A wave of young visionaries bring meditation and yoga to the party
DJ Jason Bentley unapologetically hits the crowd with contagious electronic beats. Attendance swells to 300 people inside an industrial sausage-and-beer garden in Venice, California. People dance or head to the bar — for cold brew, green nutritional smoothies, and Kind granola bars.
It’s 6:30 a.m. Time to rave.
This is Daybreaker, an event that began in December 2013 as a kind of social experiment in the basement of a coffee shop in New York’s Union Square. Since then, more than 100,000 people from Sao Paolo to London have gotten up in the wee hours to party sober before work at Daybreaker’s pop-up locations.
“The energy, experience, and intention is so similar across all these communities,” said Daybreaker co-founder Matthew Brimer. “It really does feel like a transnational movement.”
The movement goes beyond Daybreaker. A group of young entrepreneurs, many of them loyal Burning Man attendees, are throwing “mindful parties” around the globe. They say people are tired of blowing money on bars and leaving dissatisfied. They’re tired of being so absorbed in their phones they can’t appreciate the present. And they’re tired of going to the same, unoriginal clubs with redundant electronic music and Top 40 hits.
At the core of their desire to inspire thoughtful event-planning lies a fundamental belief about humanity: Everyone wants more ways to meaningfully connect with others, just not everybody realizes it…yet.
Some corporate marketing teams have noted this shift in “going out” trends. Absolut Labs, a think tank and idea incubator funded by the alcohol spirit company Absolut, released a report last year called “State of Nightlife 2015.” Its conclusion: Young people want to party in unexpected places to a diverse mix of music where they are encouraged to actively participate. Bottle service doesn’t cut it anymore.
According to an EventBrite survey conducted in 2014 by the Harris Poll, 78 percent of American millennials — people age 18 to 36 years old — would rather spend money on an experience than a possession. An accompanying EventBrite report concluded that young people’s identities are defined more by what they do than what they own: “…[M]illennials aren’t as interested in owning a home or buying a car as previous generations were at their age,” the report stated. “True now more than in past generations, for millennials, real value is derived from experiencing, not possessing.”
Logan Gaudreau, 28, sees this mentality reflected in the rise of music festivals. He’s immersed in Los Angeles’ nightlife scene as a DJ and the director of music festivals for Powerhouse Entertainment, which helps coordinate transportation for Southern California festivals hosting hundreds of thousands of attendees.
“Clubs get old and boring. It’s in the same place and you sit around and try to act cool,” Gaudreau said. “You go to a music festival and there’s 50,000 people sharing an experience. It’s definitely a different dynamic where people are more willing to talk to each other. They drop the ego and everyone’s there to have fun.” In the U.S., 32 million people, 46 percent of whom are ages 18 to 34, attend at least one event such as Lollapalooza or South by Southwest every year.
The culture at these festivals may allow for spontaneous interactions and relationship building. But it’s no secret that these moments are sometimes fueled by drugs and alcohol, particularly at electronic dance music festivals where deaths related to use of the drug MDMA — commonly known as “Molly” — have made headlines and led to a Center for Disease Control and Prevention investigation into the causes of emergency-room visits by event attendees.
Mindful-event planners seek to take the open environment of a festival and combine it with a heightened level of intentionality. This was Scott Ishihara’s motivation for founding The Transcendence Party, a dance-meditation-yoga gathering that took place monthly in Santa Monica, California, until 2013. He plans to start something similar in Santa Fe, New Mexico soon.
Ishihara got deep into the electronic rave scene while studying abroad as an undergraduate in Barcelona in fall 2008. When he returned in spring 2009 to finish his senior year at UCLA, he started attending festivals — often on party drugs and psychedelics — where he says he realized the potential for human connectivity.
At around the same time, he took a job at The Hub, a former yoga studio in Santa Monica that held classes such as “Wave Motion: The Movement of Life!” and “Tantric Dance of Feminine Power.” Ishihara had no prior exposure to meditation or yoga, but he immediately began to see the parallels between festivals and these mindfulness practices.
He had the same idea as the founders of Daybreaker: take the fun, expressive parts of nightlife; get rid of the conformist, drinking culture; and create something new — an event that isn’t just about temporarily escaping everyday challenges, but about learning how to move through them more eloquently.
“For me, having a space like that and an event like that, if you can get in touch with your own individuality, that opens a little window for you,” Ishihara said. “It’s like, okay, I don’t want this just in nightlife, but I want this in all aspects of my life. How can I achieve that?”
A key ingredient of these mindful events, Ishihara and Daybreaker co-founders said, is often “unplugging,” another nightlife trend mentioned in the Absolut report. “Technology itself is the biggest kind of factor that’s changing people’s going out, because it’s both a liberating and amazingly flexible tool which helps people find new nights and find new music,” said Absolut Labs Director Afdhel Aziz. “But it’s also a remarkably divisive factor as well, because it can take people out of the moment.”
Almost 70 percent of the millennials in the EventBrite survey said they experience FOMO — a “fear of missing out” — generally attributed to all the experiences being posted by friends on social media. Social media use has been steadily increasing since 2005 with 90 percent of young adults — ages 18 to 29 — as active participants. In 2015, there were 3.5 million tweets sent from the first weekend of Coachella and 1 million sent from South by Southwest.
“There’s really very few contexts now in which you can’t return a text message. I think that burden is really high,” digital anthropologist Mizuko Ito said. “It’s not surprising, this notion that we’re going to be disconnected from the virtual social network. It’s something people are going to want to do.”
The popularization of Burning Man and the rise in digital detox retreats already points to a growing interest in events with an emphasis on unplugging and community building.
Entry to Burning Man has become a hot commodity, with the 30-year-old festival attracting more than 65,000 participants — 30,000 more than 10 years ago. (Granted, some attendees are just there to party, but it was founded on and still prioritizes a radical culture of inclusion.)
Other Burning Man-inspired festivals have popped up around the world. Three of the biggest events — AfrikaBurn in South Africa, Fusion Festival in Germany, and KaZantin in the Ukraine — cumulatively welcome hundreds of thousands of attendees annually. And Daybreaker has plans to open more than a dozen additional pop-up locations by the end of the year, from Shanghai to Montreal.
Radha Agrawal, the other co-founder of Daybreaker, believes that while people who are already exposed to Burning Man and related communities are more likely to attend mindful events, most attendees would be convinced of their value if they only showed up. And she’s confident that, eventually, they will.
“It does take coaching, it does take a little bit of education,” Agrawal said, “but I can’t tell you, with Daybreaker, how many people I’ve invited and after [an event] they run up to me, tears streaming down their face, and say, ‘I feel like I’m on Molly!’”