Awe

Like festivals throughout history, Burning Man weaves together the wonders of life in an experiment in collective awe. Money is not allowed (although the celebrants are usually wellheeled!), so people give to meet mundane needs, enjoying rushes of oxytocin and vagus nerve activation in their acts of food sharing, trade, and grateful embrace. Desert sunrises and sunsets begin and end each day to the whoas and aahs of appreciative observers. Music and dance move people into patterns of collaboration, openness, and curiosity throughout the day. Trippy, immersive art installations astonish throughout the pop-up city.

Radha was transformed in dance:

I couldn’t sleep and rode my bicycle out to deep playa (what they call the far ends of the grounds) by myself and found a giant art car (a converted bus that had the most epic sound system I had ever heard with the most incredible bass that I could feel deep into my bones) with a converted roof that was now the throne of a DJ and a hundred-plus people in the sexiest costumes dancing. I threw my bike on the ground and found a spot in the dusty dance floor and closed my eyes and felt the music and bass course through my body in a way that I had never fully allowed (I was sober too!) and let the beat move me the way my body was meant to move, probably for the very first time.

Wondering how to re-create this experience of moving her body the way it was meant to move, Radha later hosted a dance party in a basement of a New York City lounge. Bouncers at the door were replaced with huggers. Attendees drank wheat grass instead of alcohol. The celebration took place in the morning rather than at night. And then a couple hundred people danced, experiencing Durkheim’s “collective effervescence,” the electric exaltation of moving together. The new community called for more. So, Radha, along with her husband, Eli, and his friend from college Tim, created Daybreaker, which now hosts monthly dance parties for 500,000 people around the world. It is a sacred community of groove.

I first meet Radha in 2020 in a San Francisco hotel. Daybreaker is the opening act of Oprah’s 2020 Vision tour. When Radha exits the hotel elevator, she shimmies up to me in a sparkling silver jacket that resembles a bird’s feathers or fish scales (which she lets me know later she designed herself). Eli is right behind, carrying their daughter, Soleil. They all look weary, having been on the road for ten shows.

We hop into a black van and drive to the Chase Center in San Francisco. In transit, Radha tells me how the grind of working in finance disconnected her from a sense of deeper meaning and community, noting scientific findings as she speaks: Americans today enjoy half as many picnics as we did two decades ago. We have one fewer dear friend in our circle of care than thirty years ago. Thirty-five to 40 percent of people report suffering from loneliness. This dissolving of our sense of community gets our brain’s social rejection center humming (in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which tracks the sense of loneliness, rejection, and isolation), which kicks into gear our inflammation response, heating up our bodies in that agitation of being alone. In our twenty-first-century life, we have lost occasions for collective awe.

Daybreaker’s act begins with a pulsating performance of three taiko drummers. Backed by dancers, Radha comes onstage and leads 14,500 people through an aerobics-style dance, directing our attention to chakra-like concepts: the forehead and the power of reason, the chest and the warmth of kindness, the stomach and intuition, the sexual regions and passion. Full-on embodiment. William James would have smiled, and perhaps even swayed his hips. Four high school hip-hop artists bound onstage and electrify the audience.

Standing to the side of the stage, I look into the purple light of the arena. Nearly 15,000 people are dancing. Tightening their lips as they dredge up moves from their past, like the Bump, now shaking more wiggly and wobbly middle-aged bodies. Waves of laughter, clapping, clasped hands, and embraces ripple through rows of people in the arena.

In his 1912 work, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Émile Durkheim proposed that this kind of “unison of movement” is the soul of religion. In moving in unison, he theorized, we shift to exalted feeling; we develop a shared awareness of what unites us; we represent this symbolically, often with supernatural and metaphorical ideation, and ritualize moving in unison into rites and ceremonies; and our sense of self transforms. Prior to the big God religions, people were finding the Divine in moving their bodies together the way they were meant to move.