What It Means to Be Brave
Drum circles, dancing naked under the moon, and other thoughts on my time at Medecine Festival in Reading, UK.
After a few days in the UK, I was close to having a mini breakdown.
I had traveled to London to attend Medecine Festival, which combined music, spirituality, and wellness in a unique way I had never seen offered at a festival before. I was also working the festival, which would be a first for me.
I went solo, which I didn’t find too daunting. I had gone to a few festivals solo that summer alone, and they had all worked out great. While I always get a lot of travel anxiety before a trip, it usually has to do more with logistics and accommodation. When it came to meeting people or talking to strangers, I had no problem.
However, two days into the festival, I wasn’t feeling like myself. When everyone greeted me, they would immediately ask, “You alright?” or “You okay?” Which made me instantly feel like something was wrong.
In the US, a standard polite greeting is usually a simple, “How are you?” When someone asks if you’re doing okay, it usually means they sense that something is off and you are unwell. After so many people asking if I was alright, I was starting to get worried. Was I giving off bad vibes? Did I seem not okay?
Finally, I spoke with a nice English woman who explained this was just something people said to be polite. It didn’t mean anyone thought something was wrong. As soon as she said this, I felt a deep wave of relief and even cried a little. We laughed it off and I went on my way. But if one more English person asked if I was alright, I wasn’t going to be.
Once that little mishap was cleared up, I was able to have a better time. In fact, beyond this miscommunication, I was stunned by the overwhelming kindness of strangers I had met on my trip so far. It was also an important reminder to always stay open to the universe and whatever it might bring.
When I first landed in London, I went to see Charlotte. We had never met before but we were introduced over Whatsapp through my friend
(who also has a lovely Substack you should check out!) Charlotte and I apparently both shared a love for ecstatic dance, and it turns out, that was enough for us to hit it off!Without ever meeting before, she offered me a room to stay in her flat (notice how I didn’t say apartment. I’m assimilating!), and gave me helpful camping gear for the festival. The day before the festival, as I pushed through my jet lag, she took me to Hampstead Heath to swim in a ladies-only pond.
The next morning, we picked mulberries outside John Keats’s home.
“Maybe you could write here,” she suggested. “You could get inspired.”
As we walked home from the pond and I explained my plan for after the festival, or lack thereof, she tilted her head to one side. “You really are very trusting that things will work out, aren’t you?”
I knew that the way I traveled seemed pretty reckless to most people. But whenever I went somewhere new, I always tried to fling myself into the abyss, and see what materialized. A little chaotic, sure, but always exciting and usually rewarding in the end.
When it was time to go the festival, I caught a ride with other festival-goers I had met online who also were working at the festival. The woman driving happened to be named Julia. She was Italian and worked back to back festivals most weekends while she was in grad school. She told me how at her last festival, to enter a certain area, you needed to answer a riddle:
“What is the thing that stays in a corner and travels around the world?” she asked the packed car.
“The Internet?” one woman offered. She was a dance instructor from Belgium.
I tried to think of the answer. Then, I started wondering about how this riddle eerily echoed my recent internal pull to both stay in one place, and continue traveling. Lately, I’d been feeling the desire to ground myself somewhere, only I wasn’t sure where that was, exactly. So, here I was, trying to be open until something felt right.
“It’s a stamp,” Julia replied.
When I arrived at the festival, within 24 hours, 5 different people had asked me what was sign was before they asked for my name. But there were also more pleasant surprises by strangers in store. I had posted online a week earlier that I was coming to this festival from out of the country and had no camping gear. A few hours later, a Dutch man named Sebastian responded. He told me he’d be driving from the Netherlands and could bring me camping gear. When I arrived, he had not only brought it all for me, but had it already set up.
We sat outside our tents (he also brought camping chairs), and got to know each other. The more I learned about him, I realized he was a very genuine, caring soul. He volunteered four times in Ukraine this year alone, and worked as a nurse for children with disabilities. He spent a lot of his time traveling around on his bike and camping. Before we went to bed, he offered me a gift: a ticket to a sweat lodge the following night.
I intended to try and step out of my comfort zone at this festival, even though just being there was a pretty big act of faith. I wanted to see where this discomfort could lead me.
The next day, I went to my first sweat lodge with Sebastian. I had no idea what would be involved, but soon enough I found myself crammed into a small space with twenty-five other strangers. A roaring fire continued in the middle of a circle for three hours as we all sat naked in the dirt, praying and singing and sweating. The ceremony is also called Temazcal, and it is known as an ancestral shamanic ritual. It was led by a man named Gabriel Amezcua, who came from Mexico.
After the first hour or so, people starting begging to be let out. Gabriel pleaded with them to stay. “It is very disrespectful to leave during a ceremony,” he said. “The way you leave a sweat lodge is the way you live your life.” Some wavered and stayed, others fled for fresh air.
When we were let out after three hours, I struggled to stay conscious. We crawled out onto the cool earth, and it was softly raining. They poured cold water down our backs, and then we sat again, in a circle by the fire. The experience was so intense, that you could only be centered by following your breath, and focusing on the prayers being offered, to keep you going. I had never been so grateful to be in cold air in my entire life.
This festival was unique in that it was very emotionally intense. You would probably be crying a few times throughout the day, due to a powerful workshop or breath work class, and then you had the opportunity to release these emotions through dance at night. While doing the other festivals solo had been fine because they mostly consisted of dancing and having a good time, this one felt different. The first day or two, I’d been feeling all these emotions pouring out, and started missing my friends. I was feeling so down, I even started wondering if I had made a mistake coming. One night, I sat by the fire, and a priestess approached me.
“Wow, you have such big, incredible eyes!” she said.
I thanked her, smiling. She put her hand on my shoulder.
“You have the eyes of the heart.”
I burst into tears, and she pulled me into a hug.
This is how emotional I felt, that after a day into this festival, I was crying from a touching moment with a stranger.
Then, later that night, my one friend I had made in London and my dear host, Charlotte, was at the festival with her girlfriend Idel. They decided to come to the festival last minute. There was no service, and so I ran into them by chance.
I found them in the late night sauna, an area where they turned camper vans into various makeshift saunas and you could walk around naked freely. There was a bonfire going on between all the saunas, where people would bring instruments and play all night under the full moon.
The next few days flowed with mixed highs and lows. I was able to be a part of tons of drum circles with people from all over the world, and used my own tiny drum that I had brought with me from New York.
There were incredible dances, with performances from Porangui, a Brazilian musician, and a Sufi ecstatic dance run by Momo, a German DJ, who runs dances in Portugal.
I went to a workshop one day, called “Primal Connection.” I walked in 30 minutes after it had already started, and it consisted of people crawling all over each other and communicating based on their primal selves.
I loved this concept, and the facilitator was impressed I was able to jump into it so quickly. When it was done, we all sat in a circle, and everyone expressed what they got from the workshop. Then, slightly outside the sharing circle, a man and a woman were still intertwined with each other and moaning. It was wonderful that they had such a connection instantly, but was pretty hilarious that they couldn’t be bothered to leave the workshop tent, and instead laid there sprawled out, making out with each other as everyone continued to share in a circle right next to them.
But a big takeaway from this festival was all of the internal shifts I felt.
One day, I sat watching Amenti, a dance organization that focuses on working through trauma and communicating with movement. Before they began, one of the dancers said, “The mind easily forgets. But the body remembers everything.”
Again, I burst into tears. Because as happy as I am to be in remission and moving on from all the troubles with my heatlh, my heart breaks when it remembers everything my body has been through over the years from treating my uveitis. All the chemo and immunosuppressants and surgery and depression from my surgeries and long periods of recovery and isolation.
As much as I tried to move on, all these moments would still be there. My body would still remember. Of course, I still had the scars. Several strangers asked what was wrong with my eyes, and while sometimes this question bothers me, I’m also thankful for my scars. They make sure I don’t forget, and they push me to share with strangers when maybe otherwise I’d try to pretend it all never happened.
Another shift happened when I found myself attracted to one of the ecstatic dance DJs. But after some flirting, I stopped letting it go any further. I told myself he was probably used to people flirting with him all the time, that I shouldn’t bother. When really, this was just me trying to protect myself from feeling rejected.
When I really faced this emotion full on, from a place of curiosity rather than judgement, I was able to see how badly I wanted to protect myself. But as a result, I was afraid of telling people how I felt. I know I can be bad at this. In a way, I think it’s why I’m so drawn to writing. It means sometimes I don’t need to express my emotions face to face.
But I don’t want to live my life being scared of my emotions.
People tell me I’m brave all the time. For traveling alone, for going to festivals solo, for getting through years of surgeries and illness, for getting into strangers cars and homes without any hesitation. But I’m not brave, not really.
To me, being brave is putting yourself out there as vulnerably as possible. Even if it hurts and you don’t get the result you wanted. As least you told the person how you felt. At least you tried.
I really want to become this person. So, I walked up to the DJ the next night and told him I thought he was very sexy. He beamed back at me and smiled.
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