January is a time for jumpstarting positive change for the upcoming year. Throughout the month, Resident Advisor explores the topic of wellness and self-improvement in dance music.

In past instalments of Dance Floor Epiphanies, we've explored a range of topics, from connection to empowerment and identity, by gathering personal stories from readers and ravers across the globe. This month's edition is all about wellness and what that topic means to our community.

Nightlife can be a double-edged sword, especially in its inherent affiliations with drug use and other modes of escapism. For example, we’ve seen fentanyl invade the party space. Even with pushes towards harm reduction, there comes an inevitable question: is nightlife good for us? Can the club play a role in wellness despite its connection to harm? And how can sharing these spaces affect our bodies, minds, souls and hearts?

Music, being the great connector that it is, moves us not only physically but emotionally. Dancing with others can be a way to release stored emotional pain, and many people keep coming back to the party for a good time, but also for its physical and psychic benefits. Our experiences in darkened warehouses, clubs and nature can offer moments of catharsis and potent healing. Taylor Bratches explores the idea of the club-as-cure by asking readers about their experiences and what wellness in the scene means to them.

Mister Sunday, First Dance After Lockdown

Dancing has been a part of my heart from an early age. I found passion in the ballet studio for the first 13 years of my life before transitioning this love onto club dance floors. Through it all, there was always the aspect of comfort and togetherness with others. Staying home during Covid-19 caused a dimming of light inside me; the outlet I relied on each weekend to let loose had been taken away when I felt I needed it most. So when Nowadays announced their first Mister Sunday party back in a post-pandemic world, my friends and I were first in line to see Musclecars, Eamon Harkin and Justin Carter.

Upon entering, we couldn't help but squeal like little children. As more of our friends surrounded us on the dance floor, feelings of being alone were replaced with an intense happiness. There was a sense of urgency amongst partygoers: a letting go of anger, frustration and sadness at what the world had gone through. People were searching for connection, joyful to be able to strike up a conversation with a stranger in the smoking area once again: "I can't believe we are finally able to do this" rang all around. The energy was palpable in the familiar, synchronistic movements of an ecstatic crowd. The music permeated our bodies and provided a much-needed sigh of relief. As the last track played, everyone had let go: sweat flew through the room and the air was warm from energy. All dancing came from the heart. Dance floors are a place of therapy, and this day in particular was healing to so many of us who had craved it for so long. The world was far from being okay, but in those hours, we were able to live again in the moment and experience the beauty of community through music once more. Laila, Brooklyn

The Anger Was So Loud

Docile, silent and in my place. That's how my white bourgeois social milieu dictated me to deal with my father's secrets.

I discovered that he had tried heroin with some friends when he was younger. But the syringe was infected, so he contracted HIV. Later, he sought refuge in cocaine. Both secrets I didn't know until later in life. What I know well is how brain cancer eventually left him paralyzed and mute on a bed. Our house turned into a hospital, and the familiar smell of home was replaced by Armenian incense to hide the smell of the stool. My mother took care of him, got breast cancer, and had a chunk out of her breast removed. Thankfully, she survived. When my father died, I stood and swallowed. Until the ticking bomb exploded: the anger was so loud, I needed something louder.

To deal with the pain of my past, dance floors in Berlin became the places where I could have my own secrets. In these magnificent microcosms of decadence and bliss, everything seemed much more real than any of my Christmas dinners. Under the strobe lights, I could finally be wild, panther-like, twisting in all directions, using my arms like windmills. I could shake my head until my ideas were back in place and could sweat until I had no more drops to give. In the music, I looked for the stories I wished someone had told me. I let myself feel, and I finally had a space where I could let the broken little girl and the angry woman be together in their pain.

I never imagined that after ten years of dancing to the bass of deafening music, I'd finally hear a peaceful voice inside of me. The power of the speakers has dried my anger like a bone. Now every Sunday, I celebrate the liberation of my body and my heart. I no longer dance for or against my traumas but with them. In clubs, I also met those whom I consider like my adopted family. Lovefool Crew, I thank you for standing by my side. Roshie, Paris

Refocused and Sober at Robert Hood

At some point, I got lost in the party and was only seeking unconsciousness. Nights out became weekends long. There was a shared pressure among the people I was hanging out with to never let the party end. I had lost the feeling of connectedness I initially found through the scene and felt increasingly alone. Thankfully I got help and decided to take an indefinite break from nightlife.

At about a year sober, after some intense and ongoing personal work, my life had transformed for the better. I was happy and healthy. I had a good job and managed a weekend stop in London on a work trip. I had taken a long break from going out to focus on recovery and was a bit nervous about going it alone in an unfamiliar city, but Robert Hood was playing at Village Underground—a living legend I had yet to hear live. Buoyed by a network of support available by phone, I mustered the courage to go.

That evening was one of the best nights of music I've heard in my life. After a really solid warm-up set from Efdemin, Hood stepped on and locked the crowd in. The venue was packed from front to back, and the energy was electric. I let myself go, nerves dissolving as I danced the night away sober. This was different from times past. I was intensely present. I felt connected to my body and my surroundings, snapped into awareness. I exchanged kind smiles with strangers. I felt joyous. I felt alive.

Today I'm five years sober, and my relationship with the scene has refocused. It's once again about the music and I'm doing it on my terms; if the music isn't right or the vibe is bad, I leave. And when it's good, there's no need for substances because the energy on its own is one of the best feelings in the world. James, Los Angeles

Clubbing With Dad in Nebraska

I had already had many emotional experiences on dance floors in my decade of raving. The perfect party in combination with the perfect set usually brought that out of me: No Way Back in Detroit, Lunar Lodge in Colorado, Organik in Taiwan. Healing found me on dance floors—the scene, more than anything, had been a space for that. I didn't necessarily think dancing with my dad at a mediocre club in Omaha, Nebraska, would create that kind of experience, but I wanted to see if it was possible.

My father had just transitioned. Her new name, Maddy, still felt strange on my tongue. Throughout my life, dad had been someone else entirely: a mentally ill addict, an abuser and the poster child for toxic masculinity. Now, in the lobby of The Max in downtown Omaha, I saw patent leather stilettos, blonde wig, new body, new person—and I yearned for healing between us. Though the club was filled with cis bodies and drunken fights that night, I was determined to carve out a space of comfort for the both of us. But as the thud of EDM poured into the bowl-shaped dance floor, I realized this might not be a place for healing or transcendence.

My father had been raped, tortured, traumatized in childhood. Trauma begets trauma, and I'd had my fill of it too. But in this new stage and new form, my father was someone different. So was I. Years of raving had helped me cope with the pain my dad inflicted. Now, we danced together—however imperfectly—and the DJ transitioned to a house edit of Britney Spears's "Toxic" (dad's favorite). I left my mind, allowing my head to roll back and my racing thoughts to subside… which is what dancing is so good for—entering the body, reclaiming it. Maddy, too, swayed and moved to the rhythm, still a little shaky in stilettos, but I could tell she was genuinely happy—maybe for the first time. Later, Whitney Houston cooed through the speakers: "It's not right, but it's okay. I'm gonna make it anyway." Until that moment, I hadn't been sure if my father would make it. If she could find the strength. But from the look on her face that night, I began to believe she actually might. Taylor, Brooklyn

My Weekly Therapy at Basic Club

After a bad relationship with a guy, I went through a period of acute depression. I had completely lost confidence in myself. Speaking my mind in front of other people terrified me, and I felt out of place in every context, with every person. As a woman, my comfort zone was to be less, not to be noticed, to be quiet.

Then one day, I had the chance to join the Basic Club team in Naples as a PR. Even though I lived in Rome at that time, I took trains every weekend to Naples to participate in the magic and rebirth our dance floor was giving me. Finally, with that sound system and energizing music, I felt alive again, regaining control over my body and my mind. Every Saturday was a new session of psychotherapy, where the tongue became the movements and the doctor was the sound waves.

The dance floor saved me, saved the Clara who found it difficult to make room for herself in the world. Who had created a rut to avoid feeling pain. The same rut that made me unable to feel anything, transmit messages to the world, and be myself.

The dance floor is a panacea for me. It makes me feel beautiful, inside and out. My energy now comes from the energy spent dancing, the contact with people and the conversations that randomly start during a night at the club. Some people today call me a volcano: so different from the shy girl I used to be. Now I feel explosive; my magma is a dance floor full of people. Clara, Naples

A Break From Anxiety during Ben UFO

My struggle with anxiety has always been something that's gnawed at the space between. Whenever I thought I found that moment to relax and unwind, it came speeding back in, never really allowing me to quiet my mind and be present. Even when a racing thought would stop, another would overtake it. I'd find it hard to park and just be. I still do. But, a moment at a Ben UFO show at a warehouse here in LA about two years ago gave me some relief. I was able to stop in my tracks and appreciate what that space offered me.

It was the middle of the night, pulsing breaks and bass bounced off the walls. I looked around the packed room, to what some might have called chaos—the lights shifting and the people blending together—and even though I had gone there by myself, I felt surrounded by friends and free to focus on the music and nothing else. Because of that night, I found that the energy of the dance floor (and later, being behind the decks) is the place where I'm able to be in the moment the most…where I'm truly at peace. No racing, just being. Even through the sounds from the wall of speakers, there's a space of quiet within.

When I found this "place," both physical and mental, I knew it was special and I knew it was okay to let go, and to leave anxiety at the door. I can't pretend that the anxiety isn't still waiting for me outside the rave when I leave, but the lessons I've learned on the dance floor have helped me make that anxiety easier to dance with when it's there. Joey, Los Angeles