How to Uncrazify

Originally published: 2/9/2016 on Weebly blog


Dear Drummers,

This Saturday’s drum circle and healing ceremony with the Celtic goddess Brigit is going to be one of the most unusual, beautiful, and, I hope, effective experiences you’ll ever have. With a great deal of fun, you will be able to cast off and dispel negative energies in a safe and protected environment.

First: We shake off the spiritual barnacles clinging to our hull, and prepare our energetic body to be blessed: 83 minutes of drumming and ferociously rapturous free-dancing to help remind us that “...life is a prodigious miracle created for your amusement and illumination and the universe conspires to bless you. Your allies from the other side of the veil are swarming in, inspiring you to become smarter and wilder and kinder. Primal benefactors are plotting to emancipate us. The winds and tides are on our side, forever and ever amen. The fire and rain are scheming to steal our pain. The sun and moon know our real names, and the animals pray for us all while we are dreaming.” (From Rob Brezeny: Pronoia)

No drumming skill or experience needed. Bring a drum or borrow one from the great Pile of Wahoo con Gusto. This is how we kneel and kiss the earth, this is how we invite Spirit to come and touch our human skin with new sunlight.

Then  intermission: Laugh with your likewise wahoo-infused drummin’ friends, or make new friends. Everyone there will be as confused and delirious with cosmic love as you are!  Feel free to bring a snack to share with others.

Spirit of Birch will help us.

Then the ceremony: We need to dispel negative energies or they devour us, and as they devour us they devour those around us. We make crazy ceremony so that we don’t have to be crazy in this world, so that we can send these energies safely to the other world which welcomes them. If you have an extra hammer, please feel free to bring it. Seriously.

Here’s how deliciously strange the universe is, as I was taught by one of my teachers: When you are born, there is a space - a hole - left in Spirit where you used to be. That “empty” feeling you often have - that vague “hole in my center” you feel, that cannot quite be described? That feeling like you are a bird from some other continent mysteriously swept here by some gale, that feeling that made you into a lifelong “seeker” experiencing sporadic, maddening small kisses of sunlight? The self-help section in the bookstore, the psychology industry, the political pundits and religious-industrial complex might try to tell you this hole is some form of earthly sickness that needs to be cured.

But open your Eye of Spirit and you may see that the Windswept Empty Place in your heart is what the Celts called the Great Yearning, and it is your connection to the hole left in the quantum flux of creation when you decided to leave it and come here to dress up as a “being human” for awhile. The undulating, gyrating, swirling, jewel-encrusted ocean of being-non-being has a vacant spot in it that used to be you, and it pulls at you, asking one thing of you: to fill it with love and gratitude for the gift of  incarnating in this mysterious life for awhile.

Every experience you have - the ecstatic and the painful, the mundane, the outrageous, the inexcusable and the sublime - is you filling that hole in the quantum flux. Dancing and sobbing, lovemaking and arguing, loneliness and horror, giggling and  snot-spewing-guffaws - these are all love for this life filling the hole, repaying the debt for being allowed to come here.

Here is the recipe for uncrazifying life: make the filling of the hole a conscious act. Yes, it’s that easy.  This is why we do ceremony - we summon crazy beauty consciously in order to fill the hole. That way we don’t have to summon unconscious crazy to fill the hole. Doing ceremony is like calmly tossing shovelfuls of love into the quantum hole. Otherwise, we spend our time on our knees frantically flinging dirt everywhere, sobbing, confused, singing our favorite chant: “Why me?”

So this Saturday, bring your grief, your conundrum, your wondering, wandering, winding, wyrd lament, bring your holy yearning, your fierce desire for the kiss of Spirit. Bring what one teacher calls the Hoocha - the naturally collected negative energies - and you’ll have a chance to shovel them all into the hole of Quantum Wonder, and make this world and the otherworld happy.

Momento hermoso
Las Personas hermosas
Cuerpo Hermoso
Nervios hermosas
Corazón hermoso
Mente Maravillosa
Alma Bella
Universo Hermoso

Jaime

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