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Ecstatic Dance & Conscious Dance: Exercises & Activities (Udemy.com)

Learn over forty fun activities to try in your ecstatic dance & conscious dance groups and workshops!

Created by: Adam Godwin (MA)

Last updated September 2024

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What you will learn

  • New exercises and activities to try in your ecstatic dance or conscious dance group
  • Approaches to intrapersonal and interpersonal healing through dance
  • Activities that encourage a broader range of dance movements
  • Dance exercises that build group cohesion

How it compares

Against the other 662 rated Udemy courses in Health & Fitness on CourseDuck:

  • Rating4.6 out of 5higher than 49% of them
  • Reviews157#418 of 663 by number of reviews
  • Length3.2 hourslonger than 56% of them
  • Last updatedSeptember 2024earlier than 57% of them

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Course Description

This course explores a wide range of different activities, exercises and ideas that conscious dance and ecstatic dance facilitators can try in their ecstatic dance workshops and groups.


The course is based on a broad conception of 'ecstatic dance' that refers not only to dance practices aimed at ecstatic and otherwise heightened states of consciousness but also as an arena in which to explore other aspects of mental health improvement, personal development, and social and emotional growth. To this end we explore a range of fun interpersonal dance activities as well as more typical activities that involve mindfulness, embodiment, and visualisations.


Activities range from the silly to the serious, some focus on interpersonal development whilst others focus on intrapersonal healing, some ideas are fully-developed whilst others are 'half-baked' and put forward in the hope that you will add seasoning; the course aims to explore as wide a range of possibilities and ideas as possible and I hope to add new ideas to the course as students contribute to it.


The activities and exercises in this course are based on my 15+ years of attending ecstatic dance workshops and groups around the world, the countless hours I've spent in personal private ecstatic dance practice, many nights dancing like a lunatic on psytrance dancefloors, a lot of reading on the subject, as well as my own imagination!


The ideas, activities, and exercises explored in this session are offered in the hope that ecstatic dance facilitators will use them in more experimental approaches to ecstatic dance: I hope that you'll try some of them out and see what works for your group and which ideas are of benefit to your ecstatic dance workshop participants.


The course is light-hearted, unpretentious, casual and informal! It's aimed at ecstatic dance facilitators, dance instructors wishing to explore ecstatic dance in their work,  and dance and movement therapists.


Keywords: ecstatic dance, conscious dance, dance rituals, ecstatic dance facilitator training, ecstatic dance workshops, ecstatic dance activities, ecstatic dance group exercises, professional development

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Instructor Details

Adam Godwin (MA)

Adam Godwin (MA) is from Oxford in The United Kingdom

Adam has studied philosophy and psychology for over eighteen years and his academic focus has been phenomenology, metaphysics, ontology, existentialism and clinical psychology. His overarching specialism is comparative clinical psychology and the history of psychotherapy.

Moreover, he is a specialist in the study of comparative mystical traditions with extensive personal experience with Zazen (Soto Zen Buddhist meditation), mindfulness meditation, and ecstatic dance. This passion for the study of mystical traditions is also rooted in an enduring love for mystical poetry from the Christian, Taoist, Buddhist & Sufi traditions.


Qualifications:

BA - Psychology & Philosophy (The University of Reading, UK)

MA - Philosophy (The University of Reading, UK)

CPPD - Clinical Hypnosis (The London College of Clinical Hypnosis)

PGCE - Secondary Education - Philosophy & Religious Studies (Liverpool Hope University)

C.E.L.T.A.


Professional Background:

Forensic Mental Health Support Worker (2 Years)
[Mainly working with those diagnosed with schizophrenia and 'personality disorders']

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Reviews

4.6

157 ratings on Udemy

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By Mariana Girassol on 5/21/2026

great ideas, well explained, simple and practical videos, the instructor gives space for imagination and for our own creativity yet, gives good advice on what worked in his experience and what does not so well. Felt much more confortable exploring dance with groups and on my own expression. Recommend⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

By Monica Chatterjee on 8/8/2025

I really appreciate the way that this course is taught, the tutor gives straightforward information in a fun and relatable way - this is very helpful for me at the moment. My only problem is that the video keeps freezing, I wonder if that is a problem with the Udemy platform, I don't have this issue with e.g. youtube videos. Any way, I'm very grateful to this fantastic teacher for sharing his knowledge. I have now finished the course (even though Udemy reckons I haven't, not sure why), and have edited my rating to 5 stars: Adam is a great teacher and doesn't waste time waffling on. We have held four Ecstatic Dances so far and have already used two of Adam's suggestions and they were both beautiful and fun (Squiggly snakes and Circles). We intend to try out many more and make up some of our own :-) Adam, we'd love it if you ever joined us for a dance in Leigh-on-sea!

By Michael Wherley on 3/14/2025

Useful content. For myself, some footage from an actual group doing some of the exercises would have added a valuable dimension. I realize this would make for a longer course and more complicated logistics.

By Alba Orcajo on 12/13/2024

Yes! Although i would appreciate more examples, more demonstrations, within yourself, with a small group of people, and a large group of people. More like a live workshop! But thankyou very much for putting all this ideas together

By Sydney Samadhi Strahan on 11/11/2024

This content is right on! Thank you for this class. I facilitated ecstatic dance for the past 25 years in Texas mostly, and dancers (especially ecstatic dancers) can expand their repertoire from learning more about exploring the room, different limbs, body part and other dancers. This makes for a more unified group experience. Blessings ~ Samadhi

By Darya Van den Heever on 3/6/2024

I like this course and how he explains everything. Just maybe would like to see how he dance more as practice. But others way may also understand why he don’t show much of his dancing .Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

By Thomas Westenholz on 12/29/2023

The instructor is super friendly. However, it lacks demonstrations and also how actually to introduce the exercises. It's essentially him describing his experience with ecstatic dance, but this is not training or instruction. The audio is also pretty poor, so more effort could have been put into this, and these are more free YouTube-quality videos than a training program.

By Cynthia Canela on 8/25/2023

I love the ideas in this course, shared with such joy, enthusiasm and deep understanding of how dancing is enriching our lives. I'm taking a lot of inspiration from it and highly recommend it to anyone into ecstatic dance and conscious dance facilitation.

By Stella Sandman sjöberg on 8/9/2023

Loved it! The part about feeding your demons was gold. Really appreciated your thoughts on many things and when you said "I won't go into deeper detail here, regarding dancing your life story and related to trauma. I wish you had! I've gone a 1 year dance education so definitely recognised a lot of it :D But a lot of new and it gave me different perspective and made me remember a lot that I already knew :) Thank you! This helped!

By Edith Dominguez Contreras on 1/29/2023

This course is amazing!!!! Im a yoga teacher and the course help me to have another skills for my classes!! Thanks for sharing and create this tools. I have not found it in other places. Gracias Adam

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Overall Score : 92 / 100