Many people come to Sacred Ecstatics through the doorway of Shaking Medicine, Brad’s 2007 book about the healing power of ecstatic movement. Paying homage to the world’s longstanding ecstatic traditions, Brad calls for freeing the body to shake, dance, shout, and sing in celebration of being fully alive. One of my favorite chapters is the last one, “The Ultimate Medicine,” where Brad discusses “shaking faith.” He makes the case that shaking is most potent when it’s directly fueled by religious emotion and inspiration:

I have personally experienced practically every form of spirited expression and shaking described in this book, whether it was noted in an account of a historical Shaker or that of a Kalahari shaman…More importantly, I have met other people throughout the world who have also had these experiences. We have a fire in our hearts, and we walk with great devotion and passion for all the great religions of the world. We know that these grand traditions of faith are a medicine chest hold­ing the most powerful elixirs and medicines. The oldest cultures of the world teach us that medicine is a word that is not limited to what you buy at a drugstore. To the ecstatic and spirited shamans, mystics, and medicine people, medicine is “spirit”—that which can transform our whole being. Prayer is a medicine, as is song and dance. In the universal clinic for the care of all souls, shaking faith, reborn and resurrected in love, is the greatest medicine of them all.

In many ways, Sacred Ecstatics picked up where the final chapter of Shaking Medicine left off. For the last fifteen years we’ve been digging around at the roots of “shaking faith,” uncovering the fundamental dynamics that enable the ultimate medicine to be tapped and shared. We’ve ended up with a large pantheon of dreamed saints, four thousand pages of written teachings, over one thousand musical tracks, and three letters from the alphabet:

What Brad called “shaking medicine” now lives inside Sacred Ecstatics as Ecstatic Sound Movement: an auditory-kinetic practice where body shaking exists among a larger palette of movements and multi-sensory physiological dynamics.

The letters E-S-M stand for Ecstatic Sound Movement, but more specifically they refer to:

E = ecstatic inspiration

S = sound concentration

M = movement spontaneity

Let’s examine these three letters further, starting with E.

E

E is the love, longing, and hunger we feel for Holiness, the sacred E-motion that delivers the lifeblood to religion and spirituality. It’s the concentrated heart nectar found at the center of all traditions when we go past their named differences and come in contact with the source of Divine Creation. Even when people try to bury this holy E-lixir in institutionalism, rigid morality, and excessive textuality, its river of liquid Light still flows under the surface, waiting to be struck like oil.

If there’s one universal Electrical Grand Rounds diagnosis of the human condition, it’s this: everyone needs more vitamin E.

E is the ecstasy in the mystic’s heart.
E puts the spirit in spirituality.
E is the medicine inside the ultimate medicine that can make you shake with extreme joy.

S

E-medicine needs a medium or carrier fluid so it can be administered. That’s where S comes in. The “sound” in Ecstatic Sound Movement is E-saturated sound. Musicians or vocalists fill themselves with ecstatic inspiration and pour it out into the room through music, singing, or chanting. The result is something you won’t find on the pop charts or piped into a spa. It’s unpolished, unpredictable, and a little raw. E-soaked sound is characterized by what Korean shamanic drummers call “rough beauty.” It’s irregular like a mountain boulder or the twisted branch of a tree.1

S is for

soul-tuning
spirit-stimulating
supremely non-monotonous
superbly non-sappy
sonically satisfying but in a surprising way
and
sanctified.

E-soaked sound can be slow or fast, melodic, or even a little cacophonic. When you concentrate on this sound through higher/deeper/whole-body listening, you can catch the E inside it.

The target of Ecstatic Sound Movement is to dissolve in and become one with the sound, one with the feeling-medicine it carries, and by extension, one with the Big Holy from whom all medicine pours.

M

How do you become one with sound? Through movement that is fully in sync with what you hear. I’m talking sound-driven, wu wei movement: effortless and awake but with no conscious mind interference.2 No self-observation, no over-attention to sensation, no trying to make something happen. Only movement spontaneously arising through sound concentration.

In short, you want your M to be led by S so that E can be caught.

The goal is to be so in sync that you feel as if your movement is causing the musician’s sound and vice versa. That’s heaven, right there.

M should feel like

Aah
Yes
Thank you
Breathing
Holy
Glory
Zing
Zap
Hello
Amen

In Ecstatic Sound Movement, it’s better to think of M not as something required but freely allowed. As such, movement can take any form from shaking to trembling, rocking, swaying, stomping, bobbing, swooping, or hardly any movement at all. You can move while sitting or standing, or if need be, while lying down.3

The only constraint on your movement is the sound you hear. When it comes to M, wilder or bigger does not necessarily mean stronger. The target is sound and movement synchrony. When M and S are in sync, that E-medicine will flow!

Of the three letters, E is most essential. E is not only a feeling but a frame, a room, and a context for living. Ecstatic inspiration, drawn from the highest and holiest source, is what takes sound and movement synchrony from a “wellness practice” to a means of soul-igniting, divine communion. At the same time, E needs the other two letters to amplify it, to deliver it from conceptual abstraction to something palpable and sensate.

When all three letters circulate like a mystical wheel, they generate spiritual electricity in our bodies and in the room. Call it the universal life force, Holy Spirit, seiki, or n/om. Call it electrified qi, sacred vibration, or super-charged himma. Whatever the name, you need E, S, and M in circulation to wake up the current and keep it strong.

Brad recently wrote to the Guild:

Forget the self and forget the idea of forgetting the self.

Concentrate on E, S, and M.

On what?

E, S, and M in full synchrony.

Forget the shamanic journey—there’s too much man and woman in the middle of it.

We’re here for a shasonic journey launched by E-S-M synchrony.

Let’s lose ourselves to be found in the sound, in the movement, in the ecstasy.

That’s how we plug in to God’s electricity.

ESM is Everywhere

Just as Brad recast global ecstatic traditions as forms of shaking medicine, we can do the same with Ecstatic Sound Movement. If we put on our special E-S-M goggles and headphones and fly around the globe, we find that the Kalahari singing tremblers, the Caribbean shouting shakers, the Sufi chanting whirlers, the Holy Ghost moaning pew-rockers, and numerous other traditions share the same three-letter sensory alphabet.

Therefore, rest assured that living as an Outskirts Three-Letter Circulator is perfectly normal, if not widely reflected in mainstream culture.

Ecstatic Sound Movement is a daily plug-in practice in the Guild, a way of quickly re-connecting to the Big Room of Holy Mystery. We do it solo with special E-filled audio tracks made by Brad, we do it together during weekly Spirit House Meetings, and we’ll be doing it at our intensive in Budapest this spring!

I always start my day with a few rounds of Ecstatic Sound Movement. If I don’t, I regret it later. I’m not exaggerating when I say that these three letters of the alphabet have been getting us through winter, a winter made colder by ICE in the streets and ice in the human heart.

Sacred Ecstatics doesn’t have all the answers to combatting the latest surge of cruelty in the long history of human idiocy, but we have faith: shaking faith, ecstatic faith, sounding faith, moving faith, and unwavering faith in the inexhaustible availability of God’s healing electricity.

With our deepest prayers,

Hillary (& Brad)

Bonus!

As promised, here are some movement instructions plus audio track for those who want to take a three-letter dip in eternity and recharge their spiritual batteries.

1. First, get in the Big Room. Close your eyes, build up some good loving feelings in your heart, then say/think/breathe them into the world. Keep it simple and short.

2. Turn on the audio track below.

3. Concentrate on the sound and let it move your body without effort. Maybe you’ll lift one arm every time you hear a high note, absorb the sound through the center of your outstretched palms, shake gently whenever a sound-drop lands on your heart in a certain kind of way, or let the Holy Wind gently turn your torso round and round like a slownado tornado. Who knows what the sound will do with you? Just be in sync and catch the E-medicine inside it.

4. When finished, say, “Thank you.”

Repeat as necessary.

(For more of Brad’s tracks, visit our website).

Related reading:

The recent 2024-2025 Guild season gifted us with many new advancements for refining this practice that we look forward to sharing in the future. For this first post, we begin by breathing with the rhythm of nature.

Plugging in to the universal life force is the most important thing we can do every day. At least that’s what Ikuko Osumi Sensei would unequivocally advise, and she was the greatest healer of 20th Century Japan.1

Sensei called this life force seiki, and regarded it as the source of healing, wellbeing, and relational harmony. It’s an electrical-like current that pulses through every living thing. While seiki is always present, to maintain optimal vitality our relationship to it must be regularly revived and renewed. Plug in, tune in, wake it up! Do it for health, do it for healing, but also do it because this sacred current renders us more caring, inspiring, and relationally wise rather than consumed by frustration, exhaustion, despair, selfishness, or anger.

Osumi Sensei taught that seiki is best nurtured through effortless, spontaneous movement: a simple, daily “seiki workout” that is performed seated on a bench. There is no preset sequence or choreography to follow. One simply surrenders all purposefulness and lets the body move.

In recent years, Brad and I took the traditional seiki exercise, dusted it with Kalahari sand, and pan-fried it in music. The result is something we call Ecstatic Sound Movement—a daily retreat to the higher playground of spontaneous movement and soulful sound. Ecstatic Sound Movement sets free our body’s natural wisdom that lies beyond the reach of conscious mind.

Gloriously, this practice requires no words. Before written doctrine there was only sacred emotion + sound + movement—the holy trinity of spiritual renewal. Let’s travel back in time together to join the ancestors for a brief plunge into the primordial pulse. Reset! Our journey today will take only six minutes and twenty-one seconds (though you may wish to repeat it more than once).

Your movement instructions and the accompanying musical track are below.

But first, we share the brief dream in which they were received. It’s one of several dreams from last summer in which Osumi Sensei instructed us in matters of “spiritual electricity,” which then became the primary focus of our recent Guild season. That resulted in the expansion of our Ecstatic Sound Movement audio library and movement repertoire, and also the launch of “Electrical Grand Rounds,” a new means of coaching in matters of electrical conductance that is still evolving.

Brad reports:

We found ourselves in the special room in Tokyo where Osumi Sensei transmitted seiki. She was excited, and her Japanese words flowed like the fast rapids of a mountain stream.

Without understanding what she was saying, we soon realized that Sensei was instructing us through a seiki transmission.

As she spoke, my breathing changed. It became smooth and in sync with what I can only describe as the “rhythm of nature.” I don’t know what that means, but those are the words that came to mind.

With each inhalation, an electrical current rocked steadily and smoothly back and forth as it climbed up my spine. Then with each exhalation, the current rocked side to side again while traveling back down.

Up and down, back and forth—this rocking current continued to ascend and descend with each breath. It felt effortless, rejuvenating, and healing.

Then Osumi Sensei spoke one word in crystal-clear English: “Concentrate.”

I could sense that in this context, concentration was not about focusing my mind but surrendering fully to what was happening. It meant dropping all expectation, anticipation, and self-observation.

Inhalation and exhalation, up and down, rocking side to side—this grew into electrical bliss.

I finally woke up from the dream and continued to feel the transmission taking place within. In an ongoing state of electrified joy, I mystically heard an audio track that was different than anything I had heard or composed before. I vowed to record it the next day.

Audio Track & Movement Instructions

Do this on a bench or sturdy chair that allows you to be upright and move freely.

1. Before you listen to the track, take a brief moment to begin breathing with the rhythm of nature. Don’t think about what this means; just do it. (Hint: breathe smoothly, naturally, and without effort.)

2. Then play the track below. Know this: the sound is also breathing with the rhythm of nature. Let the sound guide your movement. A gentle rock, sway, or wiggle may be all you need, although there are no rules other than to be in sync with what you hear. As you breathe, listen, and move, the electrical current circulates through you. You’ll notice the sound is sometimes fast and sometimes slow, like a river flowing through different channels and landscapes. Free your body to respond to these acoustic variations.

In summary: Breathe, listen, and move to stir up the electricity within.

Enjoy tinkering, and please let us know how it goes in the comments! Remember: concentrate. Concentration is surrender to breath, sound, and movement. Let’s go and let the current flow:

Warm (and humid) greetings from the Deep South,
Hillary & Brad

(And thank you for hitting the heart button!)

P.S. If you want more music, movement, and electrical conductance, join us in October for the next season of the Sacred Ecstatics Guild.

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