About

Sacred Ecstatics is a highly experiential, deeply imaginative,
music-led and movement-fed immersion in ecstatic mystical living.

We tap the main vein of the sacred life force, dowse for forgotten wells of soulful inspiration, invent new means of spiritual heart-resuscitation, disrupt interfering habits of frozen thinking, move from self-observing to whole-field serving, and get moving, breathing, sounding, and dreaming in sync
with the changing rhythms of ongoing Creation.

It’s getting late. Let’s give birth and re-birth to an ecstatic mystical life.

On his way to M.I.T. at age 19 after winning the International Science Fair, Brad had a full-blown, ecstatic spiritual awakening. Throughout the night his body was filled with a fiery emotion that made him shake and tremble in utmost bliss. The mystical effects lingered for over a month.

Brad waited more than a decade to tell anyone about this experience. Even then, it would be years before Brad encountered cultures for whom this kind of experience is recognized and celebrated.

Eventually Brad dropped out of M.I.T., became an improvisational pianist, and then a scholar of cybernetics (the study of circularity). Two of its founders, Gregory Bateson and Heinz von Foerster, were his mentors.

After earning his Ph.D., Brad served as the Director of Research at the leading family therapy institute in New York City. Finally, this small-town kid from Missouri was able to feed his passion for Broadway musicals!

But as it turned out, some of the best theatre at the time was happening in the family therapy clinics (it was the early 80s and the field was bursting with experimentalism). Several of the world’s leading therapists asked Brad to watch their sessions and explain to them what they were doing. That’s how he became an expert in analyzing transformative communication.

Brad soon declared psychotherapy should be taught in the school of performing arts and that every session is best regarded as a three-act play.

Then, at the height of a successful academic career, the spirit world began knocking more loudly.

Brad finally “dropped out” and spent several decades traveling the globe meeting shamans, healers, and spiritual teachers to record their life stories. Lots of miraculous and mind-blowing things happened during this period that got Brad featured in several books and magazines.*

Ultimately, Brad’s varied and unconventional roots, from science to family therapy, diverse healing traditions, and musical improvisation, always led back to the singular truth he encountered at age 19: What matters is a heart cracked open by a love so big it makes you tremble, shake, and want to share it with everyone. When the gods eventually informed Brad that it was time for him to teach, he found his match and partner in Hillary.

*These included Time, Utne Reader, and the biography, American Shaman, by Jon Carlson and Jeffrey A. Kottler. Brad also wrote about his experiences in his books, Shaking Out the Spirits and Bushman Shaman. Find our books here.

Growing up in Michigan, Hillary’s earliest passions were dance, theatre, and earning straight A’s. Six months before high school graduation, she lost her father, brother, and grandmother in a car accident. Spiritually, it was a pivotal moment. Rather than feel overcome by grief, Hillary unexpectedly felt suspended in a tangible, infinite peace. Some invisible veil dropped away and the world suddenly felt vast, immediate, and very alive. For years she never told anyone about that experience, but its liberating truth was irrepressible and became the seed that launched and steered her spiritual life.

Hillary soon found her feelings echoed back inside Zen Buddhism. Its explicit celebration of startling encounters with impermanence and stripping everything down to the bone made her feel at home.

Eventually, Hillary made her way to southern California where she lived at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. She also worked in the non-profit field in youth leadership, affordable housing, women’s issues, and anti-racism education. For almost a decade her life was organized by three competing priorities: community work, Zen Buddhism, and salsa dancing. She got little sleep but has zero regrets!

Then one night, while a Ph.D. student at the California Institute of Integral studies, Hillary attended a lecture by new faculty member, Bradford Keeney.

Was it a lecture? It was more like a revival sermon on Kalahari shamanism that broke out into shaking bodies, laying on of hands, and people collapsing into piles on the floor. Unsure what to make of it, Hillary went to the bar and ordered a martini.

If “shaking medicine” wasn’t yet her thing, Professor Keeney’s scholarship on cybernetics and systemic therapy caught her attention. It resonated with the anti-narrative wisdom of Zen and came just in time when Hillary was increasingly bored and frustrated with the psychology-saturated dynamics permeating social justice discourse.

Eventually, Hillary was assigned to co-teach an online doctoral class with Brad. It erupted into a multi-disciplinary, circular poetic experiment in virtual transformative learning. (A precursor to the Sacred Ecstatics Guild!) After sharing a Kalahari-style hug during a shaking medicine gathering, we instantly became hunting-gathering partners who track, catch, and share the mystical, creative life force originally called “n/om.”*

Read more about Hillary’s early experiences with Sacred Ecstatics in her essay “Hooked in the Heart.”

*N/om is the Kalahari Ju/’hoan Bushman word for the vibratory vital life force

Sacred Ecstatics was born from our mutually shared lineage roots: the cybernetics and Zen of circular reality construction, Kalahari spiritual cooking, out-of-the-box healing intervention, and our
shared passion for dance and music.

We first conducted our experimental work in various venues around the world including theatres, clinics, temples, cathedrals, nightclubs, a historic dude ranch, a shotgun house in New Orleans, and the ruin pubs of Budapest. We became celebrated for demonstrating how sacred ecstasy (at all degrees of spiritual temperature) can reenter a world largely out of touch with spiritually cooked ecstatic wisdom.

In 2014, after retiring as university professors to conduct Sacred Ecstatics full time, we launched the Guild—a seasonal online community dedicated to the art-and-dart of piercing the heart, igniting the soul, and living each day inside the “Big Room” of mystery.

Then something extraordinary and unexpected happened.

The very first week the Guild began, we started receiving mystical visions almost every night. It was like being sent to a higher high school. The homework load was intense—long hours each day studying the historical figures and teachings that were revealed in dream. That period fundamentally changed the way we teach. From then on, we let visionary inspiration guide our work.

A new way of old-school spiritual living was unleashed: we pioneered the art of cultivating potent ecstatic transformation over the internet. The Sacred Ecstatics Guild soon became an outskirts online community that helps everyone keep the soul-fire burning.

In the manner of Emmanuel Swedenborg and Hildegard von Bingen, our communicative link to the “mystical library” resulted in more than 4,000 pages of visionary teachings plus over a thousand ecstatic musical recordings. Today, a pantheon of dreamed saints continues to provide the Guild with higher guidance and illumination. (See the book series, Climbing the Rope to God.)

Rather than reduce spiritual experience to a diluted platitude, pseudo-magic bullet, or dumbed-down method marketed to the masses, we are more aligned with the classic mystery schools and avant-garde innovators of the past. We embrace wild thinking, outrageous fervor, absurd revelry, and unbounded creativity.