Our Story: Celebrating 5 Years of Sacred Ecstatics
We are celebrating five years of Sacred Ecstatics! Since beginning, we have published seven books (including the 2019 Sacred Ecstatics revised edition), several academic papers, and numerous blog essays, launched a new library of musical audio teachings, and conducted over 40 intensives and workshops around the world. We have also experienced people grow and transform in ways we could not have anticipated (more on that below). We decided it was time to update “our story” on the website to give a clearer and more accurate account of what has transpired since we began.
Below we share that updated story with you, but with some additional insider commentary and a bit of jargon that is only familiar to the Guild. As many Guild members have discovered when talking to family and friends, the core experiences of Sacred Ecstatics are difficult to put into brief, everyday language because they are foreign to most people in contemporary times. For example, it turns out that saying “We shoot arrows and nails of n/om into people’s hearts!”—though truthful and accurate—is met with awkward silence and puzzled stares.
Using more familiar words doesn’t help the situation much. These days terms such as “healing,” “vibration,” “shamanism,” “life force,” “vision,” “spirituality,” “energy medicine,” “movement,” “ecstasy,” and sadly even “shaking medicine” have so many contradictory and often erroneous meanings and connotations they confuddle more than clarify.
A big part of our mission is to put ineffable, numinous mystery into words without further concretizing old dualisms, cultivating new false dichotomies, or creating unnecessarily frozen ideologies that extinguish the spiritual fire. This exhilarating and occasionally frustrating endeavor has taught us many things, including this vital and undeniable truth: The utmost spiritual experience is never found in a static name, but in the divine singing-and-dancing flame.
Our Story, Annotated
Our story is in blue text, our commentary is in black.
What happens when a Zen Buddhist salsa dancer meets a jazz pianist who spent decades working with healers, shamans, and mystics throughout the world? In the case of Hillary and Brad, they fell in love, moved to New Orleans, and launched a spiritual experiment that forever changed their lives.
They knew from the start that full-blown sacred ecstasy is the key experience underlying the saint’s mystical communion, the shaman’s visionary journeying, and the healer’s hands-on transformation. However, this extreme bliss is missed and dismissed today due to a longstanding bias for what subdues rather than excites heightened emotion and spontaneous body motion. The Keeneys made it their mission to bring old school, ecstatic-somatic dynamics back to modern times.
Actually, it took us years of writing, editing, and teaching to be able to more clearly articulate that the pinnacle spiritual experience—with all its shaking, vibratory trembling, spontaneous singing, healing, ‘doption and other ecstatic forms of expression—is primarily fueled by a super-charged flood of sacred emotion. Even after we named our work “Sacred Ecstatics” we (hilariously) did not fully zero in on sacred ecstasy as the key metaphor.
Once we finally figured out that our name actually describes what we do (truly a moment of genius), it became easier to write and talk about this work. In particular, it became simpler to explain why just activating physical shaking without a heartfelt rope to God will always lack the “medicine” found among the Kalahari Bushmen and other shakers Brad profiled in his earlier book, Shaking Medicine.
But just as we were celebrating the dawn of a new era of unprecedented semantic order and clarity, we discovered that the word “ecstasy” had been appropriated and twisted among scholars of shamanism and religion to refer to a non-emotional cataleptic trance held in a still body. Right about the time we realized this, Brad dreamed of the shaman with glowing red antlers. We then knew we had to dig in and try to clear up the muddle as best we could, and so we wrote the paper on sacred ecstasy in shamanism. This extremely difficult but vitally important project was a beast, to say the least. Here it is for those interested.
As performing artists and scholars, Hillary and Brad identified the necessary ingredients and practical recipe for bringing forth sacred ecstasy: a special blend of syncopated rhythm, embellished tone, spontaneous movement, and soulful emotion. At its peak intensity an extraordinarily felt vibration called a “fire in the bones” comes to life inside the body. This vibration of jubilation is the missing link to an embodied rather than only imagined relationship to the ineffable source and force of creation.
We first identified the recipe in Sacred Ecstatics: The Recipe for Setting Your Soul on Fire. We didn’t realize, however, that we were not sufficiently clear in our articulation of the ingredients of the recipe. Thankfully the gods of music and dance came to the rescue and sent Brad to a spiritual classroom that delivered the teachings we were missing.
It was spring 2017 and we were on our way to Budapest. Brad dreamed of being admitted to the mystical university to study the French sensory physiologist Charles Henry (1859–1926). That vision and the series of mystical dreams that followed led us to reverse engineer sacred ecstatic experience. We spent the next six months writing The Spiritual Engineering of Sacred Ecstasy. It’s full of practical exercises to get you playing your body instrument in a new, spirited way.
We now could speak about the four experiential ingredients that are always present during spiritual cooking. We could also better explain the blended relationship between heightened emotion, tone, rhythm, and vibratory shaking movement.
Yes, the fire of sacred ecstasy is about heightened emotion, but this kind of emotion is inseparable from a palpable, non-subtle vibration in the body (a.k.a. n/om). Furthermore, heightened emotion and somatic vibration are activated and amplified by soulful rhythm and sacred melody. When you are spiritually “on fire” or “being cooked,” all of these ingredients are fully activated and mixing together.
The Keeneys conducted their breakthrough experiment in various venues around the world including theatres, clinics, temples, cathedrals, a historic dude ranch, and their own studio in New Orleans. They became internationally celebrated for demonstrating how sacred ecstasy can reenter a world out of touch with ecstatic wisdom.
Then something extraordinary and unexpected happened
In 2014, after retiring as university professors to explore Sacred Ecstatics full time, the Keeneys began receiving mystical visions almost every night for over six months. This resulted in direct guidance from a pantheon of saints.
When we began the first round of the Experiment in 2014, we hosted an online forum for participants on Ning. We were living in Hollywood in a tiny bungalow at the time, and when the visions started coming, Brad posted every report on Ning the next morning. It got so crazy that Hillary would wake up each morning and say, “Where did you go last night?”
Then she also started being sent to the spiritual classrooms. Ning became a mystical visionary town square and the entire group went into orbit. We threw all pre-conceived plans out the window and surrendered to being led by the visions that came down each night.
That was a true turning point in Sacred Ecstatics. From then on, we have followed visionary instruction every step of the way.
Participants in the Guild soon discovered what exists beyond the familiar spectrum of spiritual experience—ecstatic awakenings only previously known to those residing outside both organized religion and new age spirituality. This unleashed a new kind of spirituality based on evoking sacred ecstasy instead of professing and contesting ideology. The Sacred Ecstatics Guild became a global tribe devoted to exploring the numinous frontier.
In short, several people received nails of n/om and visited the visionary classrooms. Most importantly, however, people learned how to pray in a way that makes the room bigger and sets their souls on fire. Folks discovered what it means to feel a personal relationship (rope) to the Creator and how to make each other’s ropes stronger.
Brad and Hillary’s visionary downloads continue to steer the ongoing development of Sacred Ecstatics and have resulted in over 2,000 pages of written reports.
That’s right! We’ve been in the midst of another very active visionary period during the last six months. It has been a challenge to keep up with the daily writing, but we have another volume of visionary reports on the way in the near(ish) future.
Rather than reduce the utmost spiritual experience to a diluted platitude, magic bullet, or dumbed down method marketed to the masses, the Keeneys are more aligned with the classic mystery schools and avant-garde innovators of the past. Intellectually and emotionally bold, Sacred Ecstatics embraces wild thinking, outrageous fervor, absurd revelry, and unbounded creativity.
With over 40 published books and widespread acclaim for their creatively charged mysticism, spiritually cooked shamanism, and heart-opening healing sessions, Hillary and Brad have touched the lives of people throughout the world. As exemplar spiritual guides with a direct hotline to mystery, they help incubate and maturate your inborn natural gifts and unique life mission. Dr. Robert C. Fulford, the renowned physician that Dr. Andrew Weil cites as the leading healer of our time, called the Keeneys’ work “the most direct path to healing and spiritual growth.”
Welcome to Sacred Ecstatics, the counter revolution of spirited engagement and soulful communion. The door is open again to the pinnacle experience of mystery.
In other words, join us in the Shaking Medicine Life Force Theatre Mojo Doctors’ Ministry of Seiki Jutsu where circular therapeutics and the Bushman way of tracking God help lead us to the wonder-working holy ghost power found in the ecstatic, alchemical laboratory where the music is continuously playing, the Ouroborean wheel is always turning, and the spiritual fire is forever burning.
— The Keeneys, June 26, 2019
For links to all of our book titles, click here.