However I managed to overcome it without taking medication or having surgery and I finally emerged with my new identity as ‘The Renegade Pharmacist’, showing people an alternative to conventional healthcare and pills by going back to forgotten traditions from our ancestral past.

It also seems it has become more and more about showing how cool you are to your insta following rather than embracing the insights and inspirations gained by dancing into the ecstatic experience as a tribe.

Humankind is perhaps celebrating it’s own so called evolution from its once tribal dancing, cave dwelling days, projecting it’s own might and prowess on massive stages now within the walls of concrete jungles, allowing the shaman to blow apart the minds of worshippers at a push of a button, without the need for a single musician or drum stick. 

However with the advent of globalisation, all the fame, money and glory that comes with such technological advances, something seems to be distinctly missing…

What was the real purpose for our ancestors to dance around the fire in the first place?

Do we have any idea what this ritual was really about? 

Have we now somehow entirely missed the point?

Is it like the new ‘yoga industrial complex’? Yoga, like dance. also originated thousands of years ago during our ancestral tribal past. It has also turned into a billion dollar industry. However yogi’s who once practiced asanas to reach a state of mind that creates a union with the divine, are now more and more becoming distracted by the inevitable fame and glory that comes with being able to perform competitive poses for magazine covers.

Modern dance music culture began in the concrete caves of Chicago with the invention of house music and once rebelled against the rise of soulless materialism and consumerism. However you can argue and with much disappointment to it’s pioneers that dance culture has now turned into a global movement celebrating all that it once spoke out against.

I made a pact with my higher self and vowed I would do whatever I possibly could to help liberate soul’s from the mass robotisation of corporate culture, and to bring about a new culture, with a new sense of togetherness, through the love of music, dance and the celebration of life, free from the excesses of hedonism in a more healthy and sustainable way. 

Music has the power to create cultures and the ritual of coming together to dance may be a defining tool used to bring harmony and peace among tribes during human’s progression from cavedom to civilisation…

In our tribal past humans would partake in rituals that involved the whole tribe dancing ecstatically under the influence of shamanic breathing techniques, psychedelic and energising plant concoctions, rhythmic beats and music played around a fire with flickering lights from burning embers. Fast forward a few thousand years and this ritual has evolved into the familiar rave… The shaman replaces the DJ, the plants converted into chemical drugs, the music is now produced by technology, and the fire has evolved into psychedelic light shows and theatrical performances… 

However over time the ritual became less and less about cultivating a true sense of togetherness and more and more about worshipping a god like DJ, dividing tribes of people by what musical genres they play. 

However were our ancestors merely celebrating their own triumph over the forces of nature. The discovery of fire, human’s first major technological breakthrough. The accidental ingestion of psychedelics such as the magic mushroom, human’s first doorway to the invisible realms of the divine. The remarkable sound the stretched skin of a dead animal makes when struck with a stick to a beat in sync with the human heart beat. Were all these discoveries combined together into one ritual for celebrating human progress, much like the celebration of the wealth and material successes of godlike DJ’s and promoters of today?

Was this ritual of coming together as a tribe for no other purpose than to collectively celebrate each step of mankind’s advancement from jungle to civilisation?

Are human’s in modern times simply repeating the same ritualistic celebration of progress?

Or is something deeper missing?

The reason for my first love affair with the rave came from a different place entirely. When I first stepped into a club and heard the hypnotic beat, time stood still… My identity was left outside the venue. My true self was found. Love was embraced. Deep connection with other humans became the most important metric I measured when determining the quality of the rave. My life suddenly had meaning again. I no longer felt I was a prisoner of the dogmatic consumer culture that had been forced fed to me at school… This ecstatic realisation was before I even took my first dose of ecstasy… 

However when that first dose of ecstacy struck my nervous system, the ecstatic experience went to whole new level. Now I was finally free… even if the sense of liberation was just for a moment, it felt like an eternity…

The divine revealed itself and this turned me into a believer for the first time in my spiritually confused life. Christian schooling and dogmatic hindu indoctrination had made into an atheist, but now for the first time I felt that perhaps a higher power does exist, and this spirit already exists within every single one of us. 

Is the true role of the DJ to create an environment where this truth is realised in the moment of sudden rapture and ecstatic bliss?

Sadly these experiences did not last as long as I had hoped. I desperately searched for the same spiritual connection as I once experienced and cultivated at our legendary raves. DJs had become superstars with private jets, and lived a lifestyle more like corporate bosses than spiritual shamans. 

Clubs turned into bars, dance floors were covered in spilt alcohol, ecstasy was no longer trustworthy, and a cocktail of unknown drugs was being consumed that had turned ravers from spiritual pilgrims into zombies.

Something deeper from the ecstatic experience of the rave was missing for me…

The existing venues and DJs were no longer creating an environment where my soul could be set free. I felt for sake of my physical and mental health I could no longer be dependent on substances to reach ecstatic states. So I stopped going to clubs and raves for years until one day everything suddenly changed…

I had to go far far away to rediscover what I had been seeking all this time… On the mystical island of Koh Phangan, I first discovered this new concept called ‘Ecstatic Dance’. 

One community, with one love, and one mission to reach the ecstatic experience, with no drugs, ego’s left at the entrance, and absolutely no genres..

It was the perfect antidote to what EDM and what the rave culture had become… The love was back, and I had not taken a single pill to get there…

The culture of ecstatic dance does not matter who you are, what you do, where you come from, and how big your social media presence is. 

It is a culture that creates a safe space where identity is forgotten, your true self is discovered, and authentic love is embraced…

I wanted to not just become a part of it, but to become an ambassador for it, as I once was for my beloved rave scene…

So together with my tribe we bring this all together with a new experience…