08/31/2026
I have been going to music festivals for about twenty years now, and some of the most meaningful experiences of my life have happened within these strange, beautiful temporary worlds.
I have experienced tremendous joy and bliss there, danced and played and explored, connected deeply with people, encountered parts of myself I did not know were there, and had experiences that genuinely changed the course of my life. I have also had profoundly challenging experiences, including times when what opened or became amplified was difficult to navigate.
Festivals can hold so much of the spectrum of being human. There can be beauty, intimacy, creativity, wonder, freedom and belonging, while overwhelm, disconnection, fear, exhaustion, excess, loneliness and vulnerability can be very present too.
Over the years I have come to see festivals as a kind of microcosm of the macrocosm. Whatever we are collectively navigating has a way of showing up there too.
For a few days, we build an entire little world together. Camps appear, art is made, food and resources are shared, people help strangers, music carries across the landscape, and somehow thousands of people are figuring out how to coexist within this temporary community we have created.
Then, almost as quickly, we take it all apart again.
There is something fascinating to me about that building and unbuilding. In a small way, I think we are experimenting with pieces of a blueprint for how we come together. We encounter harmony and conflict, individuality and community, expression and responsibility, freedom and relationship, and we get to practice cooperation and co-creation in all of their beauty and messiness.
Within that larger experiment, we also meet ourselves.
Festival environments can amplify what is already moving through us. Joy can become enormous and connection can become profound, while our sensitivities, protective patterns, loneliness, fear, grief or longing can become louder and more difficult to move around.
Some people come partly because they need an escape from ordinary life, and sometimes that escape is restorative and life-giving. There are also times when people become overwhelmed or incapacitated while they are there, and other times when the festival itself feels incredible but coming back into everyday life afterward is surprisingly difficult.
I know pieces of that whole spectrum because I have lived them.
Festivals have been part of my own growth and transformation for two decades, and many of the experiences I have had within them have shaped who I am. Over time, another large part of my life became the study and practice of embodiment, trauma, nervous system regulation and what helps us stay in relationship with ourselves and one another through different states of experience.
Over the last several months, I have been bringing those worlds together and developing something called **Festival States: A Somatic Field Guide**.
I created Festival States to be something you can actually use while you are in the field. If you notice yourself becoming overstimulated, disconnected, floaty or numb, overwhelmed by other people's energy, having trouble sensing your boundaries or simply feeling far away from yourself, you can pull out your phone, find the state that feels closest to what is happening, and explore a few simple somatic practices right where you are.
Sometimes that might mean looking around and taking in where you actually are, feeling your hands and feet, noticing your edges, orienting toward something steady or letting your body move in a way it is already asking to move. The practices are intentionally simple because when we are in the middle of an intense experience, we may not have the capacity or desire to follow something complicated.
The intention is not necessarily to make a difficult state go away. I am much more interested in what can happen when we have a little more capacity to remain in relationship with ourselves while something is moving through us.
That connects to something I value far beyond festivals. I am interested in spaces where we can experience freedom and exploration while remaining connected to ourselves and one another, where intensity can coexist with awareness and care, and where we can become more capable of sensing what we need while also respecting what others may need.
To me, that is part of the deeper possibility within festival culture.
Thousands of people gathering in one place does not automatically make community. We create community through how we relate, how we listen, how we navigate boundaries and consent, how we receive and offer help, how we make room for difference, and how we continue finding our way toward ourselves and one another while we play and create together.
Maybe within these temporary little worlds we build for a weekend, we are practicing pieces of the larger world we would like to live in.
This week I head to **Secret Dreams**, where I will also be offering **Embodied Kin: Listening to the Animal Within**, an experiential workshop exploring instinct, embodiment, movement, creativity and our relationship with the animal intelligence within us.
After twenty years of receiving so much from festival spaces, it feels meaningful to be arriving at this point where I get to bring some of what I have learned and developed back into the community that helped shape me.
**Festival States: A Somatic Field Guide** is now live. You can explore the Overstimulated state for free, and if it feels useful, the full guide is available to carry with you into the field.
https://www.thelivingcurrent.com/festival-states
