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lb_leeAnatomy of a Dance
Summary: Group defenses and deeper, more intimate headspace work... or, as Spider Robinson puts it, "work[ing] very hard at hosing all the bullshit out of your head so that it’s clean enough for guests."
Series: Essays (Headspace Discovery and Defense)
Word Count: 4000
Notes: Winner of the December 2025 fan poll! This essay builds on “Headspace Discovery and Defense” and you should definitely read that first (and preferably “Building Headspace: Aphantasia Edition” too). This essay was overwhelmingly written by Rawlin and Rogan.
In “Headspace Discovery and Defense,” we mostly discussed defenses created by individuals. This one is about more advanced work: group defenses and dances.
Group defenses require some time commitment, more so than others in our experience, so do it on a good day when everyone’s feeling as strong, stable, and healthy as they’re likely to be, and do it during a quiet time when nobody will distract or disturb you. Shut your door, unplug your phone, get everyone together, and have a long sit-down chat about what y’all want to achieve and how best to go about it. Give room for a lot of discussion and debate, and let everyone say their piece… including your headspace, even if it can’t communicate through traditional means. It’s part of this, so it gets its say. Writing down the ensuing negotiation may seem like a pain, but it’ll give a good record to refer to later, especially if one or more of you are prone to taking disproportionate amounts of responsibility.
Since we are a small group who runs on unanimous consensus, we have never attempted a group work with any less. Our procedure likely wouldn’t work for a big group or one that runs on majority rules. Take your time to figure out the ramifications for your group; don’t be hasty. Depending how long the discussion has gone, and how folks feel about it, it might be worth sleeping on it and doing the work the next day.
The first step of any of our group works is for the parties involved to synchronize, so that they can work together in harmony. Because we spent time in high school marching band (and those of us who didn’t have a background in dance), we do this by setting a beat and marking time together.
This beat can have an external source (playing music) or internal (any marching band person will remember the “mark time—hut! One, two, three four—” procedure). Any beat will do, as long as it’s not so fast as to overwhelm or so slow as to bog folks down; an internal beat will probably naturally synch to y’all’s preferred pace. For external beats, we’ve used the following:
• Marching band drum cadences (short; easy to learn, loop, and repeat)
• Rhythm game music (easy to loop; designed to encourage concentration and activity without being obtrusive, perfect pace for this kinda stuff)
• Disco (ditto)
• AKWAEKE’s Afro-pop album Stop Dying, You Were Very Expensive!
Don’t rush past this stage! Find a trustworthy partner/s, find a beat together, and keep it going as long as you wish. See how it feels. Is it comfortable? Do one of you pull ahead all bouncy-like or fall behind as though tired? Does it feel like anything in particular? Do different people have different feelings behind them?
There is no shame in just keeping the beat, finding your footing. If it doesn’t work, don’t worry about it; go do something else. And if things go off the rails, skip to the “If Things Go Hell-Bent” section further down!
This was the earliest and simplest of regular group works we embarked on. We were initially inspired by ATW, now-deceased writer/s of got parts? an Insider’s Guide to Managing Life Successfully with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Said book encouraged a daily internal meeting for multiples, for the use of day planning and building of crew solidarity, and though the people here at the time were reluctant (“why would we need such a thing? We’re doing fine…”), Miranda enforced the rule and found success, so we were already in the habit of grouping together in the morning to talk.
In 2019, Rawlin got horked out of the bowels of our headspace, god-eaten out of her mind, and after behaving so badly she got kicked out of the house, she kept trying to break in and wreak havoc. After a couple close shaves, the rest of us decided that we needed to join forces to counterbalance her. From the morning meeting naturally grew the idea of the morning wards, expanding our “talk” to the landscape. This helped build solidarity between crew and land, provided maintenance, and kept us up to date on each other’s condition. Pouring our life force into the land also helped prevent Rawlin from hijacking it.
Here is how we do it:
First, set the beat. Once everyone is synced, pool your resources and rhythmically sweep the landscape, section by section, using whatever sense or mode feels right: “seeing” it like an overhead drone, swishing through the land like a tactile ghost, whatever works. (See “Building Headspace, Aphantasia Edition” for ideas.) What do you feel? Are there any places that feel strange or “sticky?” Do you have any idea what those sensations might mean? Go investigate, if sensible. Take notes. Sometimes things will only become clear over time. We, for instance, often notice that the water level is low and flat if our headspace is dealing with something and not feeling well.
If you don’t have a headspace, we’ve noticed other people doing this sweep and ward process through relaxation or grounding exercises, using their body or guided visualizations of gardens, stuff like that. If you want to learn more about stuff like that, maybe try “Chapter One: Deep Relaxation” of Diane Mariechild’s Mother Wit: A Feminist Guide to Psychic Development. (You can find an audio recording of the first relaxation exercise by Womancraft on YouTube; we don’t use it for headspace work, but we do sometimes use it just for nice chilling out before bed, and over the years, we’ve discovered that sweeping our body this way can let us know what parts of us still need dealing with. Turns out our headspace and our bodies are different in their needs and ways of signifying trouble!)
It takes much longer for us to explain this process than it is to do it. Our wards are usually done in less than a minute. The Mother Wit relaxation exercise, on audio, takes about fifteen minutes and tends to put us to sleep… not good for a morning meeting sort of deal!
Though techniques and temperaments may differ, the group works themselves aren’t necessarily too far abroad from the everyday cooperation you may do in the “real” world for a group project or a household agreement: you come together, you decide what to do, and then you do it. Even working with your headspace may be much like working with any other person… not necessarily a human one. A dog or horse may not have the same way of thinking or expressing as a human, but you can still certainly work with one, if you’re both trained right.
Oftentimes, such works are all you need, but there is another kind.
The commonplace daily wards do not require much in the way of intimacy, any more than a daily meeting at work. But then there’s a deeper, more intimate way to do headspace work, and we call it “dancing” for lack of anything better. It’s when you pool everything, temporarily sublimating your own individuality for the sake of the work. Instead of a group of individuals, you become a school of fish, a flock of birds… or a dance troupe. When we open our souls to each other this way, we cease to be a group of “I”s and become a “we,” united with each other and/or the landscape.
You do not need to be plural to dance this way; indeed, we got the idea from singlet dance troupes, marching bands, or religious rites. Have you ever seen a ring shout or a haka and been blown away? Have you ever seen a flock of starlings and marveled? (If you want fictional depictions of this kind of dance, you can also watch the 2025 movie Sinners or read Spider Robinson’s story “The Mick of Time” from Callahan’s Secret. We’ll quote the latter later.)
When you let others in so deeply, empty your self to make room for someone (or something) else, that is a great intimacy, a vulnerability. There’s a reason it’s associated with divine possession or holy rapture in some religions… and psychosis elsewhere! It is an awesome experience… and remember that “awe” means “reverence and terror.” Dancing can lead you to do things you normally wouldn’t or couldn’t, for better and for worse. The results can be extraordinary and life-changing, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be good. You can enact enormous changes internally, lock or unlock doors long rusted in place, rebuild or shatter relationships, break your reality for a better (or worse) one. It is not something to be undertaken lightly. Let’s talk about how to do it safely.
Anyone who has seen an angry mob should understand the inherent dangers of dancing. Nobody is immune to mob psychology. Apprehension is a sign of good sense, and your life can be full and happy without ever wading into these deep waters.
Dance requires a lot of justified goodwill and trust, and that can’t be rushed. Opening to someone too much, too early can be a total disaster, even if everyone means well. (As anyone who’s ever had a terrible whirlwind romance can testify.) This is an intense intimacy, and that vulnerability can be easily bruised.
Similarly, never, ever use coercion or force! That’ll destroy the consensual, mutually trusting relationship you’re trying to build. It’s hard to imagine a worse violation than to force someone to dance.
Finally, try to come at this from a lucid and sober place. Many people mix hunger, exhaustion, or drugs with dance safely, but we are not one of them, we know nothing about it, and we can’t recommend it. Drugs, food restriction, or sleep deprivation might make the state “easier,” but sometimes, it’s hard because you’re not ready, and no biochemical manipulations will make you ready. People break themselves doing this stuff; we’ve seen it happen, and we don’t want it to happen to you.
If you feel ready, let’s continue.
If you have experienced flow states, when you are so focused on what you’re doing, so wrapped up in the experience, that sense of self falls away and everything becomes The Work, you have experienced a mild (possibly solo) dance. The nature of the flow state means you may not be aware of it until after it’s passed, so reflect on times you’ve reached that state. What brought it on: exercise, work, dance, art, video games, sex? Was it a good feeling? What did you do while in that state? Are they things you’re proud of, things you regret or find embarrassing?
Remember, a flow state is not necessarily good. As children, we’d often stay up late because fatigue made us go into flow states easier, which we thought made our writing better… until we read it in the morning. As teenagers, Rogan learned to deprive himself of food to manipulate flow states, and when he had to give up starvation, he had to completely relearn how to make art. As adults, when attending protests, we have to catch ourself and resist falling into the mob, asking ourself, “wait, what do I feel about this? Is this a good idea?” And video games are masters of manipulating the flow state to get players to play much, much longer than they maybe intended or wanted to.
Flow states are especially dangerous when you really, really don’t like yourself. It can be tempting to sidestep the hard work of dealing with yourself by simply emptying it and filling it with something, anything else.
Feel free to write down the flow states you can remember, with the classic “pros” and “cons” columns for each one. Lay it out in black and white, what went well for you, and what really didn’t. Can you figure out what made the difference? Is it the people involved? How much sleep or food you got? How stressed out or angry you were? Think about it. Which flow states led to the best results, not just for the work but for yourself? Can you arrange your life to make those kinds of flow states easier to get, safely?
In our case, food deprivation and sleep deprivation had to be forbidden. We had to spend a year or two crunching through work and life without flow, long enough to resign ourself to never having it again. This long dry stretch wasn’t fun, but it was necessary; we had to come to peace with our selves, instead of trying to constantly empty ourselves, becoming a selfless vessel. We had to build a profession, a home, a life that supported who we were, not what we desperately wanted to be. Only then did dance open up (again, though we didn’t realize it at the time).
Flow is about focus and loss of self-consciousness. Then there’s the other work you have to do if you want to dance effectively, the hard part, the painful part. Forgive the self-indulgence, but sci-fi writer Spider Robinson is who taught us this trick, and it worked, so we’re just going to quote him (and his story, “the Mick of Time”) here. What we call “dance,” he calls “telepathy”:
“To approach telepathy, you start with empathy and crank that up as high as you can. You care about each other. You feel each other’s joy and pain. You make each other laugh, and help each other cry. You work hard at trusting each other, so that it’s safe to dismantle the fortress around your ego. You forgive each other anything that stands between you, and try to bring out each other’s best, you work very hard at hosing all the bullshit out of your head so that it’s clean enough for guests, silencing all the demons in your subconscious so that it’s quiet enough to hear somebody thinking at you, and most of all you find ways to make that work so much fun that you keep on working. You stick together and love each other and keep growing.” (Callahan and Company, pg. 254)
It sounds hard, because it is. A lot of people can’t do it, and just because you can doesn’t mean you should. There may be folks in your head who have done things you find terrifying, immoral, or dangerous, folks who have shown no sign of changing, and you may not want to open your soul to them without good reason. And you shouldn’t! A mutually trusting, consensual relationship requires both trust and consent! And this is so say nothing about the emotional pain tolerance you need to build so you can let yourself feel other people’s pain without drowning. We could write a whole essay just on that!
We need to pause and discuss forgiveness here, because that is a poisoned word for a lot of people. If, like us, you come from a background where forgiveness meant allowing atrocity, that’s not forgiveness. That’s cheap grace, an amazing term coined by theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (before the Nazis killed him) to describe “forgiveness without requiring repentance.” We aren’t talking cheap grace here. What we are talking about here is: y’all are likely trapped together in a body for a very long time, if not the rest of your lives. (If not, you would presumably have evicted someone who’s committed an unforgivable transgression, or killed them.) If y’all want to get your shit together, frankly, y’all’re going to have to accept what y’all’ve done. All of it. You have to live with that, do your penance, rebuild that fucking trust.
Among the things we’ve had to forgive each other:
• Causing each other egregious bodily harm
• Attempting vessel suicide (which would’ve killed everyone here)
• Raping each other
• Abandoning each other to atrocity
These were not things we could just say, “aw, it’s okay, you did your best” about. There were tears, anger, shouting matches. It took time. Rawlin spent years as a hermit in our headspace woods, coming back to herself, making the decision day after day to deal with what she’d done instead of shoving it away (or killing herself, which she tried first). Rogan and Miranda had to have many complicated conversations about violence and how they treated each other, and Miranda ended up choosing to make Boy Meats Girl as part of that. We all had to make heartfelt apologies and take steps to make sure these things never happened again.
We can’t pretend this process is over; it’s ongoing. But we’re doing it. Is that forgiveness? Don’t know, don’t care. Whatever you call it, though, it’s work you have to do if you want to dance well. You have to be able to sit in a room with nothing but yourself/s, no distractions, no anaesthesia, and you have to be able to tolerate the experience.
If it was easy, everyone would do it.
There is one time where we danced with someone we didn’t trust: Rawlin, in summer 2020. On that occasion, it was our headspace that initiated the dance, pulling everything and everyone into it: the living, the dead, the landscape, headmates present and emeritus, the sky and the weather, the bony lady, even Rawlin (who was in exile and still out of her mind). Being nonverbal, the waters couldn’t communicate to us its intent or goal, or even ask permission, but we had spent years building the requisite trust and felt sure that it had a good reason. We also didn’t trust Rawlin as far as we could throw her, but we did trust that whatever she might try, we were up to the challenge. Surely the dance was calling her for something important.
So we let ourselves dissolve into the dance for over an hour. It was an ecstatic, timeless experience, feeling the ground and rain pulse to the beat of our dance, and Sneak did zer best to journal through it, though the results weren’t completely coherent.
Rawlin, who’d been in a state of desolate isolation for roughly twenty years at that point, found the experience agonizing and wept the whole time, but she still answered the call, and she managed to last for the entire dance. She says that some core part of her, deep under the layers of corruption, felt pulled to that sense of communion and togetherness. It reminded her of who she used to be, who she could be again. It was the beginning of her coming back to herself, though it took a couple years.
We had strangely vivid dreams for a while afterward, and our headspace also enacted mass renovations on itself soon after. It may have sparked the dance to try and raise power for itself to do so, and the results were stunning: the landscape, a gloomy wasteland for the prior fifteen years, grew plant life, waterfalls, springs, cliffs, and valleys, reviving to fertility. It also helped reconnect us to Bob and Grey, who’d lost touch with us almost fifteen years prior. Not coincidentally, they rejoined us within a week.
So yes, there is a precedent, for us at least, of dancing with someone we didn’t trust, but only in a case where we were so secure in our bonds with everyone else that it was a case of having Rawlin safely outnumbered. We were each other’s safety net.
A couples dance is the simplest of dances, and in some ways the most difficult. All you have to do is choose your partner, start your beat, sync, and quietly pass feeling and soul back and forth, seeing what happens.
A big work dance that involves everyone, all intent on a specific task, can help distract from the soul nakedness. When there are only two people involved, there is no hiding it. That special intimacy isn’t necessarily sexual, but it can be profound… and excruciating. When Rogan did a couple’s dance with Biff (at his request), Biff couldn’t stop laughing uncomfortably. The experience is that raw.
Every individual has a different manner to their dance, and thus they may sync or work better with some folks than others, either through skill, temperament, or relationship. People who might trust each other enough for a big group dance might eschew a one-on-one dance. Sneak, for instance, is bouncy, fun, and easy to work with, like boogieing together to pop music. Meanwhile, Rogan is a forceful dancer, sometimes too forceful; Mac has described the sensation as being “run over by a sexy truck.” Mac is a much better receiver than sender, while Biff is the reverse. Grey’s a powerful yet soothing dancer, while Bob’s mind is always going a million directions at once and can’t settle down enough to do what he wants.
The sensations that can come from this are sometimes hard to describe. There can be a warm bubbly feeling, a muscular relaxation, a horniness, or a deep discomfort like having your eyeballs touched. There’s really no way to know what it’ll be like without trying.
A couples dance requires no task. It can be enjoyed purely on its own, as a sharing of intimacy and delight. It can also be used to unsnarl painful tangles of body and mind. The ability to share such things with our intimates is one of the things we most appreciate about being ourselves.
Even keeping a beat together can be an intimate act that brings up intense, unexpected feelings, including:
• Terror that you as an individual are dying or “faking”
• Deep self-loathing or shame (“I’m hurting/tainting my dance partner,” “I’m disgusting,” “they shouldn’t be doing this with me…”)
• Inability to focus, a parade of distractions (“this is stupid,” “suddenly I can’t stop thinking about work,” “have I watered my plants?”)
• Inappropriate uncontrollable giggling
• Agonizing pain, sobbing, etc.
Do not take feelings like these as a sign of moral failing; they have valuable information about things you may need to take care of before attempting dancing.
If you have been isolated or emotionally distanced from others for a long time, it can be agonizing to be so close to someone! The parade of distractions can be your mind’s way of trying to distance itself from that closeness; which can pull up all sorts of feelings about intimacy, sense of worth or deserving-ness, or what it means to give up your own psychological defenses to join with another.
If you are still insecure about your individuality (and many a plural is, even decades down the line), dancing may fuel all your worst fears. It really may feel like dying, in which case: maybe dancing isn’t for you! Go do something else! (But as you do, please consider: many a singlet has been in a marching band, a dance troupe, an army, and has no issues still seeing themselves as an individual. Why is it so desperately important that plurals be the most rugged of individuals at all times? Is that the only way you’re allowed feelings, needs, care, or respect? What if that didn’t have to be the case? Don’t try dancing, maybe, until and unless you feel you have a grip on those questions.)
Other emotions, like self-loathing or giggling, reflect the discomfort with being seen so nakedly. Others still, like sobbing or pain, are like the pins and needles as a numb limb “wakes up” and plain can’t be skipped. Sometimes, you just have to sit through it; as always, refer to your pain scale and spotter! Otherwise, there’s no shame in halting and rebalancing yourself.
And finally, there’s no shame in deciding that this is wrong for you! Go do something else! Find your own methods! (And then tell us about it!) I promise, you can find other ways of achieving what you want! The whole point of these essays is to build a relationship with yourself/s that isn’t full of pressure, force, and “you have to.” If you are forcing yourself to do something that causes you suffering, you are missing the point of these essays.
Summary: Group defenses and deeper, more intimate headspace work... or, as Spider Robinson puts it, "work[ing] very hard at hosing all the bullshit out of your head so that it’s clean enough for guests."
Series: Essays (Headspace Discovery and Defense)
Word Count: 4000
Notes: Winner of the December 2025 fan poll! This essay builds on “Headspace Discovery and Defense” and you should definitely read that first (and preferably “Building Headspace: Aphantasia Edition” too). This essay was overwhelmingly written by Rawlin and Rogan.
In “Headspace Discovery and Defense,” we mostly discussed defenses created by individuals. This one is about more advanced work: group defenses and dances.
Group defenses require some time commitment, more so than others in our experience, so do it on a good day when everyone’s feeling as strong, stable, and healthy as they’re likely to be, and do it during a quiet time when nobody will distract or disturb you. Shut your door, unplug your phone, get everyone together, and have a long sit-down chat about what y’all want to achieve and how best to go about it. Give room for a lot of discussion and debate, and let everyone say their piece… including your headspace, even if it can’t communicate through traditional means. It’s part of this, so it gets its say. Writing down the ensuing negotiation may seem like a pain, but it’ll give a good record to refer to later, especially if one or more of you are prone to taking disproportionate amounts of responsibility.
Since we are a small group who runs on unanimous consensus, we have never attempted a group work with any less. Our procedure likely wouldn’t work for a big group or one that runs on majority rules. Take your time to figure out the ramifications for your group; don’t be hasty. Depending how long the discussion has gone, and how folks feel about it, it might be worth sleeping on it and doing the work the next day.
First Exercise: Setting a Beat
The first step of any of our group works is for the parties involved to synchronize, so that they can work together in harmony. Because we spent time in high school marching band (and those of us who didn’t have a background in dance), we do this by setting a beat and marking time together.
This beat can have an external source (playing music) or internal (any marching band person will remember the “mark time—hut! One, two, three four—” procedure). Any beat will do, as long as it’s not so fast as to overwhelm or so slow as to bog folks down; an internal beat will probably naturally synch to y’all’s preferred pace. For external beats, we’ve used the following:
• Marching band drum cadences (short; easy to learn, loop, and repeat)
• Rhythm game music (easy to loop; designed to encourage concentration and activity without being obtrusive, perfect pace for this kinda stuff)
• Disco (ditto)
• AKWAEKE’s Afro-pop album Stop Dying, You Were Very Expensive!
Don’t rush past this stage! Find a trustworthy partner/s, find a beat together, and keep it going as long as you wish. See how it feels. Is it comfortable? Do one of you pull ahead all bouncy-like or fall behind as though tired? Does it feel like anything in particular? Do different people have different feelings behind them?
There is no shame in just keeping the beat, finding your footing. If it doesn’t work, don’t worry about it; go do something else. And if things go off the rails, skip to the “If Things Go Hell-Bent” section further down!
The Morning Wards
This was the earliest and simplest of regular group works we embarked on. We were initially inspired by ATW, now-deceased writer/s of got parts? an Insider’s Guide to Managing Life Successfully with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Said book encouraged a daily internal meeting for multiples, for the use of day planning and building of crew solidarity, and though the people here at the time were reluctant (“why would we need such a thing? We’re doing fine…”), Miranda enforced the rule and found success, so we were already in the habit of grouping together in the morning to talk.
In 2019, Rawlin got horked out of the bowels of our headspace, god-eaten out of her mind, and after behaving so badly she got kicked out of the house, she kept trying to break in and wreak havoc. After a couple close shaves, the rest of us decided that we needed to join forces to counterbalance her. From the morning meeting naturally grew the idea of the morning wards, expanding our “talk” to the landscape. This helped build solidarity between crew and land, provided maintenance, and kept us up to date on each other’s condition. Pouring our life force into the land also helped prevent Rawlin from hijacking it.
Here is how we do it:
First, set the beat. Once everyone is synced, pool your resources and rhythmically sweep the landscape, section by section, using whatever sense or mode feels right: “seeing” it like an overhead drone, swishing through the land like a tactile ghost, whatever works. (See “Building Headspace, Aphantasia Edition” for ideas.) What do you feel? Are there any places that feel strange or “sticky?” Do you have any idea what those sensations might mean? Go investigate, if sensible. Take notes. Sometimes things will only become clear over time. We, for instance, often notice that the water level is low and flat if our headspace is dealing with something and not feeling well.
If you don’t have a headspace, we’ve noticed other people doing this sweep and ward process through relaxation or grounding exercises, using their body or guided visualizations of gardens, stuff like that. If you want to learn more about stuff like that, maybe try “Chapter One: Deep Relaxation” of Diane Mariechild’s Mother Wit: A Feminist Guide to Psychic Development. (You can find an audio recording of the first relaxation exercise by Womancraft on YouTube; we don’t use it for headspace work, but we do sometimes use it just for nice chilling out before bed, and over the years, we’ve discovered that sweeping our body this way can let us know what parts of us still need dealing with. Turns out our headspace and our bodies are different in their needs and ways of signifying trouble!)
It takes much longer for us to explain this process than it is to do it. Our wards are usually done in less than a minute. The Mother Wit relaxation exercise, on audio, takes about fifteen minutes and tends to put us to sleep… not good for a morning meeting sort of deal!
Though techniques and temperaments may differ, the group works themselves aren’t necessarily too far abroad from the everyday cooperation you may do in the “real” world for a group project or a household agreement: you come together, you decide what to do, and then you do it. Even working with your headspace may be much like working with any other person… not necessarily a human one. A dog or horse may not have the same way of thinking or expressing as a human, but you can still certainly work with one, if you’re both trained right.
Oftentimes, such works are all you need, but there is another kind.
What is Dancing?
The commonplace daily wards do not require much in the way of intimacy, any more than a daily meeting at work. But then there’s a deeper, more intimate way to do headspace work, and we call it “dancing” for lack of anything better. It’s when you pool everything, temporarily sublimating your own individuality for the sake of the work. Instead of a group of individuals, you become a school of fish, a flock of birds… or a dance troupe. When we open our souls to each other this way, we cease to be a group of “I”s and become a “we,” united with each other and/or the landscape.
You do not need to be plural to dance this way; indeed, we got the idea from singlet dance troupes, marching bands, or religious rites. Have you ever seen a ring shout or a haka and been blown away? Have you ever seen a flock of starlings and marveled? (If you want fictional depictions of this kind of dance, you can also watch the 2025 movie Sinners or read Spider Robinson’s story “The Mick of Time” from Callahan’s Secret. We’ll quote the latter later.)
When you let others in so deeply, empty your self to make room for someone (or something) else, that is a great intimacy, a vulnerability. There’s a reason it’s associated with divine possession or holy rapture in some religions… and psychosis elsewhere! It is an awesome experience… and remember that “awe” means “reverence and terror.” Dancing can lead you to do things you normally wouldn’t or couldn’t, for better and for worse. The results can be extraordinary and life-changing, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be good. You can enact enormous changes internally, lock or unlock doors long rusted in place, rebuild or shatter relationships, break your reality for a better (or worse) one. It is not something to be undertaken lightly. Let’s talk about how to do it safely.
Why You Shouldn’t Dance
Anyone who has seen an angry mob should understand the inherent dangers of dancing. Nobody is immune to mob psychology. Apprehension is a sign of good sense, and your life can be full and happy without ever wading into these deep waters.
Dance requires a lot of justified goodwill and trust, and that can’t be rushed. Opening to someone too much, too early can be a total disaster, even if everyone means well. (As anyone who’s ever had a terrible whirlwind romance can testify.) This is an intense intimacy, and that vulnerability can be easily bruised.
Similarly, never, ever use coercion or force! That’ll destroy the consensual, mutually trusting relationship you’re trying to build. It’s hard to imagine a worse violation than to force someone to dance.
Finally, try to come at this from a lucid and sober place. Many people mix hunger, exhaustion, or drugs with dance safely, but we are not one of them, we know nothing about it, and we can’t recommend it. Drugs, food restriction, or sleep deprivation might make the state “easier,” but sometimes, it’s hard because you’re not ready, and no biochemical manipulations will make you ready. People break themselves doing this stuff; we’ve seen it happen, and we don’t want it to happen to you.
If you feel ready, let’s continue.
Prep Work: Flow States
If you have experienced flow states, when you are so focused on what you’re doing, so wrapped up in the experience, that sense of self falls away and everything becomes The Work, you have experienced a mild (possibly solo) dance. The nature of the flow state means you may not be aware of it until after it’s passed, so reflect on times you’ve reached that state. What brought it on: exercise, work, dance, art, video games, sex? Was it a good feeling? What did you do while in that state? Are they things you’re proud of, things you regret or find embarrassing?
Remember, a flow state is not necessarily good. As children, we’d often stay up late because fatigue made us go into flow states easier, which we thought made our writing better… until we read it in the morning. As teenagers, Rogan learned to deprive himself of food to manipulate flow states, and when he had to give up starvation, he had to completely relearn how to make art. As adults, when attending protests, we have to catch ourself and resist falling into the mob, asking ourself, “wait, what do I feel about this? Is this a good idea?” And video games are masters of manipulating the flow state to get players to play much, much longer than they maybe intended or wanted to.
Flow states are especially dangerous when you really, really don’t like yourself. It can be tempting to sidestep the hard work of dealing with yourself by simply emptying it and filling it with something, anything else.
Feel free to write down the flow states you can remember, with the classic “pros” and “cons” columns for each one. Lay it out in black and white, what went well for you, and what really didn’t. Can you figure out what made the difference? Is it the people involved? How much sleep or food you got? How stressed out or angry you were? Think about it. Which flow states led to the best results, not just for the work but for yourself? Can you arrange your life to make those kinds of flow states easier to get, safely?
In our case, food deprivation and sleep deprivation had to be forbidden. We had to spend a year or two crunching through work and life without flow, long enough to resign ourself to never having it again. This long dry stretch wasn’t fun, but it was necessary; we had to come to peace with our selves, instead of trying to constantly empty ourselves, becoming a selfless vessel. We had to build a profession, a home, a life that supported who we were, not what we desperately wanted to be. Only then did dance open up (again, though we didn’t realize it at the time).
Solo Work: Forgiveness and Other Bugbears
Flow is about focus and loss of self-consciousness. Then there’s the other work you have to do if you want to dance effectively, the hard part, the painful part. Forgive the self-indulgence, but sci-fi writer Spider Robinson is who taught us this trick, and it worked, so we’re just going to quote him (and his story, “the Mick of Time”) here. What we call “dance,” he calls “telepathy”:
“To approach telepathy, you start with empathy and crank that up as high as you can. You care about each other. You feel each other’s joy and pain. You make each other laugh, and help each other cry. You work hard at trusting each other, so that it’s safe to dismantle the fortress around your ego. You forgive each other anything that stands between you, and try to bring out each other’s best, you work very hard at hosing all the bullshit out of your head so that it’s clean enough for guests, silencing all the demons in your subconscious so that it’s quiet enough to hear somebody thinking at you, and most of all you find ways to make that work so much fun that you keep on working. You stick together and love each other and keep growing.” (Callahan and Company, pg. 254)
It sounds hard, because it is. A lot of people can’t do it, and just because you can doesn’t mean you should. There may be folks in your head who have done things you find terrifying, immoral, or dangerous, folks who have shown no sign of changing, and you may not want to open your soul to them without good reason. And you shouldn’t! A mutually trusting, consensual relationship requires both trust and consent! And this is so say nothing about the emotional pain tolerance you need to build so you can let yourself feel other people’s pain without drowning. We could write a whole essay just on that!
We need to pause and discuss forgiveness here, because that is a poisoned word for a lot of people. If, like us, you come from a background where forgiveness meant allowing atrocity, that’s not forgiveness. That’s cheap grace, an amazing term coined by theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (before the Nazis killed him) to describe “forgiveness without requiring repentance.” We aren’t talking cheap grace here. What we are talking about here is: y’all are likely trapped together in a body for a very long time, if not the rest of your lives. (If not, you would presumably have evicted someone who’s committed an unforgivable transgression, or killed them.) If y’all want to get your shit together, frankly, y’all’re going to have to accept what y’all’ve done. All of it. You have to live with that, do your penance, rebuild that fucking trust.
Among the things we’ve had to forgive each other:
• Causing each other egregious bodily harm
• Attempting vessel suicide (which would’ve killed everyone here)
• Raping each other
• Abandoning each other to atrocity
These were not things we could just say, “aw, it’s okay, you did your best” about. There were tears, anger, shouting matches. It took time. Rawlin spent years as a hermit in our headspace woods, coming back to herself, making the decision day after day to deal with what she’d done instead of shoving it away (or killing herself, which she tried first). Rogan and Miranda had to have many complicated conversations about violence and how they treated each other, and Miranda ended up choosing to make Boy Meats Girl as part of that. We all had to make heartfelt apologies and take steps to make sure these things never happened again.
We can’t pretend this process is over; it’s ongoing. But we’re doing it. Is that forgiveness? Don’t know, don’t care. Whatever you call it, though, it’s work you have to do if you want to dance well. You have to be able to sit in a room with nothing but yourself/s, no distractions, no anaesthesia, and you have to be able to tolerate the experience.
If it was easy, everyone would do it.
Skipping Steps: Dancing En Masse
There is one time where we danced with someone we didn’t trust: Rawlin, in summer 2020. On that occasion, it was our headspace that initiated the dance, pulling everything and everyone into it: the living, the dead, the landscape, headmates present and emeritus, the sky and the weather, the bony lady, even Rawlin (who was in exile and still out of her mind). Being nonverbal, the waters couldn’t communicate to us its intent or goal, or even ask permission, but we had spent years building the requisite trust and felt sure that it had a good reason. We also didn’t trust Rawlin as far as we could throw her, but we did trust that whatever she might try, we were up to the challenge. Surely the dance was calling her for something important.
So we let ourselves dissolve into the dance for over an hour. It was an ecstatic, timeless experience, feeling the ground and rain pulse to the beat of our dance, and Sneak did zer best to journal through it, though the results weren’t completely coherent.
Rawlin, who’d been in a state of desolate isolation for roughly twenty years at that point, found the experience agonizing and wept the whole time, but she still answered the call, and she managed to last for the entire dance. She says that some core part of her, deep under the layers of corruption, felt pulled to that sense of communion and togetherness. It reminded her of who she used to be, who she could be again. It was the beginning of her coming back to herself, though it took a couple years.
We had strangely vivid dreams for a while afterward, and our headspace also enacted mass renovations on itself soon after. It may have sparked the dance to try and raise power for itself to do so, and the results were stunning: the landscape, a gloomy wasteland for the prior fifteen years, grew plant life, waterfalls, springs, cliffs, and valleys, reviving to fertility. It also helped reconnect us to Bob and Grey, who’d lost touch with us almost fifteen years prior. Not coincidentally, they rejoined us within a week.
So yes, there is a precedent, for us at least, of dancing with someone we didn’t trust, but only in a case where we were so secure in our bonds with everyone else that it was a case of having Rawlin safely outnumbered. We were each other’s safety net.
A Couples Dance
A couples dance is the simplest of dances, and in some ways the most difficult. All you have to do is choose your partner, start your beat, sync, and quietly pass feeling and soul back and forth, seeing what happens.
A big work dance that involves everyone, all intent on a specific task, can help distract from the soul nakedness. When there are only two people involved, there is no hiding it. That special intimacy isn’t necessarily sexual, but it can be profound… and excruciating. When Rogan did a couple’s dance with Biff (at his request), Biff couldn’t stop laughing uncomfortably. The experience is that raw.
Every individual has a different manner to their dance, and thus they may sync or work better with some folks than others, either through skill, temperament, or relationship. People who might trust each other enough for a big group dance might eschew a one-on-one dance. Sneak, for instance, is bouncy, fun, and easy to work with, like boogieing together to pop music. Meanwhile, Rogan is a forceful dancer, sometimes too forceful; Mac has described the sensation as being “run over by a sexy truck.” Mac is a much better receiver than sender, while Biff is the reverse. Grey’s a powerful yet soothing dancer, while Bob’s mind is always going a million directions at once and can’t settle down enough to do what he wants.
The sensations that can come from this are sometimes hard to describe. There can be a warm bubbly feeling, a muscular relaxation, a horniness, or a deep discomfort like having your eyeballs touched. There’s really no way to know what it’ll be like without trying.
A couples dance requires no task. It can be enjoyed purely on its own, as a sharing of intimacy and delight. It can also be used to unsnarl painful tangles of body and mind. The ability to share such things with our intimates is one of the things we most appreciate about being ourselves.
If Things Go Hell-Bent
Even keeping a beat together can be an intimate act that brings up intense, unexpected feelings, including:
• Terror that you as an individual are dying or “faking”
• Deep self-loathing or shame (“I’m hurting/tainting my dance partner,” “I’m disgusting,” “they shouldn’t be doing this with me…”)
• Inability to focus, a parade of distractions (“this is stupid,” “suddenly I can’t stop thinking about work,” “have I watered my plants?”)
• Inappropriate uncontrollable giggling
• Agonizing pain, sobbing, etc.
Do not take feelings like these as a sign of moral failing; they have valuable information about things you may need to take care of before attempting dancing.
If you have been isolated or emotionally distanced from others for a long time, it can be agonizing to be so close to someone! The parade of distractions can be your mind’s way of trying to distance itself from that closeness; which can pull up all sorts of feelings about intimacy, sense of worth or deserving-ness, or what it means to give up your own psychological defenses to join with another.
If you are still insecure about your individuality (and many a plural is, even decades down the line), dancing may fuel all your worst fears. It really may feel like dying, in which case: maybe dancing isn’t for you! Go do something else! (But as you do, please consider: many a singlet has been in a marching band, a dance troupe, an army, and has no issues still seeing themselves as an individual. Why is it so desperately important that plurals be the most rugged of individuals at all times? Is that the only way you’re allowed feelings, needs, care, or respect? What if that didn’t have to be the case? Don’t try dancing, maybe, until and unless you feel you have a grip on those questions.)
Other emotions, like self-loathing or giggling, reflect the discomfort with being seen so nakedly. Others still, like sobbing or pain, are like the pins and needles as a numb limb “wakes up” and plain can’t be skipped. Sometimes, you just have to sit through it; as always, refer to your pain scale and spotter! Otherwise, there’s no shame in halting and rebalancing yourself.
And finally, there’s no shame in deciding that this is wrong for you! Go do something else! Find your own methods! (And then tell us about it!) I promise, you can find other ways of achieving what you want! The whole point of these essays is to build a relationship with yourself/s that isn’t full of pressure, force, and “you have to.” If you are forcing yourself to do something that causes you suffering, you are missing the point of these essays.
