On Saturday night, I went with Christine to this Cell Space event that Scott Leonard recommended to me. Apart from those two, and Scott's girlfriend Sofia, Adam Grandi, Adam Hibble, Vibrata, Giamma, and Jen Clemente, I was surrounded by three or four hundred people I didn't know. Many of the women were really sexy and lots of the guys seemed interesting also, but I soon realized that I am spoiled by the raves (ANDC, Gratitude, Radiance, Sweet, Infuse/Opal, Burning Man) that I go to, with notions of "intentionality", "community", "spirituality", and "ceremony". As this party, smiling and saying "hi" and asking people about themselves didn't seem to open much up with most people there that I engaged. Perhaps part of it was that many of them were probably ten or fifteen years younger than me, but it had me realize something about openness and heart that I take for granted in the parties I usually go to.

Anyway, arriving at the party, I was still feeling the cabernet, merlot, chardonnay, pinot grigio, Sierra Nevada, and hefeweizen I drank all afternoon and evening (it was the drunkest I've been in a while). I had also just had a great dinner conversation with Christine and chugged a bottle of diet coke also, so I my mind was flowing along like a bubbling brook, relatively smoothly. As I said, I didn't feel so at home with the party people, but I did have fun confabulating dancing and horsing around with Christine and the rest of the people I did know, dancing a little to some unremarkable house and breaks, and making a Burning Man mask in the huge and way cool crafts area they had set up (pre-made paper mache masks, paints, glitter, glue, feathers, beads, pom-poms, etc).

By two am, however, I was sober and caffeine-crashed, and my feet and body hurt, and I had not seen Christine (who drove) in two unpleasant full-Cell-Space searches. I was ready to go home, and was getting more and more cranky, collapsing-inwardly, and colicky about still being there. I started hating the cold people around me for not loving me, the people who created the event for being un-heart-felt, Christine and all of my friends in tha house for being unlocatable, my ex for ending our relationship so that I keep ending up at events where I don't know anyone cuz I'm avoiding events where my friends are in a group but where my ex might be at also. I was feeling a full brace of my mind's habitual and deeply-grooved ways of closing and hating, dating from being about five.

I examined my options. I didn't want to walk twenty blocks and ditch Christine without checking in with her, so just up and jetting was out. So, I decided the best option was to get on the dance floor. At first, my feet hurt, my muscles felt heavy, I felt self-conscious, old, and unfashionable, and wanted to be elsewhere. And then I thought of my recent practice of intentionally generating gratitude. I realized what a blessing it is to be have hours free to be able to get drunk and wander around the city, spend lots of money on crepes and beer and a dance party, to hang out with beautiful people, dance, and come to a party that people worked to set up for me. It may be a life many people on the planet would die for. And I also realized that I had just been listening to an audio tape about how "tiredness" is always a choice, not to mention "bad", and realized that I didn't have to have the grumpy experience my habitual karma was laying out for me.

So, as I semi-danced, I started to work with a mantra/affirmation practice. I started mentally repeating the mantra "May all beings be happy, who am I?, may all beings be happy, who am I?, may all beings be happy, who am I?". Over and over, I subvocalized those two phrases. And I have found that mantras work best when anchored with something physical, like the breath, so, with ten-foot tall speaker stacks all around me, I chose to intend to rest my awareness on feeling the bass (drum kick and bassline) in my abdomen.

Over and over, my mind wandered. I found that I got caught on my usual concerns about my life (money, career/purpose, tha ladiez), on energetically reaching out to energetically engage with many hot females around me, on having thoughts about the party and the music, and on thoughts about tiredness, what time it was, and how much I had to do the next day. I kept bringing my attention back to my mantras and my bass-awareness. My attention kept wandering, and I would feel construction and suffering, and I kept bringing it back to my practice, "May all beings be happy, who am I?" and being grounded in feeling the bass in my abdomen, and I felt release and flow.

Then the DJ changed, and starting playing a startlingly dope-ass set of break-y trance, much of it my perfect favorite dance music - deep trippy repetitive but human melodies with pounding gut-punch bass. He did a lot of that mid-nineties shit where the music stops, and then the drums build back up, and your heart races, and everyone jumps up explosively when the first hit of the kick starts again. It was all working perfectly for me.

With the "May all beings be happy" part of the mantra, I emanated well-being and expansion out of my heart. I felt billowing waves of warmth and energy emanate off of me, out to the people dancing around me, out to Christine Scott Vibrata and everyone I knew at the party, out to everyone in Cell Space, out to everyone in the city, out to every being on the planet. I noticed my heart get stuck and want to close as I concentrated on emanating out to some of the people dancing around me, for example a really pretty big-racked little girl in a tiny shiny skirt and platform boots who didn't look at me, and especially the dodgy thuggy-looking guy she didn't seem to know well but was wrapping her legs around and looking longingly at anyway. That shit ain't right, this shit ain't fair, I thought. My heart also got blocked thinking about my ex out there in the city somewhere, and also a few times blocked wishing happiness for myself. But, with a full heart racing, I dissolved into and through those blocks and other ones, and I wished happiness to all people and all beings, the little girl, the dodgy guy, my ex, everyone. My shirt and face were soaked with sweat, my heart felt full and interconnected, and I felt radiant energy shooting up my spine and out of all of my pores. Over and over - "May all beings be happy".

With the "Who am I?" part of the mantra, I dissolved whatever felt solid in me. I noticed all the definitions of self that my mind kept coming up with - some of them superior to the people around me, some inferior to the people around me, many neither. As my defining mind did its thing, I felt the heaviness tired constrainedness of those definitions - "I'm this kind of person, and that fact means that". As they came up and I got caught by them, I kept asking "Who am I?" - i.e, "who is they I that believes this?", "is this definition of self who *I* am?". As I mantra-ed, I felt less like a 35-year old white supersmart man with earrings and a blue shirt on, and more like energy energy energy always dynamic energy, beyond and through all words and definitions, an action of the whole energy everywhere and yet also a contained and very specific manifestation of the whole moving within the space of one human. Over and over - "Who am I?".

With all that flowing, the bass-abdomen-awareness brought feeling the big planet under me, wicked funkiness and savage activated animalness. The more I felt the music in my gut, the more my feet and legs moved on their own in bad-ass dance patterns that were funkier than I normally know how to do. I had the thought that the massive musical vibrations in the air around me were dancing themselves through me.

During that time, with each little energetic engagement that I felt with the intense people around me, I noticed that I wasn't reaching out in want and desire or pull back in fear. I looked at people and/or they looked at me, and I felt them and/or they felt me, and I had a relatively complete experience that was exactly what it was for as long as it was, no more and no less. The wild-eyed shirtless dude running around the dancefloor, the hippie chick with the beautiful halo of dreads and flowers in her own world - I felt peaceful with everyone. I didn't want sex or a fun conversation or anything more than what was happening with, and I felt free of any fear physical attack or rejection or anything that would have me pull back either.

I was in a realm of timelessness, it was just right now, right now, another right now. The trance was deep, my dancing was animal and energetic, one hour flowed into the next without any break in my bustin a move. Finally the DJ played a drum-supplemented Donna Summer/Georgio Moroder "I Feel Love". That song had triggered something special for me, ever since feeling it during an incredibly euphoric deep billowing peaking experience at a rave hangin with the first Community at the Richmond Civic Center in 1994. Bliss, bliss, bliss.

Twenty minutes later, I started again getting really physically tired and collapsey, and being really ready to go. I didn't practice with it that time. As I ambled about, looking for Christine again, I was pleased to bump into my housemate Lynn and her best friend, who it turns out had been there the whole time. Christine soon materialized, all beaming from having had a breakthrough multi-hour human connection with someone from her workplace, something she said was "big" for her. I felt happy to see her, and glad that she had had a breakthrough. After I semi-fell asleep on a bench, we made our way up the steps and out the front door. We drove South down Bryant street as the barest first rays of the morning sun poked up over the Eastern horizon. Soon I was brushing my teeth and getting ready for sleeping.

I try to stay away from a model of "meditation" or "spirituality" that is about intense, acute, fantastic, "getting high" experiences. I hold it more as about daily life, daily practice, and years of commitment. I have also been a little down on the motto of creating a dance floor that is a clearing for peeps to have "primary religious experiences". I have expressed my opinion that the meditation hall, yoga studio, therapist's office, or Arete course room are places of religious practice, where you do the soul work of splitting yourself open, and that the dance floor is a place to be slack and have fun. But goddamn if I didn't have something of a PRE on the dance floor last Saturday night. I've had things experiences like that before, but never sober and for two hours. Yeee-haw! I am glad that I did, and have enjoyed writing about it to send to volks. Thanks for reading about my experience.

Peace out,

Adam