When the Dance Floor Becomes a Meditation Hall (New Clip)

On raves, music, and practicing a spirituality centred on realizing "there is no problem to solve" — with Loch Kelly.

Spiritual practice doesn’t always look like silence.

For much of modern contemplative culture, meditation is imagined as stillness: eyes closed, back straight, breath counted, thoughts observed. And while that form has its place, one of the areas we focused on in my conversation with Loch Kelly which may surprise those new to spiritual life is the recognition that awakening or transcendence doesn’t require withdrawing from life’s intensity.

Sometimes, it happens right in the middle of it.

During our conversation, Loch described a moment hiking in nature that opened into deep awareness. As he spoke, something clicked for me. I realized I’d been encountering a similar doorway — not on mountain trails, but on dance floors.

For me, raves and concerts — especially electronic music — have quietly become a form of spiritual practice.

A few days before recording this episode, I was at a show by modern EDM star Fred again.., surrounded by pulsing lights, bodies in motion, and sound that felt almost alive. Instead of being swept away unconsciously, I experimented with something deliberate: meditative inquiry inside the experience.

Listening deeply, moving freely, I asked inwardly:

Is there something here that transcends the music itself?
Is there something being revealed — not by escaping the moment, but by entering it fully?

What emerged wasn’t fireworks or visions. It was something far quieter — and far more radical.

A sense of beingness.
A tranquility beneath stimulation.
A feeling that, in that moment, nothing needed to be improved.

“No problem to solve.”

That phrase — which Loch often uses in his teaching — felt like an antidote to modern forward-thinking consciousness. We live almost entirely inside optimization mode: improve your mental health, improve your career, improve your relationships, improve your body, improve your future. Even spirituality can become another self-improvement project.

But on the dance floor, for brief moments, that machinery can finally take a pause.

If you notice it.

Just sound. Movement. Presence.

Loch immediately recognized what I was describing. Coincidentally, he shared that he now regularly attends what he calls “sober raves” — dancing without substances, letting the music carry the body into a trance-like flow state. To outside observers, it might look psychedelic. Internally, it’s something simpler: letting go of control and allowing awareness to move as the body.

This is crucial. Unlike seated meditation, movement-based practice can be more expansive and enlivening. You’re alert, embodied, responsive — yet not efforting. It’s closer to flow consciousness than to concentration.

And yet, without a prompt, the mind quickly reasserts itself.

I noticed this myself. Even in the middle of an incredible song, thoughts would hijack attention: tomorrow’s plans, unfinished conversations, imagined futures, fear-rooted thoughts on how to impress or connect with others on the dance-floor. The trance would break. That’s why inquiry mattered.

At raves, I began using simple questions as anchors:

Is there something to witness here?
What’s here when there’s no problem to solve?
(Loch recommended this prompt for my next rave: Is there dancing without a dancer?)

One question in particular proved revealing:

Can this experience get better?

At first, the mind answers reflexively. Yes — if this person were here, if my life were more settled, if something missing were finally added. Desire appears instantly. Longing. Comparison.

But staying with the question — Is that actually true? — something deeper opens. Beneath the imagined improvements, there’s often a recognition: this moment is already complete.

Loch connected this directly to the Buddhist understanding of suffering. The root of dukkha isn’t pain itself, but a subtle, ongoing sense that something is missing or something needs to be removed. Wanting to add. Wanting to push away.

As Loch guided me, the inquiry becomes astonishingly simple:

Is there anything that needs to be added right now?
Is there anything that needs to be gotten rid of — for this to be okay?

If you stay with those questions — not intellectually, but somatically — awareness begins to sink beneath memory, beneath imagination, beneath future-planning. What’s revealed isn’t some hallucinogenic state. It’s a recognition.

There is, at the deepest level, nothing to improve.

Loch traced this insight back to the Buddha himself — not to asceticism or renunciation, but to a memory of sitting under a tree as a child, relaxed, unburdened, with nowhere to go and nothing to solve. That was the recognition of true nature. Everything else came later.

The tragedy, Loch noted, is that spirituality often split into extremes: renunciation on one side, excess on the other. Silence versus indulgence. Monastery versus graveyard. But neither extreme is necessary.

Everything arises in ordinary life anyway.

Music. Movement. Desire. Fear. Joy. Loss.

The practice isn’t escaping these — it’s meeting them from a deeper ground.

This ground can be access in silent, eyes-closed meditation or while moving. Walking in nature. Dancing. Being awake with eyes open, body alive. Asking gently, again and again:

Is there something here that doesn’t come and go?

As Loch reminded me, echoing Ramana Maharshi:
Find that which doesn’t come and go.

That can’t be found by thought. Or effort. Or willpower.

It’s found by being.

And sometimes — unexpectedly —
it finds you
right in the middle of a rave.

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