When I recently told a friend about my weekend plans to go out dancing, he seemed surprised. “You still go to raves?”

Of course, I still go to raves. Why wouldn’t I?

“But I thought you don’t drink or do drugs,” he said.

I don’t. These days, I’m trying to live a more spiritual life, which involves gaining greater awareness of my mind and learning not to be controlled by my thoughts and emotions. Intoxication is one of the things I know can get in the way of this process. So, I avoid it.

“But how does raving fit into the way you’re living your life now?” my friend responded.

It was a good question. Perhaps it did seem a bit weird to still be attending raves while trying to live more spiritually.

Was he right?

I know how it looks from the outside. People in wild outfits dancing to blaring music well into the next morning. The environment can come across as wild, unhinged, even hedonistic.

But it’s also so much fun. I love being in a crowded room full of people who have come to dance, lose themselves in the music, and enjoy the moment.

For several years, I was attached to this feeling of escape. As I filled out spreadsheets at work, all I could think about was the next time I would be back in that crowd, dancing my troubles away.

It was a ticket to a place far from the mundane world of work meetings and rush hour commutes. In the rave world, I was no longer a stressed-out, cog-in-the-machine kind of guy. It was a moment of freedom that I couldn’t seem to get anywhere else.

It’s also where I met my wife, and something we continue to share to this day. In our current stage of life, we both cherish the opportunity to have a night out where we can dance, enjoy some music, and spend time together.

But over the past few years, I’ve made some significant changes in my life. As I got older, I became more aware of my emotions and wanted to find a way to understand them without suppressing them. After doing some research, I decided to give meditation a try.

And I’m glad I did. After consistently practicing mindfulness techniques for several months, I began to notice something I never had before. I found that I could observe my thoughts and emotions without being swept away by them. The best way I can describe this meditative state is to imagine rising above the thrashing waves of an ocean, allowing you to observe them from a safe distance. The waves are still there, but you are no longer being tossed around by them.

With this new perspective, I became better at responding to my emotions rather than automatically reacting to them. I also became more aware of my motives and desires, which helped me recognize the habits that were getting in the way of my inner peace.

But one thing that seems to have persisted is my desire to go out dancing. My wife and I continue to attend events on a monthly basis, still finding excitement in the occasion. I can see why my friend was so confused about this. On the one hand, I claim to be trying to maintain mental equilibrium, and yet on the other, I’m voluntarily submerging myself in a hectic environment.

Inwardly, however, my new way of life has drastically altered my relationship with raves. I’ve come to realize that the happiness I associated with being in a crowded dark room isn’t entirely dependent on being there. Through meditation, I’m learning to access a sense of contentment in any setting I find myself in.

Raving still allows me to share deep moments of connection with my wife, but it’s no longer something I need or crave. I don’t feel deprived if a rave is cancelled and can still enjoy an evening at home just as much.

Becoming more in tune with my inner world has also helped me become more honest with myself. I’m better able to recognize when late nights and overstimulation begin to undermine my peace of mind.

At the same time, I have to remember that self-awareness isn’t a guarantee that I’m seeing myself clearly. It’s easy to use spirituality to justify something I don’t want to give up. Attachment can be subtle, and so I need to remain honest with myself. The goal isn’t to abandon every pleasurable experience, but to examine how each one impacts my life.

To keep peace in my life, I need to remain alert to signals for change. If I start struggling to settle my mind during meditation, or the loud music and bright lights leave me feeling out of balance for days afterward, I hope I’ll be willing to walk away. None of these signs alone would tell me everything, but together they could help me recognize when raving is no longer beneficial.

For me, a calm state of mind matters more than any particular experience, and I’m willing to do all that I can to preserve it.

So, am I weird for going to raves while trying to live a spiritual life?

While I don’t consider raving a part of my spiritual practice, I do value it as a way to strengthen my bond with my wife and have a chance to move my body. I come from a culture of dancing, and so I think that this will always be a part of who I am. More than that, it’s an opportunity to apply what spirituality teaches me: to enjoy an experience without clinging to it, to remain aware of my mental state, and to recognize when it’s time to let it go.

It would be difficult to practice these things if I renounced the world and lived in a cave somewhere. After all, it’s relatively easy to feel tranquil when meditating in a quiet room with no distractions. The real challenge is carrying that feeling into everyday life, even onto a crowded dance floor.

My spiritual life doesn’t have to end the moment the music begins.

Raving My Way to Inner Peace was originally published in Know Thyself, Heal Thyself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I spent two weeks watching my friend’s life fall apart every single day.

He has inattentive-type ADHD. His reality is a constant stream of low-level friction: grocery shopping without a list (returning home with 60% of the items missing), losing his wallet along the way, cancelling bank cards almost every month, and discovering a washing machine full of sour, three-day-old laundry, in the middle of eating a bowl of spaghetti while walking around the house.

For most people, witnessing this level of daily “chaos and failure” is physically painful. I could feel my own body bracing for impact every single time I witnessed it.

I watched him move through these moments with a lightness that I first mistook for negligence. Then I realized I was witnessing a form of self-forgiveness, acceptance, and mercy I have never seen.

When I asked him if he judged himself for the chaos, he didn’t get defensive. He simply said,

“If I judged myself for all the things I do, I would probably go crazy.”

That sentence silenced me. It wasn’t a “self-help” affirmation. It was a perfectly objective understanding of his own limits. He knew that adding self-punishment to his chaos would be the ultimate punishment for his nervous system.

The Verdict

That’s when I realized I had it backwards all along.

I believed that my internal critic was a guardian, a tool of improvement, a necessary force that kept me productive. I thought being “hard on myself” was the only thing keeping me from becoming someone I didn’t want to be.

While my friend was navigating his Monday, I was running a parallel simulation in my head of what my internal voice would be doing in his shoes. My system was already building a case:

“You lost your wallet. Again. What is fundamentally wrong with you? You messed up. You ruin everything.”

In my world, every accident was evidence that I was not good enough. Evidence that I don’t deserve what I desire. That I’m never going to be enough to live the life I dream of.

With every failure, it became harder and harder to believe otherwise.

The verdict that I am somehow “broken” or “unworthy” was decided long ago. Today’s broken mugs or lost keys were just fresh data points for the prosecution.

Event vs. Evidence: The Split

My friend never bothered building that prosecution case. He couldn’t afford to. The sheer volume of his daily setbacks made “case-building” a lethal activity. He had to learn to take it easy on himself, for the sake of his sanity.

When you treat a failure as evidence, you are no longer fixing a problem; you are arguing with your own existence. That is a high-energy, low-output state. It requires massive amounts of “processing power” to constantly link current events to old, painful stories.

Most of us do this too often. A missed opportunity isn’t just an event; it’s “proof” of incompetence. A failed relationship isn’t just a mismatch; it’s “evidence” that we are unloved, not lovable. We are effectively running a 24/7 courtroom inside our heads, and wonder why we are completely exhausted or even stuck in our lives.

The Cost of the Trial

Self-judgment is internal erosion. It chips away at your spark until you can barely move without bracing for the next piece of evidence against yourself. And the lawyer is expensive. It can cost everything you have: your house, your career, your family, your health.

My friend, despite the chaos, was intact. He was calm, present, and action-oriented. He gave zero energy to self-judgment.

Consequently, he had more usable energy for actual living than almost anyone I know. He was constantly on the go, doing what he wanted.

Even with all these setbacks, his zest for life didn’t waver.

The broken mug is just a broken mug. It has no inherent meaning until you assign one to it. But you have been assigning the same punitive meaning for so long that it no longer feels like a choice. It feels like truth.

That is basically self- execution. You are waiting for a verdict that will never come, because you are both the prisoner and the judge who refuses to adjourn.

You cannot build a happy, fulfilled life with self-prosecution.

The verdict you are building against yourself isn’t making you grow. It is costing you the life you are waiting to be “worthy” of.

The Case I Was Building Against Myself

The most confronting part of those two weeks wasn’t witnessing my friend’s daily struggles.

It was recognizing how much of my own energy I’d spent systematically demolishing myself.

I’d been treating self-judgment as discipline.

As accountability.

As the force that kept me from making mistakes.

But watching him made me question something I’d believed for most of my life.

What if punishing myself for every mistake had never actually made me better at living?

What if it had simply made me better at judging?

I started examining the evidence I’d been collecting against myself.

Every mistake. Every missed opportunity. Every moment that hadn’t gone the way I’d wanted.

And I began noticing something.

The events themselves were rarely the real problem.

It was what I made them mean about me.

A mistake became incompetence.

A rejection became unworthiness.

An unsuccessful attempt became proof that I would never reach my goals.

Somewhere along the way, I’d stopped distinguishing between a simple event and what I believed it meant about who I was.

And my friend, without ever intending to teach me anything, had exposed the entire internal courtroom I had built of all my previous failures.

It was amazing to witness that he could lose his wallet without losing his worth.

Forget the groceries without turning himself into a failure.

Have a difficult day without making himself the problem.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that.

Because perhaps the most exhausting part of my life hadn’t been everything that went wrong.

It had been the trial I put myself through afterward.

For the first time, I began questioning whether that trial needed to exist at all.

I keep coming back to his words.

“If I judged myself for all the things I do, I would probably go crazy.”

He wasn’t asking to be excused from responsibility.

He was refusing to make himself the enemy.

And somehow, watching him navigate his imperfect days taught me something about freedom that I’d spent years trying to understand.

The mistake was never the crime.

I was never on trial.

You are standing in a cell with an open door, still wondering whether you are guilty. Stop waiting for the death penalty for messing up. We all do. Understand that the courtroom was never real, and the judge just wanted to be enough.

It‘s time to live like somebody left your prison cell open.

Wonderlust

Evidence for the Prosecution: How My Friend’s ADHD Exposed My Internal Judge was originally published in Know Thyself, Heal Thyself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.