I’ve been contemplating how I work with ecstatic states — and why pulse matters more than the intensity.
The neurochemistry we engage in sacred intimacy draws us beyond the constricted bands of nervous-system experience we are trained to inhabit. We expand into more ease and more excitement at the same time. We crack the suffocating mask of ordinariness and expose our woundedness and our wonderfulness. At the outer edges of our capacity, ordinary consciousness loosens, and we enter ecstatic states.
Ecstatic states are many things. They are doorways to belonging. Practices of rewilding awareness. Neuroendocrine recalibrations. Soul-retrieval rituals. They can melt rigid identity, destabilize the trance of normal, and make the impossible feel possible. The word ecstasy comes from the Greek ekstasis — stepping outside the fixed. We move beyond the small defended self and feel ourselves held in a wider field of mystery and transpersonal belonging.
Sometimes ecstasy arrives as vivid, hallucinatory experiences of unity with all that is. But often it comes quietly — a deepened breath, a widening of perception, a felt sense of interbeing that is intimate rather than cosmic. Big, loud, long ecstatic states are not inherently more transformative than small and subtle ones. Intensity is no measure of salience. A trauma survivor shyly asking for wanted touch for the first time is as ecstatic as someone else’s thirty-minute orgasm.
I am interested in trauma-aware ecstasy — ecstasy that can be metabolized, integrated, and shared. Ecstasy that returns people to agency and community.
For me, ecstasy exists within a rhythm:
ecstasy → satisfaction → integration → deepened belonging → renewed longing, with expanded capacity for ecstasy.
Ecstatic states align us with the oscillating systems that shape the cosmos: neural firing, cardiac variability, ecological cycles, cosmic microwave background rhythms. This is a recalibration to the pulse of the universe.
In many breakthrough-oriented lineages that invite ecstatic states — breathwork, erotic ritual, large-group transformational training, psychedelic practice — intensity is used as the catalyst. Intensity can be generated reliably through breath, touch, group dynamics, extended erotic stimulation, or large doses of psychedelics. Sometimes these fast-track paths to ecstasy are exactly right for a particular person or group. What matters is whether the experience can be metabolized and woven into everyday life.
Some people have nervous systems that genuinely thrive at higher amplitudes and frequencies of intensity. For them, deep activation, edge-work, and sustained charge are enlivening. For others, the same conditions are dysregulating. The question is whether intensity can be held within a rhythm that supports integration, agency, and belonging.
We grow nervous-system capacity by exploring ecstasy in non-habitual ways. That might mean lingering in enoughness and discovering quieter paths to ecstasy, or spending time in amplified aliveness and courageous edge-walking. When learning unfolds at the pace of trust — with a just-right blend of challenge and support — we flourish.
In my work I attend carefully to context: ritual container, temple time, clear beginnings and endings, knowing who each ritual is for, and always being guided by the person receiving it. I emphasize moving at the pace of trust, tracking each person’s neural learning zone, and attending to the power dynamics that are always present. I prioritize harvest and aftercare — savouring satisfactions, and weaving insights from ecstatic states back into everyday life. I cultivate communities of practice where resonance is horizontal rather than hierarchical.
The same ritual architecture can hold transformation that arrives as a whisper or a thunderclap. The art is discerning what is right for this unique person at this particular moment.
I do have concerns about the intensity-focused culture of the lineage in which I was trained. My own work developed, in part, as an effort to bring greater care and discernment to the field.
Across breakthrough-oriented healing cultures, I have repeatedly observed that when high-intensity altered states are combined with charismatic authority, the risk of retraumatization and boundary violations increases in ways that feel structural rather than incidental. When intensity, hierarchy, and heightened suggestibility converge without sufficient attention to pacing, integration, and power-awareness, harm becomes more likely.
On the other hand, with greater awareness of trauma and regulation, the pendulum can swing the other way. Sometimes we become so careful that we avoid the courageous threshold-crossing, where ecstasy unfolds its magic.
Across human history, people have sought ecstatic states through collective joy practices — ritual, drumming, breath, plant medicine, fasting, rites of passage, erotic ceremony. These practices are holy when they realign us with relational and ecological rhythms. As sacred intimates, our role is not merely to facilitate ecstatic states, but to help weave the embodied wisdom gathered there back into everyday life, community, and culture — where our longings expand to include collective liberation, peace, and joy.