The Body Ecstatic

Ritual Postures as a portal to altered states—and healing

I’ve just returned from a week at CUYA, the Cuyamungue Institute, immersed in a practice that, among other things, helped me heal from leukemia. I wanted to give you a taste of the Cuyamungue method of Ritual Postures and ecstatic trance.

But first, some back story. My assignment on a hot July day in 1996 was to sprout raven’s wings and soar over a mesa dotted with pinon and juniper. Yoga Journal had sent me to Santa Fe to interview the German anthropologist Dr. Felicitas Goodman, then 82, with a long gray braid. I found myself standing in an adobe kiva with others, our arm positions mimicking that of an ancient figurine. When Goodman began to drum, my spirit traveled down through the floor of the kiva, slithered snakelike through earthen tunnels. I wondered, How did I get here? Am I really in a trance state—or just making it up?

Images from the Yoga Journal piece, "Sing the Body Ecstatic!" April 1997. I demo the Corn Goddess and Emergence postures. Photos by Michael Sexton.

Goodman had theorized that many artifacts and cave paintings from worldwide cultures depict people in states of ecstatic trance. She asked her research subjects to assume these Ritual Postures while she drummed or rattled at a tempo that invited a shift in consciousness. To her surprise, subjects reported otherworldly journeys: becoming animals, dialoguing with spirits, receiving healing. Each posture seemed to carry a unique signature.

Through my first days in the kiva, I worried my article would be utter crap if I couldn’t get into trance. But during the final session, the rattle’s sound came from all around me and inside me. My Yoga Journal piece, “Sing the Body Ecstatic!” chronicles my journey from skeptic to bona fide trancer—and features pics of baby me age 29 😊.

Fast-forward to winter 2022 and my treatment for leukemia. Goodman’s successors, Paul and Laura Lee Robear, were hosting sessions on Zoom due to the pandemic. The trance journeys took me deep into my bloodstream, my bone marrow. I held the sun in my womb. I saw my body decomposing and becoming earth. I saw myself rise from my hospital bed and dance to the lush banks of a river, where I prostrated to drink.

Now, after returning from a week at the Institute’s newish home in Sedona, I’m still buzzing with the sounds of Paul’s rattle. I’m studying to become a facilitator of the work. Here’s the story (from last year’s retreat) of what catalyzed my desire to go deeper with this practice and, eventually, share it with others.

During the meditation before the trance, I find myself inside the dark network of tunnels that is my bloodstream. I tune into the horror of when it’s your own blood that could kill you, and you need a poison liquid that can kill it, and the liquid is at war with your own blood. I’m marveling, bewildered, about what the fuck happened to my body, when the rattling begins.

The rattle rains staccato bursts of light down through the top of my head, which is the head of a Cooper’s hawk, or is it an osprey. Light soaks the feathers of my chest in prismatic colors. The colors enter my bloodstream and course down every vein and artery, out to the capillaries, zapping any confused cells along their path. Meanwhile, mycelia grow in a network of shining filaments from the soil through my feet and legs, colonizing the inner and outer shell of my body, consuming all pathogens. Mushrooms sprout from the top of my head.

After I read my notes to the group, Paul speaks about the time when I was in treatment for leukemia and coming to the trance sessions on Zoom. His voice breaks when he says, “Laura and I didn’t know if you were gonna stay on the planet.”

“You might think we should all gather around Kristin and give her a healing,” Paul continues. “But in ancient cultures, the shaman is the one who’s had the near-death experience, who brings healing back from that edge. So Kristin will give us a healing.”

I’m honored and a little nervous. I walk alone in the red-rock hills above the retreat center, asking the spirits how to proceed. When the time comes, we gather in the Sanctuary Dome. I show drawings I’d made of trance journeys during my cancer treatment and talk about their role in my healing. As Paul, Laura Lee, and others lie on their backs, I lead a guided meditation using healing imagery that had come to me in trance. Light and love course through our bloodstreams; the mycelium and mushrooms clean out impurities. Our prone bodies sprout flowers that are pollinated by butterflies and hummingbirds.

Later, I tell them this session was more healing for me than for everyone else. I’d grown into a new role, if only for one night.

Laura says, “We are all both healer and healee.”