About

We celebrate spiritual heat over frozen belief,
spontaneous dance over ideological stance,
somatic vibration over mindful contemplation,
sonic tonic over pharma logic,
catching inspiration over setting an intention,
effervescent bubbling over psychobabbling,
spiritual cooking over introspective looking
changing realities over fixing personalities,
& ineffable mystery over personal mastery.

Welcome to the secret of secrets that originated in the Kalahari:
After climbing up the rope to the higher fire, we climb back down to change the world.

At 19, on his way to M.I.T. after winning the International Science Fair, Brad experienced a full-blown, ecstatic spiritual awakening. Throughout the night, his body was filled with a fiery emotion so powerful that he shook and trembled in utter bliss.

This experience was pure accident. Brad was not a spiritual seeker, he was a music tinkerer. His experiments with emotion-driven piano improvisation had somehow ripped open the veil of reality. No spiritual, psychological, or biochemical intervention was involved, though the mystical effects of that night lingered for over a month.

Brad waited more than a decade to tell anyone about it. Even then, it would be years before he encountered cultures and traditions in which this kind of sonic-kinetic-somatic experience is recognized and celebrated.

Eventually, Brad dropped out of M.I.T., became an improvisational pianist, and then a scholar of human cybernetics—the circular patterns that organize mind, sensation, and social interaction. Two of its founders, Gregory Bateson and Heinz von Foerster, became his mentors.

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

As it turned out, however, 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 experimentation. Several of the world’s leading therapists asked Brad to observe their sessions and explain to them what, exactly, they were doing. In the process, 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 louder.

Brad finally “dropped out” and spent several decades traveling the globe meeting shamans, healers, and spiritual teachers to record their life stories. Along the way, a remarkable stream of miraculous and mind-bending experiences unfolded, eventually leading to Brad being featured in several books and magazines.*

Ultimately, Brad’s varied and unconventional paths, 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. Such heightened love is best conveyed through a song whose arrow pierce to the heart awakens spontaneous dance.

When the gods eventually informed Brad that it was time for him to teach how a theatre of sound, movement, and interactional circularity can change lives, he found his match and partner in Hillary.

*These included Time, Utne Reader, and the biography, American Shaman, by Jeffrey A. Kottler and Jon Carlson. 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 inner fire and 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 ecstatic know-how.

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 getting spiritually cooked over the internet. The Sacred Ecstatics Guild soon became a global 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 to awaken the sacred ecstasy born of love extreme and light supreme.

The Sacred Ecstatics Guild
A soul-igniting immersion in deep-fried mysticism

The Sacred Ecstatics Reset
Private sessions to reset and recharge your life

The Sacred Ecstatics Intensive
Spirited ceremony, tent revival, shamanic cabaret