Dear Drummers,

The letter for this Friday’s drum is below, but I do want to remind you of the fifth annual “Winter Solstice Blessing.” It’s at the Minnesota Opera Center. Seats are limited and we only have 2 performances rather than the usual four to six. If you really want to attend, I suggest you get tickets soon.

Click here to buy tickets on line.
Click here for more information about the experience.

Dear Drummers,
Welcome to the joyous jumble of groovelicious rhythmocity known as Drumming The Soul Awake, this Friday, November 27! (See the sidebar at right for directions)

Welcome one and all! Welcome tap-tender beginners and slap-happy whappers! Welcome all. Welcome to all of you who have made the drum your spiritual tool and those of you who sense that drumming might be a fun thing to try. Welcome to you who always want to get to our drumming evenings and never quite seem to. Welcome to you who have heard tantalizing stories of wild, laugh-filled, mystical experiences bursting forth in a Universalist Church basement somewhere in Uptown. Welcome all! No drumming or mystical experience needed. Plenty of drums for everyone. If you are not too tired from having been at Wal-Mart at 4:30 in the morning to catch the world's greatest deals on stuff, please feel free to join us. As usual we will drum for about 90 minutes. Then for those who want to stay for the second part, we'll enter into what I can only call a ceremony of protection for you, protection from the energies that rule December in modern America. Islam has a word for these energies: the Al-Nafs Al Amara. There are various translations for this, like "the lower soul" but the one I like best is "The Wanting Creature" - that creature in us that wants more, more MORE. Somewhere along the line, December transformed from a month-long celebration of the "One Who Washes Away Sin" to a 35-day invocation and feeding of the "Wanting Creature." The Nafs, of course are not only about wanting with all your heart the ITouch, the WII and the radio controlled Rhumba. The NAfs convince us to never stop wanting more and more of everything for ourselves - including more praise, more sex, more fun, more spiritual experiences, more status, more market share, more zeros in the bank account, and on and on. When we become wrapped in the power of the wanting creature, we forget about everything else but us, we break our connection to everything. Our culture calls it drive and healthy ambition. Certainly, as every wise person from the ancients to today affirm, there is a balance between wanting for yourself, wanting for others, and wanting not at all. For the next month, we will be battered with the power of "the holly jolly happiest time of the year" which is our name for the NAFs, which make us want wildly, and which also arise in us as holiday depression. So with some humor and some help from Spirit, we will try to strengthen our soul so that we may enter the holiday season with a calm joy.
See you soon, Jaime

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Spiritual Power of the Receding Hairline

Image
For father’s day I will be shaving off the nub. As a trained theologian, it is time for me to put down the books and take spiritual action. For those who need to know, the nub is that humiliating last patch of hair just above the forehead, the last scrap of youth clinging to an otherwise balding head. I'm shaving it off. Here is why. Many men have experienced the crushing realization that their hairline is receding. It makes no difference if they are young or old, if it has happened glacially or with the suddenness of a wildfire laying bare the forest. The moment when the man faces the truth is what the 18th century German theologians aptly termed Aufschrei den Verlust von Haarleukoplakie Steifigkeit, loosely translated as “the mournful gasp over the loss of hairy stiffness.” The Germans dealt with the moment of realization by drinking dark beer and moving several pews closer to the rumbling organ in church, but in our time we are peppered with hair replacement products promising...
Read more
Image
Dear seekers after the Spirit, Now four people have sent me this video of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, telling me how amazing it is. Finally I watched it and they were all right, it’s astonishing. Now I get to become part of the viral spread of this video by recommending it to you. It’s 18 minutes long, and it is well worth it. I’ve made some comments below as a response to the video. Taylor is a brain scientist who describes her own experience of having a stroke, and how this event opened her perception about the workings of the brain. She points out that each side of the brain essentially creates its own reality and those two different realities are only barely connected by a thin (but exceedingly wondrous) membrane. The left brain’s world relies on the sense of “I” and therefore a sense of being separate from everything else. It observes everything as objects outside itself. The right brain relies on a sense of oneness with everything, a sense of expansiveness and inclusion. Each brain li...
Read more
Image
Dear Solstice Drummers, If you attended my Winter Solstice Drumming/Ceremony at Wisdom Ways, thank you! I promised you a few musings on the Reindeer Runes, and here they are below. By the way, if you purchased a script of the show, the runes in the script are in an inncorrect order. My aplologies about that. The runes in your program, and below, are in correct alignment. If you would like to purchase a script that contains the text from this year's show as well as last year's "Blessing," please send me an email at jaime@drummingthesoulawake.com . There's alot more in the script than actually made it into the show, thankfully - or you would have been there for four hours. When I began working on this solstice event, I considered using the classic Scandinavian/Celtic runes. Hundreds of books have been written interpreting these runes in wildly different ways. While the runes are a powerful meditation tool, they come from a time and culture far removed from our own....
Read more