When men talk about wanting a deeper relationship with their emotional lives, the usual suspects come up… Anger, sadness, shame. But almost no one says: “I want to get closer to my embarrassment.” And yet embarrassment quietly runs so much of what we do and don’t do. It needs an audience, real or imagined. It lives in the gap between who we are and how we think we appear. Men tend not to want to study it. They want to avoid it, outrun it, or make sure it never gets a chance to show up.

“The real edge isn’t in a workshop circle where everyone is there for the same reason. It’s in the ordinary, mixed world – on the street, with colleagues, with strangers who didn’t sign up for your self-exploration.”

Ecstatic dance is interesting because it goes straight to the body. There’s no planning your way through it. You show up, the music starts, and your nervous system has to decide whether it’s safe to move freely in front of a room full of strangers. That tension, that specific awkwardness, is the practice.