At the height of the festivity, we step out of our assigned roles and statuses—of gender, ethnicity, tribe, and rank—and into a brief utopia defined by egalitarianism, creativity, and mutual love. This is how danced rituals and festivities served to bind prehistoric human groups, and this is what still beckons us today.
— Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2006)
On October 22nd, we introduced Brené Brown’s ten guideposts for wholehearted living. Today we conclude with Guidepost #10, Cultivating Laughter, Song, and Dance—Letting Go of “Being Cool” and “Always in Control.”
Throughout human history, we’ve relied on these three to express ourselves, to celebrate and mourn, to tell our stories. In her book Dancing in the Streets, Barbara Ehrenreich found that 92 percent of traditional societies encouraged ecstatic group rituals built around music, movement, and shared laughter. The capacity for collective joy, she writes, is encoded in us “almost as deeply as the capacity for erotic love.” Brown agrees. After years of research, she discovered one thing these expressions have in common. They remind us we are not alone.
True laughter, what Brown calls “knowing laughter,” is a spiritual form of communing. It’s not the nervous laugh we use to deflect. It’s not self-deprecating humour that beats others to the punch. It’s the laughter that rises up when we share our stories and realize we’re not the only ones. Without words, we say to one another, I’m with you. I get it. It’s the relief that comes when shame loosens its grip, when we stop performing and start connecting.
Music offers another form of connection. Whether it’s a hymn, a fight song, or a film soundtrack, it gives our inner life a voice. Brown noticed that even the same dramatic scene in a movie fell flat without music—factual instead of emotional. Music bypasses the mind entirely. It reaches into us and pulls something out we didn’t know was there. A song can bring us to tears before we understand why.
And then there’s dance. For many of us, no form of self-expression makes us feel more exposed. It’s full-body vulnerability. Some of us only move freely at home or in front of people we trust. Others have stopped moving altogether. Yet Brown believes this is in our DNA. Watch children before we teach them to worry about how they look. They move without hesitation. That impulse stays in our hearts, even when our heads become overly concerned with what people might think.
The enemies of laughter, song, and dance are the twin hustles of being “cool” and “always in control.” Cool minimizes vulnerability to reduce ridicule. Control manages perception so we feel good enough. Somewhere along the way, Western culture taught us to resist the invitation to let go—to build what Ehrenreich calls “a fortress of ego and rationality” and call it maturity. But we pay for this protection with our joy.
Brown calls this betrayal. When we value being cool over granting ourselves the freedom to be passionate, goofy, heartfelt, and soulful—we abandon ourselves. And when we consistently do that, we do it to the people we love too. We roll our eyes at their enthusiasm. We shoot them a look that says don’t be so uncool. We teach them to hide.
The Hopi have a saying. “To watch us dance is to hear our hearts speak.” Ehrenreich notices that despite centuries of suppression, the ecstatic possibility doesn’t go away. Festivity keeps bubbling up. The urge to move together, laugh together, sing together—it survives. It waits. Life is too precious to keep pretending when that joy is still there, ready to be reclaimed.
When did I last laugh so hard I forgot to be dignified?
What song makes me want to sing at the top of my lungs?
When did I last let my body move without worrying who was watching?
Where am I still choosing image over connection?
