Endless Summer with Bernice Raabis!

“Being a dancer is just an extension of being a human being.”
~ Tovaris Wilson ~Bernice Raabis is our guest Minister of Music this Sunday! She says, “Having just come through the midpoint of summer, also known as Lammas, or midsummer’s eve, I’m feeling the strong sun energy of IT WILL BE SUMMER FOREVER! While I know it’s an illusion, I’m choosing to ride this wave of endless summer with a feeling of discovery that is guiding my musical selections for our dance this Sunday.

What I love most about being an ecstatic dance DJ is the amazing feedback loop I experience between dancers and myself.  I love that each community is distinct and unique while still being part of a global movement with a shared belief that dance heals and unites us.  For me, Ecstatic Dance is about coming together in community to be our true selves on a shared journey while experiencing the full spectrum of our human emotions. Everyone welcomed, Every BODY a dancer.

Music and Dance are the mediums by which we create this community field.  The journey being non-verbal makes it easy to keep things non-denominational.  Dancing barefoot allows us to really sink into all the bones of our feet, allowing our whole body to come alive in a way that takes the thinking mind out of the driver seat, letting it rest while we actually FEEL our feelings rather than think about and analyze them.  The substance-free part is about foregoing the bypass that substances create and thereby allowing us to really work and sweat in our body to earn the ecstasy of “Ecstatic Dance.”  Hopefully we do reach an ecstatic state through our dance but if we don’t at least we know that we are willing to work for it and maybe next time we will achieve it. ED is about using what we have by being human, adding music, and creating, through the alchemy of movement, a community united by something deeper than doctrine.”

          Guest Minister of Music Bernice Raabis, co-founder of Ecstatic Dance International, is on a mission to infect the world with conscious dance.  She is a DJ, a certified conscious dance facilitator, an expressive arts therapist, and a teacher of teachers. Her Ecstatic Dance career began in 2011 when she founded Dance Church, a beloved weekly dance in Nelson, BC, Canada.  Today she spends her time traveling the world teaching DJ, event production and dance ceremony leadership trainings. The icing on the cake is that she gets to play epic tracks for epic dancers at Ecstatic Dances all over the world!