For love, the Natyashastra recommends that we are to relax our bodies, tilt our heads, open our arms and hands, smile, and mirror the gaze of the beloved (think Gene Kelly in his iconic “Singin’ in the Rain” dance.)
For awe, we are to widen our eyes and mouth, look up, and open our arms, shoulders, chest, and hands, the very behaviors we found that express awe in different cultures from around the world. One can see such awe-filled dance today when Pentecostal Christians are moved by the holy spirit or revelers are rolling at a rave.
Dance transforms us in the ways of awe. In a study from Brazil, high school students engaged in dance-like movements, either in sync with others to the beat of a metronome or out of sync with those nearby. Those who “danced” with others, in particular when making more vigorous movements, felt more interconnected. They could also tolerate more pain, a sign of elevated natural opioids, which accompany feelings of merging. Even twelve-month-old babies will help an experimenter pick up dropped pens if the babies have bounced in synchronized rhythm to music with the experimenter.
Over the thousands of years of its evolution, dance, like sports, music, art, and religion, became a way to document awe. In dance, we recognize in a symbolic language what is wonderful (and horrifying) about life. In one relevant study, a classically trained dancer in the Hindu tradition made four- to ten-second videos of her Natyashastra-inspired performances of ten emotions, or rasas. Western Europeans had no trouble discerning the emotions expressed in these brief performances, including those of wonder. When moving in unison through dance, we communicate with others about the sublime.
When we watch the expression of rasas in dance, the Natyashastra continues, we as spectators feel aesthetic emotions known as bhavas. These aesthetic emotions are different from the emotions of our mundane lives, or rasas; we feel bhavas in the realm of the imagination, where we are momentarily and delightfully free of the concerns of our quotidian lives.
How does this work? Current thinking holds that when we see others dance, we instinctively start to mimic their actions, which you may sense in your foot tapping or body swaying. These bodily movements then lead our embodied minds to bring to consciousness ideas, images, or memories related to the actions expressed in the dance. A dancer’s portrayal of awe, for example, might lead you to open your body ever so slightly and shift your gaze upward. You may recall past encounters with a wonder of life or imagine possible wonders you might enjoy. All of this, it merits noting, takes place in the realm of the imagination, where we are free to consider what is possible.
When dancing together, we share the delights of moving our bodies. And we experience flights of our imagination in seeing others dance. This all can bring about a porous intermingling of bodies and minds we experience as collective effervescence. No wonder dance is so transporting, and so often borders, like the collective effervescence of sports, on the spiritual.
SIX WILD AWE How Nature Becomes Spiritual and Heals Bodies and Minds
Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.
• RACHEL CARSON
My collaborators Jennifer Stellar and Neha John-Henderson and I had a hunch about how awe may be an antidote to our overheated and overstressed times. We suspected that awe may reduce the inflammation produced by our immune system, in particular that which arises in response to chronic threat, rejection, and loneliness. How? Why might the wonders of life shift this problematic inflammation? Because in many ways, awe is the antithesis to the social threats that cause the release of proinflammatory cytokines.
Proinflammatory cytokines are released in immune cells throughout your body to kill invading bacteria and viruses. In the short run, cytokines heat up your body to kill the pathogen, leaving you feeling sluggish, vague, achy, and disoriented as the body marshals resources to fend off the attack and recuperate. The trouble, though, is that the human mind treats social threats like an invading pathogen: studies find that social rejection, shame, being the target of prejudice, chronic stress, loneliness, and threats to loved ones elevate cytokine levels in your body.
Awe, by contrast, heightens our awareness of being part of a community, of feeling embraced and supported by others. Feeling awe, we place the stresses of life within larger contexts. Perhaps everyday awe, we wondered, would be associated with lower inflammation.
To test this hypothesis, we gathered measures of inflammation (as assessed in the biomarker Interleukin 6, or IL 6). Participants also reported on their everyday awe by offering responses on a seven-point scale (1 = not true, 7 = very true) to questions like:
I often feel wonder about what is around me.
I feel awe outside regularly.
We also measured the tendency to feel other positive emotions, such as pride and amusement. In this study, it was only awe that predicted lower levels of inflammation. Everyday awe, then, can be a pathway for avoiding chronic inflammation and the diseases of the twenty-first century such inflammation is associated with, including depression, chronic anxiety, heart disease, autoimmune problems, and despair. This finding caught the attention of a very large human being who knew the inflammation of trauma well.
Stacy Bare stands six feet, eight inches tall. He has a giant beard and a massive head that stretches the biggest beanies. His voice has the tree-shaking pitch of a moose call. When thoughts of his deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan move through his mind, his gaze shifts to the side and his lips retract—traces of a cry of distress, perhaps, for brothers in combat or innocent Iraqis lying dead by the side of the road. When he talks about the need to do more for veterans than numb their minds with pharmaceutical cocktails, or when he recalls a veteran friend who just took his own life, his prose and prosody slow, moved by a conviction found in getting very close to human suffering.
During his childhood in South Dakota, Stacy was inspired by his grandparents’ stories of awe from serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II. At age nineteen he tried to enlist but was rejected; he was too tall. Instead, he joined the army, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. During these engagements, he suffered from chronic inflammation. This didn’t prevent him from finding awe:
During my year in Iraq I was in a near-constant state of low-grade to high-grade funk. I was being forced into a horrific policy decision and a poorly run war every day. I’d lost friends, watched Iraqis being killed, endured blasts and rifle shots and mortar fire and food that made me crap my pants once a month. I worked mostly for a string of ever-changing leadership, each one intent on “making a difference” in their own way.
The light shifted dramatically.
I turned around and saw a huge, pulsing orange wall charging down the road and obliterating everything in its path. Less than a second and the buildings and cars that stretched on either side of the road were gone. I ran, laughing and smiling, to duck into a concrete structure, a little bunker, on the side of the road. I kept my back against the wind but all around me the bunker filled up with fine misted sand. It caught in my mouth and in my throat, but I couldn’t stop smiling or laughing.
The world was a huge place and I was just a tiny speck in it. My challenges and concerns and worries of life all were erased in an instant as I just tried to breathe. It was a remarkably freeing feeling amidst an otherwise incredibly imprisoning year. In its total obliteration, I also found the dust storm magnificently beautiful.