth, exchanging nutrients and signals through invisible threads.

And we are part of this same web of exchange. Culture circulates through stories, rituals, habits, and repeated gestures until both the unspoken and spoken codes begin to feel natural, timeless, even sacred.

Cultures have never existed in isolation. They have always been in exchange with one another. Through migration, trade, colonisation, translation, imitation, resistance. New influences are constantly entering the field. What we call “one culture” is always already a weaving of many threads.

We can see this clearly in the history of Indian classical dance. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, under British colonial rule, many temple dances such as Bharatanatyam were labelled immoral and pushed aside.

At the same time, Indian reformers and nationalists reshaped these dances with intention. They changed staging, costume, and context. They reframed the narrative. Instead of being seen as sensual temple ritual, the dances were presented as spiritual, refined expressions of national heritage.

What had been marginalised was repositioned as classical tradition and as a symbol of identity. Over time, this new framing settled into the Indian culture. When I travelled through India, almost every tourist I met had seen one of these “ancient traditional” performances.

The shaping of culture thus does not happen accidentally. And the same mechanisms are at work on the dance floor.

Culture on the dance floor

Dance floors are temporary micro-societies. Even though dancers gather for only a few hours or days, community values form quickly, like a sudden village. You can feel it as soon as you enter a room.

How do people arrive? Do they rush in or pause to land? Who takes the centre? Who stays near the edges? Is subtle movement seen, or only intensity? Within minutes, an unwritten choreography begins to shape the space.

And this brings me to the two questions I am reflecting on in my upcoming writings:

Which movements are we feeding through our actions? And how are our individual choices, over time, shaping the collective field?

Healing power of dance

Dance quite literally saved my life.

To me, dancing means giving expression to the stories and experiences that live inside me. Some of them have been stored for years - blocked parts of my expression that never found a way out. When you look at animals, they shake off tension immediately after being chased by a predator. Their bodies complete the cycle. We, as humans, often interrupt that process and hold the tension inside.

And so the dance becomes a place where the body can finish what it once had to stop. A place where we can shake what our mothers gave us, where the breath deepens, and where what became frozen begins to move again. Dancing is a direct gateway into a state that feels both spacious and deeply embodied. I am here. Fully here. And at the same time, wider than the version of myself I thought I had to be.

However, I didn’t grow up wanting to have a body. Oh, how I blamed myself. How I felt shame and doubt concerning my looks, my sensitivity, the ways in which my body did not fit into the mould I thought I had to meet. I tried to manage her. Control her. Improve her. Silence her.

But my body kept doing her work.

She kept speaking through sensation, through fatigue, through desire, through resistance. Step by step, I literally moved my way with and through the old stories that kept me from loving myself. Breath by breath, I danced with the pain of my own traumas and the collective pain. Suppression. Oppression. Rage. Abuse. And also joy. Bliss. Love. Abundance. Celebration. Connection. Truth.

Through studying dance anthropologically, I began to see that my story was not only personal. Across cultures and across time, dance has been a way to come home to the body. To restore connection. To metabolise grief. To mark transitions. To remember that we are not separate, but part of the larger web of life.

And this is why dance - and any form of art - is so powerful. Because it can bring us back into the places we most often avoid. Our bodies. Our feelings. The truth that lives inside of us. In my writing Dance Back to the Land, I share a piece of my own healing journey with dance - how I rediscovered my passion and found my tribe after the passing of my father.

My muse once told me: “Notice the details, and then you will see the bigger picture.” In our most intimate stories, we often find the collective ones mirrored back to us. So let us return to what lives at the centre of this writing: how dance and ecstasy shape us - and how we are constantly co-creating culture through our actions and choices.

Ecstasy is shaped by culture

Ecstasy is often spoken about as if it were a universal experience. And while the capacity for ecstatic states is human and widespread, the way ecstasy is valued is always culturally shaped.

“This passion
This moment
This breath”

The word ecstasy comes from the Greek ekstasis, meaning “to stand outside oneself.” How ecstasy is understood has developed over time and across cultures, and it appears very differently depending on context. What matters centrally - what I keep returning to - is that ecstasy names a shift in perception in which familiar boundaries soften and experience moves toward wholeness.

Our experience of ecstasy throughout history has taken many forms, some of which unsettle us today because they do not align with modern ideals of rationality and individuation. In his recent Substack piece on the dancing plagues - my colleague from Conscious Dance Academy (formerly Heart of the Dance) - Léon Beckx traces how, in medieval Europe, entire communities moved together for days or even weeks in ways that deeply puzzled later chroniclers. Within their own cultural frame, these collective movements were not understood as individual pathology. They were embedded in ritual life and interpreted as embodied states of shared experience, emerging at moments of social pressure.

Most people come to the ecstatic dance floor because they long to belong. To break out of what blocks them. To feel themselves again. When we feel like we are welcome, we begin to sense the field we are moving in together. We become less occupied with how we appear and more aware of how we are connected.

Dance has always been related to the beat of the drum, attuning the rhythm of our hearts to the pulse of the earth.

Even though many of us have come to believe that ecstasy lives in the highs or in peak experiences - and this can certainly be one way, especially in the short term - I have come to recognise different patterns when I observe the dance floor, and life itself, over a longer period of time…

Belonging and the nervous system

Ecstasy might arise when dopamine surges through the system. It influences brain waves, creates flow states, sharpens attention, and heightens sensation. And yes, there are many benefits to dance.

At the same time, in nervous system language, when the dance becomes a place to escape what we do not want to feel, we begin to project our inner feelings of not-enoughness onto whatever comes our way. In these moments, dance can become overwhelming rather than integrating.

“This heartbeat
This movement
This sweat”

In my own experience, ecstasy lives in presence. It arises when dancers are able to sink into the here and now. Easier said than done, I know. And yet this capacity is part of our natural state. Ecstasy lives in small experiences. It lives in the somatic intelligence of our body when we give ourselves the permission to move in a way that feels natural to us.

When I watch my own children, I see how naturally they belong to the world around them. Their bodies respond to wind, to mud, to rain, to music, to the beauty of life. They crouch down to study an insect as if it were the most important meeting of the day. They run, roll, balance on stones, hum to themselves while building small universes out of sticks and sand. There is no effort in their connection. It is immediate.

In these early years, children live predominantly in theta brainwaves - a slower, imaginal state of consciousness. It is a field of deep receptivity where imagination and reality intertwine, where learning happens through absorption. The world is porous. The body listens and responds.

Movement rises from curiosity and wonder. And this wisdom lies inside all of us. Watching my children, I remember that this state is not lost to us. It still hums underneath our everyday movement, waiting for our attention.

At the same time, I also have come to realize how boredom can become a catalyst for creativity. A stick becomes a sword, a boat, a story. A quiet afternoon becomes a story full of adventures. Imagination rises from the empty spaces.

Translated to the dance floor, when we allow moments of simplicity, spaceousness, and silence, our own authentic voice can become visible again.

In the coming writings, I will explore what being a woman and a mother in our current Western patriarchal society has given me, and where it has constrained me. How it has deepened my work, and how it has, at times, narrowed my voice. I will look at how these dynamics show up on the dance floor itself, and share my vision for where we can go. I believe feminine wisdom is essential in the healing of our world.

But first, I want to begin at the root: with the freebirth of my two sons, and how those experiences are intimately woven into dance, into leadership, and into how we shape our world.

Freebirthing the dance

Freebirthing my sons was my deepest initiation into embodied authority. It taught me to trust the intelligence of my body, to stand inside my own knowing, and to move without external permission. The way we birth our children shapes how we birth everything else: dance, community, culture.

When I am DJing, I let the music move through my body in order to truly know a song. I cannot understand it with my mind alone. I feel where it lands - in my chest, in my belly, in my breath. When I embody the music, dancers sense it. When I am disconnected, they sense that too. And when the floor loses presence, I feel it immediately.

The dance floor becomes a lively field of interconnection - something people sometimes call “quantum,” because everything affects everything. As a DJ, I am constantly listening - to the room, to the subtle shifts in energy, to what wants to emerge next - while also guiding the arc of the journey. It is mutual. I need the dancers’ presence as much as they need mine. We are all in service of the dance. When this common sense of reciprocity is alive, it becomes a shared experience. When it is not, it turns into performance.

Yet I notice how easily dance floors can slip into entertainment. Into the pressure to deliver intensity, to keep the energy high, to avoid the silent moments. I have seen this tendency on club dance floors, and I see it increasingly these days on ecstatic and conscious dance floors. At a certain point, organizers started asking me to play at least two peaks. And many dancers arrive with the expectation that someone else will provide what feels missing inside themselves.

I have chosen not to live up to those standards, and I have felt the tension that followed. It meant stepping away from certain dance floors, speaking out, and not always being invited back. We all know these moments - when something no longer aligns with our deeper, soulful nature, and we are asked to choose between belonging and purpose. Staying true often comes with a cost. And I have come to understand that just beneath the pain is where the gold lies.

I will share more in upcoming writings about what it means to find a deeper kind of peace in our lives - the kind that does not come from fitting in, but from standing gently inside our own truth.

And at the end of a dance, when someone comes up to me and says, “I was finally able to feel again,” I know I have done my work.

Letting the dance breathe again

For I strongly believe that it is time to let the dance be set free again. Free from the need to perform. Free from the expectation that it must always build, always peak, always impress. When dance becomes another product to deliver, we lose a huge part of her power.

If we dare to loosen our grip - as DJs, as dancers, as organisers - we can become co-creators of a new dance. A dance that trusts its own timing. A dance that allows silence. A dance that does not chase ecstasy but creates the conditions in which it can arise naturally. From here, we can birth a culture rooted in presence rather than stimulation.

I often think of our experiences on the dance floor - and in life - like midwifery. A midwife does not force a birth. She listens. She senses timing. In fact, when a woman giving birth trusts her own body, a midwife simply needs to be present and hold space so the woman can fully dive within. She offers what is needed when it is needed, creates safety, and trusts the intelligence of life already unfolding.

I gave birth to my sons in complete freedom, without intervention. When I gave myself full time and space to listen within, ecstasy took over. I experienced a pain-free birth in the moments I was able to fully surrender.

Continuum of ecstasy

All of us are carriers of life force. As a DJ, I can offer my artistry. I can widen or soften the arc. But I cannot make the dance happen. My role is to listen closely and support what is already moving, to protect the space. And it is the role of the dancers to sink deeper into their own willingness to show up with whatever is alive. In this moment of shared trust and truth, ecstasy finds room to arrive.

Just as a forest is healthiest when biodiversity is preserved, a conscious dance journey asks for a multitude of elements. I have come to call this a Continuum of Ecstasy - a whole made of many parts.

This continuum includes the emotional range of the room, the pacing of intensity and rest, the courage to move slowly, the willingness to soften, the way light falls into the space, the agreements we hold, and the trust between dancers. It includes how authority circulates, how the feminine is respected, and how people are welcomed at the edges.

What shapes the dance

Presence is essential. Yet presence alone is not enough. What shapes the journey is the quality of relationship - between DJ and dancer, between dancer and dancer, between the visible and the invisible currents moving through the room.

Across cultures, ecstasy has not belonged (only) to peak experience. It has lived in prayer, in repetitive work, in communal song, in mourning, in devotion. In the Sufi tradition, poetry and song were ecstatic love letters to the divine, sung as holy transmission.

Ecstasy was woven into daily life. It appeared while grinding grain, tending animals, walking long distances, rocking a child to sleep, or sitting together at dusk. It did not require a stage.

Even though much of the sacred has been pushed to the margins of contemporary life, the essence of who we are lives in our nervous systems and in the way we can truly meet each other when we actually feel witnessed in our human messiness. And this brings me to the heart of the matter…

Heartbeat and rhythm

“Because the heart dwells in unattended dark, we often forget its sublime sensitivity to everything that is happening to us. Without our ever noticing, the heart absorbs the joy of things and also their pain and care. When you allow your heart to speak, the burdens it carries diminish, a new lightness enters your body and relief floods the heart.”
- John O’Donohue

I remember hearing the heartbeat of my oldest son for the very first time, while he was growing inside my womb. It was a moment of deep wonder - the realisation that from our earliest beginnings as a foetus, and all the way to the end of our lives, we live in constant relationship with rhythm and the beating of our hearts.

Across many traditions, rhythm is carried by the drum. The drum echoes the heartbeat - the first rhythm we ever knew, while still in our mother’s womb. When people gather in one space and move together, hearts begin to synchronise. Breath starts to align. The rhythm of the music influences the rhythm of the body.

In a world that often feels fragmented and overstimulating, a steady beat can create coherence and predictability. The vagus nerve, for instance - the long nerve that connects our face, throat, heart, lungs, and gut - responds directly to tone and vibration. In PART II, I will dive deeper into beat culture, because the question is not whether beats are good or bad. The question is how we relate to them.

Do we use rhythm to come home to ourselves, or to override what is alive inside us?

This is where the deeper work begins.

Sometimes people tell me that my poems influence the atmosphere on the dance floor. And they do. Of course they do. Sound is never neutral. Music and words are vibration. The way someone has played an instrument and recorded it influences the space. The intention behind the creation of a song. The instrument being used. The material it is made of. Our surroundings shape us beyond what we consciously register.

Our ears are directly linked to this system of regulation. They are not only organs of hearing; they are part of our balance system. They orient us in space. They anticipate what might come next. What we know shapes how we listen. And how we listen shapes how our bodies prepare to respond.

So then we can ask ourselves: if rhythm influences the heart, and the heart shapes how we move, then every choice made in that space - every transition, every silence, every build, every intention - feeds the quality of the collective nervous system. Repetition wires expectation. Expectation wires our actions. And over time, our choices and actions become the culture we inhabit.

Dance as reflection on life

The dance floor is not separate from society. It is a reflection of it.

After many years of DJing, I have come to see how unique every expression is. When we put all the ideas to the side, what stays alive? Of course, we all have our own preferences and we each bring our own medicine. Some dancers come to life the moment I drop a house or techno track. Others only step forward when I play classical music. Some light up when I weave poetry through the set. Others pull back, because words draw them into their heads.

But what lies underneath it all?

We each arrive with our habits. With familiar doorways into the dance. Patterns that feel safe. Movements that protect us. Rhythms that awaken us.

And when we step onto the dance floor, we step into a field of co-creation. Our choices do not exist in isolation. The way we take space affects others. The way we listen shifts the room. The way we move ripples outward.

If we are willing to look closely, we begin to see that the dance floor magnifies what already lives inside us. It becomes a mirror. A place to witness how we relate to power. How we handle consent. How we take space. How we withdraw. How we hide. And how we find belonging.

Freedom meets responsibility

As I have shared before, the dance floor is a micro version of culture, a sudden village, a community that we build together.

It is powerful to witness what unfolds there. People find their loved ones - I met my husband on the dance floor, and we are now almost ten years together. People grieve together. They hold each other through heartbreak. Long-lasting friendships are born. Business partnerships begin. What starts as a shared rhythm often becomes a shared life.

I have seen people arrive alone and leave with a tribe. I have watched strangers become witnesses to each other’s most vulnerable moments. I have seen conflicts arise and soften, tears turn into laughter, silence deepen into trust.

The dance floor compresses time. In a few hours, it can reveal the architecture of relationship - how we approach, how we withdraw, how we offer support, how we ask for it. It shows us who we are when we are seen, and who we are when we dare to see others.

At the same time, dance communities create their own ecosystems. Their own language. Their own codes of conduct. Their own unspoken agreements about what is acceptable, what is celebrated, and what is avoided.

What feels liberating inside the dance does not automatically integrate into daily life. Consent and embodied awareness require conscious practice both on and beyond the floor. What happens on the dance floor magnifies what already lives inside us. If we are not attentive, it can become a place where unconscious patterns continue, simply carried by a different soundtrack.

This is why all of this matters.

On the dance floor, integration is key. It can become a rehearsal space for inclusion. A place where freedom meets responsibility. Where our desire for ecstasy walks hand in hand with awareness. We can leave a powerful impact when our care is grounded in the whole - when we move in ways that honour not only our own experience, but the field we are part of.

The dance floor has a nervous system

And this brings me back to where we began. If I look at everything I have shared so far, it comes down to this:

Dance is more than expression. It is culture practised through the body. The dance floor is a field in which values are embodied, reinforced, and eventually: rewritten.

Ecstasy can deepen us or distract us. It can integrate what is alive or intensify what remains unresolved.

Culture does not exist somewhere outside of us. It takes form through repetition, through storytelling, through what we reward and what we tolerate.

So as we return to the question: Which movements are we feeding through our actions? And how are our individual choices, over time, shaping the collective field?

Well… the quality of our presence matters. The choices we repeat matter. What we offer to the dance floor does not disappear when the music stops.

The dance floor has a nervous system. It makes our learned patterns visible. We see how power circulates, how belonging is granted or withheld, how intensity is handled, how silence is respected or avoided. And if we are honest, we recognise these same movements in daily life.

We shape the dance, and the dance shapes us in return.
We shape life, and life shapes us in return.

And over time, these small movements become the world we create together.

Over the coming months, I will be sharing more exploring what years of listening on dance floors have taught me about ecstasy, cancel culture, colonialism & capitalism (and the importance of ‘unschooling’), beat-driven spaces, feminine leadership, and the responsibility we carry in shaping collective fields.

Some of the topics I will be sharing about:

Ecstasy, culture and the body: How dance floors become living micro-societies, how dance is a reflection of life, and how culture is shaped through the body.

Beat culture and the loss of the sacred: How stress, economics, projection, and nervous-system activation influence contemporary dance spaces - and what reclaiming the sacred might ask of us.

Peace culture and the return of responsibility: How authority, projection, and cancel culture show up on the dance floor, and how listening becomes a form of leadership.

Curious about your thoughts on this. Feel free to leave a comment!

Even in rest, I catch myself slowing down with intention, relaxing with awareness, letting go in a focused way. There is still a subtle movement inside that wants to do it properly, to get it right. (Sounds familiar?)

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.” (Rumi)

On being “flink”

In Dutch we have the word flink. It means capable, strong, well-behaved. And I notice what it asks of a body. How much we try to box ourselves in because we are wired with a deep social need to belong and be nurtured - and belonging, at its core, is simply our way to survive.

Especially as a mother, I see the strong ideas we hold about the way our children should behave. A toddler who doesn’t want to give a goodbye kiss. A child who doesn’t say thank you in the exact tone we expect. A teenager who doesn’t feel like making small talk with visiting relatives. Immediately there is tension in the room. A raised eyebrow. A whisper: “Come on, be flink.” And when they don’t comply, we as adults feel impelled to comment. To explain. To correct. To shape them into the constructions we were framed into ourselves.

And it doesn’t stop with children.

At work, being flink means saying yes when your body says no. Finishing the task even when you are exhausted. Smiling in meetings. Staying composed when something feels unfair. In friendships, it can mean listening endlessly while not naming your own limits. In relationships, it can mean keeping the peace instead of speaking the truth. On social media, it looks like being strong, balanced, grateful, while privately holding overwhelm.

So it becomes so clear to me how we are trained into being in control. Being flink is rewarded. It brings approval, safety, recognition, and most importantly: love. The teacher praises the quiet child. The employer promotes the reliable one. The family calls you mature because you “handle things so well.” So we adapt. We become easy, reliable, strong, joyful, happy. At least, that’s how it looks on the outside.

I recognise this as a deep good girl / good boy pattern. A way of learning how to be acceptable. How to not disturb. How to fit into what is expected of us. And when we dive beyond the superficial behavior, we start to see what is happening on a deeper level. The tight jaw when you swallow your words. The shallow breath when you try not to cry. The constant scanning of the room to see if everyone is okay. How much of our so-called stability is actually regulation. How much energy goes into “doing it right” or “not being too much.”

I’m curious if you recognise this in yourself too. The moment you say “it’s fine” while your stomach contracts. The automatic smile. The quick apology for taking up space.

I also feel how much of this is shaped and reinforced by culture. Schools reward sitting still and performing. Families praise the child who makes life easier. Workplaces benefit from employees who regulate themselves and rarely question. Spiritual spaces admire calmness and composure over honest emotion. So the pattern keeps repeating itself, generation after generation.

Until we start making an active choice to rewrite our stories…

Already Worthy

And this is where I keep landing, again and again: the remembering of who we already are - underneath it all.

Because we are human beings, messy and real. We laugh out loud. We cry. We yell. We get triggered. Angry. We change our minds. We get tired. We feel jealous. We feel immense love. We contradict ourselves. And none of that needs to be improved, fixed, regulated, optimised or held together in order to be worthy.

Our society appreciates performing. It rewards composure. It values productivity. It claps for the ones who keep going.

And yet, in essence, our soul simply is love.

Before we learned how to behave. Before we learned how to please. Before we learned how to be flink. We were already worthy.

Underneath It All

Lately, I am spending much time unlearning. Noticing the inner structures that keep me functioning, productive, “together.” The part that answers emails while exhausted. The part that smiles when I want to withdraw. The part that keeps everything smooth. And gently softening these behaviours. Not fighting them. Just seeing them.

It has been about listening to what moves when I stop managing myself. When I don’t rush to regulate the discomfort. When I allow the silence. When I let my no be a no. When I let my desire speak without immediately negotiating it.

And then sensing, slowly, how life begins to align again - through integrity. Through small daily actions that come from a deeper place. Saying yes because it is true. Saying no because it is true. Resting when I am tired. Speaking when something matters. Letting my children feel that their worth does not depend on how pleasant they are.

At the moment, I’m exploring this theme of Already Worthy more deeply inside my Pulse Membership. The doors open again on the 3rd of March. It is a space where we practice this remembering in the body. And bring it back into the world.

I’m also genuinely curious how this lands for you. What does worthiness mean in your own life? Where do you still feel you have to be flink in order to be loved?

With love,
Caroline

One evening during a dance, the music hit my ear so hard it sent a shock through my whole system. The sound was overwhelming, people were screaming towards me, and for a moment it genuinely felt like being in war, like my nervous system was under attack. After that night, my relationship with sound and space shifted. For a long time, I couldn’t be in between beats anymore. I couldn’t even lie on my ear. My body drew a clear line and said: stop.

And with that came a deeper question that kept echoing inside me, quietly at first, then more and more present: who am I without being my identity anymore?

My inner guides laughed and told me I was learning to listen within the listening. At the time it felt strange and disorienting, like being pulled out of a current I had been swimming in for years. Now, two years later, I look back and I feel so much lighter. I see how deeply I had moved into both beauty and distraction, how easily those two can start to blend, how any world we enter - artistic, spiritual, communal - can either bring us closer to ourselves or gently pull us away without us even noticing.

We can walk each other home, or we can start placing people on pedestals. And eventually, every kingdom falls again. Every image dissolves. Every role asks to be released.

I always stayed close to the ground, yet it still impacts a person when many people suddenly want a part of your voice and your presence. First you are the artist nobody really sees. Then you are treated like a guru. And then you are dropped again when you no longer fit the image people created of you. We all outgrow boxes. Eventually, we even outgrow our own bodily presence. And living inside these shifting projections asks for a very strong sense of worthiness.

Following my passion for such a long time and then stepping back down was a true Inanna descent. During my time in war zones, I could clearly see how strongly control, fear and conditioning impact our systems. And vice versa… We cannot be free if we keep ourselves - and each other - in chains.

What remains now is an open heart and a strong willingness to dive deeper. I am deeply enjoying spending time alone, with my gorgeous family, in nature, in words that land slowly, in music that carries complexity and opens space from the inside out. And slowly, I can sense life aligning again in my daily actions.

In the end, wisdom lives within. In staying close to our soul, in letting life move through us, and in staying present with what is alive in the world, even when it is raw. And if you ask me, I believe this is the deepest form of listening there is.

I will share more soon. I feel deeply grateful to be here.

And yet it is so simple:

Our bodies are an extension of the earth

Every cell a divine intelligence of light

A door into my story

Before you start reading, here’s my invitation: if you feel your surroundings no longer feed you, or you have moments of feeling lost in the world, don’t look for a new version of yourself (outside). Listen to the part of you that remembers where you belong (inside). The part of you that already knows the way back - through your body, into what truly matters.

My story is also our story. Many of us feel a strong calling to return to what has been forgotten. And we sense, just as strongly, that the way back does not live in our heads, but in how we move, breathe, and live on our beautiful planet earth.

My biggest dream has always been to bring dance back to the land.

I don’t know about you, but I went to many dance venues and parties in my life and always felt a deep discomfort when I entered those black boxes we have created for them. Loud music (what are you saying? I cannot hear you!), flashy lights filling the room. Everyone drinking alcohol (because how else can we feel comfortable enough to be vulnerable?). And then not to mention the men constantly around me (sometimes also very comfortable of course lol). My friends even told me I danced too well, so they stopped dancing with me altogether. At some point I just wanted to be invisible on the dance floor.

Remembering what I always knew

I remember it as if it was yesterday. I was 18 years old and my friends were going to dance at Café d’Anvers in Antwerp. That same day, my mother took me to a full-day ritual with an American woman who had lived with the Dakota tribe for thirteen years. She had been married to the head chief and had received the blessings of the grandmothers to share their wisdom with the world.

She spoke about the unseen worlds, about respecting our feminine nature - the parts within us that move slower, yet carry so much wisdom. She spoke of the prophecies of ancient tribes. Of how we lost our connection to nature, to tribal life, and how we as a human species became so individualistic that we forgot our innate relationship with all of life.

I was hanging onto every word. She spoke what I had always known. I remembered being a young girl, walking the streets around our home in a small Belgian city, and crying because I missed the old forests and open plains. I couldn’t understand how we were able to cut down so many trees, simply to pour cement over the earth. She is our home - and we treat her like a commodity.

At the end of the day I went up to her and said: “You finally shared what I have always known, but was never taught at school. Thank you for helping me remember this ancient wisdom.” And she replied: “Oh no - did I not teach you anything new?”

Choosing another way

That evening I rode my bicycle to Antwerp to meet my friends. But I couldn’t return to my old self. Everything felt off. A dance club in the middle of a prostitution street. So many people lost, wounded, moving through their lives as if no one cared. I could read sadness and loneliness in their eyes.

I also deeply disliked how people constantly came up to me on dance floors to ask how I was doing. I couldn’t hear them, had to shout, and meanwhile I just wanted to dance.

That night I decided to create another way. And started dreaming about spaces where we could gather in silence. Drop the chit-chat mind. Simply dance.

Dance floor = home

If you’ve ever been to an ecstatic dance, you know what I mean. A dance floor where we express ourselves beyond words. The first time I set foot in the Oakland Sweet’s Ballroom in 2011, I felt an immediate homecoming.

That same year my father had passed away. He had lived many years with schizophrenia and drank himself into death. He could have been the shaman in our city, but instead became the one pushed aside. The one with too many gifts, many wounds - and no container. He was a writer and poet, just like me.

Grief, tribe, and belonging

In my grief I travelled to the US. And dance kept me alive. The dance floor became my safe haven - a place to explore parts of myself I had forgotten while caring for my father. I let go of old friendships and found myself in deep healing spaces. For the first time, I felt I had found my tribe.

I continued traveling the world to dance and explore poetry, and in 2014 began bringing ecstatic dance to Belgium. How this path evolved, and how I became the first female ecstatic dance DJ in Europe, is a story I will share another time.

What I can already say is this: it was on a dance floor I had created myself that I met my husband. (What a blessing!) For many years, we lived in a permaculture community - and I was being reconnected back to the land. I received the privilege of free birthing our kids in one of our yurts. The teachings of the dance slowly expanded into every aspect of my life.

During my anthropology studies I had already dove deeper into the healing role of dance in many cultures. Humans have always danced: to give thanks, to ask for healing, to connect with the spirit world, to mark transitions. In our Western society, dance gives us a strong sense of belonging. Not only in our bodies, but also in community.

During the pandemic dance became a way to stay sane in a world running on machinery and fear. We started bringing dance into churches and chapels. And slowly, we brought dance outside again. Back to the land.

When nature starts to respond

If you’ve ever danced outdoors, you know: many worlds come together. The birds, the trees, the animals. Nature talks back. As if we remember that everything is connected through invisible webs - and that we are part of it too. Gravity holding us. Roots anchoring us. So we can fly.

And now, as my own life is moving back to the land (more on that soon), I feel the same call again.

To bring the dance back to the land. And to let the land bring me back to myself.

Because this is where we belong. On our beautiful planet earth.

So how do we actually return?

Here are a few simple ways (feel free to screenshot).

• Go outside every day, even briefly.

• Listen to music with your whole body.

• Gather with people who value presence.

• Touch the land - soil, trees, water, stone.

• Let your body set the pace from time to time.

These are small acts. But they change how we listen and relate to life.

I am clearly in the in-between. One moment, I can tune into the field of endless possibilities. And the other moment, I feel the not knowing of what is to come - and sometimes, my body does not quite find her groove. More and more, life is actually showing me, in all her beauty, grief, and terror, that so much more is possible. That we don’t have to continue repeating the same old, same old patterns of despair and destruction. Of distraction, hate, and fear. That we truly have the opportunity to rewrite our story, rewrite the ways in which many of us relate to one another - and foremost: to ourselves. We don’t have to wait until anyone outside of us creates change. The narrative lies within. The system lies within.

We are the ones we have been waiting for…

And then, of course, there is the aspect of time and space. My father clearly showed me - especially after his death - that there is no linear way to resurrection. That we all come with a very specific task. And that there are many different timelines, all moving forward and backward in spiraling ways. I cannot tell you that I have any answers. As every answer gives me more questions. And yet, it is becoming very silent inside. The more I come to understand who I truly am, the less noise I am in need of. Because wisdom lies within.

No one can walk this path alone. As we are all connected at the same time. The feminine principles have been long forgotten. And we are more lost than ever before. But the moment before dawn is the darkest hour of the night. So even though so much pain is becoming visible now, underneath lies the golden.

So dive beyond what shines. Sink below what pulsates.

What if life is merely about remembering the core of what brought us here? What if the old stories of not enough and original sin were all made up by… well… some old wounded parts of our forgotten selves? And what if his-story, her-story, and in fact: our story is now lying on the tip of our tongues? Just waiting - with full charisma and grace - to be told? To be expressed? To be shared?

I am not telling you that I have any intention of leading the path all by myself. We all have a torch of truth and love lying in the depths of our hearts. And it is but a matter of tapping back into our own sensations. Tears are our biggest gift. To wash the earth clean again. To nourish the bare soil underneath our feet. To plant new seeds of birthing our world anew.

And as children, we can rock ourselves back to our playful simplicity. We are part of nature. What we do to the earth, we do to ourselves. And with forgiveness, we give back the innocence that was taken from us. For no one, and I mean this: no one can do harm when the heart remembers her way back home. You are so welcome here, dear one. 🙏🏼❤️

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