I almost didn’t go to Tomorrowland in 2024. At 43, during a routine mammogram, an irregularity was found. Not a lump, but something much smaller. It turned out to be stage 1 breast cancer.

If you aren’t familiar, Tomorrowland is arguably the biggest electronic dance music festival in the world. It takes place in Boom, Belgium, and spans 2 weekends in July to accommodate the estimated 400,000 annual attendance. It’s also very difficult to get tickets. Only half of our loose group chat was able to get through the queue when we purchased our passes in January. I was lucky enough to be one of them.

Tomorrowland had been on my bucket list for almost a decade at that point. Beyond a standard festival, it’s a fully immersive, beautifully curated experience. Stages, costumes, and little side quests everywhere all feel like cohesive works of art. And it brings together people from so many countries. Looking out in the crowd, it’s common to see a sea of different flags, with all those people dancing together. In 2022, it was something I told myself I wanted to get to before turning 50. In 2024, the opportunity came up, so I took it. Aptly, the theme that year was “Life.”

Back to cancer. The timeline leading up to the festival was this: January, get tickets; April, diagnosis; May, surgery to remove the tumor. The problem was that the second part of the treatment required local radiation 10 – 12 weeks following surgery. That meant I needed to be available for 4 consecutive weeks of daily radiation in that window, which fell in July, exactly when I was supposed to be in Belgium.

I was determined to make this work. My breast surgeon was on the fence. She wanted to do the radiation earlier in that window. So, I dove into all the available medical literature I could find on PubMed around efficacy, radiation windows post-surgery, and my particular type of breast cancer. I have a PhD in biomedical science, so I can read these papers and understand them. What I found was that outcomes were similar for whether radiation was initiated 10 or 12 weeks following surgery in cases similar to mine. I brought this to her, and she said she would be comfortable starting at the 12-week mark given the research.

So, I went. And from the moment I was welcomed in the Brussels airport by people in Tomorrowland costume (because, yes, the whole country is in on the festival), I was able to push the treatment out of my mind. I stood in front of the iconic mainstage, with its multiple waterfalls, moving plant features, and breathtaking layers of color, and I was in absolute awe. I’d watched so many of these scenes on a screen, and now I was here, in person.

I returned from Tomorrowland on July 22, then began 4 weeks of radiation on July 23. To say this was difficult is an understatement. I was coming off such a peak experience back to the reality of treatment and hospitals. I distinctly remember my phone vibrating with notifications from our group, sending photos and reminiscing, while I was putting on the hospital cape for my first session. What a crash.

In the end, I have absolutely no regrets about this. What I learned through this experience is how important it is to hold space for joyful experiences, particularly when you are going through something like cancer treatment.

I am happy to say I am healthy now and have had no recurrences two years later. People react to these circumstances differently. For me, it was important not to let a diagnosis define me. And part of processing it that way was not to put my life on hold.

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Anjunadeep Open Air, Washington DC, May 2026

For eight months, I’d been looking forward to Groove Cruise, a 4-day dance music festival on a ship. It was my big travel music event for 2026. The day before, I was laid off from my corporate job. I was there for eight years, and in the end, even though I had mixed feelings, it was a big part of my history. A formative chapter that ended abruptly in a 10-min Teams call.

I usually set an intention for how I want the weekend to go ahead of big festivals. In the wake of the layoff, it was to escape real life and delay dealing with the fallout. So, naturally, I went hard for four straight days. I saw three sunrises and followed this with a longer than planned recovery. It was excessive, but I kept telling myself during the trip that it was OK because I was working through something. I was, in fact, doing quite the opposite. But it was what I needed.

The dancefloor can bring up a lot. Even Groove Cruise was not a complete escape. Out of nowhere, I found tears streaming down my face at Sean Tyas’s trance set on the last day. Over the last few months, I’ve been to a handful of dance music events, and each of those spaces gave me what I was seeking in those moments. Groove Cruise served its purpose as a (really fun) distraction from reality. And after coming home and licking my wounds, I wanted to reconnect.

In March, I flew out to Arizona to see old friends and went to M3F, a smaller, mixed dance and indie music festival. I wrote a whole separate essay about why this visit felt like a homecoming – I lived there years ago, and the vibe, the people, the landscape all still speak to me decades later. I wanted to be around people and in places linked to me before the corporate job I leaned so heavily into during the last decade. I looked around one night after the festival as friends I’d had for close to twenty years gathered for our little after party. We were crowded in a little guest casita, alternating between deep conversations and belly-laughing silliness, with the occasional flow toy for entertainment. Those relationships had not only endured but evolved as we moved through life. I took from this trip exactly what I needed. I still existed as a whole.

Following this, May felt alive. Like waking up after a long winter. Two, very different events barely two weeks apart reminded me why I keep coming back to the dancefloor three decades later. The first was a daytime, open-air outing with beautiful melodic house as the backdrop in Washington DC. Dancing outside in the spring sun, what I remember from that day is happy, familiar faces and bubbles in the air. Two weeks later, I was at a high-energy hard techno event at DC’s Echostage. There were a lot of sunglasses, leather, and black. The venue was crowded, hot, and sweaty, and when it closed at 3 am, the club was still packed. At both events, I felt present in a way I had not been able to for months. The background chatter around an uncertain future was gone. I felt like I was actually living life again.

May closed with Project Glow in DC, which holds a special place for me. I’ve been every year since the first one five years ago, when I went completely alone without knowing anyone there. This year, I found myself bouncing between groups of friends, others I’ve met online through Substack and Instagram, and performers I’ve met over the last few years. The large, lit-up “GLOW” sign in the center of the festival grounds became my default meet-up point, and I came back to it many times over that weekend. Yes, I had cultivated a community, but it’s more than that. I’d created a whole life completely outside of work.

I am still very much in a transitional period, but looking back, each of these events has become a landmark on this journey. When a place that occupied forty or more hours a week for close to a decade suddenly disappeared, the rest of me is still here. And so is everything else that mattered.

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The barn, October.

Last fall, I went to a rave on a farm, completely solo, and danced to techno in an unheated barn for 6 hours on a cool October afternoon. I parked on the grass and walked up to the entrance, not knowing what to expect. The contrast of heavy beats with the backdrop of horses and the scent of hay was immediate. Entering the dim barn, even at that mid-afternoon hour, pounding techno and moving lights filled the room. The assault on the senses was so complete that it commanded full attention. And it had mine. It was hypnotizing in a way that caused the rest of the world to fade into a whisper. I hardly moved from that spot all day.

I’ve been to a lot of dance music shows by myself. It’s a favorite activity lately, where I go when I want to get deeply lost in something, and one of the few places where the background mental noise of day-to-day life gets anywhere near zero. On any given day, there is a cognitive load: booking appointments, managing calendars and schedules, making grocery lists, reminding kids to brush teeth and bathe. But not that day. Raving alone pushes all of this out for a short time. Those few hours, it was just me and the beat and lights. Like a soul nap.

This is not to say I don’t like going with a group. It doesn’t so much detract from the experience, it just creates a different one. It’s hard to lose yourself in something for long stretches of time with others around, even if they are your closest friends. There’s an element of monitoring that takes away just enough attention, but it’s so small it goes unnoticed. You’re aware of their preferences: what sets to see, when to eat, when to rest. Being even lightly conscious of those pieces pulls me back about ten percent from full immersion.

Solo also means no one really notices you unless you want to be noticed. It strips expectations around performance and how you are perceived. You can be invisible if you choose, and that kind of anonymity removes the self-imposed constraints around how you move. You are temporarily relieved of the weight of being known. In that barn, I wouldn’t have cared if there were 10 or 100 people around, I was there for myself.

And solo does not necessarily mean alone. Even I was surprised at the number of other solo ravers at this small event, and how we all seemed to find each other on the dancefloor. We were a group of strangers, in a cold, dark barn, dancing to banging techno at 3 pm, and I felt oddly connected to them. That afternoon, it was enough.

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Last month, I went to M3F Festival in Phoenix, Arizona. The lineup was good, but the real reason for the trip was to visit old friends. I lived there almost 20 years ago and still count them among my closest.

This group has a rhythm of meeting somewhere yearly for a music festival; over the last 5 years, Electric Forest (twice), EDC Las Vegas, and now, M3F. But this visit was different. It lingered in a way that others had not. It was a whirlwind few days of hiking, the festival, staying up too late, and lots of deep conversations. It felt simultaneously nostalgic and current.

My partner and I met in Arizona. We love it out there and plan to return when our kids are grown. The desert, both geographically and socially, feels wild and untamed in a way that is very different from where either of us grew up.

But it’s more than this. The combination of the uninhibited desert vibe and the friends who live there allows the most complete version of myself to show up. They know more parts of me than most people. They were graduate school roommates. Like me, they are married, PhDs in neuroscience, and parents of young kids in midlife. I introduced them to the rave scene when I lived there, and also like me, they still go to raves and festivals. Nowhere else meets me where I am in so many aspects of my life.

I’m also unexpectedly in a place where I can really think about how to honor these various layers due to a recent layoff. A few months ago, I wrote a piece about integration across life decades. Going to visit those friends, and attend the festival with them exactly at this time, held a mirror up to what I want that integration to look like now. It forced a reset in orientation.

And it’s not just me. Another graduate school friend in the middle of a career pivot jokingly mentioned she is building towards a combination hippie commune / animal rescue, because enough of the real-world matrix. While I’m not planning on blowing everything up in one fell swoop, I am taking the long view towards designing a life that is slowly moving toward something like that. This trip helped me see that.

What this means is spending more time in environments and around people that allow for expansion and growth in the directions I want: planning to meet those Arizona friends more frequently as life allows; returning to places where I feel most myself; continuing to cultivate a local rave and music festival community where I currently live; and exploring career options that allow more structural flexibility.

The point is that places and people that enable the most complete version of yourself are not incidental, they are data. Once you recognize them, they start to shape how you design your life.

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Source: Pinterest.

Intro

On day 1 of Electric Forest 2022, I solo sidequested to see Andrew Bayer at the Observatory. I climbed up onto the deck, seeking space to dance and a better view. Another solo raver appeared next to me in what I could only describe as full ‘90s rave regalia (JNCOs, kandi up and down the arms, and a visor). I came up in that era, so this was instantly my vibe.

Throughout the entire 90-minute, high-energy set, we danced wordlessly side by side, respecting the big space we were each taking up while also moving freely, without inhibition or constraint. We were completely present in the moment, focused only on the music, movement, and experience. The only words we exchanged were brief compliments on our outfits. At the end of the set, we gave each other a hug, and went our separate ways.

I was at the festival for 5 days. There were a lot of memorable, beautiful moments, but dancing next to a stranger who was feeling the music in exactly the same way – as we moved without talking, like we had both tapped into the same current running through the whole crowd – felt spiritual.

Many people describe feeling a sense of collective unity, being part of something bigger, or experiencing a profound transformation during a festival, all of which also occur frequently in spiritual practices.

Traditional spiritual experiences and music festivals share common features, such as:

🌀 Loss of Self in the moment

🎶 Collective ritual involving music, chanting, and dancing

✨ Awe and altered states through practices like meditation, fasting, prayer, music, lights, movement, and, sometimes, mind-altering substances

When you delve into the research for each of these features, you see that what’s happening in the brain and body is similar across spiritual experiences, regardless of whether the stimulus occurs in a church or on the dance floor.

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Lost in the moment

If you’ve been to a rave or music festival, you probably know what losing yourself in the moment feels like. Meditation, prayer, rituals, ceremonies, nature, and other spiritual practices often evoke the same feeling; what happens in the brain is strikingly similar across these varied contexts.

In this state, multiple brain networks – or related collections of connected neurons – work together to create a heightened version of presence.

The brain’s default mode network (DMN), which is responsible for your background mental chatter, quiets. The DMN is most active when daydreaming and directing thought inward, and it slows when your focus turns outward. Research shows that this happens during meditation, prayer, and experiences of awe.

The frontoparietal network (FPN) also eases up. It’s typically active during executive planning; things like goal-directed thinking and problem solving. (On a side note, the FPN is actually more active during flow states, when you are totally engrossed in a task – a completely different but related experience, and maybe a topic for a separate post).

Both the DMN and FPN are involved in higher-order thinking and memory. A third – the salience network (SN) – acts as a dial for the DMN and FPN, turning them up or down. It bridges these networks that receive information from your senses and emotional and reward systems, and integrates this information so that the DMN and FPN know how to respond.

So, during a spiritual (or similar) experience, you take in sensory and emotional information, which the SN relays to the other two networks with instructions to “ease up”, causing your internal chatter (DMN) and external, task-related focus and attention (FPN) to soften. This can be experienced as the individual self melting away, leading to a sense of connectedness and unity.

That feeling I had of being tapped into the same current running through the crowd while dancing next to the stranger – that was it. I was fully in that moment with unwavering attention. Those three brain networks were acting together to quiet my internal chatter and task-related focus, leading to me feeling fully present in the experience and part of the collective.

Bonding through collective ritual and music

Dancing and listening to music together in groups is an ancient practice. It doesn’t matter whether the source is a drum circle or line-array speakers. This combination of dance and music bonds us together.

One way this works is through synchronous movement. Rhythm gives us a common backdrop to move similarly together, and neurons sync up across people just like our physical movement does. This phenomenon is called entrainment. When neurons sync, people report better mutual understanding, more prosocial behavior, and a greater sense of connection to others. They also often feel psychological blending, or “self-other merging.”

Additionally, brain chemistry changes during collective dancing. Oxytocin, which is involved in social bonding and attachment, increases; it helps us synchronize movement during dance by making us more attuned to social cues. Collective dancing and music also activate our internal endorphin system. Endorphins are our natural morphine, influencing mood, stress, pain relief, and reward. They make us feel good while also enhancing social bonding directly.

The feeling of being one with the group and just generally happy at the same time is, again, what I experienced at the Andrew Bayer set. What I was experiencing wasn’t just emotion, but the endorphins and oxytocin working together through the same mechanisms that have bonded humans through ritual and music for thousands of years.

Awe and altered states

Awe is a universal emotion. Awe-inspiring experiences are consistent across cultures and vary widely. They include other people’s courage and kindness, nature, collective gatherings (dance, rituals, and ceremonies), music, visual art, religious and spiritual practice, epiphanies, and birth and death.

That’s right! Raves and music festivals can be right up there with some of life’s most profound events because of how they induce awe.

Awe inspires feelings of deep emotion, respect, and amazement. It taps into some of the same mechanisms as being lost in the moment and collective dancing do. It quiets the DMN and increases oxytocin, and, if experienced in a group, enhances a sense of self-other merging.

Awe also stimulates the vagus nerve, which runs from the brain to the heart, lungs, and digestive system. When activated, your heart rate slows, blood pressure decreases, and digestion ramps up. It pushes your body into the “rest-and-digest” state, the opposite of what happens during stress (i.e., fight or flight). Activities like breathwork and meditation also activate the vagus nerve.

If you’ve danced at the Observatory Stage at Electric Forest – deep in the woods, with lights and lasers reflecting everywhere and a beautiful design—you most likely understand the awe I felt.

Source: my camera roll.

Same, same, but different

Many experiences can make you lose yourself in the moment. Collective ritual can happen in different settings. The sources of awe are diverse. But when a specific experience hits all 3 of these qualities, it feels spiritual.

Research shows that the same brain and body mechanisms are stimulated by both traditional spiritual experiences as well as raves and music festivals. People also report similar subjective emotional reactions.

At their core, spirituality and raving connect one with transcendence, the feeling of tapping into something larger than the Self. Science can help to explain what is happening in your body when experiencing transcendence at the rave, but the experience itself needs no explanation. It’s a reminder that we are alive– and are not alone.

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References

1. Demos, A. P., Chaffin, R., Begosh, K. T., Daniels, J. R., & Marsh, K. L. (2012). Rocking to the beat: Effects of music and a partner’s movements on spontaneous interpersonal coordination. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(1), 49–53. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21668129/

2. Dominguez, L. J., Veronese, N., & Barbagallo, M. (2024). The link between spirituality and longevity. Aging Clinical and Experimental Research, 36(1), 32. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38341843/

3. Dunbar, R. I. M. (2022). Laughter and its role in the evolution of human social bonding. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 377(1863), 20210176. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9489299/

4. Feng, X., Sun, B., Chen, C., Li, W., Wang, Y., Zhang, W., Xiao, W., & Shao, Y. (2020). Self–other overlap and interpersonal neural synchronization serially mediate the effect of behavioral synchronization on prosociality. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 15(2), 203–214. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7304511/

5. Jedlicka, P., & Havenith, M. N. (2025). Religious and spiritual experie

   nces from a neuroscientific and complex-systems perspective. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 177, 106319. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763425003203

6. Josef, L., Goldstein, P., Mayseless, N., Ayalon, L., & Shamay-Tsoory, S. G. (2019). The oxytocinergic system mediates synchronized interpersonal movement during dance. Scientific Reports, 9, 1894. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30760751/

7. Massachusetts General Hospital. (2024). Vagus nerve: Key to the body–mind connection. MGH News & Publications. https://www.massgeneral.org/news/article/vagus-nerve

8. McNamara, P., & Grafman, J. (2024). Advances in brain and religion studies: A review and synthesis of recent representative studies. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 18, 1495565. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2024.1495565/full

9. Menon, V. (2023). Twenty years of the default mode network: A review and synthesis. Neuron, 111(16), 2469–2487. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37167968/

10. Monroy, M., & Keltner, D. (2023). Awe as a pathway to mental and physical health. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(2), 309–320. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35994778/

11. Shamay-Tsoory, S. G., & Abu-Akel, A. (2016). The social salience hypothesis of oxytocin. Biological Psychiatry, 79(3), 194–202. https://core.ac.uk/reader/185493730

12. Tarr, B., Launay, J., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2014). Music and social bonding: “Self–other” merging and neurohormonal mechanisms. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1096. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25324805/

Most adults rarely get the chance to play. Not because we’ve forgotten how, but because modern life rarely creates the conditions that allow it.

I left our stateroom a few minutes early to catch a set on the last night of Groove Cruise, an electronic dance music festival at sea. Two people at the venue entrance were dancing in head-to-toe mirror-paneled suits, silver helmets, and green lasers shining from their chests. Groove Cruise has themes for every day and night, and that night was Glitterverse. These two were not performers, but festival-goers, just like me. I watched for a few minutes from the edge of their space with a sense of childlike wonder before begrudgingly breaking the spell to go inside.

A unique aspect of Groove Cruise culture is the costumes, and people really show up. Down the Rabbit Hole night featured dancefloors full of mad hatters, cheshire cats, and white rabbits among confetti and lasers. It felt like an alternate dimension, and it was where we belonged that night. We even left with a rogue mad hatter top hat to remember the journey.

What followed was a late night. A sunrise set led into the morning hours with new friends for an after party. Even at that sleep-deprived hour, the gathering was in full swing, and the conversations were welcoming and light. It had the feeling of children on a playground asking, “Do you want to be friends?”

Groove Cruise is easy. The usual festival logistics disappear. Food, rooms, and beds are right there. FOMO is at a minimum because there is always music somewhere over the full four days, with DJs playing multiple sets. It’s different than land-based festivals.

A reality-suspended, four-day floating party with six thousand other people in the middle of the sea is hard to put into words. The best way to describe it is adults at play. It made me start wondering what conditions allow adults to play like this.

Maslow’s Ladder of Play

Play serves a very specific purpose for children – it’s a primary mechanism for learning about the world. But for adults, play becomes a surplus behavior; it happens only when other, more immediate needs aren’t siphoning our attention. It’s like Maslow’s framework, where movement up each level of the pyramid is required to reach the top.

Groove Cruise meets physiological and safety needs in spades. Access to food and shelter is effortless. The environment feels safe because of its containment, smaller size, and the demographic. It’s notorious for an older, well-seasoned crowd, where everyone knows how to keep behavior in check, substances or not. Bottom two levels: check.

Where Groove Cruise really shines is in meeting social needs. You will hear people talking about how many times they’ve been to the festival like a badge of honor – some for 15 or more consecutive years. Participation in the themes is near universal, which fosters a sense of community. And festival goers genuinely want to talk and engage. The late morning with our new friends was one of many examples of this. Groove Cruise’s culture and social openness create an atmosphere of kinship and group bonding.

Moving further up the hierarchy, you see parallels to play theory and research. Dr. Peter Gray, a former psychology professor at Boston College whose evolutionary psychology courses I took, describes several characteristics of play: it’s self-chosen and self-directed, intrinsically motivated, creative and imaginative, and similar to flow state. These factors map directly to some aspects of self-esteem and self-actualization, Maslow’s highest two levels.

Self-esteem has different dimensions, and one of these is authenticity. An environment like Groove Cruise temporarily removes social constraints and allows freedom from social roles, so for a short time, identity can be suspended. Through cosplay, people can put on the personas they want and tap into a more authentic version of themselves should they choose. Humans have a long precedent for this behavior. Take Venice’s Carnevale, where, still today, people publicly don masks and costumes in the days before Lent. The practice goes back to the Middle Ages and is described as a time when people felt free to eat, drink, dance, and do what they wanted.

At the top of the hierarchy is self-actualization, which includes elements of creativity and motivation. Rave culture in general, and particularly on Groove Cruise, is incredibly expressive. We saw some great costumes, but the best ones were homemade, like crowns made of disco balls or corsets made of chain links. Creativity and imagination, including dancing, also contribute to the feeling of flow state. While adult play is not the same as self-actualization, similar conditions need to be present for it to happen. In other words, playful behavior doesn’t happen by accident.

Modern adult life is not set up for us to play freely. We are constrained by time scarcity, stress, constant evaluation, and rigid roles. Festivals create settings that temporarily remove these limitations. Groove Cruise happens to be really good at this, and that is why you see people returning for years and decades. For my part, I’m planning on going back for the 2028 sailing.

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References

1. Dickinson, Samuel. 2020. “Grit and Flow as Prescriptions for Self-Actualization.” Journal of Wellness 2(2): Article 4. (abstract only)

2. Gray, Peter. 2013. “Definitions of Play.” Scholarpedia 8(7):30578.

3. Sullivan, Erin. 2026. “Self-Actualization.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.

4. Stets, Jan E., and Peter J. Burke. 2014. “Self-Esteem and Identities.” Sociological Perspectives 57(4).

5. “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: Impacts on Motivation and Self-Actualization.” Behavioral Health Research Centre.

I turned 45 in 2025, but my brain has only caught up to being over 40 in this past year. Midlife is weird. There’s so much to look back on and, if you are lucky, so much still ahead. You’ve built a foundation, but you don’t know what the building on top of it will fully look like yet.

My bedrock is a handful of identities I’ve collected over the decades that are all part of who I am, from being a partner, to parenting, to managing a corporate career. What feels different now is not adding something new but paying closer attention to how each of these identities actually feels. I recognize myself in a lot of the conversations happening among women in midlife, less about reinvention and more about alignment within what’s already been built.

I’ve been in the corporate world for over 15 years, and I feel like I am standing at the edge of something professionally that may require big decisions soon. I am not sure if I even want a change, but when something has been part of you for that long, even the possibility shakes your sense of self.

In this wobbly place, I did not expect to feel steadiness on the dancefloor. Sure, I’ve written about how raving is grounding, regulating, and meditative, but those are all focused on inward states. This is different. It’s more than that – the dancefloor in this season feels like something certain I can hold onto in the face of ambiguity.

Maybe it’s because it’s been a part of my life for decades, but my sense of home within the rave world makes it an anchor. Walking onto a dancefloor, I know what to expect; my body knows what the beats and rhythm will feel like; I know the rituals and the rules. It provides a deep sense of comfort, even if I am alone.

I was recently at DC’s Soundcheck for a Green Velvet show in December. Our group was mixed of new friends and old, but we were all there for the same reason. It felt familiar and easy in the best way. Everyone was on a similar vibe that night, dancing together like it was the only place that mattered for a few hours. That sense of continuity carried beyond the show itself: some of us met up beforehand, others drove home together, talking through the night during the long ride back. It was exactly the sense of community I needed after a destabilizing work week.

Right now, my solid ground is in an environment that many consider chaotic or overstimulating. For me, in this moment, it brings steadiness.

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Integration shows up in many forms in modern life. But at its core, it’s a deliberate effort to expand a significant moment into something that stays with you. It can follow any profound experience: a challenge, a breakthrough, a psychedelic trip.

Before I turned 40, I remember thinking that this would be my decade of integration. The timescale was not a moment, but tens of years. I wanted to bring together the parts of myself I had forgotten, those I was actively living, and those I hadn’t yet met, so they could coexist.

At that time, we had two toddlers and were deep into homeownership and career grinding—very traditional adult trappings. And while I truly did want these things, I was starting to miss pieces of past lives that had been deprioritized and buried. This made clear to me how compartmentalized modern adulthood can become. Separate identities take on their own expectations, and over time, that separation can begin to feel like living in fragments.

I write a lot about music festivals and raving, but in all honesty, the focus on integration heading into my 40s was entirely separate from my return to that space. This perspective was about permission, letting different domains be present together.

Overwhelmingly, the traits most valued in adulthood align with responsibility, stability, and goal-orientation. These naturally map to identities like being a professional or a parent, and they often assume a level of self-restraint. I certainly felt this throughout my 30s. Without fully realizing it, my fun self, often viewed generically as frivolous or purposeless, began to be self-policed. Over time, this felt like losing pieces of myself, even if I couldn’t name what’s happening in the moment. Left unchecked for too long, resentment may quietly creep in.

Even now, well into my 40s, I still struggle with this. I was recently out to see Green Velvet with friends and made a joke about living a double life on the 4 a.m. drive home, a comment that landed because it felt true. I share rave content only with my close friends list on my personal Instagram, largely out of fear that it will read as evidence of being a bad parent or someone who never learned to let go of youth.

In this phase of life, many adults find themselves mentally code-switching across identities. The more fragmented those identities become, the more exhausting it can feel to hold them apart.

The point is not perfection, but coherence, to integrate these parts into a whole as a work in progress. Integration allows room for everything to exist and breathe. It can remain fluid too, as some years naturally lean more heavily into certain pieces than others.

Over time, I’ve come to see that integration isn’t about earning permission at all. It’s about recognizing that it was never required.

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Instagram

Electric Forest, Michigan

Intro
I arrived at Electric Forest 2022 completely naïve to what I was about to experience. Despite going to raves for more than two decades, I had never actually camped at a music festival. I thought it would be a fun birthday trip, but it ended up being something else entirely.

I danced way too hard for way too long, swept up in the excitement of meeting up with friends I hadn’t seen in more than 10 years. I thought I was in decent physical shape, but the Forest taught me otherwise. Spending Day 4 on an inflatable couch for John Summit and Dom Dolla was not exactly where I wanted to be.

While physically taxing, the time with friends, both old and new, was full of good conversations and silly, fun moments; the kind that are truly healing. The immersion in the camping environment, the sunsets and sunrises together, sharing space and supplies like family, and experiencing the physical toll of camping for five days as a group really heightened the feeling of community.

And the music. I love deep dives into unfamiliar names on festival line-ups. Discovering good, new music and then hearing it live is one of life’s greatest joys. One of these sets for me was Sidepiece. A few of our group joined, and we shared this moment dancing together.

I left Electric Forest physically depleted but heart full, and I knew then that I wanted to keep doing this again and again. And it wasn’t about the party. Somewhere between exhaustion and euphoria, something clicked.

After turning 40, I started learning a lot about the wellness and longevity world, both because 40 is a big, significant number and because of a health scare that caused me to re-evaluate things. I began to see how many parallels exist between the wellness and festival spaces. Only later did I realize that what I experienced at Electric Forest wasn’t an indulgence but a form of healing.

Movement is Medicine
Exercise is the single most influential factor for maintaining health, and you get a lot of it at a music festival. Between walking across big venues and dancing for hours and days on end, the amount of daily movement can rival that of a marathon. My personal best festival day was 40,000 steps, including hours of straight cardio.

Exercise supports longevity and quality of life. It improves mood, boosts energy, promotes better sleep, and reduces risk for all major disease categories: cardiovascular disease, dementia, diabetes, and cancer. The advantages extend even to walking as a form of exercise. It truly is medicine.

If you frequently attend raves and festivals, you get this exposure just by being there.

But it goes beyond this. You need to be in good physical shape to enjoy the environment; it helps you last longer and recover faster. And if you want to continue attending raves and festivals for years to come, it becomes a strong motivational factor.

But movement is just the first layer. What surprised me was how far those effects extended beyond fitness. Movement naturally led into the next layer: joy.

Joyfulness
The biggest reason I rave is it gives me joy, and this is exactly what I tell people who aren’t familiar with dance music culture. The music, the lights, the beats, the movement — it is a true celebration of being alive.

Joy has a measurable influence on the body. Experiencing it stimulates the vagal nerve, which slows heart rate, decreases blood pressure, increases digestion (improving gut health), and regulates the immune system to reduce inflammation. This is the opposite of what happens during your fight-or-flight response. Your body knows when you’re happy.

Joy is not frivolous but essential. Dancing with friends to that hour-long Sidepiece set carried effects that lasted well beyond that night. And for me, what followed joy was something deeper.

Art installation at Electric Forest

Spirituality
There was a moment at Electric Forest when I danced next to a complete stranger and felt deeply connected to both that person and the sensory wellspring of music, sound, and people around us. I wrote about this and why it felt spiritual in a guest post for the Dancer’s Dispatch entitled Why the Dancefloor Feels Like Church.

Spirituality has been shown to support long-term mental and physical wellness. It’s associated with increased longevity, reduced depression and suicide, and reduced substance use.

The key takeaway from my guest post was that spiritual practices and raving share common features linked to similar biology:

1. Getting lost in the moment and feeling fully present; this is thought to quiet the brain’s Default Mode and Frontoparietal Networks, redirecting attention to what’s happening externally.

2. Collective ritual, particularly dancing or chanting; this increases oxytocin and endorphins that bond us to others and make us feel good.

3. Experiencing awe and altered states through meditation, fasting, prayer, music, lights, or movement; similar to joy, these increase vagal nerve activity.

The unity I felt dancing next to that stranger touched a deep human need for something spiritual. I felt it profoundly. Regular exposure to this type of meaningful experience becomes part of a comprehensive wellness practice.

And experiences like this are inseparable from the community that holds them.

Community
A camping festival is the epitome of community. At Electric Forest, our group of 30 shared 10 or 15 tents. We made space for common seating and cooking areas. We invited neighbors to join us. It was communal in its truest sense.

One of the strongest predictors of longevity is a strong community, or the quality of our social relationships with others. An 80+ year Harvard study showed that deep social bonds are the most influential factor for long-term health, happiness, and lifespan.

Positive social interactions increase oxytocin, which strengthens social bonding and attachment. Oxytocin also directly decreases cortisol, the stress hormone. Cortisol opposes the effects of the vagal nerve by increasing heart rate and blood pressure, raising alertness, and redirecting the body toward a perceived threat. Being in community with others literally protects against the biological burden of stress.

The sense of fellowship is deep in the rave and festival community and is exactly what I felt in our temporary tent village. It is this type of social engagement that is essential for well-being.

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But none of these elements stand alone. They all orbit around the same gravitational force: music.

Music
You cannot have a rave or festival without music. It’s what I most look forward to, research for weeks before big events, and what enables movement, joy, and awe. Even from an inflatable couch for Dom Dolla’s set that year, a peak moment for me was when he dropped Charlotte De Witte’s Age of Love, the perfect combination of nostalgia and new.

Music alone has real physiological impact. It is commonly used in medical settings for its ability to reduce pain perception, stress, and anxiety. Rhythm, in particular, causes the auditory cortex, where sound is perceived, to couple with the motor cortex, responsible for movement planning. This coupling is known as groove, a well-documented concept in music research. Groove evokes movement and positive emotion, both of which support well-being.

Music lights up the brain in a distinct and far-reaching pattern. In addition to the auditory and motor cortex, it activates the reward circuitry, which signals pleasure, and the hypothalamus, which controls vagal nerve activity and releases oxytocin and endorphins. Music enhances the effects of movement, joy, awe, and community at a festival or rave. It is woven into the entire experience.

In the end, music interacts with every other part of the rave environment to elevate it from entertainment into something that genuinely functions as a wellness practice. It engages the body, calms the nervous system, heightens positive emotion, and strengthens social bonds. It is the core of the entire experience.

When you step back, you realize these elements form a complete ecosystem of well-being.

Art installation at Electric Forest

Festivals as Temporary Blue Zones
The whole point of a wellness practice is to maintain vitality and health for as long as possible. To understand how, researchers have looked to Blue Zones — areas in the world with a higher-than-average population living past 100, where people enjoy remarkable vitality and quality of life into older age.

In thinking about the rave and festival atmosphere, I was struck by how much it has in common with the Blue Zones. The overlap with festival culture is striking:

• Activity through lots of walking and dancing

• Purpose: being connected to something bigger than the self and experiencing awe

• Reduced stress: time with friends and loved ones, dancing, listening to music, and witnessing awe

• Community and relationship focus, particularly when camping

Blue Zones may be far away, but the concepts that define them are not. For a few days each year, we can build our own temporary Blue Zones, where movement, joy, awe, music, and community all converge.

Raving, done with intention, becomes one more doorway into a longer, fuller, more connected life. One that supports you today and as you grow older.

These essays will always be free to read. If they have been meaningful to you, becoming a paid subscriber helps me continue researching and writing them.

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References

1. Attia, P. (2023). Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity. Harmony Books.

2. Balboni, T. A., VanderWeele, T. J., Doan-Soares, S. D., et al. (2022). Spirituality in Serious Illness and Health. JAMA, 328(2), 184–197. Abstract: https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2022.11086

3. Bowling, D. L. (2023). Biological principles for music and mental health. Translational Psychiatry, 13, 374. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38049408/

4. Buettner, D., & Skemp, S. (2016). Blue Zones: Lessons from the world’s longest lived. American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, 10(5), 318–321. https://doi.org/10.1177/1559827616637066

5. Cochran, D., Fallon, D., Hill, M., & Frazier, J. A. (2013). The role of oxytocin in psychiatric disorders: A review of biological and therapeutic research findings. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 21(5), 219–247. https://doi.org/10.1097/HRP.0b013e3182a75b7d

6. Harvard Study of Adult Development. Official site: https://www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org/

7. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (2023). Research: Spirituality linked to better health outcomes, patient care. https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/spirituality-better-health-outcomes-patient-care/

8. Izquierdo, M., de Souto Barreto, P., Arai, H., Bischoff-Ferrari, H. A., Cadore, E. L., Cesari, M., … Singh, M. A. F. (2025). Global consensus on optimal exercise recommendations for enhancing healthy longevity in older adults (ICFSR). Journal of Nutrition, Health & Aging, 29(1), 100401. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnha.2024.100401

9. Kok, B. E., Coffey, K. A., Cohn, M. A., Catalino, L. I., Vacharkulksemsuk, T., Algoe, S. B., Brantley, M., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). How positive emotions build physical health: Perceived positive social connections account for the upward spiral between positive emotions and vagal tone. Psychological Science, 24(7), 1123–1132.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612470827

10. MacDonald, R. A. R. (2013). Music, health, and well-being: A review. Arts & Health, Published online Aug 7, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1080/17533015.2013.812270

11. Massachusetts General Hospital (2024). Vagus nerve: Key to the body–mind connection. https://www.massgeneral.org/news/article/vagus-nerve

12. U. Stellar, J. E., John-Henderson, N., Anderson, C. L., Gordon, A. M., McNeil, G. D., & Keltner, D. (2015). Positive affect and markers of inflammation: Discrete positive emotions predict lower levels of inflammatory cytokines. Emotion, 15(2), 129–133. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000033

13. Ungvari, Z., Fazekas-Pongor, V., Csiszar, A., & Kunutsor, S. K. (2023). The multifaceted benefits of walking for healthy aging: From Blue Zones to molecular mechanisms. GeroScience, 45, 3211–3239. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11357-023-00873-8

My last two events were solo ventures: a techno-forward barn rave called Forma Festival in central Maryland, and one of Soundcheck’s final shows to see Nico Moreno before the DC club closes for good in January.

I’ve been going to electronic dance music shows since the late 90s, and these two nights made something clear: the way I move through this world in my 40s is nothing like how I approached it in my 20s.

Back then, I was a party kid. Going out was a hedonistic escape — random, frequent, and unintentional. I wouldn’t change it; I had a great time and experienced some epic music (from what I can remember). But that version of raving is not compatible with the life I have now.

After stepping away for some time, I slowly returned to live electronic music about eight years ago. I made an effort to integrate it into my life as a parent with a corporate job, living in a small city with limited show options. What surprised me was how easy it actually was. The broader embrace of electronic music — for better or worse — has made the scene far more accessible than it was in the late 90s and early 2000s.

What is different now is the intentionality. I don’t go out randomly. I choose events for the music, the environment, the experience I want. And if I want to be fully present, I often go solo. For both of these recent events, I did exactly that. I danced alone for hours and left each night with my cup full, like I’d had a deep, soul-level meditation. Going to events like this by myself in my 40s feels like a superpower — if I can do this, I can do anything. It’s a far cry from the hungover, party-chasing, insecure 20-something I once was.

Another shift has been the preparation. Raving is physically demanding, and if I want to keep doing this well into my late 40s and beyond, my lifestyle has to support it. Longevity is the focus now. I treat raving like a sport.

As a neuroscientist and former researcher, for me, it’s also become a wellness practice. Hard techno, in particular, forces presence. That kind of absorption reduces activity in the brain’s default mode network (DMN) — the system responsible for internal chatter. It pulls you out of your head and quiets stress and anxiety in a way that feels both primal and intentional.

The older I get, the more I realize that raving doesn’t have to be something you grow out of — it can be something you grow into, if you approach it with care and intention. Raving is grounding for me in a way it never was back then. These days, it feels like coming home.

These essays will always be free to read. If they have been meaningful to you, becoming a paid subscriber helps me continue researching and writing them.

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Start here: Raving in My 40s

Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.

I’m exploring how music, movement, and midlife intersect, how certain experiences wake something up in us, and why they stay with us long after they’re over.

I started asking questions after years of finding meaning and connection on dance floors and at music festivals. Why can a weekend of music change the way we feel for months? Why does dancing with strangers sometimes feel spiritual? Why do certain places feel like home?

This newsletter is where I explore those questions through personal essays grounded in neuroscience, psychology, and lived experience.

You’ll find essays about:

• Music, movement, and the brain

• Awe, belonging, and joy

• Play, identity, and modern adulthood

• What festivals can teach us about living a fuller life

I have a PhD in neuroscience and a background in psychology, but I’m less interested in having all the answers than in asking better questions. My hope is that you’ll see a little of your own experiences reflected in these essays, whether you’ve spent years on dance floors or simply know what it feels like to come alive in a particular place, with particular people.

I publish a new essay about once a month, with shorter reflections in between.

I also welcome guest writing and thoughtful editorial collaborations. If something resonates, I’d love to connect.

Thanks for being here.

Sanya

If these essays resonate with you, I’d love to have you as a subscriber. I use dance culture as a lens to explore wellbeing, identity, and modern adulthood.

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