Drumming The Soul Awake

2011-11-17T10:54:00.003-06:00

Dear Drummers,

Welcome one and all to the joyous jumble of groovelicious rhythmocity known as Drumming The Soul Awake, this Friday in Minneapolis and Saturday in St. Paul. (See the sidebar at right for.) This will be the last two drums before the winter solstice extravaganza at the Minnesota Opera Center, December 16, 17, & 18.

Welcome one and all! Welcome tender tappers and welcome happy-whappers. Welcome to all of you who have made the drum a 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. No drumming or mystical experience needed. Bring your own drums or borrow one of mine from the great “Mound ‘O Glee” that is part of all of our drums.

We’ve had extraordinary experiences together recently. There is a power and beauty arising from this community that I’ve never felt or seen before. Thank you all for helping confirm to me and each other that reality is made of layers, some seen, many unseen.

This week’s drumming will focus on an important issue for all of us: protection. We all need protection in this world, for all sorts of personal reasons. Plus, we are heading into a dangerous time: the holidays. Since I won’t see you until the solstice, I want to offer you some protections to help you to keep your head on straight, live with more joy, and feel less holiday depression as we enter the holly jolly jingle dingle best time of the year.

December in modern America is ruled by certain energy. 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 Brings Forgiveness" to a 50-day invocation and feeding of the "Wanting Creature."

The Nafs, are not only about wanting with all your heart the IPad, the recliner with cupholders, the diamond encrusted bauble, 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 – each other, nature, Mystery, love, wisdom.

Our culture calls this energy 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 fill us with wild eyed wanting, 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

A Spiritual Halloween

2011-10-25T07:36:00.003-05:00

Dear Drummers,

This Saturday I want to offer you an opportunity to sink richly into a "spiritual Halloween." The intention is to offer you a way to honor, listen to or heal your ancestors. Drumming will begin at 7, but please feel free to come earlier to hang out and help with some set up. I'll be in the space by 6:15 PM. As always, come with or without a drum, with or without any experience in drumming, with or without the need to dance wildly, but definitely with a desire to open whatever has been closed off in you for too long, to be with similarly exotically cool people and to sail out onto amber-lit, undulating waves of the irrational human soul-scape.

It's going to be a big, messy ceremony - beautiful, and very communal. I'm hoping several people will step forward to help facilitate the ceremony. You don't need special skills or training. I'll let you know what's needed. Just email me. One thing you'll have to do is make prayers each day this week: prayers of protection for the people who come on Saturday, prayers of love to the Unseen, prayers of blessing to this world. And you'll do some other stuff. I'll teach you, don't worry.

Working with the ancestors can be very powerful for all kinds of reasons which I'll talk about a little on Saturday.

Everyone who comes will make an offering to their ancestors. You can either bring the offering with you or you can make it when you arrive (I'll have stuff for you to use). What kind of offering? Flowers with your breath-prayers on them, objects upon which you've placed prayers, memories, or intentions as an act of love or gratitude to your ancestors. So, for example, go on an autumn walk and allow some natural object to call to you - a leaf, a twig, an acorn, a stone. Ask it if it will carry a prayer to the ancestors for you. If it agrees, take it, and place that prayer for thanks, or healing, or just plain love on it with words, with song, with breath. Then bring it on Saturday. Instead of a natural object it can be something you make, or something you own - a photo, a letter, an object that reminds you of the ancestors. You'll put them on the altar, which becomes the threshold between our world and the world of the dead. Most of the time you don't get your object back from our ceremonies, but in this case, you may retrieve it if you wish. That allows you to bring something that you value deeply, have it participate in the ceremony, and be able to take it back into your life with you.

Please consider bringing a little food to share. Nuts, fruit, breads, crackers, veggies, sweets - it's all good. If you forget, or can't get to it, don't worry. Just show up.

We'll be in the social hall at First Universalist Church, which has a huge labyrinth etched on the floor. It provides a beautiful image for the evening, because with Halloween, or the Celtic Samhain (pronounced SOW-wen), we enter the mythic direction of the west, which in the Celtic tradition is associated with big ideas of destiny and mystery, and contemplating the purpose and patterns of our life.

We'll begin with drumming and dancing on the labyrinth. If you want to wear anything that speaks somehow of your ancestors or of the Unseen, please do. This includes any masks that you think of as distinctly spiritual, or any item of clothing that reminds you of your ancestors. After some drumming, we'll move into the ceremony for the ancestors. Part of that will be an opportunity for you to bring healing to your ancestors if you feel that's needed. We'll end with clearing the space and, if you want to, you can walk the labyrinth as a meditation, or you can hang out and commune with your tribes-people and have snacks. So what I'm saying is the last part of the evening is more like a relaxed party.

Feel free to email questions to me. See you soon!

Jaime

2011-10-04T20:46:00.015-05:00

Shamanic Retreat to Isla Mujeres
February 18-25, 2012

Isla Mujeres (The Women's Island) is a small island about a 20 minute ferry ride into the Caribbean Sea from Cancun Mexico. The north end of the island has all the amenities any northern winter vacationer might want: fabulous gourmet dining, interesting shopping, massages on the beach, flowing rum and tequila, and a tiny bit of nightlife.

The southern part of the island is its own quiet small town. At the southern tip you'll find Punta Sur, which holds a funky sculpture garden and a 300 year old temple to Ixchel, the Mayan goddess of the sea, the moon, the rain, fertility, the jaguar, weaving, and birth – in other words, one Mayan name for the Great Mother. There by her temple, we will sing, rattle, drum and pray in reverence, surrounded on three sides by the sea, crashing majestically from the wild, open Caribbean side, flowing shallow and gentle from the Yucatan side, and blending into a milky way-like swirl of aqua, cerulean and indigo before us to the southern side.

There, as many generations of Mayan and non-Mayan women (and a few non-women) have, we will pray in humility for a healthy birth and rebirth of ourselves and this world. We will make our offerings, pleas, vows and acts of beauty to the great unnamable, unclaimable, untamable creative Spirit that guides us to our authentic powers, to our prophetic mission, and to our active tasks as we walk the land-path north again, back to our lives.

Our retreat makes its home at a Casa de las Palmas, (click for pictures) a gorgeous, private villa with its own pool and access to a secluded beach. The beach will be the center of much ceremonial and shamanic work. The villa is our place of rest, delight, conversation, friendship, and tribal wahoo. Our casa holds a maximum of 15.

Each morning of the retreat I will provide a delightful bit of basic, practical, useful shamanic instruction - something that you can put into practice in your real life to expand your capabilities, leadership, prayer life and connection with Spirit. Each day you are free to explore, lounge in non-snowy delight and vacation in any way that appeals to you.

We will make ceremony together at our private place. We will make ceremony together at Ixchel’s temple. And if you want it, I will design and/or enact training, instruction or specific ceremony for you. For more details, click here to go to my web site.

Drumming Firday, Sept 30 - WAHOO!

2011-09-29T11:47:00.009-05:00

Dear Drummers,

Welcome one and all to drumming this Friday, September 30, at First Universalist Church in cosmically stimulating Uptown, Minneapolis, 7-9:30ish. Drums and many other wahoo-makers are provided if you don't have one. No experience, skill or tools needed - just a desire to be open, to have fun, and if you want, to work on refining your soul-power, so that this whirlwind we call life buffets you to and fro with less ferocity.

We are all in a whirlwind life in one form or another, and the reason drumming exists is to help us at least survive the wind, but in the best case scenario, actually exit it. It's good to be in a room of drummers and spiritual seekers, and know that you are not alone in the wind.

See you at the drum!

Jaime

2011-08-04T16:14:00.004-05:00

Within singing distance of the Mississippi River, cradled among the giant trees, with both shelter and open spaces available in case of rain.

Saturday, August 13
Time: 5-9ish PM.
Hidden Falls State Park - North Gate (Map)
Water Ceremony at 6:30. Drum ceremony at 7:30. Drumming, dancing and ebullient wahoo throughout.

The intention is simple: Let us gather in gratitude to the spirit of the drum which is also the spirit of the earth and the wholly Holy Spirit of mystery, love, darkness, dreams, openness, pathwalking, beauty-making, inner courage, life-force, God/ess, shaper, unnameable, ungraspable delight-maker, healer and teacher. Bring a drum or rattle (we’ll have extra too), blanket or camp chair if you want to, wares to sell if you want, some food and drink (with a little extra to share) and a desire to commune with the larger tribe of those who love this earth and love to drum.

The feeding of the drums: With fire and incense, we ritually feed our drums - an annual ritual that honors the many gifts given to us by the drum and reconfirms our openness to the drum spirit's many teachings. If you have a drum, bring it. If you don't have one, dont worry - you can feed one of the many in the community "Mound 'O Drums."

The blessing of the waters: At the banks of the pulsing Mississippi we gather to honor this artery, this serpent of life, this winding song of the Great Mother from which we all drink and are sustained.

The sharing of the medicine: Each one of us carries medicine for the world. Big, small, subtle, obvious, it doesn't matter how your medicine comes into the world. What matters is that it does. The overall prayer of the day will be for each of us to awaken to our medicine, to find the courage and clarity to share it with the world, to say Yes to it.The world needs you to be alive to your medicine.

Selling wares: Please feel free to bring wares to sell. Tables, blankets, full-on display booth, whatever works for you. Just set up and see what happens. Of course there is no charge. Good luck. We cannot gurantee how many poeple will be there, but last year about 120 people gathered.

Questions? Comntact Jaime Meyer: drummingthesoulawake@gmail.com
http://www.drummingthesoulawake.com/

Summer Solstice! Wahoo!

2011-05-31T08:31:00.002-05:00

At the Minnesota Opera Center
620 North First Street
Downtown Minneapolis
(Click for a map)
Ample free parking across the street,
paid parking all around.
7 PM (Drumming starts at 6:30.)
Ticket Price: $20
Order tickets online with a credit card: CLICK HERE
or pay cash at the door
Past Solstce wahoo events have sold out quickly!
Need more info? Email Jaime Meyer:
mailto:drummingthesoulawake@gmail.com
or visit: http://www.drummingthesoulawake.com/

Part theatre. Part shamanic ceremony. Primal, live, laughing, human reverent reverie.The entire audience drums. Drums are provided, or bring your own! Dancing and ecstasy are allowed (but not required). As he has in seven years of sold-out winter and summer solstice "Blessings" Jaime Meyer will weave storytelling, sheer wildness and sacred shamanic ceremony from Celtic and northern European traditions into an inspiring, funny, spiritually imaginative and, if you are seeking it, healing evening. Idisi (a chorus of ultra cool, groovilly gorgeous goddessy women) will chant ebullient, earthy melodies that Lutherans are not allowed to learn. Idisi expertly calls in the sonic love vibes of the Divine Feminine. Everyone who wants to can receive a blessing from the powers of sun, earth, and from the huge mound of Marigold blossoms. The general theme of the evening (or meditation, or prayer - however you wish to frame it) is "how do I live an authentic life?"

"Meyer's writing is enormously seductive...farfetched whimsy with thickly textured thoughtfulness..." - Star Tribune

"It takes you safely into the Spirit world to romp, grieve or be healed, and then back out again..."-Past audience member

Smudge

2011-04-26T22:30:00.001-05:00

Dear Drummers,

Welcome one and all to the previously unscheduled drum, this Friday, April 29th in the basement womb of First Universalist Church in cosmically kinky uptown Minneapolis!

Why the unscheduled drum? Because of the dream I had Monday night.

I have kind of ritualized practice in terms of how I serve the Spirit and our drumming community. On the Monday before the next drum, I send prayers for the community out, and I send an open-ended question out to the otherworld “What do the people need from Friday’s drum?” Often a clear answer comes, often none at all, often blurry mixed messages that make me grumble and mutter all night long.

Last Monday, with no drum this week, I had a powerful dream. I woke up with a clear message that what was needed this Friday was smudging (cleansing with aromatic smoke). The smudging has a clear purpose: to reshuffle inner energies so that you may trust your visions, trust your love, and trust your power.

I waited for a couple of days to make sure I wasn’t making stuff up, and also that this dream wasn’t just talking to me, but to anyone who shows up on Friday. That voice had not gone away this afternoon, so I called the church to ask if our usual drumming room was available, and it was. So: Wahoo. Drum this Friday!

As usual, for about 90 minutes we’ll drum up some sweet-spicy-syncopation that I hope will coax open your fragrant magnolia blossoms and radiant tulip petals! We’ll fill the room with grooveliciousness that will massage away the small cares and curse of this world (and some large ones) and open your soul space to the cleansing of the four winds: the wind of mystery, the wind of love, the wind of trust, and the wind of endurance.* Then all who wish to are welcome to stay for a cleansing from Spirit, delivered in the form of smoke and birds wings.

Please feel free to bring a few snacks for people to share.

*Please don’t in any way think these four winds are some traditional schema. I just completely made up those categories while typing really fast. But I will say, these are the four winds we’ll invite into the room.

If you have read this far, I’d like to take this opportunity to say that I have about 8 spots left for the weekend drumming-shamanic-wahoo-weekend May 20-22. If you check my web site and say “Hey! That’s definitely for me!” please email me soon to reserve a spot. Discounts are still available and if money is a big obstacle, just talk to me and we can likely work something out.

See you soon,

Jaime

Be - longing

2011-03-29T19:29:00.006-05:00

Dear Drummers,

Welcome, oh air-blown wanderers, oh, pilgrims seeking some inner dawn! Welcome, oh you winged creatures circling over this gorgeous earth, welcome to the drum this Friday in the friendly basement otherworld of First Universalist Church, 34th and Dupont, in Fairy-kissed Uptown, Minneapolis. Welcome, all! No need of drumming skill or experience, no need to own a drum. Only one requirement: show up. Spirit will take it from there.

Below is a meditation on "belonging" - the general theme for this Friday's drumming. But first I want to announce two items that may interest you. 1) It is time to make your reservations for the Annual Earth Ecstasy Spring Wahoo Drumming Retreat, May 20-22 (Friday evening to Sunday noon). Honestly, this weekend is so fun, freeing, relaxing and cleansing for the spirit - and it's an unbelievable price ($250 includes accommodations at what the Star Tribune calls "one of the five best resorts in Minnesota). Go to my web site for more details! 2) Saturday May 14th you have the opportunity to release and transform grief through a ritual facilitated by Terrileigh Schmidt. Click here to see a flyer. Contact Terrileigh directly with any questions.

On Belonging

On the Celtic wheel of the year, we are now firmly in the mythic direction East, the direction associated with spring time, dawn, the element air and with "abundance." Abundance is a loaded topic for me and maybe for you too. Maybe like me, you pine and cry out for just a little more abundance, maybe you are nervous or ashamed of abundance, maybe you long for it and fear it at the same time. Maybe you yearn for a different kind of abundance than you have. Maybe you are blind to the abundance in your life. All of this happens to me constantly.

Last week I was on a family vacation on Isla Mujeres ("Woman's Island") near Cancun, Mexico. We rented a house that gave us privacy and our own winding path down to a secluded beach. I spent much of the week thinking about abundance in its many forms.

I stood in the water watching the smallish waves roll around me. I saw that a bright line of silver light rides the wave crest until it crashes on the sand, where that silver explodes into golden shards of glittering light. It was hypnotic, calming, beautiful. I lost track of time and identity as I watched this sight over and over. I thought I heard the voice of the Sacred (perhaps it was the Mayan Goddess Ixchel, the goddess of this island, of the sea, the moon, of medicine, art and of new life) saying, "Look, human! You are awash in silver and gold at each moment, if you only you have the eyes to see the abundance." At that moment, I was swimming in gold and silver; the richest man who ever lived.

The voice said something else to me: "You belong to me." I took that to mean I belonged to this lovely earth, these roiling waves, this light dancing on the sand, the breeze dancing through the trees, all of it - all that Ixchel is, and all that she guides and creates and protects, I belong to. But perhaps Ixchel was laying claim to me directly, I don't know.

Later, in the middle of the night, after all on the island were asleep, even after the parties in Cancun, four miles across the water, had sputtered into Tequila-dizzy silence, unable to sleep, I wandered out under the full moon, to the edge of the quietly shushing sea, where I sang prayers for you to Ixchel.

Yes you: Each of "my tribe," you who come to drum all the time, you who stopped by once four years ago but remain on this email list, you who have not yet come to the drum but still receive emails, even you whose spam folder I live in permanently. I prayed for abundance for each of you - whatever abundance you really need. Rumi says "There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth" and I prayed that each of you recieve the kiss you need.

The abundance we need may not always be the abundance we think we want, Ixchel said to me. I turned to go back into the house.

A sudden, startling, immense wave crashed up on the rock behind me, spattering sea-and-moon-drenched diamonds all around me into the luminous night air. I took it as a sign to stay for awhile longer. I stood silent for awhile and perhaps it was Ixchel again who said: To belong is the greatest abundance of all. "

Belonging" is the marriage of "longing" and "being." The human heart is naturally restless, but also naturally seeks a home. It wavers endlessly between wanting to wander and wanting to belong. We live in a time where belonging has devolved into simplistic, often cruel litmus tests of identity. Many of the traditional institutions of belonging - family, church, marriage, career, political parties - have crumbled for us. False belonging is sold to us again and again. False belonging rises from being connected to (one of my favorite phrases from philosophy:) "bad infinity." Being connected to a bad infinity creates false belonging. So, belonging is difficult for us. And yet in some crucial way, we understand that we are made "real" by what we belong to, and if we belong to nothing, our realness is damaged. John O'Donohue, the great Irish scholar, says that where he comes from, the traditional phrase for people first meeting one another is not "where are you from?" but rather "to whom do you belong?" This is an excellent question, and it will form the the focus of this Friday's ceremonial and shamanic half.

But before that we will drum up silver, gold and diamonds with one another in a treasure trove of sonic abundance. Wahoo, tribe, Wahoo, indeed. See you soon,

Jaime

Imbolc Drum - The Great Goddess Awakes Wahoo!

2011-02-01T14:59:00.003-06:00

Dear Seekers of Earthy Wisdom,

Welcome all to the warm wonder of the wild Wahoo! You have two chances to drum this week - in ecstatic south Minneapolis, or in sublime Burnsville. The Burnsville drum is a smaller space, a smaller group (for now) and it makes for an intimate experience.

This week we find ourselves at Imbolc - the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. February 2nd is the holiday in European traditions that honors the great mother-grain goddess, and, in the Celtic world, the goddess of springtime, Brigit. February 1 is the Christian holiday Candlemas.

In the British Isles (and places like Seattle) this time of year really is the beginning of spring. Crocuses are emerging. You could dig the first furrows in the land for the seed. There are all kinds of rituals around this ancient act of co-creation with the Great Mother. But here in our arctic tundra, it is too much of an abstract leap for me to say that February 2nd is the beginning of spring. The ground remains un-plantable until nearly the end of May - another three months.

However, I do want to offer you what I hope is a powerful meditation on, or direct experience with, the Great Mother this Friday. We will drum for awhile - maybe 90 minutes or so - as a way of de-stressing, of shedding the weight of the world, of boosting our immune systems (yes, science that's true), opening the spiritual imagination and feeding the heart of compassion and forgiveness that beats in each of us (and is so often buffeted and silenced by pain and worry). We drum for all of those reasons.

Then we'll have an intermission where you can enjoy crumpets or small pancakes (a traditional image of the Goddess because they are made from grain, and of the sun because of the round shape and golden color).

Then those who want to can rejoin the circle for a ceremony of taking awakening warmth into the earth as an offering to the Great Mother. Those who wish may also seek guidance, solace or healing from her (in whatever form she may take at the moment).

Part of this ceremony will involve building a cairn - a pile of rocks that honors the Great Mother. In the Celtic world, cairns were used for mundane purposes like marking the boundary between lands, and also as a marker and a cover for tombs, which are the passage way into the realm of the Great Mother. If you want to, please bring a fist sized rock (smaller will be fine too). If you can't, or forget, don't worry, I'll have some. You'll get the rock back.

Stay warm, see you soon.

For more on Imbolc/Candlemas: http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=mekxtcdab&et=1104331122069&s=0&e=001ZfXgZOQ0mRrhTkBFwkyTlStndel6Jt8-MZc4tuWj0LLQMmsQ4GTUBJTtAgGVzpGOW-mAKQswFUWENix-QvT-NF5CRE6QoD3hwJhQ1KtgisDtH1W1DfDPrn6mtEODnj_74nY2iO9JljE=

By the way, I have one spot left open in the Shamanic Intensive: a three month study program. More details are found by clicking here. The group closes in two days.

Jaime

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It's all a Dream

2011-01-28T17:07:00.004-06:00

I love the shamanic path for many reasons, including that it makes me agitated and freaked out. I have a finely tuned woo-woo meter and the shamanic path constantly sets the needle jiggering. I love that.

Today’s needle-jigger comes from the notion promulgated by so many teachers that everything is a dream: that we live in a constant dreamtime, and there is no difference between night dreams, reveries, day dreams and what we call waking. Night dreams are a form of reality where energies are less dense; my waking life is a dream where the energies are hardened into forms. But waking is a dream just the same. Waking is a shared dream. I dream I have a car, and my neighbor also dreams I have a car, and that’s why there is one parked in my dream driveway, right by the dream Azalea that Ralph, my dream neighbor surreptitiously tosses the dream poop squished out of his dream Schnauzer while walking by my dream house.

According to the teachers, when you realize that all is a dream, it empowers you to act by dreaming your own dream, and not being bound by the dreams that others try to perpetrate upon you. The opposite is true also: it is an act of weakness and complacency to claim that we are victimized by outside circumstances or trapped by fate.[1] The dream universe is not just New Age fritter-flutter. Leading edge science is increasingly telling us that reality is more fluid, less “real” and more multi varied than we ever imagined.[2]

So the woo-woo meter jiggle and shakes. Not because this dream idea is crazy, but because it is clearly true and I just do not understand fully how to deal with it and that makes me agitated and freaked out.

Humans are storytelling creatures. We create stories for ourselves and each other all the time. We then begin to live those stories. Some stories become accepted by ever larger groups of people, and those stories become enforced on children and on those who have not yet accepted the stories. This is clear in religion, but every culture is a story, every family, every company. Economics, science, relationship, psychology – each and everything we do is an act of story making, or, in other words, dreaming. Science tells me that the table on which my laptop sits right now is only solid when viewed from one layer of reality – the farther down you go into the atomic structure of everything, the less solid everything becomes. At the atomic level there is as much space between atoms as there is between stars in the galaxy.

ACK! Jiggle-jiggle goes the meter. (As you can see, it’s not really a woo-woo meter, but a “cosmic miasma meter”)[3]

Every human-made story is accompanied by (an often invisible) “therefore, you must live like this…” There is the idea or story of how the universe works and then there is the in imperative to make decisions and act in certain ways in order to live in harmony with that idea. This is true in economics, religion, lifestyle, family – on and on.

The difference between being an explorer of a path and walker of a path comes when you decide to engage in the “therefore live like this…” If you accept the Jesus story, you must live in certain ways to be “Christian.” Otherwise you are merely a student of an idea.

So if I accept the shamanic notion that “all is a dream,” what is the “then live like this…” part? Why do I seem so powerless to change reality if reality is only my dream? Do I have any responsibility to stop other people’s “bad dreams” from being perpetrated on the world?

Comments please.

[1] Jose Stevens, quoted in Sandra Ingerman and Hank Wasserman, Awakening to the Spirit World (Sounds True, 2010) 134
[2] It’s a comedy show, but check out The Steven Colbert’s interview with Brian Green, string theory guru, who suggests that what we call reality may actually be a vast hologram. http://www.colbertnation.com/home/?xrs=sem_b_col_colbert_report
[3] Miasma: noxious exhalations from putrescent organic matter; poisonous effluvia or germs polluting the atmosphere. 2. a dangerous, foreboding, or deathlike feeling hanging in the air – in the case of challenging spiritual ideas, it is the ego that experiences the miasma.

2011-01-09T22:03:00.005-06:00

image: Digital Expressionism

Dear Seekers,

I’ve been asked many times to provide intensive shamanic training. I’ve been able to wrestle my schedule and create a four-month session, described below. The group will meet six times, but the bulk of your work will take place outside of those meetings, and will be created by you and me for your individual needs. My job will be to listen to where you are and what you want, and to find the right ways to move you to the next level.

If you are interested in this, you’ll want to be available for these Saturday mornings:
Feb 12, 26
March 12
April 2, 16
May 7

And you’ll want to contact me soon: drummingthesoulawake@gmail.com

The Next Level: Personal Shamanic Soulwork

Beginning early February, meeting approximately twice per month on Saturday mornings through May 7. The Saturday meetings will be mini-workshops on a theme and will include shamanic journey work or ceremony and individualized consultation. You will begin by completing a questionnaire, followed by a conversation with me about what you are deeply yearning for and a divination from me. This will create the outline for your individualized, personal work during this training. It doesn’t matter where you are starting out; the goal is move to the next level from where you are. Your training will involve some or all of the following:
· shamanic journey work on your own once or twice per week;
· prayer, indoors and outdoors;
· individualized personal ceremonies and other tasks assigned by me;
· reading assigned by me;
· memorizing some poetry;
· A commitment to confidentiality inside the group;
· A willingness to be open, honest and vulnerable to both your group-mates and the teachings;
· work outside in nature, sometimes not so comfortable;
· service to a community of your choosing. Part of that service will include our drumming community.

This work requires commitment on your part. That commitment will include:
· Attending at least 4 of the six Saturday sessions. (Understand that missing a session means missing assignments and the growth that comes from them.)
· Attending a Friday drum at least once per month or more.
· A fiery desire to go to the next level.
· Openness to facing fears and swimming through ambiguity and confusion.
· Trust in the process, trust in the teacher
· Payment of $600. $350 is due before the first session, and is non-refundable after the work begins. $250 is due by April 2. I can be somewhat flexible on payment schedule and I can be somewhat flexible on the amount. What matters to me most in a student is commitment. If money is not the form that the commitment can take, then we can find another way.

Deep Winter Blessings,

Jaime

Openess, Fear, Trust

2011-01-04T11:22:00.006-06:00

All true spiritual work is about the tension between being open and being safe. That sounds lovely to say, but in practice it becomes difficult at different times because openness and fear are in a constant dance. You fear your experiences, or you fear what you imagine you may experience if you are too open. There is a point where openness becomes naiveté. Sometimes you are encouraged to be afraid, and sometimes that's good advice. So how does a seeker make their way? How do you navigate the tension between openness to new experience, trust, and fear? What has worked for you?

Thank You, Sosltice Blessing

2010-12-21T09:22:00.004-06:00

Jaime does the reindeer dance. Photo by Theresa Savina.

Thank you, thank you to the 425 wild and wonderful folks who attended Winter Solstice Blessing!

Here's wishing you a fabulous holiday Sseason and a new year of beauty, depth, glee, love, poetry and abundant Wahoo.

Don't miss Winter Solstice Blessing

2010-11-16T16:38:00.008-06:00

Winter Solstice Blessing
Part Theatre. Part shamanic ceremony.
Primal, live, human reverent reverie.
Unrepeatable. Untweetable. Can’t be downloaded.

At The Minnesota Opera Center, 620 North First Street, Downtown Minneapolis (Click here for a map)
December 17, 18, 19 (Friday, Saturday, Sunday)
Time: 7:30 PM (Drumming starts at 7)
Price: $20
Reserve your spot in advance! Click here to order tickets online
This event sells quickly. (You may also pay cash at the door)

The entire audience drums (Drums and other wahoo-makers are provided, or bring your own!) A chorus of 20 terrifyingly gorgeous earth-goddess women chant ancient melodies that Lutherans are not allowed to learn. The Urban Shaman tells three stories that call up laughter and a quivering sensation from inside your mythic muscles. The Old Bone Mother comes to remove your spiritual toxins (if you want that). The evening culminates in a shamanic ceremony in which the Great White Reindeer comes to give you a blessing (if you want that). Dancing and ecstasy are encouraged (but not required).

What past audience members say:
“It’s like church on acid.”
“I have not felt this alive in years!”
“It takes you into a whole other world where you feel a great power of blessing, and then brings you back again safely.”
“Dear Jaime Meyer, I don’t know who you are or how you learned this, but you blew my mind in exactly the way I’ve been wanting. Thank you.”
“Get tickets early.

Seating is limited. All seats are general admission.

Questions? Contact Jaime Meyer: drummingthesoulsawake@gmail.com

Reindeer image above: Chris Kliesen Wehrman

Video: "We thank You" Song

2010-11-02T15:52:00.008-05:00

Click here to watch the Video
At the autumn drumming retreat about a month ago, I was given a song by the land and water. I don't mean that to sound overly mystical, I just feel like I didn't make this song up - it came to me intact. Because it was a gift to me and that group, it is also a gift to everyone to learn, to sing, to teach, and to use. One way to let this song loose into the world is to make a video, and that's what a few of us did a few weeks ago. To Percolate Films who shot and edited the video: we thank you, we thank you, we thank you.

The basic words are improvisational and the structure is simple: Someone sings out a praise of something, and the group repeats that praise twice. So you have "Power of the river, we thank you" or "Blessing of the falling leaves we thank you" or "Beauty of the half moon, we thank you." There is also a wordless phrase that can be cycled in: "Hey na-a na na, hey na-na-na, hey na-na, hey na-na, hey na-na-na." The wordless phrase represents all the things we thank that we cannot describe in human language because our tongues are too clumsy and words too small and heavy.

I added a chorus:
Love to the fertile earth
Love to the fruitful sea
Love to the skies of mystery

This chorus is not just a "thank you." It's actually singing these powers into the earth, sea and sky, participating in making them bountiful. It's channeling your love up from inside you, and projecting it into the world as nourishment. It's a form of love-talk to creation; it's a form of healing for the earth. I also added a djembe-based drum rhythm after the chorus, to allow this particular version of the song to become full of motion and ecstatic energy and to give the group an opportunity to enter into Unburdened Wahoo.

Please feel free to spread the song as you wish, forward the video link and this email about it, change it, add, subtract, edit and embellish as you wish. Make your own video and upload it (send me the link-I want to see it!). The only requirement is that it cannot be sold or claimed as your property. This particular video shows a rather ecstatic and loud version, but the song is also very good as a quiet, meditative, personal prayer. Look around (with both your eyes and your heart) at what is beautiful at the moment, and sing praises to it. Let this love rise up out of you, and take shape in song, ending with "we thank you." Let that love speak with your mouth. Let the tears come. Like lovemaking and art-making, the best prayer is something that you open yourself to, become vulnerable to, open up to as totally as you can (the goals: a little more this time than last time) and allow it to do its work on you, and through you.

Yours in reverent Wahoo
Jaime
drummingthesoulawake@gmail.com

2010-10-28T14:21:00.006-05:00

Photo: J in the cavern of the ancestors, otherwise known as the studio where eight people are building ancestor masks.

Dear Drummers,
Below are two prayers that I hope will help set the mood if you are coming to the Spiritual Halloween event tomorrow, or merely be useful if you if have other plans.

Prayer for the first part of Friday's drum:
You Presences: you breaths, you vibrations, you sound of flickering leaves and unseen wings, you far off water burbling, you mist-silenced mountain, you space between stars, you gust of summer, you root-song, you murmur of minerals, you glow inside the ember, you gleam on the antler, glimmer on the feather, glitter on the wave crest, we gather to thank you and honor you. You teach us, you heal us, and lead us into beauty. You change us in ways we want and don't want. May our laughter and music make you fat with delight, may our dance bring a fire of pleasure into your eyes. May our love of this world and of each other make you giddy with gladness. May our love of your mystery make you dizzy with pride for us. We thank you, we thank you we thank you.

Prayer for the second part of Fridays' drum:
You, ancestors: blood inside my blood that I know and do not know, that I feel and do not feel, that I see in the mirror and do not see; we honor you and thank you. You whisper to us and you live in us. We stand on your shoulders in order to see the world. May our laughter and music make your legs strong and your hearts glad. May our drum songs fill your mouths with food. May our dance kindle a healing fire to burn away your old fears and your old disappointments. May the work of our hands and the work of our hearts and the work of our minds for this evening be a healing song poured onto your old regrets and humiliations. Strength to you: nourishment and love from this world to your world. May your hearts be warmed and your eyes filled with sweet tears when you behold our respectful and loving attentions to you this evening. We thank you, we thank you we thank you.

Jaime
drummingthesoulawake@gmail.com

Spiritual Halloween-this Friday the 29th

2010-10-25T14:28:00.004-05:00

Dear Drummers,

I think Friday will be an amazing evening. Ten of us are making ancestor spirit masks for our Spiritual Halloween extravaganza, Friday the 29th. I’m making several masks so that if you are someone who wants to dance a mask as a gift to the community gathered and to the ancestors, you can.

The intention of Friday is to offer you a way to honor, listen to or heal your ancestors. Like all of our drumming and ceremonial work, you are totally free to enter into this any way you want: with as much heartfelt faith, agnostic curiosity, or restrained skepticism as you wish. You can view it as Halloween theatre or as ancient ceremony, whichever works for you. If you want to, and you really do not have to, bring a spirit mask or costume for the first part of the evening – some mask that you feel honors the unseen world. If you want to, and you don’t have to, bring some kind of offering for your ancestors for the second part of the evening: anything biodegradable works.

We are making the masks from papier-mâché (French for “chewed up paper”). It’s making me wonderfully aware of the presence of layers in our life – life is really made up of chewed up layers that sink into the earth of our being, to be covered over by the next layer. The face you see is made not only of the visible, most recent layer, but all the layers at once. This is what makes it strong and able to move about in this world. The ancestors are buried in our lower layers, our DNA, our shadowed consciousness, our sinews; they are mostly unseen, hardly felt, but present.

I try not to ponder too much about what happens to us after we die, but one irrational, improvable thing I believe is this: at the moment of death we understand just how little we ever understood about this world and about the Holy. We realize how much inane jabbering we have done during life. We realize the stupidity of the judgment and degradation we spouted at each other, and the ridiculousness of how hard we tried to make others obey our inner story. It is this message that I hear from the ancestors all the time: don’t worry about what God looks like, just learn to give love and receive love, right here, right now. Heal one another’s pain, hold each other’s hand, be present for each other, urge each other to move past fear, and don’t worry about making others act, look and behave like you. When I talk about honoring the ancestors, I’m talking less about honoring their specific acts in life, but honoring the life force that they carried – sometimes gracefully, often clumsily, sometimes tragically – while they were human. We all carry this life force with us and pass it along to one another, gracefully and lovingly, or covered in curses – not only to children but to everyone we meet. Sometimes the ancestors, having been through this life already, can help us spot and remove the curses placed on our life force. Sometimes we can spot them and in removing them from us, we remove them from the family line, even moving backwards. Yes, indeed, that’s crazy irrational.

In papier-mâché, you tear pieces of paper, wet them with an oozy glue, and attach them, overlapping, rubbing, blending them into the previous piece. You find that it is the torn, frayed edges that do the best work of bonding invisibly with the face you are making. A straight, hard edge shows up on the mask’s face as visible scar. There is a lesson to be learned from this about allowing our hard edges to be softened by the world, and a lesson in how our suffering can bind us to one another.

It feels good to be still and listen to the ancestors. It helps me put my life into wider and deeper context. Each one of them carried disappointment, frustration, and anger at the unfairness of life and love. Each bore fears of illness and death, and negotiated mightily with the obligation to others versus the obligation to their own soul. Each wondered if this was all there is. And each marveled at something and tried to understand things. Each wanted more than anything to give and receive love. I’m sure of this, and I’m sure that each one failed in some ways and triumphed in others.

With all of this in mind, we dedicate this Friday to the ancestors.

Yours in reverent Wahoo,

Jaime

Drumming This Friday and Saturday!

2010-09-22T15:00:00.002-05:00

Two drums this week:
Friday: First Universalist Church, 34th and Dupont, Uptown Mpls.
Saturday: UU Church of Minnetonka
7-9:30ish each night.

Dear Drummers,

So we arrive at the autumnal equinox - the point in the sun's yearly rhythm where day and night are equally balanced, heading toward the dark time, toward to the winter solstice. The equinox is officially on Thursday, as is the full moon. The full moon will rise again on Friday at around 7:15, so we will be bathed in equinoxical moonshine as we drum together.

This is the time of year when, in the Celtic wheel of the year, we move from the direction south, associated with bright summer, music, dancing and glee, toward the mythic west - the realm of water, destiny, faith, mystery, grieving, letting go.

When we gather this Friday, we will celebrate the transition into early autumn, with at least one wild, whirling throb-groove, and at least one sonically wistful meander. I also hope to tell you a beautiful Irish story of the powers of the west and how they call to us, urge us and cajole us into the Presence of Mystery.

I intend to shorten the Friday drum slightly so that those who want to can follow me a few blocks south from the church to a park where we may cavort and drum (softly) to the equinoxically glimmering moon. You might bring a long sleeved shirt, and if you want, a blanket to lie on or even a camp chair if you wish.

I leave you with old Scottish invocation to the moon:

O moon so fair,
May it be so,
As seasons come,
And seasons go.
May thy laving lustre leave us
Seven times still more blest.

(Laving: 1. To wash; bathe. 2. To lap or wash against. 3. To refresh or soothe as if by washing.

Blessings,

Jaime

8th Annual Fall Drumming-Shamanic Retreat

2010-09-01T20:11:00.003-05:00

Dark Mother Comes to Change You

Drumming & laughing, forest & lake, respite, hoo-ha & wahoo, soul-talk with fellow earth-loving-soul-seekers, comfortable cabins with private rooms and actual beds, sauna (otherwise known for this weekend as the womb of the Great Mother), rhythmic, sensual delight, freedom to let your wildness dance itself out of you, all under the half-moon heading toward darkness.

There is a simple, yet potent, intention for all of our drumming retreats: to offer you time away from the psychic clutter of your life, so that you may come close to Spirit in whatever way is right for you. The drum is a powerful, easy and fun tool that helps you shake off toxins and distress and open your heart, body and spirit to grace, forgiveness, insight, vision and wisdom. The weekend offers some structure, opportunities to go deeply into shamanic work, and to commune with people on the same winding, beautiful, frustrating, joyous, grieving spiritual path as you. There is also much open time, and you are free to engage with the structure and community as much or as little as you desire, and free to spend as much alone time, quiet time, or prayer and healing time as you need. We have always had incredible people come to our retreats - warm, loving, funny, devoted seekers of wisdom. The participants make the weekend what it is, and they often form lasting bonds. No drumming or shamanic experience is needed. Drums and rattles are provided, or bring your own.

Our ceremonial work this weekend will focus on the Dark Mother. She is the transformative power of autumn, a goddess figure appearing in every culture -suppressed and repressed in our culture. She is the power of dreams and intuition, the voice of the deep, the night wind, the song locked away in the abdomen, she is the tears that come when awe fills you, she is the song of loss, the feeling in the chest as the sun vanishes below the horizon in the west. She is often present in what we are told to fear. When she is denied she comes as a storm, when repressed, she appears as neurosis, anxiety and violence. When listened to, she offers us complete transformation and she opens us to our authentic powers. To connect to the power of the dark mother is to give ourselves a lifeline to the great unnameable, unclaimable, untamable creative Spirit - a lifeline to hold onto when we re-enter the clattering, nattering, spattering world of our day-to-day lives.

Crow Wing Crest Lodge near Akeley, Minnesota (about a 3.5 hour drive north of the Twin Cities). The Star Tribune calls Crow Wing Crest Lodge "one of the 5 best resorts in Minnesota." We will have the entire resort to ourselves. The usual price for the weekend would be around $500 per person. Our retreat Price: $275. Price includes all lodging, retreat fun and Saturday dinner. (Early bird special: Pay before September 15: $250. Wahoo.) Spaces are limited. Some scholarship places are available. To reserve your spot or ask questions, please contact Jaime Meyer: drummingthesoulawake@gmail.com or click on the blue box below. The best way to reserve a spot is to pay on-line by going to http://www.paypal.com/, click on "send money" and type in drummingthesoulawake@gmail,com as the recipient.

For more, click here.

2010-07-28T08:53:00.005-05:00

Welcome, you pulsing seekers of experience, you sly dancers on the edges of reason, you lovers of the Holy in its uncountable costumes, oh you beautiful, extended tribe of drum lovers! Welcome to the drum this Friday, July 30, at First Universalist Church, located in cosmically enlightening Uptown Minneapolis! We have plenty of drums and other funkilicous items that you can play with, or you can bring your own wahoo-maker. We love it when people bring their musical instruments to add melody, and we love those of you who come to dance. Friends, the Great Wahoo has many faces, yes, yes it does, and we invite them all.

In 1819 the Poet John Keats wrote in a letter, "Call the world, if you please 'the vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find out the use of the world." He was saying that we are not a perfect soul imprisoned at birth in a naughty body, pining to be released back home to pearly heaven. Like fruit and grain, like metal tools, our journey through life shapes, refines and ripens the soul. We take in the energies and nutrients of this world, use some, toss off others, mix them, fire them, water them, heat and cool them, and we make a soul. I find that so beautiful, so mysterious and so right: we make the soul. If there is a motto for Drumming The Soul Awake, that little phrase of Keats would be in the top 10.

We are entering late summer, the time of the ripened fruits and summer storms, the time when the grain will soon be harvested. In the Celtic wheel of the year, the month of August is called Lunasa, after the god Lugh (pronounced LOO), the God of many skills. Lugh is the very image of the soul fully shaped and ripened. (More about Lugh here).

This Friday we will enter into a powerful shamanic experience on the idea of being shaped (and re-shaped) by Spirit. I will draw from two mythic pools - the Celtic and the Scandinavian traditions. It's one of the most powerful interactions I've been taught and I hope you will find it to be also.

If you have come to recent drums, you may notice how this Friday's drum connects backward to the Summer Solstice drum with the theme of "changing the story," and it will connect forward to the drum in August 14th (the Gathering of the Tribes,) and to the following drums in September and to the fall Earth Ecstasy retreat which, for now is subtitled "Oh Great Dark Mother Release This Love." I build each Drumming the Soul Awake experience as its own unique (hopefully useful and beautiful) experience, but I also try to build a year of experiences that you can connect together to shape for yourself a long, deep journey of soul-making, if you please.

Blessings of the summer thunder, the buzzing dragonfly and the sweet nectarine juice be yours,

Jaime

2010-07-07T10:54:00.007-05:00

I have friends who are tech geeks. They think about gizmos all the time, and it's all they want to talk about. If you are not a tech geek, they sigh and roll their eyes and exchange knowing looks when you try to join the conversation. My 6 year-old is a Star Wars Lego geek. It may not be all he thinks about, but it's all he wants to talk about, and he, too, grows impatient when you cannot tell the difference between General Grievous and Count Dooku.

I fear I have become a Spirit geek. It's not all I think about, because I do think about sex and coffee. But beyond those, all I seem to think about is the mystery of Spirit, and particularly why, throughout human history, we have made Spirit so complicated, corrupt and cynical.

Everyone likes to criticize other people, and religious people top the list of gleeful finger pointers. I've studied many religions and it seems clear to me that at the core, all religions offer us the choice of how big or how small of a box we want to live in. All religions frame the box as immense, eternal, incomprehensible. And then all religions begin shrinking the box with stories, images and rules arising from two places: the culture and the landscape from which they arise. This is how the Creator Of The Universe somehow becomes so small as to worry that homosexuals will destroy even the Galaxies and spiritual writings from the people over the hill are completely wrong and dangerous. It's also why the God of the western world is founded on desert imagery, because that god arose from the desert of the ancient Near East.

So we call out to God, who brings us into immensity, and then we shrink god to fit our comfort zone and understanding. On and on it goes and human history is made on this shrinkage. But history is also made on the valiant attempt to resist that shrinking of Mystery - the compressing and compacting of God - and on and on this resistance goes too. In each time, in each culture, in each landscape we are offered the holy choice of how much shrinking of God we will allow and how much expanding of God we dare to embrace.

Drumming, for some incomprehensible reason, brings expansion, which is one ancient definition of "blessing." And that is why we drum.

Solstice Thanks

2010-06-21T10:35:00.002-05:00

Dear Drummers,
Thanks to the 200+ of you who drummed, danced, wahooed, revered, wept, insighted, prayed and generally did the work of a gleefully serious spiritual human being at the two summer solstice drums this weekend. We were all incredibly blessed by the presence of that powerful band of women singers, The Idisi. And of course, the drum itself, our teacher and ally, was as gracious as ever to us.

It never ceases to amaze me how powerful these events can be, whether it is a smaller group at our monthly drums, or a larger tribal gathering at the solstices. If you were at either drum, please feel free to send me your comments and feedback. If you missed this one you did miss an amazing time, but do not worry, my plan is to offer larger events like these at each solstice, and at the two equinoxes, a weekend retreat. And of course, the Friday drums in between.

Blessings of Summer to you!

Jaime

2010-06-14T11:22:00.003-05:00

Dear Drummers,

Join us this weekend for Summer Solstice Blessing!

The entire audience drums. Drums are provided, or bring your own! Dancing and ecstasy are allowed (but not required). Laughter and spiritual juiciness are virtually guaranteed.

I will weave storytelling, sheer wildness and shamanic ceremony from Celtic and northern European traditions into an inspiring, funny, and, if you are seeking it, healing evening. Idisi (a chorus of ultra cool, groovilly gorgeous goddessy women) will chant ebullient, earthy melodies that Lutherans are not allowed to learn. Idisi expertly calls in the sonic love vibes of the Divine Feminine. Everyone who wants to can receive a blessing from the powers of sun, earth, blossoms and the powers of change.

"Meyer’s writing is enormously seductive...farfetched whimsy with thickly textured thoughtfulness..." - Star Tribune

"It takes you safely into the Spirit world to romp, grieve and be healed, and then back out again..."-Past audience member

Dates: June 18 or 19
Time: 7:30 PM
Place: The Minnesota Opera Center,
620 North First Street, Downtown Minneapolis.
Ample free parking across the street, paid parking 1/2 away
and on the street. Click here for a map.
Ticket Price: $20
Order advance tickets online by clicking here
(Or you may pay cash at the door.)
House opens at 7 PM and the drumming begins!
All seats are general admission and seating is limited.
Past Solstice Blessing events have sold out quickly.

The Story of My Story is My Story

2010-05-11T10:53:00.002-05:00

Dear Drummers,

Welcome, oh you courageous explorers of the great, unnamable, untamable, unframable, undrainable, Mystery! Welcome to the drum, this Friday, May 14th, 7-9:30 PM at the Saint Paul Council of Churches Building, two block west of Snelling Avenue on Summit, in the very vortex of cosmic mystery: Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Humans are constructed less of bone, sinew and blood than of story. We are taught stories from the moment we are born. We are warned about which stories to grasp onto and which ones to flee from. We learn to tell ourselves stories. We swim through currents of stories our whole lives. Often we find ourselves flailing in the rip tide of the clashing mix of stories. Every action we take springs from the story we believe.

If the spiritual life is about a single thing, it is about freeing ourselves from the stories that poison us and finding the stories that bless us, that make us free, light and able to move through life with happiness. (That's a story too.) You - wild drummers of the Spirit - you value the work to investigate the Story and you work to summon the courage to deconstruct the poisonous ones and step into blessing stories. If you were not that kind of person, you would not be reading this email.We are each engaged in the task of reframing our story - many of us on a very personal level, but also on a cutural and species-wide level. We are in a great time of editing and revising. Someday, our ancestors will call our time "Draft 3."

Our focus for this Friday's drum: to ask the spirits of nature, the spirits of spring time, the Mighty Ones of the reborn, renewed land to help remove us from the stories that poison us and help us find the story that blesses us. If you'd like to bump it up a notch for yourself, shamanically speaking, healingwise, bring a marigold flower with you on Friday-maybe one planted in a little pot. You don't have to, but you can.

For the 17 of you who have signed up for the Spring drumming retreat May 21-23, this is the beginning of the work we will also be doing over that fun, friendly, freely funkelicious weekend. You don't have to come this Friday to get started, but I just wanted to let you know, you could start the work this Friday if you want to. You don't have to, but you can. There is still one spot available at the retreat; if you are interested, please email me: drummingthesoulawake@gmail.com

I look forward to seeing your radiant faces on Friday!
Joyful blessings of the greening trees be yours,

Jaime

p.s. Three brief items I'd like to pass along. I've done some work on my web site and added some new info. One bit is an introductory video. The intention for that is really simple: to let people who have never seen me see me. It's aimed at the person who is sorta, kinda interested in this drumming thing, but who is a little reticent to try it. If you know anyone like that, please feel free to send them the link to my video. I also have a page about shamanic services I offer. This is a new step for me. It took me awhile to come to an agreement with the spirit world about this. (Awhile = 16 years.) Finally, there is a page of "testimonials." These are also aimed to introduce people to the work we are doing together on these wild Fridays. If you have any comments, corrections or testimonials you'd like to send me about the web site, please feel free. Thanks.

I also direct your attention to the Drum Heart's 20th year celebration, June 5th. Sponsored by the Women's Drum Center, Drum Heart is a women's drum ensemble - very, very fun, cool and really good. June 5th offers a great drumming workshop for women and an evening concert for all.

Lastly, I hope you'll mark your calendar for the summer solstice weekend, June 18-19 for "Summer Blessing." It's the other side of the wheel from the winter solstice drumming event, which so many of you have come to. It will be at the Minnesota Opera Center, downtown Minneapolis. More details as they emerge (from my mind).

Celebrating the Sensous Earth

2010-04-27T09:26:00.003-05:00

Dear Drummers,

Welcome one and all to the fruitful, fertile, funkified frenzy of Drumming the Soul Awake this Friday, April 30, 7-9:30 PM, in the very center of cosmic enlightenment, Saint Paul Minnesota (the St. Paul Council of Churches Building, 1671 Summit Avenue, Saint Paul - Summit Avenue two blocks west of Snelling (Click for a map). All are welcome, no drums or drumming skill neccessarry - all you need is is a desire for spiritual fun-making, a desire for connection to earth and earth-tribe, and a desire to renew your connnection to your own love of the Great Unbounded Mystery.

This Friday is a HUGE day in the Celtic shamanic calendar - May Eve, the night before May Day (Beltane in Gaelic). May Eve is traditionally associated with the celebration of pleasure, sensuous delight, and fertility. There is an old tradition that May Eve is a night for lovers to sneak away into the woods to embody for one another the springtime lovemaking between the sun and the earth. On May Eve, married men and women were allowed to remove their wedding rings - and the boundaries encircled therein - for this one night.

Traditionally, the men in pulpits have really, really disliked May Eve.

We Moderns are obsessed with accurate measurement, so we like to say May 1st is Beltane, and April 30th is May Eve. But Beltane is a loose time through mid May. Beltane is traditionally associated with the visible blooming of trees, with that tangible, heady fragrance in the air and with the first full moon after the sun has reached the midpoint between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. The moon is full this Wednesday, just slightly past full for us this Friday.

Beltane is the celebration of the sun's golden fingers easing open the small white buttons, his honey-sweet kisses awakening the long slumbering earth. It is the celebration of the land's wild craving to receive the seeds; it is the moon whispering:

Now, Love, at last I come
In warm fullness rising over you.
Let there be trembling in the soft hills
at the light play of my fingers
And sighing in the valleys.
Let there be glimmering of sweet dew
At the caress of my breath
And gleaming in the estuaries.
Let the hundred winged ones burst free
from your greening branches
Let there be heard swirling
Up to the joyous stars and
over the newborn land
Your aching song of Yes.

We will dedicate this Friday in Saint Paul, and the following Friday (May 7) at the Minneapolis drum, to this wild love of the irrepressible life force, this fragrant blossoming in the world, and in us. I would love to have a few people help me prepare the ceremonial aspect for Friday. Please send me an email if that interests you.

Lastly, if you are interested in attending our spring drumming retreat, May 21-23, there are a couple of spaces open still. Click here for more details. We always have a lot of fun at our retreats and I design them so that you can go as deeply into meditation, healing or contemplation as you wish.

See you soon,

Jaime

The Alternative Login

2010-04-16T16:50:00.002-05:00

Dear Drummers,

Welcome one and all to drumming this Friday at First Universalist Church, 34th and Dupont, in delirious uptown Minneapolis. The letter for this week is below, but a note first: Please see that the dates of the spring retreat have changed to May 21-23. If you are interested, please make your reservations soon. Space is limited. At the retreat we will be drumming up what the Ancient mystics refered to as "profound wahoo," and, if you want, I'll give you the opportunity to look deeply at that one myth that guides your life that you may want to rewrite. Change the story, change your life as they say. And we will work with the magical properties of marigold which has been calling out. And of course, there's the sauna, the lake, the forest, the birds, the Spring, the away time. Yes, wa-hoo.

Now the letter for this week:

Today I tried to Login to Facebook on my phone and noticed a tiny link: "Having trouble logging in? Try alternate login here." I clicked and it took me to an error message: "You must login first." It's a funny tidbit about the frustrations of technology, but it made me think about Mircea Eliade, the great mid 20th century cultural anthropologist.

Eliade said that all religions acknowledge that that the world is profane, or un-sacred, and all religions construct a way to enter into that sacred place that is separate from the profane world. In today's words, all religions give you the web same address to the login screen to the divine. Each religion gives you a different password. So when you enter a church, you are crossing the threshold from this profane world to a separate, sacred realm - the house of God. Indigenous ceremonies where the natives drum and dance and cavort are about inviting the sacred to come crashing over that threshold from the sacred realm and into this profane realm. It's a compelling idea that makes a lot of sense.

Eliade's idea has been much criticized, in the same way that Joseph Campbell's ideas have been: white western academic (non-drumming) males trying to impose a universal world view on the thousands of cultures and tribes around the world and throughout history, as though all of us were really the same. The impulse to try to find that one thing that makes us all alike is a western, male impulse according to the criticism. For the "neck-up" western academic male, alternative logins do not really exist.

But what I see as the promise in the shamanic path is that there is not a separation between the sacred and the profane. Eliade was awesomely smart, but his cultural and intellectual foundation sprang from the idea that God lives elsewhere, or that God is merely an idea that everyone has. The shamanic view is that, even though it's often called "the other world," it is here now. The past and future are present now, all things are happening right now, or in theological language, the divine is "radically present." There is something in this idea that seems very right to me, and as Jesus said in the non-official gospel of Thomas, speaking for the Divine: "It is I who am all things. From me all things come forth, and to all things I extend. Split a piece of wood and I am there; lift up a stone and you'll find me."

The basis of so much shamanic healing is that even old spiritual wounds from years ago, even wounds from generations ago, are present now sometimes. Healing the wound now also heals wounds going back perhaps generations. Healing your wound now may heal your ancestors, and healing your ancestors may set things right for you. This is a very powerful and very beautiful notion for me, and I believe I have experienced it personallythrough shamanic work.
And that will be the theme of this Friday's drum. But not before we release ourselves as totally as each of you wants to, into the whoop-de-doo, whirling, swirling, sensuous delight of groovelicious rhythmocity.

I hope to see you soon!

Jaime

Link above: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return_(Eliade)

2010-04-09T10:01:00.000-05:00

Dear Drummers,

Welcome one and all to the drum this Friday, 7-9:30 PM at First Universalist Church, 34th and Dupont, in ecstatic, mystical Uptown Minneapolis. Oh, what a Friday awaits you, you explorers of the soul-scape, you brave travelers on the unpaved road to Spirit. (Unpaved, but not un- traveled! Look there, food left for us by those who have come before! And look there! That bird is pointing the way, and so is that tree! Wa-hoo, I say. And I say again: Wa-hoo.

The magnolia tree outside my window has been speaking to me of boldness. Along with the siberian squill, the magnolia is the first blossom to boldly burst forth in spring in our landscape, confidently announcing its fragrance to the neighborhood. When I spoke to her about boldness she instructed me in the difference between boldness and brashness. Brashness comes from rebellion, from wanting to show authority that you are not obeying them. Adolescent brashness may mature into boldness, or it may devolve into the toxic addiction to confrontation like we see in television pundits.

Boldness, as the magnolia taught me, comes not as a confrontation to others, but as a natural expression of one’s joyful connection to Spirit. All too often we mistake brashness, rudeness, certainty and sarcasm for power when these are, in truth, expressions of fear and powerlessness.

Boldness is required of us at various times throughout our lives. We are called to boldness against toxic patterns, ideas, people and institutions, and boldness in the face of change. In our time and culture, we need boldness just to stay balanced and healthy in mind, spirit and body. If you are like me, you recognize the call to boldness and very often back away. Voices float in our heads, policing our call to boldness, whispering “be humble” “listen to the experts” or “don’t be a show off” or my favorite, “just who do you think you are anyway?”

This Friday, we will ask the spirit of magnolia to help us become bold, and if you want, you can be washed with magnolia blossoms. You don’t have to, but you can if you want to. First, we’ll drum up a whompin’ whoopin’ whirlin’ wahoo of Wyrd. I will forget to say it, but please, please, if you feel like dancing, leap up, leap up, and let the weavin’ wagglin’ woogglin spirit take you into the blue, blue breeze!

Here is what is weirdly cool about the shamanic path: after I spoke with the magnolia I did some research to discover that, in herbal healing, magnolia blossoms are used for self-esteem, loyalty, love and attraction. When I asked her about that she said (with some irritation) yes, it’s all true, but “loyalty” in this sense is connected with what the Celts called “sovereignty.” I’ll have more to say about that on Friday. In Chinese medicine, magnolia leaves are used on the physical level sinus and chest congestion and abdominal problems.

Be well, travelers, I hope to see you on Friday.

Jaime

2010-04-03T17:28:00.002-05:00

Dear Drummers,

Though I no longer connect to my childhood's magic of Easter, I adore (and try to live by) the imagery embedded in the story: the power of all creation knows each of us, and loves us. It wants us to blossom in wisdom, peace, and love. It suffers with us as we fail again and again, as selfishness, envy and fear overcome our emerging wisdom. That power of creation is beyond our ability to comprehend, but we somehow understand that, to it, all things are possible. Death, which so terrifies us, loses its meaning when we are able to "open our eyes and ears" wider and feel this Presence of creation. When we become open, we can be transformed, utterly: reborn. We become able to "Fear not." Each time we make decisions out of fear and envy we perpetrate an inner crucifixion, and each time we make decisions from love and awe we roll back the stone for an inner resurrection. And whatever we accomplish on the inside radiates out from us in our actions, small to large, in the world.

The frightening, gloomy melody of good Friday and the shimmering tune of Easter morning that were so important to my childhood have been replaced by a steady, rhythmic Wonder at the unfathomable powers present in nature as wide and deep as I am able to understand it - from the quark to the ten dimensions of modern physics. And in between, miniscule me: my small human mind sparking faintly inside its clay cup, my tiny human heart playing its simple beat amidst the uncountable other instruments in the cosmic orchestra, trying my best to push envy and fear out of the way for a few moments longer today than I was able to yesterday, and let awe and love make more decisions for me.

I have not rejected the Easter story; I have drawn it inside and made it both more subtle and more personally meaningful. I have transformed it. Dare I say it has died and been resurrected in me in a new spiritual form, something Jesus promised would happen to all who followed him to the truth. In an article posted today, Dr. Jean Houston tells of the series of visions of Christ that came to the 5th century Augustine. As the visions began to wane, "...filled with anguish at the loss of the Beloved, the saint cried out to Christ to return. Out of darkness he heard the words, "I have disappeared right before your eyes in order for you to return into your heart to find me."

I have not given up on the magic in the Easter story. Actually, I find myself these days seeing more and more magic at work, experiencing it more viscerally and obviously. My eyes are opening to the evidence that we are surrounded by, penetrated, permeated and infused by miracle and what rightly can be called magic. I like to call it the "powers" or the "spirits" or the "energies" or a hundred other names to keep it from sounding anything like what the religious bureaucrats and scripture zealots call it, and I describe it as coming from inside the same place as the green leaves emerging from the reborn trees and the periwinkle Siberian Squill resurrecting all around my neighborhood.

On this beautiful early spring day before Easter, I wish for you what I see as the core of Christ's message: "Epatha!" (Greek for "Be opened!")

Jaime

2010-03-13T12:30:00.011-06:00

Earth Ecstasy Spring Retreat
May 21-23
(Friday Eve - Sunday Noon)

Drumming & laughing, forest & lake, respite, hoo-ha & wahoo, soul-talk, fabulous comfortable cabins with actual beds, sauna, delight, down-time & quiet, tribal whoop-de-doo, bonfire & drumming, thrilling, cleansing, healing ceremony of grounding & renewal with earth, water, air, fire and the Presence of the Great Unnameable, Untameable Mystery, all under the sensuous new springtime sun and loving new moon.

We need time away from the hustle and tussle of our life. We need time to work deeply with the powers of the Spirit. We need time to be with our tribe. We need time to sink into the embrace of the earth. We need this time to rebalance and restore. We need this time to come back into our soul, to come back into our body, to come back into our authentic self.

Crow Wing Crest Lodge near Akley, Minnesota (about a 3-hour drive north of the Twin Cities). We will have the whole resort to ourselves!

Cost: $275. (Early bird special! Pay before April 1: $250. Wahoo.) Price includes all lodging, retreat fun and dinner. Spaces are limited. Some scholarship places are available

If you are interested in using this time to do one-on-one shamanic or ceremonial work with me, I’ve reserved three slots: Thursday evening, Friday morning and Friday afternoon. Please contact me if this interests you. Click here to Email me.

Click here for more details, and to reserve a spot.
Or email Jaime Meyer: mailto:drummingthesoulawake@gmail.com

Drumming March 5! Wa-hoo!

2010-03-04T08:26:00.002-06:00

Dear Drummers,

I welcome you to our first Drumming the Soul Awake: SAINT PAUL EDITION, this Friday, from 7-9:30 PM. That’s right, let them say “Oh, poor pitiful Saint Paul rolls up the streets at 5 o’clock…” We will prove them WRONG with some ecstatic Earth-loving whoop-de-doo.

Where: St. Paul Area Council of Churches Building (1671 Summit Avenue, two block west of Snelling Avenue on the north side of Summit. Their phone: 651-646-8805). I’ve drummed in this space several times before. It’s slightly bigger than the space we use in south Minneapolis, and it’s very inviting.

As usual, we will drum for awhile - no previous skills or experience needed! And then those who wish to stay for the second part can enter into the meditative, heart-stirring, imagination-nourishing, soul-loving presence of the Spiritual Drum. Drums are provided, or bring your own. Bring a friend (or meet a new friend at the drum!) Please pass this email along to whomever you think may be intrigued.

One of our drummers said to me recently, “Everybody’s injured. We understand that. Everybody needs healing. Sure. It’s our culture, our modern industrialized society, that is responsible. Yes, we know. That’s not what scares us. What scares us is we have a visceral sense that the big change is coming. Actually, it’s already underway. Normal is gone and it’s not coming back. It is a transformation of that modern industrialized society, of our culture, of lifestyle and livelihood, of economy big and small. Transformation is occurring all around us, in every aspect of our life. We’re not ready for it. We’re not equipped for it. That makes us afraid.”

He could not have described more eloquently why the path of the drum as I present it (wildly fun drum plus carefully deep shamanic experiences) offers you the skills to navigate through the changes - personal, communal, global - in which you find yourself swimming. This Friday we will continue to work with images from the Celtic shamanic tradition: Brigit, the goddess of healing and transformation, and the earth serpent that “emerges from the mound.” I think it will be a powerfully nurturing evening for you. And it’s in totally rockin’, ecstatic SAINT PAUL!

February 5 Drumming

2010-02-03T10:06:00.006-06:00

I lost my job two weeks ago. Please do me a HUGE favor by clicking here to take my short survey. It will help me make decisions about how to serve the Drum and our community now that my life has opened up some. Thanks so much!

Dear drummers,

Welcome, welcome, one and all to the Groovelicious Rhythmocity, the boom-boom-whakka-whakka-boom-whakka-whak of Drumming the Soul Awake, this Friday, February 5th. If your are new to drumming, don’t worry, our drumming group is about the easiest thing in the world to slip into, be comfortable and have a bucket 'o fun. We have plenty of drums, rattles and object of noise-a-liciousness, or bring your own.

I lost my job two weeks ago, and I’ve been ruminating on the haiku:
Since my house burned down
I now have a better view
Of the rising moon.

This Friday’s drum will focus on the topic of transformation. All of us are transforming, our world is transforming (all the time). The saying goes: every creature is crouched in eagerness to become the next thing. I’m not sure we are all so eager, but the key is to change the balance toward eagerness and away from fear.

We are in the part of the Celtic wheel of the year typically associated with Brigit, the goddess of healing, metal-working and poetry. She is a terrific Presence to ask for guidance in respect to transformation, and we will work with her this Friday. If you have a short poem about transformation (or about Brigit) that you’d like to share, please feel free to bring it.

So, two weeks ago the slashing axe of staff reduction came through our office, cutting down nearly half the staff, me included. I surprised myself at how little this bothered me. I have been ready to change the structure of my work life for some time, I just didn’t have a compelling reason (read: courage) to make that change. I shy away from blanket new-agey statements about bad things being blessings in disguise or our higher mind manifesting the change that we need. But in this particular case, it’s as true as the sparkle on the morning snow.

I began packing the very few personal items from my desk into a small box - a picture of my kids swimming; a calendula scented deodorant stick, and two figurines - a dashboard Jesus (Jesus on a spring so he dances as you drive over potholes) and a dashboard “Knight of Nee” (from the Monty Python movie). For three years they were next to me, Jesus looking like he was whispering a secret into the astonished Knight’s ear. I liked to pretend that Jesus, during his twelve “lost years” had made it to Scotland where one day he whispered the secret “Gospel of Nee” to my ancestor, which was passed down to me. Click here to see a picture of them!)

While packing, I surprisingly did not think about losing my house, and having to move to Surinam to work in the dank gold mines with the greasy, bare-chested Dutch foreman swishing his whip and shouting “Verk, u durty schkum, verk harder, schtoopit animals, get da gŏld, or no vater fer u!” All I thought about was how I have been handed to opportunity to collapse in fear or to ask what it is I want, or what it is I am called to do.

I’ve been given the opportunity to trust the Spirit(s), and myself. My “call” is expressed through our drumming groups. I have no explanation for why that is, but I’ve stopped worrying about it. My only thoughts as I packed away Jesus and the deodorant were, “Now that my life schedule is wide open, how will I expand my service to the Drum and to our community?” You can help me by offering any and all suggestions and ideas. Please feel free to email me (drummingthesoulawake@gmail.com) or please, click here to take my short survey.

2010-01-10T12:30:00.005-06:00

image: dzeni.blogspot.com
Check out Jennifer Gottschalk's other cool work-click here!

Dear Drummers,

Welcome one and all to the drum, Friday January 8, from 7-9 PM. A note setting the tone for Friday is below, but since there are so many people new to this list right now, and to the idea of drumming, I’d like to say a little about why we drum.

We need ceremony; we need ritual in our lives. The culture provides it for us in the form of the accepted mainstream worship and in the commercial marketplace. So we have Sunday church available to us, and we have television and sporting events and bars, each of which are about filling a need in us for ritual, ceremony and community. I suspect you are attracted to the drum because there is something calling to you that desires (or requires) a mythic, poetic, spiritual alternative to the buffet of rituals that has been set out for you by the culture. I think a spiritual life really requires a nuanced dance between two things: courage and discipline (or openness and work). Courage opens imagination, fear, doubt, love, joy, mystery and yearning. Discipline is about negotiating with the ego. Without some modicum of spiritual discipline, we float between diversions and flirtations. Without some courage, we merely become superstitious robots, doing and saying what we are told. This drumming group offers you an opportunity to uncover in you both courage and discipline, if you want to, at whatever level you want to work them. One of the greatest, holy-endowed gifts that must be used frequently is irreverence and sheer, gut-wiggling laughter, and I surely always make a place for those energies at each drum! So there. That’s why we drum.

About Friday’s Drum:

In the depths of winter, we drum. During the most silent slice of the wheel of the year, we raise a joyful pulse. Wrapped in the arms of the darkness, we ride with one another on the wave. The trees are dreaming, the land is dreaming, the silver stars call us into the dreaming place of winter. We have built for ourselves a life of constant rush and shout, a life of never-ceasing motion, movement and frenzied light. We live them externally and we have created a room in our inner house for them to live as well. The winter calls us into slowness, into silence, into dreaming; the place lit of dim lavender light on snow, the place of unadorned bare branches and sleeping roots; the place where we rest, and reset our balance between the seen and the unseen, between our fevered plans for ourselves and the purpose woven into us in the dark womb. Winter calls us to breathe deeply between the summer dances. Rest, breathe, and drink from the well of darkness. Before we may drink, though, we must do something. And that is what we will do on Friday.

If you can, please try to bring two self-addressed stamped envelopes. If you forget, don’t worry, I will have some available.

I leave you with this bit of text from Kahil Gibran (The Prophet):

You have been told that life is darkness
and in your weariness you echo the words of the weary.
I say to you life is indeed darkness
save when there is Urge.
And all urge is blind
save when there is Knowledge.
And all knowledge is vain
save when there is Work.
And all work is empty
save when there is Love.
When you work with love,
you bind yourself to yourself
and to one another
and to God.

New Year's Evolution

2009-12-30T13:09:00.004-06:00

Image: SyrianSpeakersCormer

New Year's greetings to you, oh seekers, drummers on the drum of love, lovers of the great twisting, pulsing, unfathomable Mystery. Below I offer you a New Year's spiritual exercise to try as deeply as you want to.

New Year's Eve and Day are are filled with promises we make to ourselves to change. I love the impulse of this mythic exercise, but if you are like me, New Year's resolutions rarely stick. So, I avoid the word "resolution" which smacks of heavy old Christian moralism, a word that says you must hunker down and defeat that devil in you. I like the phrase New Year's Evolutions. In that spirit I offer you an exercise to try if you want to.

Find your 99(9) names for the Holy
The wonderful history of humankind is a history of naming the holy. The tragic history of humankind is a history of forgetting that the Holy always has more names than we can count - that our small set of sacred names for the Holy arise out of our language, our cultural framework and the landscape we live in - all of which evolve and change drastically again and again. The Koran lists 99 excellent names of Allah, names like The Opener, The Bestower, The Creator, The Judge. An exercise to try: start your own list. Take a few moments to scratch down a few names of the holy from your own experience, your reading, your tradition. Then as your days move forward, try to be aware when you have an experience, large or tiny, of the Holy, and name that experience, and add it to your list. You will begin to assemble a list of powerful, beautiful names and phrases. Here are a few from my list:

-The one who tears me loose from those important thoughts so I can once again marvel at my children's laughter which is the song of the creator.

-He who comes with a candle in the night of fear.

-That which moves my fingers on the drum.

-The one who comes to call the flowers open in April.-She who strips the flesh from my bones so that I may learn to not be afraid of gleaming in the moonlight.

-The one who sings the trees to sleep, and sends dreams of fragrant blossoms hidden within.

On and on it goes. For extra credit, erect a large chalkboard on a wall in your house to keep your ever-expanding list. Save room for the last name, "The one who erases all" and when it's time, erase and start over. Share the list with others. Add some of their names to your list. Have a "Names of the Holy" wine party. (Make sure to add "The one inside the wine who jiggers open our laughter" to your list) For those who desire discipline: Establish a time each day, in the early morning or end of the day, where you meditate with the mantra "What is the name you want me to know now?" Call out, ask. You can sit in silence repeating the question, or you can drum. Or go outside, close your eyes, turn in a circle or three, calling out the question, pause, open your eyes. Maybe the name that arises will be with you for a day, or a week. Maybe some will become stronger for you than others. The list will grow, you'll forget some, and read them later and be surprised. You'll be uncomfortable at some of the names. At about the number 73 you will begin to understand a secret. (It may take a higher or lower number for you for the secret to be revealed.) Of course I can't tell you that secret. You will have to discover it yourself.

2009-12-14T14:59:00.002-06:00

Join us at the 5th Solstice Blessing extravaganza at the Minnesota Opera Center, Dec 18-19.
Click here for more information!

2009-12-01T20:34:00.002-06:00

Drummers: This is the huge mother-drum-heartbeat-of-the-earth that we'll be using in the solstice show Dec. 18-19. Please join me in welcoming it at the drum group this Friday Dec 4th. This drum has a great deal to teach us about claiming our fierce power and we will enter into that study this Friday.

See you soon!
Jaime

2009-11-25T16:05:00.006-06:00

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

2009-11-12T14:15:00.006-06:00

Dear Drummers,

Welcome to you, oh wild wanderers on the road of wonder, you who know you are bigger than your worries, bigger than your envies, bigger than your fears. (You know you are, though so many voices tell you that you are a small, quivering thing and you should act like it.) Welcome, seekers after the heartbeat of the deep, oh open-armed lovers of the pulse of life. Welcome you who want the kiss of the stars, the kiss of the moonlight on the rolling hills, the kiss of the sea rolling against the sand. Welcome, you who ache to learn the next verse of “Oran Mor,” the “great song” of the universe. Welcome one and all to the drum this Friday, November 13th 7-9 PM at First Universalist Church, 34th and Dupont, in mystical uptown, Minneapolis. If you are like the rest of us, you say,” Oh I really want to make it to drumming!” and then Friday comes and some force steps in your way - inertia, tiredness, shyness, fear, and you say “Ah, well, maybe another time...” I say to you now, beautiful wanderer, do not let those inner voices keep you small! Come into the embrace of the Great Pulse! Huzzah! Wahoo! (And, of course, Whoopdeedoo!)

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road--
Only wakes upon the sea.
(Anotnio Machado)

Many of you have asked about my winter solstice show. I’m happy to announce that I am producing it at the Minnesota Opera Center, December 18-19 (Friday-Saturday). I will have more details later but right now I’d like toss out three opportunities for you to be part of this experience.

First, I am seeking women who would like to sing, embody the Great White Reindeer Goddess and, ultimately bless the audience with rattles, drums and voice. The requirements are a decent voice, a willingness to commit to three rehearsals and two performances and learn four easy shamanic songs, and a desire to channel the energy of the female Divine through you in order to bless audience members. Yes. It’s kind of heady, and so, so cool. The whole show is all about releasing this Spirit to do its work, and the audience absolutely loves it.

Second, I am producing this event myself, which is a different process from past years. I need to put energy into marketing this event and this is another volunteer opportunity. If you have networks that you can work, marketing skills, or connections to people who would love to be involved in marketing this event, please jump in with me. The marketing budget for this event is a precise, cosmic $0, so all the marketing will be done through email, social networks and word of mouth.

Third: If you are in the position to donate money to help defray three costs, I will be amazingly grateful. The three costs are 1) rental of the performance space at about $600, paying a couple of musicians at about $600, and the purchase of a monster-sized drum (again about $600) that can be played by eight people, will knock the spiritual socks off of the audience, and then appear at random times in our regular drumming groups. If any of these opportunities for generosity interest you, please feel free to email me. Or if you want, you can donate by going to http://www.paypal.com/, click on “send money” and send it to drummingthesoulawake@gmail.com. Contributions are not tax deductible, but they are certainly spirit enhancing! Contributions of any amount are gratefully welcomed. (If you contribute the full amount of any of the three costs mentioned above, I will kiss your feet, in public, anywhere you name. Yes, I really will, I would be just that grateful and odd.)

See you soon, I hope,

Jaime

In Darkness We Are Born

2009-10-28T15:07:00.005-05:00

I read recently that in the early 20th century, the sum total of human knowledge would double every generation. Now it doubles every year or faster. You could say that our daily world is moving 40 times faster than our parents’ world did. Technology advances so swiftly that none of us can keep up completely. Our lives become like a ride I went on in Copenhagen a few weeks ago, called the Himmelskibet which means “Sky-Boat” (but we called it the “Shpinup-Highunpuker”).

Spiritual work, at least how I see it, is our way of entering into a power that helps us slow down this whirling thing we call our life so that we can make decisions not out of shrieking, wind-blown terror as we clutch the handle of our Sky-Boat, but out of the power of beauty. This is what I hope our drumming does for you.

Stanley Schachter conducted a famous experiment years ago in which young women were told they would be given electric shocks. The more anxious they were about the shocks, the more they wanted to wait with the others who would experience the same shocks. We need to be with people who are experiencing the same shocks, and I hope our drumming groups provide that for you.

Hi-tech consultant Bill Campbell said that today’s software companies are successful only when the people with the crazy ideas are given stature. In this rapidly changing world we must listen to the crazy voices. The theological way to say that is that in times of radical change, the prophetic voice appears to guide us in a new direction. That voice always appears crazy to the "mainstream." The shocks that we feel in this spinning Himmelskibet of our life call out for that prophetic voice to come and guide us, and I hope this, too, is what our drum groups provide to you.

So this Friday, we will enter into a state of crazy beauty, crazy love for this troubled and magnificent earth and the layers of life on it and inside it - and inside us. We will move into a ceremony emerging from the Celtic New Year, Samhain (pronounced SOW-wen), which we know as Halloween. We will call out to the old bone mother to help us. If you want to bump up the power of this evening for yourself, bring two things 1) some kind of biodegradable offering for the spirit world like flowers, herbs, nuts, scotch, chocolate, colorful fallen leaves, – anything you would put in your garden compost and that you find lovely or nurturing and 2) a yearning desire to love this life. If you forget to bring either don’t worry, and don’t stay away because you don’t understand what I just said. Come, come and don’t worry.

Jaime

Fall Drumming Retreat

2009-09-12T10:23:00.004-05:00

I have been offered an extraordinary opportunity to hold a drumming retreat Oct 9-11 (Friday-Sunday) at a lovely resort, Crow Wing Crest Lodge, near Brainerd. Click here to see their web site.

I've been there twice with my family, and it is very beautiful and peaceful, located on a lovely lake near great hiking trails (and Itasca State Park) and it's more upscale than places we have held retreats at in the past (It has actual beds, actual living rooms and couches.) We would be the only people there that weekend, and the autumn colors should still be vibrant.

I’m calling the retreat "Nurturing the Fires of Eros." The weekend is dedicated to the element fire, and we would ask that spirit to help us nurture (or reignite) the life-force - the fire of eros - that is in us, that animates our creativity, boldness, curiosity, confidence, pleasures, and passion for life. We would also ask the element fire to cleanse us of any obstacles in us that inhibit the flow of our erotic, life-loving energies.

The resort has a great sauna, so we’d definitely have steam ceremony (the lake is few steps away for those who want to do the classic post-steam dunk!). There is also a fabulous large outdoor fire ring on the beach and an indoor fireplace in the Lodge if it's raining or cold.

I imagine a weekend where we drum together surrounded by water, earth, air and fire - lots of fire. I don’t want to over-plan the weekend because I'd like to offer you some long stretches of rest, conversation, and silent contemplation if you wish, So even if you just want a break and don’t really want the steam or the drumming or the rowdy, erotic laughing, you are still heartily invited!

Beyond drumming together, I will offer those who want it the opportunity for creating your own personal ceremony working with the element fire, asking for energy, support, healing, or blessing of your own powers of eros. There is also massage available on site, and the people who own the resort do reflexology and aromatherapy. You can bring a drum or borrow one of my many instruments.

The cost is $210 and that includes lodging and Friday and Saturday dinner. The cabins have full kitchens for other food needs. There are restaurants about a ten minute drive away. I’ve tried to keep the cost as low as possible and I have a few scholarship spots if the fee is impossible for you to pay. It's about a 2 1/2 hour drive from the Twin Cities. You could arrive anytime after 3 on Friday, and I think it’s possible to go on Thursdays if you want to (that would add about another $60).

Please let me know if you would like to attend. I hope to keep the size of the group under 20. Email me at Jaime@drummingthesoulawake.com.

Thanks!

2009-09-10T09:45:00.002-05:00

Welcome one and all to the 8th boom-boom-chakk-chakka-tikka-tik-boom year of Drumming the Soul Awake! Friday, Sept 11, 2009, 7PM -9:30 PM.

Welcome to the newcomers and the old comers, the once-in-awhile and the every-ones, the dancers, the thump-thumpers, the explorers, the timid, the loquacious, the whappity-whappers and the closed-eyed reverie-ers. Welcome to you who are on fire with Spirit, and to you afloat in grief and confusion, and to you air-borne thinkers of grand thoughts, and welcome to you lovers of the moist, dark, mothering earth who teaches us how to be human beings. Welcome one and all.

For those of you newer to this, usually about 25 people show up, we drum for about 90 minutes – with a little guidance from me, but mostly my job is to get out of the way of the emerging groove. If you are new to drumming, I’ll teach you what you need to know, don’t worry. I have mounds of drums and rattles and shaky, thumpy, scratchy, woo-wooy gizmos to satisfy just about every rhythmic desire. Don’t’ worry. Just show up. Let the spirit of the drum drum you and dance you.

If you have been thinking to yourself “Oh, I’d like to try to get to drumming sometime” or if you’ve thought “Oh, how I miss drumming” or "God, I really need SOMETHING to move me" or if you are thinking “who is this nut writing this email?” now is the time. Just show up, and fear not. Don’t let that worldly inertia win this time. Stand up to the voices that say "too tired, too bummed, too worried, too poor, too embarrassed…" on and on the voices go. I know these voices well, because they are in me all the time and the drum has been the greatest gift of my life to help me stand up against any voce that tells me to remain small and sad, empty and disappointed and disconnected.

I’m no expert, I’m not wise man, I’m no guru. I’m a guy that fell in love with the drum and was opened, opened. It doesn’t matter if you want ecstatic fun, human connection, answers to that old question, healing from that wound, some way of running the sadness through you so it stops choking you, some way of touching the Divine, the otherworld, the Mighty Ones, the Holy Spirit – it’s all there in the drum. Welcome.

See you soon,

Jaime

August 2009 Experiences

2009-08-03T12:04:00.006-05:00

Amanda Hone

Dear seekers after earthy wonder,

I can’t stand it, I want to drum. I want to drum in the woods. How about you? It's a full moon this Friday.

Below are a series of drumming experiences I am offering in August. The first one, August 7th (7-9:30PM) is most like one of our usual drumming events, except it will be outdoors. The location is Hidden Falls Park, North Entrance. (There is a south entrance too, but we will be at the north entrance). We will meet in the open space near the covered dining areas. Then I will lead you to a hidden spot in the woods, and we will drum, drum, drum for about an hour. Then the second part of the evening will focus on contacting the spirits of nature. Wa-hoo!

Click for Directions. Bring a blanket or camp chair to sit on. And bug spray if you need it. And water to drink. And an absolute lack of worry about how you look when you are sweating and ecstatic. And a dose of curiosity. And a love of this wondrous earth.

The remaining August events described below will be limited to less than a dozen people, and focused on exploring the modern shamanic path. If you are looking only for cool, spirit-filled drumming, August 7th is for you, and you can skip the rest of this email. If you are interested in an introduction to the modern shamanic path, read on, traveler, read on.

Other August Drum Experiences
If you are interested in any of the below, please email me your reservation. I have a couple of scholarship spots open, so if money is your only obstacle to attending any of these, please feel free to contact me, and don’t let money stop you. There is also what I call “the intensive option” which is a way of adding in more individual guidance from me as you work through all or any of the experiences below. You can choose to attend one or more of the “intensive meetings” in this option.

Saturday Aug 8: Shamanic Experience: The Wisdom of Wild Things
1-4 PM Cost: $45 Intensive mtg. at 11:30
This work will focus on what are often called “power animals.” For those of you who have no experience in this area, this will be a very good introduction and will lay the groundwork for a great deal of further shamanic study. For those who have had experience with power animals, you can use this workshop to deepen your relationship with the other world. Location: Hidden Falls Park, North entrance. We will meet in the open space near the covered dining areas.
Click for Directions

Friday 14th Intensive meeting 7-8:30 PM At First Universalist Church, 34th and Dupont
Saturday Aug: 15: Shamanic Experience: The Healing of the Waters
1-4 PM Cost: $45
This experience is dedicated to asking to be healed. It will involve getting wet. Very, very wet. Like all shamanic work, this will be most effective for you if you bring to it a very open and trusting heart and a deep need to be set free from what has wounded you.
Location: Hidden Falls Park, North entrance. We will meet in the open space near the covered dining areas.
Click for Directions

Friday Aug 28: Intensive meeting 7-8:30 PM
Saturday Aug 29: Shamanic Experience: The Baptism of the Elements
1-4 PM Cost: $45
The focus is on making a change in your life, asking for support for that change from the elements (earth, water, fire and air) and also making a promise to the elements. This is a simple sounding experience, but I can tell you from experience that it can be quite challenging and profound, and absolutely not to be taken lightly.
Location: To be determined.

Sunday Aug 30: intensive meeting/coffee chat 10 am-11:30

You can sign up for all of the above, or pick and choose.

Intensive option: Like our Friday drums, all of the above are “stand-alone” experiences that require no preparation, no follow up, and no previous experience. Also like the Friday drums, if you chose to participate in all of these experiences, they build on one another creating a total that is greater than the sum of the parts. For those who have previous shamanic experience or want want to go deeper into this kind of study, I have what I call the Intensive option which is merely a way for us to work on crafting your journey through these experiences more to you specific, individual needs. Those choosing this option will have the option to meet with me one-on one and also as a group.

Payment:
If you are not part of the intensive study, please feel free to pay on the spot at any of the experiences you are able to attend. Cash is best, but checks are okay too.

For those in the intensive study your total cost is $250. I ask that you pay $150 in advance of or at the first meeting on Aug. 7, and $100 by Friday Aug 29 (unless I have made other arrangements with you). If this poses a problem let’s chat about the timing. If you decide to exit the study before Aug 15, I will refund $75, and no refunds will happen after that point. It’s outside of my nature to sound so strict, but I consider the commitment you are making to be very important. I will work very hard to give you the best experience and guidance I can, and hope you will return this by placing this brief time period very high on your priority list. You may pay by check or cash at our first meeting, or you can pay through www.paypal.com (click on “send money” and enter jaime@drummingthesoulawake.com ).

Thanks to you all for your shimmering courage and your warm yearning.
Jaime

2009-06-17T11:20:00.005-05:00

"Sun God*" by Anya ´broom rider´ Kholodova

Dear Drummers,

You’d think a shamanish-mythic guy like me would pay more attention to the summer solstice. The winter solstice – I’m totally wrapped up in that, but why is the summer solstice less important to me?

The winter solstice has been drawn into the mainstream by the influence of feminism. The images around the winter solstice are immediately accessible to all: rebirth, hope, light in the dark time. You don’t need to be in any way pagan to love these ideas. The winter solstice is also powerfully rebellious – it’s the anti-Christmas holiday, but placed at the same time of year so you get to eat fudge without needing to obey Jesus.

The summer solstice has none of this going for it, and it has a major strike against it: it focuses on the divine masculine, and this makes my feminist energies uncomfortable. I danced my way to the great mother largely because I was tired of having the divine masculine jammed down my mythic gullet. I have been wanting to explore and rectify my own resistance to the summer solstice.

In the pagan world it is said that the summer solstice honors the sun god in all his full, blooming, exuberant, life-giving, Yang-ness. The Celts connected summer to the direction south, where the sun comes from, climbing its way up from the southern horizon day by day after the winter solstice and returning there as winter returns. And for the Celts, the south is the mythic direction associated with exuberant, sensuous, celebratory reveling of the life force: music, dancing, love-making and feasting are all qualities of the south and summer.

But the summer solstice is also the point on the wheel of the year when the sun begins its descent toward the darkness of the winter solstice. So the day that we celebrate as the first day of summer is actually the last day of the sun-god’s brilliant fullness. There is a grieving here and this is another reason why the summer solstice has not made it into the mainstream.

But how beautiful, and how exactly like all of life: in the midst of the greatest, most intense joy, the grieving: the knowledge that life is linked inextricably with death, that everything is transient. Your lover’s face will grow old, and yours too; the darkness will come. Isn’t this what makes orgasm so powerful and so sought after – the fact that it only lasts a few moments? The sun turns its back on us and heads south, and we cry out over the unfairness; summer should last longer, the life force should never wane or transform or abandon us.

So we create heaven and we tell our children that death is only an illusion, or only for some, but not us. The Celts created “Summerland” - sort of a version of heaven where it’s always summer, and the trees have blossoms, fruit and nuts all the time, where it’s never night and the air is filled with constant music, dancing and revelry. Summerland is heaven with sex and whiskey, and that is why I think the Celts are the smartest people in the world.

There is nothing at all wrong with heaven unless, as is so often the case, your vision of heaven keeps you from dancing, eating, singing and kissing your ever-loving worldly heart out while in this life, and sneering at those who aren’t afraid to. If the summer solstice teaches us anything, it teaches us to not be afraid of loving this world, loving our bodies, and loving our desires and our skills, and loving this moment - this moment, now, as the sun god does.

So this Friday, please come prepared for exuberance. Bring cut flowers if you can, and maybe a little summery kind of snack. And don’t be distressed if you can’t, or if you forget.

I leave you with this poem from my book “Drumming The Soul Awake”

Don’t listen to those who tell you
it’s wrong to love me.
Untie those perfectly starched clothes
and open your soft animal body.

Seawater wears down the sharp rocks
kiss after soft kiss
then takes such pleasure moving a slow hand
over that smooth roundness.

The southern breeze runs its fingers
through the trees
and they can’t hold back their bursting:
One after another fragrant sighs fill the air.

And that flame — how it licks at the crevices
between trembling logs.
Can’t you hear them crying out:
“Glowing like this is what I was made for!”

How I enjoy stealing up behind you
on your peaceful walk through the shady woods.
How you moan with surprise and fall open to me.
How I love to sing to you from
the night branches
holding my distance until you beg me
in that particular voice
to climb in your window
and utterly own you.

But, beloved, you know a secret dance —
the one they warned you not to learn.
When you open your soft animal body
you become my favorite wine
and before I know it
I come begging you for that particular kiss.

© 2006 by Jaime Meyer. I am compelled to admit that the “soft animal body” line is a quote from Mary Oliver’s poem The Wild Geese.

Appearing and Vanishing

2009-06-03T22:33:00.005-05:00

Dear Drummers,

Welcome all, welcome newcomers and old-comers, welcome rhythmically proficient and groovlically challenged, welcome to anyone who wants to set in motion their hands, their arms, their bodies, and most important, their life-loving, love-living, ever-pulsing Spirit, that Spirit coursing through you that loves your Earth and earths your love! Welcome, welcome to drumming this Friday, June 5th.

The photo above is a robin’s nest that seemed to suddenly appear on the second-story window sill of our house two weeks ago. Ten days ago, these eggs appeared. A few days ago, two gooey, trembling almost-birds appeared. A couple of days ago, fully feathered small robins seemed to replace the previous occupants. This morning the nest was empty. Tonight, while playing catch with my two boys in the front yard, a sudden explosion of bird screeches made us run to the back yard where we witnessed no less than six robins attacking, as mightily as they were able to, a large, dark bird. They all scuttled through the shadowed branches of the giant elm, appearing here, disappearing there, until finally the large bird swooped out – maybe a Cooper’s hawk – I’ve seen him fly through our yard low several times lately, gliding low past the living room window – or maybe it was a crow. In the large bird’s mouth, a trembling baby robin. A few muscular flaps of its long wings, and the dark bird was gone, skimming just out of reach of the tree tops, the community of robins only able to watch: stunned, quiet, empty as the sun sank down.

And so it goes, this life in which each and every one of us eats, and each and every one of us becomes food.

And so we drum.

Addendum: This morning I awoke to the sound of small wings fluttering against the window. I looked out, and there I saw the mother robin, perched in the nest - preparing it for the next brood? Robins typically have two broods per season, sometines three. On it goes, this dance between eros and thanatos, the life force and death force, both of whom sing to us at each moment. On it goes, on and on.

And so we drum together.

The Spiritual Power of the Receding Hairline

2009-05-21T12:59:00.007-05:00

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 that, with your new hair, you will be invited to play volleyball at the beach and your sales numbers will increase.

We have forgotten the spiritual aspect of balding. Our culture has twisted this as it has twisted so many other experiences that are essentially holy. You are certainly aware that the ancient Greeks believed that balding was caused by too much Eros, or sensual life energy, rising up inside a man, burning the roots of the hair from the inside. The Greeks revered these transformed men as περιπλάνηση θεία ψωλή: wandering divine phalluses, dispensing sexual wisdom.

In even more ancient India, a similar image appears. A second-century BCE illustration of the Hindu holy book The Bhagavad-Gita shows Krishna, the divine embodiment of bliss, dancing on what is clearly a top view of the human mind, with the two lobes of the brain on either side. The dark hair on the left is being danced away by the God of Bliss, and at the right, Krishna lifts the veil of illusion, revealing the balding head—the seat of divine emptiness, spiritual openness, and unfettered awareness. In this image, Krishna dances atop the highest chakra (spiritual energy center) on the top of the head. This is the culmination point of the Kundalini, the erotic energy that works its way up from the base of the spine to the top of the head. An ancient text says, “When the Kundalini is raised up to Sahasrara chakra, illusion is dissolved.” The God of Bliss literally dances away a man’s hair—the symbol for his worldly attachment.

We may move backwards even more in history to the time of the shamans and the very earliest cave paintings. This image etched in stone from primitive Scotland shows a shaman, empowered by divine energy—his hands have become small suns, radiating life energy. He appears poised before a Celtic knot, the ancient mystical artwork of the Celts. It would be easy to see the shape rising from the shaman’s head as imbas, Gaelic for “the fire in the head,” a renowned spiritual flame that issues forth from poets and druids. This would link this image to the two previous ideas of the fiery Greek Eros and the erotic Kundalini rising.

That would indeed be an exciting connection, but it would be incorrect. In truth, the shape above his head is the claw of the female Irish divinity the Morrigan, or Great Queen, who often assumes a crow’s shape. Here that crow’s claw scratches the last hair off the front of the shaman’s head—that last remaining “soul patch” on many a man’s otherwise bald head. In Scots Gaelic that hairy patch was called the “final plug of understanding.” The image displays that moment of opened awareness, the same moment as Krishna lifting the veil in the previous picture, or the “mournful gasp” as the Germans would refer to it three thousand years later. At this moment, the shaman suddenly sees the interconnectedness of the entire universe, symbolized by the Celtic knot at his feet. Does he gaze in; does he bend to drink from that universal well of wisdom? Or perhaps he dives in? Whichever he decides, it is only because the final plug of understanding has been removed and the secrets of creation revealed.

And so for father’s day I will shave off my own final plug of understanding. The secrets of the universe will open to me, and I too can begin to sing the ancient druid’s song:

Beautiful it is when the drum
is rubbed smooth by the Gods.
Beautiful the song of understanding.
Beautiful the shining orb of dawn
moving across the land.
The maidens gasp with delight.

Jaime Meyer is a theologian, writer and urban shaman living in Minneapolis. Some things in this article were not exactly factually true.

The Pain-Body and The Presence

2009-05-06T10:20:00.011-05:00

Dear drummers,

The picture of me at left was taken about 18 years ago, from a semester-long mask-making class I taught at Winona State University. I named the mask “Mr. Doom.” He was the voice constantly chattering in my mind telling me, “everything you think, everything you say and everything you do has always turned out shitty and it always will.” I worked with students to build masks of their own inner voices, and the class culminated with each student performing a masked dance/monologue as that inner voice.

I didn’t realize until years later that what I was teaching my students, and what I was doing for myself, is what the superstar spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle calls “distancing yourself from the pain-body,” and what the shamans call “allowing yourself to be danced by spirits.” Both acts are intended to move the chattering voices from the inside to the outside so you can understand what they want from you.

Tolle describes the pain-body as an energy field which almost everyone carries within them, made up of old emotional pain. The pain-body generates a story for you that defines your actions and decisions. The stories have titles like “No one can be trusted,” “I’m in this all alone,” “I have to fight to survive,” “There is never enough money,” “Life will always let you down,” and in some people’s case, “I am shitty at everything I think, say and do.”

One way to recognize the pain-body is when your “buttons” are pushed-when you over-react to a fairly simple comment or situation (like when I opened an email from my boss this morning saying I had not included some of his edits in a document so it was a “good thing” he looked it over. Mr. Doom began dancing wildly, chanting in that guttural croak, “He finally found out you’re shitty! You’re gonna get fired! You’re gonna die homeless, alone and crazy and your children will forget you ever existed!”).

Tolle says that the majority of our interactions with one another are interactions between our pain-bodies. That is a powerful statement. Read it again, and think about your interactions. He goes onto say, hauntingly, “You don’t just marry your spouse; you marry their pain body.” Argh.

The first and most important thing we can do on our spiritual path is to free ourselves from the delusions of the pain-body’s manufactured, false, tiny reality. When we do, we find ourselves living on “A New Earth” (the title of his most recent book), an earth wherein we feel connected to everything, can take great pleasure in the smallest things, can shed ourselves of compulsions to acquire things, and can live in the “Now;” an earth in which we are viscerally aware of a blessing Presence.

Wait a minute-this is exactly what we do in our Firday drums!

This Friday we will work specifically with Tolle’s image, and we will have a wonderful gift given to us by one of our drumming kinsman. I think its going to be an amazing evening, and powerful.

See you soon,
Jaime

2009-04-16T21:55:00.004-05:00

Dear Drummers,

Welcome Spring! Welcome drummers! If you have been saying, “Ah, man, I really want to get to one of those drumming groups,” this Friday is a perfect time. It’s going to be a fun, uplifting and blessing drum.

I love the term you hear in Minnesota at mid-April: “ice-out.” It’s the point at which the lakes are finally free of winter ice. Or as some say, it’s the point at which the ice no longer blocks navigation. That is a wonderful spiritual image, for all spiritual work is about two things: removing blockages and courageously opening yourself to the heat of the life force. I’ve been fortunate to have been iced-in many times in my life - fortunate because it taught me how wonderful it is at ice-out. The drum is our warming deliverer of life force, the bringer of ice-out.

I’ve been thinking about loneliness. I seem to come across a lot of articles about how lonely we all are, and many of them point to the proliferation of electronic devices in our lives as the root cause. These little blinking seductresses are certainly mesmerizing but they are a symptom, not the cause of our loneliness. We are lonely because we have been culturally trained to detach from creation, and what could be lonelier than that? I believe we are in a long, painful, but absolutely necessary process of learning how to reattach to creation. This is the role of theology in our lifetime because there will be no re-attachment to creation without a viable theology to support it. I believe this is why drumming is more than just fun – everything about drumming teaches us how to re-connect with creation: with our body, with the rhythms of the earth and sky, with each other, with the holy imagination, and with sacred eroticism.

By the way, there’s nothing wrong with drumming just being fun.

At this drum (April 17th) we celebrate and connect with the awakening warmth and pleasure in the land (both outer and inner landscapes), the Groovelicious Rhythmocity of the softening earth, the dancing waters, the flowing air. And the fire, yes, that southerly breeze pouring from the lips of The Goddess Brigit, that warming breath of springtime. Ice-out.

Welcome one and all!

Jaime

Easter Week

2009-04-09T22:12:00.008-05:00

Dear Drummers,

I always want Easter week to be different than it is. There is so much to love about the tradition of Christ and Easter, except for the core theological story claimed by the church, which I reject.

That story goes that 1) God made a beautiful world without death 2) we disobeyed His command not to eat from the tree of knowledge 3) in His anger and disappointment He re-engineered creation to include death and suffering 4) He kicked us out into that world to make our own way 5) after awhile He was overcome with regret or forgiveness and 6) He sent His Son/Himself to be sacrificed, which cleansed humanity of its sin and guilt, as long as they believed the story.

It’s often said that every religion is a culture’s answer to the question “Why do we suffer and die?” The Garden of Eden story is a workable answer to that question, and the Christ-as-sacrifice addendum is a workable evolution of the story. Well, workable up until now when we need to stop hoping and praying to get off the planet, and we need to start saving the web of life.

Yes, it is an important question: why do we suffer and die? But there is another question that is actually more important to me: why is there beauty and pleasure? And why are they so deep and profound? If our disobedience caused God such anguish that He re-engineered all of His creation in order to punish us, why would He then insert so much beauty and pleasure into that secondary creation? Do we fill our penitentiaries with ballet and opera, with chocolate éclairs, with forests of chirping birds, with art and love and pleasure?

There are only a few answers to this question: why is there pleasure and beauty in such abundance?

One is that God made earth a place of punishment but then sort of changed his mind and made it so it wasn’t THAT bad, because He loved us, or for some other reason. But that does not really account for the intensity and ubiquity of pleasure and beauty.
Another is God is really cynical and so taunts us with pleasure and beauty to make suffering seem even worse by comparison.
Another is that God places beauty and pleasure on earth as a test of our faith—to see if we will fall into the trap of wanting to stay here more than we want to go to heaven.
Another is that all pleasure and beauty come from the devil. Plenty of people believe this. God allows the devil to tempt us, which either makes Him super mysteriously wise and all-powerful, or extra-cynical.
Another is that the pleasure, beauty, suffering and death are all part of the same illusion. This answer is found most famously in Buddhism and in Hinduism, but also in all mystical (i.e. escape-the-earth-and-body) theologies.

Well, these answers work for a lot of people, but they don’t work for me. The answer for me is that the story of Sin-Redemption-Salvation is wrong. Or to put it a better way, it was a workable story for a long time – for the centuries that we thought the sun revolved around the earth and that when it rained it was because God opens windows in the dome of heaven to let a little of the watery chaos fall into his bubble of creation. Almost no one believes any of that now, and it’s time we move off the Sin-Redemption-Salvation story.

For me, the move needs to be away from redemption and toward forgiveness. You need redemption for being born broken. We are not born broken. That story is wrong, twisted and anti-Holy. Its no wonder some of the earliest heretics killed by the church died for saying that the punishing God portrayed by the church fathers was, in fact, the devil. We do not need redemption for being born into a naturally sinful body, but we need forgiveness often for the choices we make.

From Good Friday to Easter morning I choose to focus on Christ’s words from the cross: “Forgive them, they do not know what they are doing.” This is the core of the Christian tradition for me, because again and again and again we become afraid when the Holy appears before us saying, “Love your neighbor as much as yourself, love the creator of this unfathomable beauty around you as much as you love yourself.” We are always afraid that if we truly live that humble love for this world, we will lose power, prestige and possessions. We chose ourselves again and again over our neighbor and over the beauty of the world, and for that we are engaged in a constant dance of forgiveness with the Sacred. The story of the cross and the Resurrection did not happen once 2,000 years ago to someone else - it happens inside me again and again each day as I make my choices.

I leave you with a poem from Rainer Maria Rilke:

Through the empty branches the sky remains.

It is what you have.

Be earth now, and evensong.

Be the ground lying under that sky.

Be modest now, like a thing

ripened until it is real,

so that what began it all

can feel you when it reaches for you.

(I changed the words from “so that ‘he’ who began it all…”)

Back from India

2009-03-26T16:49:00.003-05:00

This is one of my favorite images, taken by a friend, from Jaipur, India, a few hours south of New Delhi.

2009-03-19T01:34:00.004-05:00

Image: Israfel's Trumpet

I am just outside New Delhi right now, working in one of India’s “Silicon Valleys.” It doesn’t take traveling to the other side of the world to make you meditate on the human condition, but it does help.

I often see in snapshots and here is my picture of the day:

A well-dressed Indian man standing on the curb, gracefully smoking his cigarette while jibber-jabber-yakking into his cell phone. He is set aglow by the slanting morning light careening off the cement dust and motor-scooter exhaust swirling around him. He stands, confident and strong, like a God surveying his creation. Two women in saris, banana yellow and radiant teal, waft by him, angelic faces the color of dusk-lit earth. Just beyond the glowing man, on the other side of the street, a long strip of temporary houses line the road; houses made of thick branches and plastic sheeting – a tent town of 100 parents and children, the workers building a brick wall along the road. The women squat by makeshift hearths, cooking tea for the men while the children run giddily up and down the mounds of grey sand piled here and there. In the back of my throat I can taste the dust kicked up by their game, the dust that fills the air everywhere here. The children are gleeful like my children. This snapshot is bordered by two immense bougainvillea trees, two cascades of fuchsia blossoms framing each side of the image.

What I see in this is a planet brimming with living creatures, each doing its best to survive and to work itself into the next level of security and comfort, each eating the earth and making tools of the earth and eventually becoming earth. From smoking man to cooking woman to the bees buzzing in the bougainvillea and mosquitoes prowling for just one taste of any of it, to the malaria parasites in the mosquito waiting to be ejected into Shangri-la, each of us moves day by day, surviving, and if we are luckily placed in the system, or strong, or a little more ruthless than the next being: thriving.

On it goes across the face of a tiny blue-green marble spinning through the outskirts of a medium-sized galaxy, dancing among hundreds of billions of galaxies. Simultaneously religion is the most unimportant and the most crucial thing in this picture. For we are adrift in energies not of our own making, energies we cannot comprehend though some us try, energies which bring us into life, give us sustenance and suffering throughout our lives, and that tell us it is time for us to become earth again, goodbye, for now.

And so we drum together.

I leave you with this poem by the 12th Century Sufi, Yunus Emre:

We encountered the house of realization,

we witnessed the body.

The whirling skies, the many-layered earth,the seventy-thousand veils,

we found in the body.

The night and the day,

the planets,the words inscribed on the Holy Tablets,

the hill that Moses climbed, the Temple,

and Israfil's trumpet, we observed in the body.

Torah, Psalms, Gospel, Quran --

what these books have to say,

we found in the body.

Everybody says these words of Yunus

are true. Truth is wherever you want it.

We found it all within the body.

Jon Stewart: Amos With Fart Jokes

2009-03-13T11:24:00.007-05:00

Every now and then I see the Holy Spirit rise up and I get amazed, thrilled and spooked all at the same time-the way you are supposed to feel when the Holy Spirit comes near you. It happened Thursday when Jon Stewart interviewed Jim Cramer from CNBC, calling to task Cramer and other television financial reporters for not working harder to uncover the financial crisis before it wrecked the economy. If you have not seen it, and all of this week’s Daily Shows leading up to the confrontation, you see it by clicking here. And you can see the nauseating extended interview with Cramer where he, for some reason, tells the truth about himself and CNBC by clicking here.

In the Hebrew Scriptures (the “Old Testament”) the prophet Amos cries out disparagingly:

“Hear this word, you cows of Bashan…you women who oppress the poor and crush the needy and say to your husbands, "Bring us some drinks!" …The time will surely come when you will be taken away with hooks…”(Amos 4)

Amos is speaking to the well-coiffed country-club ladies of his time; the prideful, narcissistic, empty-headed, trend-setting, fashion-forward wives of the CEOs, hedge-fund managers and AIG executives of ancient Israel – the respected, highly successful men who swept up the nation’s riches while the workers (the producers of the wealth) went without shoes. The wives live beautiful lives with but one simple task – to be pretty and entertaining while heaping praise on their husbands and on the economic structure that sustains the pretty cows' lip-glossed existence. When Stewart makes fun of Jim Cramer and CNBC financial “reporters,” he is calling them the cows of Bashan. There's a lot more in this text, and he's not indicitng women as the bone-headed biblical literalists of our time would claim. Amos is talking to any nicely dressed synchopant, which describes all television financial reporters.

Jon Stewart is a prophet dressed in new clothes. Prophets are always dismissed and ridiculed by the power elite, and this is why in our time, as in most times, the prophet arrives in the form of the Fool. The Fool’s job is to attack the power elite with humor. The prophets’ job is to bring down those in economic power who are wreaking destruction on the land and to call the people back in to the state of shalom: balance, peace, right-living. It is an amazing thing to behold, and who would have thought it would be beamed in from the home of fart jokes and censor bleeps: the Comedy Channel? The Spirit works n mysterious ways.

The Collapse

2009-03-10T15:46:00.003-05:00

Click here for the origin of this image

Dear Drummers,

Welcome one and all to the next boom-boom-whacka-whacka-thump-tikka-takka-thump- drumming gathering. If you have been wishing you’d finally make it to a drum, turn those thoughts into life-loving action and join in this week for what will be great deal of lighthearted fun. Well, lighthearted for the first 93 minutes or so, and then…well, I’ll get to that.

Some days I write a really smart, insightful letter to you that lays out a stunning, imaginative plan for the upcoming drum. And then I erase it because it’s all a bunch of insincere crap. Today is one of those days, and I have to go back to being honest, which always scares me.

The past few days I’ve noticed that my dreams have been overwhelmingly anxious. I wake up having been chased around by wild-haired women who bite me all over with razor sharp teeth, or I wake up after driving fast along winding mountain roads, with those three guffawing yellow-toothed murderers trying to run me off a cliff. I began to realize that these dreams are otherworldly translations of the ambient anxiety upon which we are all floating these days – worry over the economy, job losses and the future. I personally welcome the change that we are seeing – a forced move away from panting consumerism that is so destructive. But I admit to wishing everything was back to “normal” with my house ballooning in (false) value, and being able to refinance again and again to feel (falsely) ever-richer.

The collapsing economy is, in essence a collapse of cultural mythology. What we all “bought into” is collapsing under us. It does not matter if you welcome this new world or fear it; we are all in the collapse together.

So I wrote a really smart letter and laid out a wonderful plan, and it was all so spiritually hip except for the fact that I had completely ignored what I had been told by the spirit world earlier this week. I ignored it because I was afraid of it - afraid of doing what I was advised to do. Finally after far too much typing of brilliant, flat and meaningless drivel, I came back around to saying yes to the advice.

When the mythic structure is collapsing, it’s even more important to drum, for two reasons. First, the drum catches you, cradles and embraces you. Second, the drum reminds you that you are not really falling, but changing, which certainly can feel like falling. So the drum is a great help right now, a necessary tool to help us remain grounded, calm and focused on what matters most. Coming on Friday just to let the drum hold you – that is reason enough to make your way to the group.

After that 93 minutes or so of drumming we will head into the ceremonial part of the evening involving some shamanic activity that I’d rather not do, but I trust it has a healing value or it would not be made so present to me this week. Time after time when I am resistant to what the spirit world asks of me, and when I take the courage to move against that resistance, to melt into trust, I have found that there is a healing involved. I think the spirit world wants to offer you that kind of healing, so I’ll do what I can to follow its advice this Friday during the ceremonial part of the evening. As always, you’ll have the complete freedom to participate in whatever way feels true and right for you.

But we will begin the evening with rambunctious, rowdy rhythmocity, moving toward sublime, supine (but not sub-prime) soulfulness.

Welcome fellow travelers in the landscape of the inner body! Welcome adventurers of the soul-scape! Welcome one and all!

Jaime

The Two Imaginations

2009-02-18T21:14:00.006-06:00

Image: Karin Basel

Dear Drummers,

Lately I find myself lost in this recurring reverie: Me, reclining on a sun-drenched, padded, chaise lounge by the glittering blue swimming pool in my Los Angeles back yard, typing the next episode of Law and Order SVU or Dirty Sexy Money on my laptop, a frosty Mojito and shiny cell phone on the table next to me, a bevy of eager interns nearby, ready to meet my every demand. When I jolt back to my dim and frosty Minnesota reality, I understand that this daydream is about achieving some kind of great success by working with my imagination, which I have spent so many years refining.

Once again I am reminded that there are two kinds of imagination.

When we gather to drum, we enter into the sacred imagination. This is the imagination as described by philosophical giants like Henry Corbin, who drew a distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal. This imagination is the bridge, the ladder, the clearing in the woods, the amber-lit hollows of the heart – whatever image you would like to describe it by – where we go and where the divine comes to meet us. It is the place where we transmute spiritual states into physical states; in other words, where wisdom comes into our awareness and then into our body and into our actions.

Much of modern culture would make light of this meeting place, calling it mere self-generated fantasy. Yet for as long as humans have stood on two legs we have sought out and entered the sacred imagination in order to make meaning of our lives on earth, and to help us see through the pain and limits of our existence. Whether you are aware of it or not, I believe this is why you come (or wish you had come!) to our drumming gatherings.

But neither is entering the sacred imagination as grand as some would make it. The truth is, the sacred imagination is a gift – a Grace – bestowed on each of us that come into this world through a human womb. It takes no special skill, no special blessing to commune with the sacred imagination any more than it does to have a beating heart or filling and expelling lungs. This is why I try to keep our ceremonial work together as free of mystical mumbo-jumbo as I can. It’s why when I sing, I don’t use words.

The purpose of our drum gatherings, as I see it, is to simply prepare an environment wherein you can feel safe to drop any resistance or fear you have to opening your own pathway into your own sacred imagination.

What is the other imagination? Simone Weil referred to it as the imagination whose purpose was to create filler for the cracks in our psyche from which Grace would normally arise. That is, for me, a hugely powerful phrase, and it answers the question of why I devote my imaginative skills to our drumming community rather than writing Dirty Sexy Money. Television, far above all other skilled, artful mediums, exists to fill the cracks in our psyche, to plug the emerging openings where Grace would enter into our life.

I believe that, for you, coming to the drum is an act of saying no, for at least a short while, to the many forces that pour out filler onto your soul-scape. I pray that my friend, the amazing TV writer and producer of Dirty Sexy Money, doesn’t read this, or my chances of getting into that sunlit chaise lounge will be vastly reduced. But I’m not saying anything he doesn’t already know. And to be clear: I love and need some imaginative filler in my life as much as anyone! For me the important issue is the balance between the two imaginations.

So, we gather this Friday to boom-ba-boom-tak-tada-tada-boom-ba-boom our way into the imaginal, where we may ask for a little bit of Grace to seep up through the cracks in our inner soul-scape and teach us how we should live in wisdom. Welcome one and all! Welcome newcomers and welcome old-comers! Welcome!

See you soon,

Jaime

Another Great Awakening

2009-02-04T16:56:00.004-06:00

Kathryn Abernathy, "Mandarin Morning" See more of her amazing work.

Dear Drummers,

I want to extend a warm invitation to all of you to join in the groovelicious rhythmocity this Friday! But a special welcome to anyone who is new to the group and anyone who has wanted to attend but has been a bit shy about it. There are a LOT of new people right now and that makes for a wonderful energy. If I have not said it out loud, please know that I always admire anyone who seeks out our drumming community and takes the step to attend, because everything in our culture makes it far easier to withdraw from human company and from spiritual seeking than to move toward it. I think you will see very quickly that this is an open, welcoming conglomeration of human spirits. So, welcome!

This is the time of year that we in the Celtic Shamanic tradition start talking about the goddess Brighid, who is associated with the emerging springtime and the surfacing of new life from frozen winter. Brighid is a major figure in the Celtic pantheon; a mother goddess and divine force of healing and creativity. You can get all kinds of inspiring understanding of Brighid from a million web sites and from that absolutely stunning new book by Jaime Meyer: Drumming the Soul Awake. (What a masterpiece!)

Do you see, as I do, that on a national and global level, we are in a time of awakening? I believe you all are attracted to drumming, at least in the way I facilitate it and the way our group embodies it, because you feel a kind of awakening happening, in the world, and in you, and you want to understand it; you want to call it forth and feed it. You want to nurture the Awakening.

This Friday we will drum up a cornucopia of hot grooves and cool moves for about 90 minutes. Then we will enter into a ceremony of feeding the spirit of our drum. If you own a drum, it’s a great time to bring it. If you don’t, please don’t worry, the drum is an object but it is also a spirit that accompanies you and a metaphor upon which you can pleasantly ruminate. This Friday, the drum is the voice of Brighid, the one who sings to us to awaken what needs to be awakened. So if you want to, bring a drum, rattle or any ceremonial object. And if you want to, bring an offering—anything biodegradable. Examples include herbs, flowers, tobacco, and poems written on small pieces of paper, liquor, chocolate, nuts, fruit, and seed. But no meat, dairy or eggs.

Bruce Levine wrote a heady article for Z Magazine this month called Fundamentalist Consumerism and an Insane Society. His point is that our entire culture is insane in its worship of stuff over anything else. I agree with much of his thesis, and especially like his use of the word “Fundamentalist.” The media revels in funny stories about wacky religious ideas and religious wars, but the real (and truly destructive) fundamentalism in our culture is consumerism, which rarely gets a serious treatment. The awakening we are feeling now through the economic crash is a cracking open of our fundamentalist consumer culture. Time will tell whether we actually peer into that wound and heal it or put yet another Band-Aid on it and go dancing and drinking.

Below is an excerpt from Levine’s article. I believe our drumming serves as an antidote - as a healing force (as a song from Brighid) - to these six “assaults” on us by the consumerist culture.

It is difficult to protect oneself from the slow death caused by consumer culture. Human beings are every day and in numerous ways psychologically, socially, and spiritually assaulted by a culture which:
· creates increasing material expectations
· devalues human connectedness
· socializes people to be self-absorbed
· obliterates self-reliance
· alienates people from normal human emotional reactions
· sells false hope that creates more pain

I leave you with what has become a famous poem even in American culture by: Rumi

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don't go back to sleep.

2009-01-22T09:19:00.006-06:00

Image: abnormalarts.com

Dear Drummers,

I’ve been trying to write an eloquent, deeply thoughtful letter to you about the power of grieving, and the need for formalized ceremonies to channel grief through us so we can rebalance ourselves, for to be human is to build up grief about decisions we have made that later we realize have caused harm. I was going to tie my thinking to Obama’s inauguration speech where he said we need to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off. Americans hear in those words “good ‘ole American pluck” but I hear "and we need a ceremony to go with that."

I was going to say something about how our usual religious rituals to channel grieving through us – confession, the Eucharist, and asking Father God to forgive us our sins –these do not really work for me. Neither do the most common ritual activities to dispel grief: television and shopping. I was going to write about how Americans have become accustomed to living in some kind of a bubble , in fact, they demand a bubble and respond well to politicians who promise more bubbles, yet Obama seems to be saying that it’s time for us to exit the bubble life and live in the world. That’s easier said than done and we shall see if it is possible.

Well I was going to try to tie all of that together concisely but it’s been a week of distractions and suddenly it's Thursday and the drum is tomorrow I made a terrible mistake this morning by making up this little song for my two boys at breakfast:

“There once was a boy who lost his pants
He sat on hill populated by ants
Ow- ow- oooooooh! Ow Ow ooooooh!”
(And then you have to shake wildly)

And now they are running around the house singing it and guffawing and there is no way I can craft a thoughtful letter to you in the few moments I have to do it. But as I think about it, that song is a pretty good description of grieving and the ceremony of dispelling grief. Well, the Spirit works through us in unexpected ways, I suppose.

Tomorrow I intend to tell you a very good midwinter story about grief over choices that have harmed us. Some of you may have heard it before and that’s good, because stories get more powerful the more times you hear them. Then we’ll enter into a ceremony intended to move grieving through us. But of course we will begin with warm, delicious, groovelicious rhythm-making!

See you soon!

Jaime

Happy New Year!

2008-12-31T18:14:00.007-06:00

Joan Miro, Bathing Woman

Dear Drummers,

I look forward to gathering this Friday, January 2 for warm laughs and cool rhythms. For those of you new to this email list, we meet at from 7-9:30 PM at First Universalist Church in uptown, Minneapolis: 34th street and Dupont Avenue South. Click here for a map. The easiest parking is on the south end of the building. We drum for about 90 minutes, then we take a break for tea and cookies and we come back together in “hour two” for a meditative or ceremonial element. The suggested donation for the evening is $15 but please don’t stay away because money is an issue. If the drum is calling you, answer. Pay with joy, and with abandon and with love of Spirit.

It is lovely, oh lovely
We turn our eyes to the North:
The frozen earth, the defense against the dark,
the silence between the dreams.
Arise in me, and pour forth from me
Thou silence of the North.

By the time Friday rolls around, the whirlwind of the holidays will be over. Now we can turn our attention to the energies of winter: rest and silence and what I like to call instasy. This is a similar energy to ecstasy (a rapturous delight arising from moving outside of your accepted boundaries) except that its direction is inward.

I have never liked the phrase “New Year’s resolutions.” I like to replace it with: “New Year’s dissolutions and evolutions.” I think the reason so many New Year’s resolutions fail is twofold. First, we don’t do the “dissolution” part. Like painting a wall, if you do the quick, easy (lazy) work of slapping a new coat on without scraping the old paint off first, the paint does not stick for long; it bubbles and peels quickly and you find yourself back where you started (and even more depressed). Ceremonially speaking, we need to do the dissolution alongside the evolution.

Second, our resolutions tend to be mandated by society, not by the gods. Our resolutions are so often attempts to fit better into society’s norms, by getting thinner or prettier or more muscular or richer or less hairy or happier. I think the way around this is to ask not ourselves (our ego) what we want or should try to become, but ask the Spirit(s) what they want from us. They may not want us to exercise more—they may want us to forgive more. And by forgiving more we may find that we stop eating compulsively.

So Friday, we will find a way to create dissolution and evolution, and hopefully along the way experience a little (or a lot) of instasy.

See you soon!

Jaime

2008-12-04T15:03:00.005-06:00

"Heaven Forbid" by Gosha Gibek.)

Dear Drummers,

I’d like tor remind you about my Winter Solstice event at Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality. Click here for tickets. We had a rehearsal last night, and I am telling you, this show is going to be amazing.

At work today I asked a new employee if I could take his picture for a communications piece I was producing. He did what everyone one does when I ask to take their photo: cringed, and sheepishly said, okay. I started my usual speech trying to make him feel comfortable, and he let me speak for awhile but then quietly interrupted me and said it’s not that he’s embarrassed, it’s that is religion doesn’t really allow him to have his photo taken. He would have done it if I had insisted, which of course I did not. This experience made me wonder: what does my religion forbid me to do?

Well, first off, I don’t have a religion. I have a “spirituality” but I definitely not a religion, which is a heavy word. In fact the roots of the word religion are “to bind.” Spirituality comes from the word Spirit, which is the Latin word for breath: diaphanous, ephemeral, free.

All religions sprout from culture. I don’t think we invent God, as Freud asserted. There is something more mysterious about the universe than simply humans fantasizing about a Creator. But it is clear that in every corner of the world, our concept of God sprouts from our culture, which is rooted in our physical landscape. It is our time and place that offers us our vocabulary and imagery for God.

I am well aware that my God, my religion, sprout from the soil of 1960’s America, watered with fear of “the Man” and his institutions and fertilized with feminism and her freedoms. And this is why I have spirituality (breath) rather than a religion (the ties that bind).

But a question nags at me today: I know what my spiritual life calls me to do, what it calls me to try to be like. But does my spirituality call me away from anything? Does it ask me to deny anything of myself? Does it forbid me anything? I am finding that this is a very good question for me to ponder and so I offer it to you as well.

When religion forbids, is this the sign of some corrupt authority holding onto power? Is it a holdover from an older superstition that no one has dared to think through now in modern times? Or is it possible that a religion cannot be a truly deep one without stating injunctions against certain things? Once in seminary a professor said that any religion that does not seriously wrangle with sin is not a religion but a hobby. I walked away offended but I think he was right (and that’s probably why I was offended).

Can spirituality only call us to “the Good” or must it also warn us away from the evil? But not only warn, for that is a suggestion. I am talking about the power to forbid.

I’m thinking about this because on the Celtic wheel of the year we are heading into the direction North, which is associated with spiritual battle. And I’m thinking about the great Celtic warrior-hero Cúchulainn. In the Celtic world many heroes have a geasa, or taboo, laid upon them. Cúchulainn’s fate is sealed by his breaking of his geasa against eating dog meat. But in early Ireland there was a powerful general taboo against refusing hospitality, so when an old crone offers him a meal of dog meat, he has no choice to break his personal geis or break the cultural gies. He eats the meat, is made weak, and dies in battle soon after.

I am also thinking about a conversation I had once with a Rabbi who said that the laws of Judaism, which some people think of as too many and extreme, actually make him feel free. He knows exactly what he cannot do and therefore he does not spend energy contemplating these possibilities. For him, freedom comes from being firmly bound.

So, back to the question. What in my spiritual life binds me and thus frees me? What are my taboos? On Friday we will explore the topic of Spiritual battle. But not before we have a whole lotta thumpin’ stompin’ whompin’ fun.

2008-11-19T14:03:00.003-06:00

Dear Drummers,

I love Radio Jesus.

I’ve been groovin’ to Radio 91.5 “The Refuge: Positive hit Music” (translation: Christian rock music). When I worked a t the seminary I remember people making snipy comments about Christian pop music because it was considered so light on real theology. I always suspected that some of the professorial consternation included a dose of envy—that Christian Rock has an enthusiastic, even orgiastic audience, something scholarly publications could only dream about. Christian Rock also taps into one of the basic tensions for ministers—they always want their flock to go deeper, to work harder at their faith, to pray with more vulnerability, read more difficult books, and meditate longer. They find that the vast majority of the faithful want simple, non-nuanced and fun experiences that bring them a sense of peace.

Christian Rock co-opts the coolest riffs and most compelling melodies from the secular pop music world, and jams in praise lyrics. Only a few of the lyrics are distinctly dogmatic like the hip hop-lite: “I can’t believe that you died 4 me, gave me eternal life and eyes that see….” Most of the songs are love songs and the lyrics are indistinguishable from anything you’d hear on any other pop music radio station except all sexual energy is excised, as is anger. So you have the heavy metal sound without the earthy bite, and you have hip hop-hop structure with the sweat carefully removed.

What you are left with is a popular art form that is all about one thing: pleading for companionship, in a non human form, without the frailties, vagaries and pettiness that we must endure in every other relationship in our lives. Radio Jesus never lies to us or demands anything of us except our love; never betrays us or comes up short, never confuses us with competing truths. To the biblical scholar steeped in the conflicting truths revealed in every passage of scripture, Radio Jesus is an insult.

But to 99% of the faithful, Radio Jesus is all they really want from religion. Radio Jesus reminds us that on this cloudy day, if you were to just rise high enough, you would burst through the clouds and realize the sun is always shining and it’s constantly a new day in which your mistakes are erased and your welcome never wears out. The theologian comes to faith through the intricate maze of the mind; a faith built carefully brick by brick, and this is a good path for some. Most people come to faith through the need for comfort in a terribly frightening, disempowering and disappointing world, they want a spiritual Jacuzzi.

Well, I suppose there is plenty wrong with Radio Jesus if you look deeply into it, but having steeped myself for so long in the scholarly love of ambiguity and ambivalence, I find the simplicity of Radio Jesus very attractive. I too sometimes want to be loved, and not always worked by God. Because I always live in the grey area between scholarship and mysticism, between the one God and the many, I tend to see Radio Jesus as a collection of awesome and helpful energies rather than as one guy. But that’s just me.

At this Friday’s drum I hope we can enter into a conversation about The Comforter. How do you find comfort in this world? And I hope we can ask the drum to take us above the clouds, or if you wish, beneath the earth, to that place where The Comforter comes to us and gives all the love we need.

See you soon,

Jaime

2008-11-05T17:34:00.002-06:00

Dear Drummers,

I write this a few moments after President-elect Barak Obama’s magnificent acceptance speech in which he reminded me that change is possible and that hope is the beginning of change. Change is the body in action and all action is impossible without food. Hope is the food. Without the food of hope, the body weakens and actions are made impossible.

For as long as there have been humans, it has been tempting to fall into hopelessness and the languor of the body. For far too long our leaders have deliberately, systematically starved us of the food of hope, in order to make us weak so that they may be left free to enact their avaricious visions. Obama’s remarkable victory teaches me many things, but the one I thinking of right now is my embarrassment at how often I have turned away from hope and accepted, in my own way, the processed food of cynicism and the colorless side dishes of complaint and sarcasm.

Hope is often seen as a gift of the Holy Spirit, an emergence of Spirit, wending its way up through the thick, recalcitrant spiritual sinews of the human individual and the human community. And when hope comes, it opens love in us. Spirit has a far larger vision than the human does, forward and backward in time, and in all seven directions. When it wends its way up into our awareness, we are opened and we love more of the world, in more ways. Our contraction - our compaction into ourselves - is released, and we realize, as Rilke said, that wherever we are folded in on ourselves, there we are a lie.

The years of small-minded chatter of the biblical literalist zealots compressed the primal American sense of hope that has now been reawakened. Those jowled pulpit pounders are revealed for what they are: frightened, narcissistic, snapping creatures with a theology not only irrelevant but dangerous to our collective future.

Tonight I delight in the play of the wind through the night-lit branches outside my window. I hear the cleansing song of the Old Bone Mother carrying away the world-killing poisons of these past eight years, emptying me and opening me to hope, which opens me to love.
And I hear the Mother making a demand on me: now that she has opened me to Hope and to Love, how do I repay her with my changes, with my actions? As Obama has said, our work is only beginning.

This is the topic I intend to lead us into when we gather together this Friday to drum. I hope to see you there.

Nuance

2008-10-21T11:10:00.002-05:00

Dear Drummers,

I am looking forward to drumming with you this Friday. I feel like I have been “away” for a long time because of recuperating from surgery to repair a detached retina. All seems to be well with my eye although as any of you know who have had to be patient while healing, it takes far longer than you wish.

So with one good eye and one terribly blurry eye, I have watched the presidential campaign sink into the expected malodorousness, and have wondered why we all – left to right, anarchist to wing nut –claim distaste at swimming in the sewer yet we all so happily jump in every election. I wonder how the mobs of wingnuts can love the eliminator of sin while hyukking it up at Limbaugh’s racist quips, and I wonder how the lefties can decry hate mongers while stretching truth as weirdly as possible to paint political opponents as wholly demonic.

Don’t get me wrong—I live firmly on the angry left; I believe the current administration is full of actual criminals and I believe the GOP was taken over 30 years ago by cynical strategists who understood that because so few people vote in America, all you need to do to snatch the presidency is to turn out everybody in a subset of the populace. They targeted radical evangelicals, people with only a passing understanding of Christianity, and it worked. Their tactic was to create division and righteous anger at “the other” and it worked as it has throughout history. In the world of Celtic shamanism, this strategy would be called an incredibly powerful glamoury- a spell that covers the ugly truth with a dazzling sheen. George Bush, compassionate Christian hero, is a triumphant glam.

I saw Bill Maher’s new movie Religulous yesterday – his rant against religion as dumb people believing in dumb fairy tales. I admired the movie but like all political strategists, Hollywood writers and pyromaniacs his goal is merely to set a fire, not explore the nuanced human condition. Nuance is virtually dead in our public sphere and this is the root of such vast soul loss. Nuance is the place of subtlety, of shade, or as the Celts would say, the “between places.” It is in the between places that, in religions’ dumb myths, we meet God. And this is what unites both Maher’s movie and those he ridicules, and what oddly aligns Maher with the Karl Roves of the political world: all stay away from the between places in order to “win.”

The “economic crisis” is yet another subject that begs for nuance and will not receive it. We revel in the failure because it offers us the glee of casting blame on greedy Wall Street gamblers and the corrupt Bushies who gave them the keys to our treasury. Or we snidely blame the democrats for changing laws that forced honest bankers to make risky loans. Or as our beloved Rep. Bachman appears to, we just directly blame the poor for audaciously wanting to own a house, to participate in the “real” America. Or we blame predatory lenders for tricking people into buying a $600,000 house in the suburbs. The most nuanced description of the economic crisis I have come across is in last Sunday’s New York Times. Click here for it.

In the world of nuance, there is not a war between the light and dark, truth and error, a war between reason and fairy tale, a war between religion and atheism. In the world of nuance there is a path between the hard mountain of literalism and the surging ocean of metaphor, between law and experience, between certainty and doubt. I believe if we are to call ourselves religious or spiritual, or conscious, or smart we devote ourselves to walking the whole path back and forth, to learn how to believe in something that beautifies our lives and to learn how to unbelieve when it is time to do so, so that we may learn how to believe the next deeper thing that we are capable of grasping, that brings deeper beauty.

The drum helps me walk this long path from ocean to mountain, back and forth, again and again. All of you help each other walk it when you choose to gather together around the drum rather than do something else. And that is why I miss the drum so much right now and why I miss all of you.

This Friday I look forward to exploring this path between ocean and mountain and back with you.

2008-09-24T12:12:00.004-05:00

Image: Modern Art Images

Dear Drummers,

Last week I was on my way to Antwerp for the annual European zoo conference. In the airport I picked up Eckhart Tolle’s book “A New Earth.” Tolle is the most recent to be anointed as one of Oprah’s telegenic gurus of the month.

Can you hear my ego speaking through that catty last phrase? Tolle’s book is an exploration of the ego - in fact I find it a rather shattering exploration. It’s one of those books in which I see myself on each page and have those realizations like “oh…that’s why I am so often such a doink.”

I like Tolle’s writing because it is non-spiritual. He draws from the Buddhist and Christian worlds, as I often do, with a smattering of the Hindu world, as I do. But there’s no talk of sprits or deity so much as “consciousness.” I certainly like spirit-talk, and I find myself translating what Tolle is saying into shamanic language because I love those images. In my experience shamanic work is mostly about the ego, in just the way Tolle describes it in different words. People come to shamanic work for the magic, but if they stay it’s for the ego work. And when I say shamanic work, I mean any practice with the drum, whether its journeys to the other world or playing rhythms that are a little difficult for you, or merely having the drum group leader ask you to play your djembe a little softer. It’s all ego work and the drum is a master teacher.

Here is one of the things Tolle says:

Although the body is very intelligent, it cannot tell the difference between an actual situation and a thought. It reacts to every thought as though it were a reality. To the body, a worrisome, fearful thought means “I am in danger” and it responds accordingly, even though it might be lying in a warm and comfortable bed at night. The heart beats faster, muscles contract, the breathing becomes faster.

He goes on to say there is a buildup of energy, but since it is a mental fiction rather than a real threat, there is no way to dispel the “fight or flight” energy that has been built up—you really have nothing to fight and nothing from which to flee. So the body feeds that energy back on the mind which then generates more anxious thought. If you are like me, you sometimes (or frequently) encircle yourself with rather poisonous thoughts: replaying battles you had or should have had, setting people straight who misunderstand you, triumphing over those who have slighted you or taken you lightly. These thoughts don’t come into the real world because we rarely act on them and they are overwhelmingly thoughts located in the “otherworld” of the past and the future. But the energies from these thoughts lodge in our “now” body.

This Friday we meet to drum and to learn some ways to dispel those energies. We will drum ourselves into a place beyond thinking. We will consider the ego in some very simple ways that I hope may be profound or useful for you. Early autumn is a fine time to do this kind of spiritual work, when the world of delightful days and blossoming flowers gives way to the decay and darkness and death. The ego hates all of that and I think it’s one reason why melancholy is my major daily feeling during autumn. It is not me, but the ego who feels melancholy because it doesn’t like the idea of something else –like nature --having power over it.

So, on Friday we will ask the drum to clear away the thought-toxins…the Thoxins. Hey, I coined a word! Oprah, choose me! Hey! Oprah!

Two Wells

2008-09-02T14:09:00.007-05:00

(Painting by Esao Andrews )

Welcome to year seven of Drumming the Soul Awake. (I am astonished and humbled by that sentence!)

The drum is my teacher with 1,000 lessons to teach me. One lesson would be enough to fill a life but the drum does not stop at one. Here is one lesson the drum teaches: we live with two wells in our heart.

When we drink from the well of fear we begin wanting to build a walled garden around our life, to plant only acceptable plants, and to paint pictures of our own face on each wall. We sit in our garden, sipping from that well of fear, and we look for imperfections in our work, where this curve went wrong, and where these colors clash. We try to remember the correct scientific names for each plant, nervous that we will forget or get one wrong. We decide who we allow inside the garden, and it is always only a very few and they must agree to live by our rules.

The walls need constant repair and the beds require constant weeding. The height of the grass needs to be measured. We walk through the garden and we slowly stop seeing the flowers or the grass; we see only the enemies threatening --the weeds, and the crack in the walkway, the insects devouring the bark, and how that one self-portrait on the western wall is already fading and cracking after such a short time. Each time we repair one thing another begins to crack or fade or fall down, and we live in a world of encroaching enemies. We become like single celled creatures, instinctively rejecting what touches us, running or attacking.

We are organic creatures- we have bodies and therefore the world does contain predators. Our lives will have fear. Disappointment, sickness, grief, regret –they stalk us. And death is a predator that will one day devour each one of us. The reward offered by the well of fear is a small, controllable cosmos, a cosmos of that is ordered and reasonable, where mystery is present but relatively inconsequential because it lives outside the walls.

The drum, like all incarnations of the Holy Spirit, teaches us that we also have in us the well of wonder. When we drink form the well of wonder, we install four gates in the garden walls-gates that do not shut. We place welcoming signs and baskets of food and wine at each of the four gates so that those passing by can take nourishment. We often arrive to find a stranger sitting on the garden bench, and we ask them where they are from and where they are going and what is their name, and most importantly what their name means. We are visited by mystery constantly and we learn to play music and we learn to see into poems - the ones written by humans and the ones written by the creator. We learn to live on more than one level at a time. We learn to hold paradox between our two hands. We learn that what we fear cannot be solved, but it can be dissolved.

So we drum to drink from the well of wonder and to balance the effects of the waters of fear which few of us live without sipping. And curiously, by entering into the multi-layered sound for awhile we ride the drum to a place of silence, a place beyond knowing and knowledge, beyond memory and learning, beyond words and names and categories and labels, a place where mystery – the unnamable, unnamed, unimaginable and indefinable – warmly greets us.

(Thanks to Ravi Ravindra for sparking some of the ideas in the above. See “The End of Knowledge” Parabola Magazine, Fall 2009.)

I leave you with this poem form Denise Levertov:

The Well

At sixteen I believed the moonlight
could change me if it would.
I moved my head
on the pillow, even moved my bed
as the moon slowly
crossed the open lattice.

I wanted beauty, a dangerous
gleam of steel, my body thinner,
my pale face paler.
I moonbathed
diligently, as others sunbathe.
But the moon's unsmiling stare
kept me awake. Mornings,
I was flushed and cross.

It was on dark nights of deep sleep
that I dreamed the most, sunk in the well,
and woke rested, and if not beautiful,
filled with some other power.

Eye of Spirit

2008-07-13T12:40:00.004-05:00

Dear Drummers,

I wanted to send you a follow up to last night’s drum. I felt a little discombobulated last night for several reasons, but I hope it didn’t show through too much. The language I was playing with came from a phrase from Meister Eckhart (click here or here): “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” The music that inspired me is Hawaiian chants from The Brothers Kanilau. Thanks for being willing to play along. It was admittedly all a bit awkward, but I hope you had fun.

I’ve long been intrigued with the image of the Eye of Spirit ever since a friend and I were driving to the Kansas City Renaissance Festival twenty years ago to perform weird shows, and he said he could never flirt with a woman who was not his wife because then he would feel the eye of God burning a hole in the back of neck for the rest of his life. I thought wow, that’s a powerful guiding force for him. Since then I have asked what my idea of the “eye of God” looks like and acts like, where it burns and where it heals burns. Clearly the Eye of God and Eye of Spirit are two different things. (A few years later my friend and his wife divorced.)

So I often find myself thinking about anything vaguely round as an eye of spirit: the sun, the moon, the arc of the horizon, rocks, fruit, the drum – on and on. This idea helps move me along in the extended meditation I seem to be living: on the divine as present everywhere, whispering, coaching, suggesting, guiding, not just burning my sins out of me from the back of my neck. For me, Eye of Spirit urges us to become open so we can know ourselves better and make decisions out of wisdom rather than fear. I think the eye of God, as my friend experienced it, urges us to become closed. (For an interesting if long winded exploration, see Ken Wilbur’s book The Eye of Spirit).

The poem I read while drumming, so beautifully brought to life by Johnna’s flute playing, is my adaptation of a poem I found in The Gift, Poems of Hafiz (pg 124) here’s my version:

Keep playing your drum, calling, calling.
You have touched something Holy inside
With your spirit body.
And now your heart is blessed and ruined.
Once it has been touched by that divine beauty
It becomes a restless sky hunter,
Circling, searching for more
Sweet kisses
of sunlight.

Thanks for your willingness to play, and to let me explore! I hope we’ll be able to schedule a drum in August. We will let you know.

Jaime

2008-07-13T11:21:00.003-05:00

Dear Drummers,

I’m so looking forward to our gathering this Saturday! It’s been awhile, and that has given me some much needed rest, but I’m eager to be inside that earthy beat again.

To be spiritual is to actively dance your way into paradoxes and allow them to work on you. Here is the paradox I’m captured by right now. Since early humans began doing cave paintings, there have been about 1,500 generations, assuming a generation to be 25 years. (Read a cool article on cave paintings here). Since history began being written down about 3,500 years ago, there have been 200 generations of humans. In one way this all seems like a long stretch of time, but of course by earth standards, or cosmic standards it is barely a blink of an eye.

Time moves forward, technology changes the world again and again, whole cultures and their Gods are born, die and are forgotten, but the basic challenges of humanity seem to be unchanging. The need for love and the desire for power, the yearning to know Mystery and compulsion to kill others to gain resources, the fear of apocalypse and the blindness to how we are perpetrating it – on and on the list goes of things that don’t seem to change to for humans, regardless of the technology they are using at the moment or the language they are speaking or the god to whom they are chanting. The biblical phrase from Ecclesiastes 1:9 comes to mind:

What has been is what will be,and what has been done is what will be done,and there is nothing new under the sun.

Or as another passage says:
“Vanity of vanities! saith the Preacher,
Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!”
(Ecclesiastes 1:2)

That word, vanity, is the moral-leaning King James translation from the Latin translation of the Greek translated from the original Hebrew which has, of course many meanings, one of which is “vapor” or “breath.” So in that context, the phrase might say:
“Vapor of Breaths! saith the Preacher,
Breath of breath! All is breath!”

When we speak of breath, we speak automatically of rhythm, for breath is not breath without both inhalation and exhalation. Breathing is a cycle of presence and absence, fullness and emptiness, creation and void. On it goes, on and on, generation after generation, in the human world and in the cosmic world in which humans are but a passing whim.

It’s not that I discount the possibility that I may indeed be all about vanity! But I love the phrase “All is breath” because I do indeed see everything as breath, and breath in everything – movement of fullness to emptiness and back to fullness, carrying with it the life force that swims inside for awhile, is released to the world, and taken in by someone else for awhile, and released, on and on, in and out, exchanging, transforming and exchanging the life force.

I think this is why the drum has been with us for so long – some say for 1200 generations – and continues to be our companion even in a culture like ours that has such an array of amazing toys that so easily replace the drum. The drum reminds us of this cycle of taking in and letting go, and it reminds us that this is the very definition of what it means to live. On the strictly biological level, we take in and let go without any effort: the lungs fill and empty, the heart contracts and expands, we are born and die, all without conscious effort. But we become spiritual beings by becoming more conscious about what we are taking in and what we are releasing, what we let live in us, and how we move the life force through us and into the world. The drum is a tool and teacher for moving the life force through us, for unblocking the life force and letting it flow as it is meant to do. In this way to drum is the simplest act there can be, because it brings us into alignment with fundamental process going on in everything in the universe. So the drum is a natural spiritual cleanser. And we can decide to put more or less thought (read: prayer) into what needs to flow into us, or through us, or what needs to become unstuck.

It’s the height of summer now, and we are firmly in the grasp of the direction South according to the Celtic wheel of the year: the direction of heat, light, music, dancing, joy, feasting, and Fruition – fruitiness, juiciness. The inhale that is the other side of the exhale of the winter solstice.

I look forward to gathering in delicious juiciness with you all this Saturday. If you would like to, please feel free to bring some kind of snacky food or cut flowers to help fill out our festivities.

2008-05-08T20:06:00.006-05:00

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 lives in a wildly different universe; each creates its own language and its own way of living in its universe. I love Taylor’s main point: our task is to learn to step into each of these worlds comfortably, back and forth, in order to gain wisdom, strength and skills from both.

The video is astonishing for me because Taylor summarizes – in essentially non poetic, non spiritual language – what I think we are seeking in shamanic studies and in our regular drumming groups. She uses the language of right brain/left brain. Shamanic language describes it as traveling between worlds – this world and the spirit world. The triumph, for me, of her 18 minute lecture is that she does not arrive at the usual scientist’s conclusion – that all of our religious experiences are merely a function of right-brain chemistry, and therefore God/ess/Spirit is an illusion. That is a conclusion arrived at by the left brain. What I hear her saying is that there are multiple realities operating inside us and each have their own basic validity, because each generates a specific kind of perception.

Our main task is not to prove the validity of one perception over the other. That is the work of the left brain. You see it at work in science and you see it at work in every human effort to espouse and enforce on others a certain kind of Truth, whether that truth is scientific materialism, atheism, or monotheism – the list goes on and on. This left-brain fundamentalism came to the forefront of human evolution in the 17th century European Enlightenment – a great awakening of science and reason, and a sweeping movement away from religion and “superstition.” Science seemed to be able to prove what is real and what is not. Material facts and intellectual conclusions are real; dreams, poetry, myth and art are not real. This became a direct attack on religion’s truth which rises from story, poetry and metaphor. All fundamentalisms today, no matter what flavor, are outgrowths of the Enlightenment which is based on the left brain’s universal principal that things are separate, some things are real/true and some are not, and that everyone should be made to accept the Truth. That is all left brain work.

So our task is not to prove the validity of one brain’s universe over the other’s; our task is to learn to step into each of these worlds comfortably, back and forth, in order to gain perspective, wisdom, skills and strength from both, because both brains offer us skills to live as full human beings.

I think this is precisely the skill I am trying to teach people whether it is in the monthly drums or in shamanic workshops: to gain first the courage, then the skills to step from one brain to the other, from this world to the spirit world, from one valid perception of reality to another valid perception of reality. The work of moving between multiple perceptions, or multiple universes, is the same whether you think of it as spiritual path walking, intellectual calisthenics, or art-making. What matters most to me as a teacher is expanding your skills to travel from the land of hard facts, separation and sequential reality to the land of image, poetry, belonging and simultaneous multi-meaning (and back again), and to be able to draw on both universes.

There is a connection between this “traveling” or “journey” work and healing. People often experience drumming as healing, and when people begin shamanic journeying, early on they begin to experience healings by the spirit world. Michael Harner said that when people practice shamanic journeying long enough they inevitably start to ask what their role as healers in this world can be. The answer may be contained to themselves: My role is to heal myself. That is certainly enough, for we need more healed people walking through our world.

I’ve certainly experienced what Harner was talking about. When I began my shamanic studies in the mid 1980’s, I applied it to my playwrighting life which was also my discipline of self healing, as I think all art-making is to some extent. But after (in my case) seven years, I turned my artistic endeavors to creating plays in the Hmong community, which really was all about finding a place where I could use my skills to bring healing to this refugee community (although I would not have been able to articulate it that way at the time). One of the finest things ever said to me was by one of my Hmong partners. We were at a rehearsal where our cast of 40 excited young Hmong actors was preparing for one of our ten plays written over ten years. I was remarking how fascinated I was by shamanism and how I have so often had this suburban white boy’s ego fantasy about being a shaman and how even saying that embarrasses me so. She said so simply: “But Jaime, you are our shaman – look at all the energy and all the healing you have brought into this room. None of this would be here without your work.”What I saw was not at all my inner vision of “shamanic healing” but she was right – all humility aside, I had brought some skills to bear (skills given to me by the spirit world), moved energy, and there was a lot of healing happening in those young adults. One of our actors went on to become a state legislator and certainly being in front of audiences helped prepare him. And as we brought that work out into large audiences of both Hmong and non-Hmong people, healing was brought to them as well, in simple, yet profound ways. After mentoring my two partners, they took over the Hmong arts company (it’s still operating!) and I turned my attention to “my own tribe” as someone once called it.

Well I tell you this only to emphasize that this work does lead us toward becoming healers, but we may not know what that means –at least I didn’t, and to a large extent I am still discovering what that means. I believe if you are doing this kind of work – drumming and /or “journeying” – it is because you are asking on some level what your role as a healer of this world is to be. We work with power animals and guides to help us articulate that question and shape the answer and then take action.

Shamanic work takes us into healing because it takes us into the reality where the Life Force flows freely and openly, in immense abundance and accessibility, where it permeates all boundaries. This is a different place from that of Dr. Taylor’s left brain which thrives on hard boundaries. For the left brain to fully use its skills, it must restrict the flow of this universal energy so that we can do good, helpful left brain things like scientific experiments, analysis, drive the car, read the TV Guide, follow recipes, speak in structured language rather than grunts and moans, and, of course most importantly: write overly long, theologically pedantic blog posts.

When we drum and enter into ceremonial space, or what Harner calls the Shamanic State of Consciousness (what I call opening the dreaming eye, what Ken Wilbur calls opening the eye of Spirit) we step into this other universe where the life force interpenetrates everything, where the distinction between one sound and another begins to blur, and where small “I” and immense “Thou” begin to merge. The healing that shamans and energy healers do comes from their ability to step into that flow and then learn how to absorb Life Force and channel it. That channeling of the life force can take so many forms, and really one of your main tasks is to become open to the signals of what form it wants to take in you.

Because this Life Force is far too immense for us to comprehend (no less contact directly), we find ways to grasp it (or as the poet Rilke says “we are grasped by what we cannot grasp” – god, how I love that line!). We use metaphor and symbol to describe it and explain it to each other, and anyone truly aligned with Spirit understands that, as the 14th Century Meister Eckhart says, “All language has taken a vow to be wrong about God.” So we grasp at it with words that seem large to us, but are only small human words. In the shamanic path, we also comprehend the Life Force through personal imagery, through visions, dreams (night dreams, or half-awake drumming dreams). We contact the Life Force through power animals and spirit guides. These images are condensed parcels of Life Force that we communicate with, merge with, and allow to work through us. And we channel Life Force through learning spirit songs or dances, ceremonies, healing acts large and small, and through choosing certain ways to live and respond to this world. This is why we drum and why we journey to the spirit world – to step into this other, valid universe were the rules of how the life force works are different from the universe we live in most of the time.

2008-04-23T10:05:00.005-05:00

Dear Drummers,

(My apologies in advance for the length of this post. The word "bloviator" floats around me constantly, to my utter dismay. However, I do provide you with a warning of when the great wind begins to blow harshly below...) And now the post:

It’s said that the Celts divided the year into two halves, summer and winter or light and dark halves. I like to think of it as the earth singing a yearly melody, with very early spring (Imbolc/Brigit’s day/February) as the inhale and late autumn as the exhale, winter solstice as the end of the silence between breaths, and the time we are in now – spring into summer as the sung melody.

There is a Gaelic phrase: Oran Mor: the Great Song sung by the created universe. And Oran Croi: the small song sung by each creature, each creature with its own part of the great melody. The swelling of the buds, the emergence of the scarlet tulips and cerulean Siberian Squill, the ecstatic, sunburst of Forsythia , the flutter of small wings in the arbor vitae, the humans hammering something in the back yard – all of these are parts of this year’s great melody, which is but one small part of the long song of the earth, which is but a tiny part of the song of the Milky Way which is only a fragment of the Oran Mor: the song sung by the Life Force.

Now Earth swells with life force. Maybe you feel this song in your body as I do this week, as heart-filling joy, as awe-struck wonder, as relief from the long winter, as primal desire, as a desire to create. I feel the Oran Mor as a song of desire – desire in all of its emotional notes: ecstatic pleasure, deep yearning, trembling physicality, heartbreak, loss. These are the notes of the great song of the universe, and in our own Oran Croi sung throughout our lives. There is a majestic, terrible sweetness for those of us experiencing loss right now as so much around us swells with fullness, color, and pleasure.

Bloviation alert: The next three paragraphs! Bloviation alert: The next four paragraphs!

It seems to me that all spirituality is about the Life Force, and every spiritual system is, at its root, about identifying what the life force is, how it acts, and most importantly how we may live in alignment with it.

Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher (c. 500 BCE) is credited with being the first to widely use the word logos to describe the active, rational organizing force of the cosmos. (Cosmos – the organized universe, is the result of the action of logos). Logos can mean speech, or word, because it presumes that to use language, one must be rational, creative and organized. This is how Christianity appropriated the term in the Gospel of John (“The Word was made flesh”). This use of logos ties the appearance of Jesus to the first chapter of Genesis, where God speaks the universe into existence (“God said ‘ Let there be’”…).

The Greek philosophers, and later the Christian Europeans, really wanted God to be entirely rational. Perhaps the toughest tension in the Christian tradition has been trying to hold together the idea of the Creator as rational (and therefore not emotional) which was inherited from the Greeks, and the Creator as emotional, which was inherited from the Hebrews. Uncountable gallons of ink have been spilled by theologians trying to work their away around this tension. And uncountable rounds of ammunition have been spent taking down people who were comfortable with the idea of the life force not being entirely rational.

And it seems that the answer to this tension is always the same whether we are speaking of God, or the Tao, or Dharma, or astrophysics: The One, the source, the Creator, the Monad, is organized and calm, and rational (or beyond concepts of reason which I think is still a rational framing of it). But Creation falls away from this rational source and becomes increasingly irrational. So we find ourselves in an irrational Created place, a place of matter which cannot really be touched by God. When certain religious people remind us to “worship the creator and not the creation” this is what they mean – admire the exuberance of the spring time flowers but remember that God is not exuberant or scarlet. And God cannot touch matter. This was one of the ideas from the ancient Greeks slipped into western Christianity, an idea which I find bizarre. A reminder: whenever a human being uses the word “God” and the word “cannot” in the same sentence, beware. Isn’t God the most profound expression of “can do”?

It’s taken me a long time, far too much reading, and too many hours staring into the glittering flashes of light on the summer-glinting skin of lakes to come to believe what probably many of you have known all along: the Life Force is not entirely rational. It’s beyond reason and refuses to be locked into reason. The Life Force is the greatest improviser we can imagine. The universe is much more like a drum jam than like a classical symphony. A little guidance, but mostly freedom to explore and create vastly multi - layered sounds within sounds within sounds. The life force operates on the sheer audacity of desire. It cares only to bloom and to reproduce and everything else is idle chit chat. Maybe you can feel that force now in this time of rising sun and singing blooms and primal desire.

I’ve been thinking hard for many days, wondering what a small-minded person like me could possibly say about the Life Force. Then I got an email today from American Pie (PIE for Public Information on the Environment) http://www.americanpie.org/index.html and their communications person said it better than I can:

"With so many Earth Day messages aimed at saving the planet, it’s well to remember that the Earth doesn’t need to be saved by us. We couldn’t destroy it if we tried; we have, however, given our best effort to do so. What we need to save is an Earthly environment as we like it, with its climate, air, water and biomass all in that destructible balance that best supports life as we’ve come to know it. Destroy the balance, and Earth will simply shake us off - like flotsam and jetsam - as it has shaken off countless species before us. In the end, then, it’s us we’re trying to save...not the planet."

I would add that it’s us, and the innumerable species we have come to love, who share the planet with us, that we are trying to save. We know we cannot stave off all extinction, for extinction too is one phrase in the great song. But we want to be less directly responsible for out-shouting so many of our living relatives’ melodies.

So, how do we align ourselves with this kind of unimaginable, singing, organizing force of the universe?

Here is my cryptic answer, with a minor bloviator alert: the irrational is tied to the creative and the rational is tied to the practical. When your universe is founded on the rational, you focus your creativity on producing practical things, in other words manufacturing things that make your life more practically comfortable, like toasters and drive through car washes and I-pod docking stations with wireless speakers. Manufacturing is all about transforming physical resources into other kinds of physical objects. This is the path of the industrial West: creativity applied to manufacturing ever more practical, physical objects.

But when your organizing life force is not entirely rational – and perhaps only barely rational - you focus your creative forces to producing things of passing beauty more than practicality. To me, it is not a mistake, not a coincidence that the culture that is so dedicated to a rational creator also has the most unhinged desire for manufactured goods and also has the most twisted idea of what art is (separate, rare, elitist, and only validated by the exchange of large sums of money). True beauty uses fewer physical resources than manufacturing practical goods. I suspect that if we are to survive as a species, if we are to re-balance our earthly environment that we love and that supports us, we will do so by aligning ourselves with the irrational god who has a greater desire for beauty than for the next better toaster.

When we drum together, we praise this God of improvisational beauty who lives in us and around us and in and around everything.

I leave you with a song I wrote for my son a few years ago:

There once was a lad name of wee Lukie
People thought him a might kooky.
In the evening he’d pick up his crumpet and tea
And amble down to the twi-lit sea.

He’d look to the north and around to the south
Thrust out his arms and spin slow roundabout.
Then hoist his crumpet and hoist up his tea
To the fiery sun kissing the glistening sea.

He’d say: “Thanks be to the One and to the Three
Who come to enfold and mystify me.”
Then he’d close his eyes and open his mouth
And that’s when wee Lukie’s song would slip out:

Chorus:
Oran Croi Oran Croi
Oran Croi Oran Croi
May my wee song bring pleasure to thee
Powers of grace and mystery.

He’d eat up his crumpet and drink up his tea
All the while gazing out o’er the darkening sea
The sky so black, the earth so green
And so much unseen living in between.

Oran Croi Oran Croi
Oran Croi Oran Croi
May my wee song bring pleasure to thee
Powers of grace and mystery.

He’d set awhile longer humming his wee melody
With the stars so silver and sea so shimmery.
Then he’d amble back home to his little stone house
And slip into bed quiet as a brown mouse

Now sleep comes ‘round, and he begins to drowse.
He thinks he hears humming coming from a million mouths.
Animals and stars and fish and birds and trees—
Each and every living thing humming their Oran Croi.

Oran Croi Oran Croi
Oran Croi Oran Croi
May my wee song bring pleasure to thee
Powers of grace and mystery. [1]

[1] © 2006 Jaime Meyer. Pronounced “Orun Cree,” Gaelic for “the small song that is part of the great song.”

Join the fun on April 25th

2008-04-16T16:42:00.002-05:00

Dear Drummers,

If you are one of the hundreds who attended any of my sold-out Winter Solstice events in the last two years at Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality, make reservations to join us April 25th from 7 -9 PM. With the entire audience drumming and chanting, we'll journey toward the the groovelicious fragrance of the original, love-bursting, flowering of creation. It’s going to be joyous (even raucous!) celebration of spring!

Bring your drum rattle or other noisemaker. I'll also have a pile of drums and other stuff for you to use. No drumming experience needed! Just the yearning for coming into contact with the Divine Spirit in the drum.

“It’s impossible to describe the experience! Jaime took the whole audience to a place of wonder, love, and healing.” (past audience member).

For more info see: Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality.

2008-04-06T21:51:00.003-05:00

Dear Drummers,

Those of you who were at the April 4th drum may be interested in a bit more about the Hindu Black Bee Goddess Bhramari Devi. Sue found the info below. Thank you all for the buzzing good time!

"Bramari" signifies the 'Bees' in Hindi language. Shri Mataji said that the central heart chakra posesses 12 petals and it helps build the antibodies to protect humans from disease. Within this chakra resides Bhramari Devi and emits the droning notes of 'Bees' termed 'Bhramaran' as it throbs. It protects us from external attacks of negativities like bacteria or virus and is predominantly felt up to the age of 12 years in humans. It takes the form of Durga to protect us all the time, providing the element of confidence and security.

According to Hindu mythology, there once lived an asura (demon) called Arun. He wanted to establish his kingdom by driving out the devas (nature spirits). The devas gathered together to decide how to defeat their enemy, but meanwhile, Aruna, surrounded by his army, invaded the heavens and dislodged the devas from their stations. The devas left their city, families and wives to seek advice from Lord Shiva. Thus Aruna effortlessly entered the kingdom. He summoned his fellow demons and angrily ordered them to summon the wives of the devas. The devis were brought before Aruna. In utter fear they closed their eyes and prayed to Parmeshwari Devi to save them.

Parmeshwari Devi transformed herself into a large bee and with a swarm of bees which emerged out from her form surrounded the wives of the devas and sent out numerous lines of black bees, which joined with those emerging from her hands, covering the whole Earth. The sky was completely overcast with the swarm of bees, and the Earth was cast into darkness. The sky, mountain peaks, trees, forests, all became filled with bees and the specacle presented a terrific sight. Then the black bees began to tear assunder the breasts of the demons, as bees sting those who disturb their hives. The powerless asuras could not fight or communicate with one another, and so perished rapidly. Adi Shakti, in her form as the divine bee approached Aruna asura and said, "O, asura! Meet your end!" And she stung him to death. The devis thanked Parmeshwari Devi for saving their chastity. That is how Devi got the name of 'Bhramari Devi' as the protector.

Good Friday

2008-03-20T11:22:00.005-05:00

Dear Drummers,

Much of the Christian tradition has become meaningless to me, but pockets of immense power remain, and Good Friday is one of them.

I love the idea that Spirit (in this story, Jesus as the embodiment of Spirit) comes to us to forgive us. Forgiveness is a powerful and necessary thing, for to be human is to make mistakes that require forgiveness. Or as the shamanic tradition might say it: mistakes that require ceremonies for putting things back in balance again.

I’ve often wondered why Jesus was laid in the tomb. God can make the resurrection happen anyway God wants. Why didn’t Jesus just fly off the cross, fly around the temple and vanish into the sky? Why didn’t a host of angels come down and carry him off with trumpets blaring? Why would God have a few people take Jesus down, wrap him up and lay him in the tomb, and then just have him gone on Sunday – leaving all sorts of alternative stories to be told (they stole the body, or he didn’t really die, he woke up and walked out of the tomb, etc.).

I think here is the great mother in the story. The sky father played his part in the story- the preaching, the words, the healings and public relations. But Jesus must enter into the realm of the great mother – the earth – in order to finish the healing process of this ceremony. The sky father is great at talking and ideating and law giving, but the earth mother is the healer and they must work together.

So after all that public work, Jesus enters into the tomb, into the darkness of the womb, and in a secret process that none of us are allowed to see, the collected spiritual toxins are taken into the earth to be recycled by the great mother, as everything else is, was and always shall be. I see the great mother everywhere in the bible, even though the priests, bishops and emperors who edited and rewrote the Jesus stories uncountable times thought they were keeping her out.

I love the idea that Jesus enters the tomb/womb and then emerges changed and sanctified. This is the power of the Spirit in Earth—to remove from us the energies that block our connection to Spirit and to reaffirm the mutual embrace between us and the divine. All our talking, all our preaching is fine, but we must finally involve the earth to complete any healing ceremony.

I love that on the first Easter morning, it is Mary Magdalene, not one of the beloved male disciples, that first discovers the empty tomb, and first sees the risen Jesus and mistakes him for a gardener—one who works the soil, whose hands are covered in mothering, changeable earth. Peter, who would establish the unerring, unchanging male church and become the first unerring sermonizing, rule-dispensing Pope, was hiding in some corner, wrapped in grief, praying that no one would recognize him as a follower of Jesus. After teaching them all to summon hope for a renewed world, a world of loving kindness, a world where the men with armies and money would realize they were not the real power, suddenly in a few short hours Jesus was dead, in abject humiliation; one of dozens, maybe hundreds of anonymous, petty criminals easily dispatched by the state that day. That renewed and renewing world crashed. The disciples ran, panicked, in fear and anguish.

Mary knew that when the grief beyond words comes, when words fail, we head to the earth - to the garden - to have the grief taken and transformed. She is the first to meet the risen Jesus. This passage is so beautiful I swear it is some kind of incredible goof by the many redactors of the scriptures. Or, like so many times the great Mother inserts herself in the story even as the men try to keep the patriarchal filter in place.

You have been told that he emerged from the tomb totally disconnected from the world, more air than earth and therefore we too should strive to be airy and separate. But that is Peter’s wordy story after he came out of hiding, and Paul’s shouted sermons as he twisted the tale to his own liking. I say to you: After all the talking, Jesus went to the mother to be cleansed and healed and sanctified, and he emerged from the mother not as a spirit of air but as an enspirited earth creature, as a human infused, permeated by earth spirit, and that is what Good Friday and Easter teach us.

St. Patrick

2008-03-16T21:27:00.006-05:00

The text that follows is adapted from the sermon I delivered at Michael Servetus UU church Sunday March 16.

To be human is to tell stories. It doesn’t matter if your stories are cloaked in the language of myth, science, psychology or religion, we tell ourselves and each other stories all the time. And most of these stories are about how the universe works, or how we should live inside it.

This brings me to one of my least favorite characters in all of western history: St Patrick. He is famous for converting Ireland to Christianity. Legend tells us he chased the snakes out of Ireland. Of course, the snake – the better word is serpent - is a symbol for pagans. The serpent is the symbol for the great goddess, and of people who see holiness in the earth, and who have divinities that take female forms.

To me the serpent is a symbol of the raw, untamable, awesome and frightening power of the life force that surges and courses through everything we see (and everything we don’t). And that energy moves not in straight lines but in pulsing waves or like lightning, in unpredictable jaggedness, or like in roots and branches (and emotions and ideas), in slithering serpentine wriggles. In springtime that energy becomes strikingly visible as it emerges out of the bleak quiet of winter and creation seems to awaken again, moving outward in writhing, tangling, unfolding patterns. For more about serpents in myth go here and here.

An old pre-Patrick Irish song to the Irish Goddess Bridget, the goddess of springtime, goes like this:
Early on Brigit’s morn
The serpent will come from the mound
I will not harm the serpent
Nor with the serpent harm me.

In these simple four lines are found a vow of a mutually fostering relationship with the wriggling life force that infuses everything.

What the tradition celebrates about St. Patrick – that he converted the pagan Irish – I reframe this way: In the 5th century, the venerable St. Patrick was able to begin the process of changing the fundamental cosmic story of the people of that Emerald Isle. He began the process where they stopped telling the story of mutually nourishing relationship with the serpentine energies of life on earth, and began telling (and living) the story of dominating and destroying those energies and eventually escaping them altogether.

This, of course, is the foundational myth of western industrial culture, the culture that poet Wendell Berry says “thrives on destruction.”St. Patrick was the bringer of amnesia, and now we celebrate him with a day devoted to drinking until we are stupefied. Matthew Fox called alcohol and all mind altering chemicals “liquid cosmos”: we, who feel alienated from the universe, imbibe to bring the awe of the universe back into our body. This is not so different from the church tradition that tells us we are fallen and then offers us the supernatural medicine to cure our falleness.

Now I don't meant to spoil a good day of drinking and celebrating the Irish. Patrick was a man and a worshipper of his time, and he truly believed he had found the keys to the mystery of why life is so difficult. We too are people of out time, and I hope all of us will take seriously what we believe and act on it.

The new story that Patrick began telling the Irish is described by theologian Thomas Berry as “the six transcendences.” [1] Transcendent means to become separate, to remove yourself from the action. According to Berry, the six transcendences are:
1. The transcendent, personal monotheistic deity. Berry says the first commandment should actually read: “Thou shalt not have an earth mother.”
2. The transcendent human spirit. The natural world is material. Humans are spiritual. We transcend the material messiness.
3. The foundational belief in redemption. Another way to say this is the world is fallen, and we need to be taken away from it to be saved.
4. The transcendence of mind. The mind is what links humans to the transcendent, male God, and it is the mind that is evidence of our own transcendence from nature. There is fallen, material nature, and there is mind. Mind and nature are of a different substance, and only humans possess mind which allows them to transcend nature. Nature is female. Mind is male.
5. Our transcendent technology: our creative discoveries and applications of technology, from fire to computer chips in our toaster, has allowed us to transcend much biological law that would otherwise limit our species’ impact on the earth.
6. The transcendence of historical identity for humans—that our destiny goes beyond earthly history, that our destiny is somewhere else. This world really does not matter.

I like to put what Berry is saying like this:Christianity is a heliumisitc religion. That’s a very complex, old theological term mixing Greek and Latin ideas. Okay not really, I made it up. It means “to be full of helium.” As soon as anyone becomes holy in the Christian tradition, the holy men come running out with the Helium taken and PFFFT! Up they go away into the sky. The tradition calls it ascension. Jesus. The saints. Mary. PFFFT! And if you believe the made for TV miniseries drawn from the mega best sellers, all believers on that glorious day of rapture. The story St. Patrick convinced the Irish to believe was that everything sacred lives above, and that nothing below matters. All float up and away, and, like my three-year old whose grocery store balloon with “free strawberries” printed on it came untied as soon as we stepped outside the store, we can only watch, aghast, as our delight vanishes into the airy expanse, and we are left behind, with strawberries that taste of vague disappointment.I believe you and I are alive at a point in human history where that fundamental story we tell ourselves about how the world works is changing. We are inside a change of seasons right now, and we are in an extended change of consciousness – one which is nourished and enlivened by our drumming I hope - one that is wishing to subvert Patrick’s six transcendences.

This emerging consciousness is telling us:
1. God – if there is a god - can certainly take any form God would want to take including earth mother, and sky father, and an uncountable array of other forms, and non-human forms. What’s more God – however you define God - is inside everything, or as the theologians say: immanent.
2. Our spiritual lives are intertwined with our physical lives, they are not separate, with one being real, and one an illusion. We are biospiritual.
3. Our pure spirit does not battle our corrupt flesh, but spirit is the unseen extension of the body: the soul is the part of the body undiscerned by the five senses as William Blake said.
4. Mind is the inheritance of all creation, though we may not perceive its entire workings. The body, the emotions, the imagination—these are also gifts of the Spirit and equal to mind.
5. Technology may make us comfortable, but it will not redeem us, it will not sanctify us and make us invulnerable to nature. Nothing can separate us from nature. Everything is nature.
6. We come from here and we return to here. And we are always intertwined with everything else.

I’d like to offer you a meditation to try. Go to the front or back door of your house, looking out at your own land – the land you live on. Call out to the spirit – that springtime spirit of life that is at this moment, waking up and beginning its gleeful twisting, cavorting, wriggling, dancing movement into our visible world. Try to see it. You might have to close your eyes in order to see it. As Ken Wilbur might say, close the eye of flesh and open the eye of spirit. Call to this spirit of life, and ask it to come into you and make itself more visible. Or ask it to heal you or make you new again. Or ask it how you can be in service to it.

I leave you with this:

How I become hyacinth
How I become daffodil
How I become hosta
How I become sedumeasily divided easily rooted
How I become the two tonewhistle chirp in that far off oak.
How I become something you never planted
How I green from brown
How I heave up your mulch and crawl to you in your winter slumber
How I spring from pruned branches
How I become again the weeds you poisoned
How I emerge out of dead vines
How the longer you know me the bigger I grow
How you think you can cultivate me
How long it takes you to see
How I become you.

©Jaime Meyer 2006

[1] Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts (Sierra Club Books 2006) 25-27

2008-03-12T11:37:00.004-05:00

Dear Drummers,

I may be one of only a very few people in our drumming community who have a deep, almost obsessive fascination with Christian evangelicals. Zealots are amusing until they get control of the army; then there is always trouble. History has shown us again and again that the more assured religious people are about their god, the more certain they are to use violence to shape the world.

But I have always admired evangelicals’ passion for their myth, and truthfully I admire their ability to spout certainties without wincing. Clearly, I am on the other end of that spectrum – I can barely say a few words about faith without backtracking, joking, and apologizing for the apparent hubris I am displaying. Well, that is a very old dichotomy in the life of religion: call it the tension between blinded faith and blinded doubt.

Three years ago I was listening to a radio interview with Rabbi Michael Lerner, an amazing thinker and speaker (http://www.tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/bio). Someone asked him about the power of the religious right and he said, something like “Oh, that movement is already over.” I was astonished at how he could say that given the evidence to the contrary and also wondered how he could be so sure. He said that people are attracted to the conservative mega-church for the comfort it offers, but after a few years, they start to grow up spiritually and they just can’t be told anymore exactly what to believe – they assert their God-given talent and desire for personal exploration of truth, more subtle, nuanced and more beautiful. And more helpful to today’s immediate challenges.

Well, perhaps he was right. We see the neo-con paradise crumbling everywhere, and we see the puff-chested, sword-wagging, One-Truth-spewing men in red-striped ties scrambling to hold onto one last corner of their constructed empire by turning on one another like cowards, or more often, we see them jumping, trying to find a place to land where they can still make easy money by waving simplistic, large banners of fear and narcissism. For an interesting article about several prominent architects of the religious right and their repudiation of the movement, see (http://www.alternet.org/rights/78818/). One of my favorite quotes in the article is from Frank Schaeffer: "Pat Robertson would have had a hard time finding work in any job where hearing voices is not a requirement." Well, perhaps my fascination with these folks is that I see myself as just as nutty as I see Pat Robertson, except I’m a lot funnier.

There are many reasons why the Christian right is crumbling, and many books are being written now about it. One thing I’d like to point out is that “Christian conservative” is a completely inaccurate name for this movement. The real word is “Christian totalitarianism.” Apart from the fact that the neo-con policies have been revealed as sham, I see a theological reason for the crumbling, and it is this: if you are spiritually minded, you are seeking to come into contact with a Divine Spirit of love. The spiritual life is all about seeking love. Big Love. Cosmic Love.

Christianity came on the scene originally as a Bhakti Path – the Hindu name for the path of love, the path of ecstasy and openness. Jesus apparently healed anyone who asked, and his healing power is said to spring from his direct contact with the god of love. His main message was love, love, and love some more. Love God, love one another. Love enemies and strangers. Forgive and love more.

It is difficult to believe that the god of the Christian totalitarians is a god of love, and I think people have grown weary (for now) of the idea that if you repeat something often enough it becomes true. The totalitarians’' god is primarily a punishing god, as he must be to keep people obedient to the movement and to set people against one another which gives them the illusion of real spiritual energy.

If people move out of that myth, I believe it is because they need real love, not fake, twisted, abusive love. They need real love from their god so that they can recognize real love in this life and so that they can radiate real love and attract real love in this life. They need real love because life is hard and confusing we make a lot of mistakes and we need Big Love to help us through each day.

And so this brings me to Grace – a Christian word that I see as synonymous with Big-Cosmic-Love. To me, Jesus was and is all about Grace. Grace: Cosmic love, the love of the creator, given to everything that comes into being in this universe. Given freely, without conditions, without limit, without question, without doubt. And to me, the drum is all about that same love. (So by the mathematical transitive property of equality, Jesus is a drum. I believe that.)

This Friday we will drum our way down the Bhakti Path, the path of divine grace, the path of opening to Big Love. I’m not Jesus; I can’t promise anything except to try to open the door a little for you to peek through, or step through at your own comfort level. But let us drum the door open together and see where the path leads.

See you soon, Jaime

Biospiritual

2008-02-20T19:39:00.005-06:00

Dear Drummers,

A word has been floating around in my mind lately: biospiritual. It is a word used by some to define our planet, and by extension, the universe. The word affirms the interplay between the physical (“bio”) and ephemeral parts of existence.

For much of the west’s religious history the physical and spiritual have been split apart and set in opposition to one another. Religion has viewed the physical world as fallen, unclean, sinful, or merely of no real importance. As science and religion came into increasing conflict during the Enlightenment (1700’s onward) the devout in both camps tended to preach that you must choose between poles.

Science told us that must grow up, become rational and intelligent and put away the absurd superstitions of religion. As the enlightenment wit Voltaire said: “It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.”

Extremist religion told us that it is a sign of deep faith to resist any science that conflicts with the Bible, and to twist as much science as possible to fit the Biblical world view. For example, some biblical people accept the existence of atoms, but say that it is clear that the atoms are held together by Christ’s power. They go on to say that the atomic elements themselves are cursed by God because of Adam’s sin. The evidence is in the rocks that decay and give off deadly radiation.

Both sides agreed that there is and should be a split between bio and spiritual, and all of us must choose the right side or perish. But also, classically, both sides agree that that the material world is meaningless. Bible-wavers pine for the rapture to get us off this cursed plain. Physicists, who now know exponentially more about the universe than even only a few years ago, say things like “The more the universe seems comprehensible the more it seems pointless” (Dr. Steven Weinberg).

So we come now to that word, biospiritual, which recombines perhaps the two greatest gifts of humankind, our ability to reason, analyze and deduce, and our ability to dream, to speak in metaphor and symbol, and to create art – our seemingly inborn need to revere what we cannot see, touch or comprehend.

And that word, biospiritual, helps us to re-member what has been torn apart in us by the fight between science and faith – a wound that has so damaged our world both outer and inner. It is a good word, a word that perhaps could only come around to us at this time in history, a word that we are ready for now.

And this is why I love the drum! Anyone who has spent more than a few moments with the drum knows that it reminds you that you are biospiritual that you are an amalgam of physical and spiritual – because the drum is clearly this. And so is everything you can see and cannot see. When we gather together this Friday, we will explore our biospirituality with rhythmic exuberance!

Jaime

It's okay to feel a little broken

2008-02-13T21:20:00.004-06:00

Dear Drummers,

Recently I discovered this hot new singer, Bon Jovi. Okay, he’s not new, he’s one of the kings of the 1980’s big hair bands who has survived and kept maturing. But I was in a sustained trance for the entire 1980’s and missed all the pop music of that decade. That may have been a great blessing, by the way.

On his newest album, Lost Highway, Bon Jovi sings a song with amazingly simple lyrics: “It’s okay to be a little broken/Everybody’s broken in this life...” I’ve been listening to this song constantly for three weeks now. (Listen to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj00ncx-X6U)

When I worked in the liberal Christian world, this was also a guiding image, that we are all broken (and that through Jesus we are made whole again, or healed). This phrase, “we’re all broken in this world” was tossed about constantly. It irritated me because it smacked of original sin – the idea that because of Adam’s disobedience of God, we are all born broken, or infected by sin. This is a horrifying theology to me in so many ways. If this is a topic of deep interest to you, I point you to Mathew Fox’s book Original Blessing. It can change your life.

So I’m in the car with my 3 ½ year old, Ethan, listening to a different Bon Jovi Song, what my son calls “the new Yeah-Yeah song.”

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s4xQ6dqdhQ)

We stop in front of the house and he asks if we can listen to the rest of the yeah-yeah song. I want to say no because of all the practical reasons – its dinner time, I’m tired etc. But I say yes and we sit in the twi-lit car as traffic on our busy street rushes by and I reach back and hold his tiny smooth hand and we listen. I look back at him and he has a slight, calm smile on his face and there is something radiant about him – not because he’s my child but because he’s a human being listening with great calm joy to music – such a distinctly human act, to stop your life for a moment to allow the ephemeral to wash over you. And I think, “No. HE is not broken, not yet.” And of course I know life will break him in many ways, and I know that he will most often be broken by other human beings, and most often by those who he loves in one way or another. This is how it goes. So original sin may be a bad theological conclusion to why life is so hard, but there is no debating that we get broken and battered by life. It reminds me of what Frederick Buechner said: Be kind to everyone you meet because everyone you meet is carrying an enormous burden. Everyone who walks into our little drumming room is carrying an enormous burden – I try to remember this.

And it reminds me of the passage from Kahil Gibran’s The Prophet:

You have been told that life is darkness,
and in your weariness you echo the words of the weary.

At work someone had a really bad day and they sent out an email to the whole staff essentially shaming everyone for a mistake that was really the responsibility of a couple of people, including me. Here is how we spread our brokenness, yes? – we broadcast it to the wind in hopes of removing it from ourselves? This is so human, and so common. How often have I spread my brokenness to others, through malice, or anger, or trying to unload my disappointment or fear, or by sheer clumsiness?

In the shamanic cosmos as I understand it, we are not born broken because of disobedience, and then saved by Jesus (and obeying the church fathers). We are not broken throughout life until we are reassembled in glory after death, making this entire world simply a torturous bus stop. In shamanic thinking as I understand it, we are indeed broken by energies that come to us and break us, or eat at us, or sicken us, or block our flow of energy which we need to grow green and fruity and fragrant and colorful. These energies can be called spirits, or curses or many other things. And this makes sense to me because it matches my experience, and perhaps sometimes these are free floating spirits but most often they are generated by other human beings and sent into the world to eat.

All religions have their cleansing ceremonies. The Christian ceremony of the Eucharist – the eating of the little round cracker and drinking of the wine – is a way to ceremonially bring the power of Jesus into our body to cleanse us of the disease of original sin (in the catholic world) or remind us that God’s enduring love saves us (in the liberal Protestant world). These are effective for many people. We have our Eucharist cracker too – it’s called the drum. We don’t eat it, we whack on it and it makes us dance, to shake loose the spiritual barnacles eating our hull.

Over the years I have found that winter is a time for cleansing ceremonies – at the last drum we focused on resentment and blame. We’ll continue our string of cleansing ceremonies this week by whacking and shaking. I leave you with the complete passage from the Prophet:

You have been told that life is darkness,
and in your weariness you echo the words of the weary.
And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge,

And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge,

And all knowledge is vain save when there is work,

And all work is empty save when there is love;

And when you work with love
you bind yourself to yourself,
and to one another,
and to God.

Introductory Course: Shamanism as a Spiritual Path

2008-01-09T13:02:00.000-06:00

Dear Drummers,
Below is an outline for a six month introductory course I'd like to lead. Please let me know if you are interested. The class is limited to 15, but I need a minimum number of about 10 to get started and pay costs. If you are interested, please send me an email at jaime@drummingthesoulawake.com

Thanks!

Shamanism as a spiritual path - Level 1

This six-month course will introduce students to the core concepts and cross-cultural practices of shamanism. This course is ideal for persons who want to formally learn the core skills and ideas associated with shamanism, who are motivated by a desire to expand and deepen their spiritual lives through earth-centered spiritual practice, and who want to engage with a community of like-minded seekers. This course sees shamanism, or shamanic spirituality, as a practice and a way of life of a person who is skilled in crossing into non-ordinary reality for the purpose of creating balance and healing of self and others in the community. This course does not involve the use of psychotropic plant substances, and is not recommended for those currently using substantial dosages of mind - altering medications or chemicals.

The course will not only teach common shamanic techniques and practices but also provide students with a broad cultural context for shamanic practice in the modern world, touching on art, psychology, and theology. Students who take the course will exit with an understanding of many core shamanic practices and confidence to continue building their shamanic skills. They will also have a greater understanding of their own shamanic call and how it fits into today’s world and in their own creativity. In this sense, shamanic practice is about learning ancient methods of gaining insight to today’s life issues. Students will leave the course with a greater understanding of their own spiritual power, how to cultivate it and how to bring it into the world for good.

The class will meet approximately once per month for a 4-5 hour workshop (specific times and location TBA). An outline of the curriculum follows below. Each workshop will contain 30% lecture/demonstration and 70% experiential work with opportunity for discussion and sharing of ideas and experiences. Students will be assigned homework to complete before the next monthly workshop. The homework will involve some reading and journaling, but mostly practice. In addition, each student will receive two individual consultations with the instructor during the six months to help set individual direction and answer specific questions.

Students are urged to bring a drum and rattle with them. However, some drums and rattles can be provided and the instructor can also help students find ways to purchase or make their own drum and rattle. Enrollment is limited to 15. Prospective students will be asked to submit a brief essay outlining their interests, prior experience, history of spiritual practice, and expectations for this course.

The course begins near the Spring Equinox (March 2008) and ends near the Autumnal Equinox (September 2008). The six workshop dates will be on Saturdays or Sundays in the Twin Cities metro area for 4-5 hours (specific times and location TBA).

Class 1 (March 2008)
Lecture/presentation: historical overview of shamanism; the shamanic cosmos; the science of shamanism and trance; sonic driving & visions.
Experience/Training: basics of the shamanic journey, safety, protection, openness.
Homework: Reading, journey practice, journaling.

Class 2 (May 2008):
Lecture/Presentation: Comparative theology of spirit guides and relationship with Spirit
Experience/Training: Finding a power animal or spirit guide
Homework: journey practice, dancing a power animal, following instructions of spirit guides, looking for “signs” in the natural world.

Class 3 (June 2008)
Lecture/Presentation: The shaman’s task: creating balance between spirit and humans realms; ideas of the wounded healer; identifying the call.
Experience/Training: Working with the spirits of nature
Homework: journey practice, dancing a power animal, following instructions of spirit guides regarding balance.

Class 4 (July 2008)
Lecture/Presentation: Spirit and voice, the singing shaman, song as power
Experience/Training; Finding a power song and its use
Homework: singing your power song and learning to use it, memorizing poetry, journey practice, journaling.

Class 5 (August) 2008)
Lecture/Presentation: Shamanism and personal creativity, art-making
Experience/Training: Becoming a storyteller (tools of the trade).
Homework: journey practice, dancing power animals, learning a story to tell, memorizing poetry , journaling.

Class 6 (September 2008)
Lecture/Presentation: Shamanism and psychology; the “transpersonal”
Experience/Training: Working with the different types of ancestors
Homework: Journey to the ancestors, telling the ancestors’ story, memorizing poetry, power song practice; connecting the past to the present and future community

The cost for the six month course is $550 covers the costs of the course, handouts and some other ceremonial materials. Students will provide their own journals and some other ceremonial supplies at minimal cost. A deposit of $250 is required before the first class with the remaining $300 due before Class # 4. Some flexibility on payment schedule can be arranged. Some scholarship support is available – just ask.

Becomming Preposterous

2008-01-09T12:52:00.001-06:00

January 11, 2008

Dear Drummers,

I love the word preposterous. The words absurd and ridiculous always float through my head, especially in reference to myself. Ridiculous means to cause laughter. Absurd means to be out of tune, or to not be with those who are playing the prescribed chord structure or melody. Both imply moving into a place considered by the rule-setters as uncouth or ill mannered. Both words imply entrance into the non-rational.

But preposterous carries the day. Pre / posterior. To have what is behind come first, or to lead with your ass. I’m reminded of a story someone told me that may or may not be true, which does not really matter, I suppose: Sitting Bull, the great leader, sitting in a very important meeting of elders, gets up, leaves the tipi, comes back ass first with his pants down and parades around the circle, then leaves again, then re-enters again, the dignified leader we love to imagine. Imagine how the world would be different if the Pope or Billy Graham did that or even if there was merely a story floating around that they did.

These words absurd, ridiculous, preposterous float in my head every time I begin my prayers and meditations about what I am called to do in our next drumming gathering. I suspect these words float in your head too, as you enter into your own dreaming, drumming prayers. These are powerful words that feed powerful feelings that, as you move along this (or any) spiritual path, become your companions. When you take on a spiritual path, you invite the feelings of being ridiculous, absurd and preposterous to walk with you the whole way, singing bawdy songs and smacking their lips as they eat, making rude gestures to everyone that you pass by. I’m saying this because I assume that you too are accompanied by similar companions. Good God, I hope you are, or it’s only me, and I don’t want to think about that.

These companions get rowdier for me as Drum Friday approaches. Thankfully, over the years the voices of these companions have led me to another word: Sacred, which at its essence, means to be set apart. All sacred activity takes place in a setting that is set apart from the daily world, in other words, the absurd, the place out of tune with the dominant melody. All sacred work draws a circle around the worshipers – with a wand, a rattle, with words or chants, or with stone architecture like a cathedral – to separate the worshipers from the dominant melody for a time, to take them into a different melodic structure and then return them, refreshed, re-made, renewed, again to the world.

Humans need to go to this other world, this absurd place, this place with a different music, and we need to go there regularly, or we become the opposite of Holy, which means Whole. To be whole, to be in balance with the holy, is to enter into the absurd on a regular basis and to discover its alternative melody, and to walk with these uncouth companions on our way. These companions, these words, are your allies, not your enemies.

Well, this brings me around to what I wanted to say at the very beginning, that if there is one reason for our drumming, it is to re-balance. We go to the other world not to escape this world, and not even to find a more beautiful place to be than this world, but to learn more kinds of music that can change the way we play in this world, change how we play, how we compose our personal melody, and who we play with. We drum so that we may live in more wholeness in this world. Balance and Wholeness will be our theme for Friday.

I’m looking forward making absurd music with you. I leave you with one of my favorite poems form the Hindu-Muslim-mystic poets, the 13th Century Kabir:

Between the conscious and the unconscious,
Between waking and dreaming,
Between this world and the other world,
the mind has put up
a swing:all earth creatures, even the supernovas, sway between these two trees,and it never winds down.
Angels, animals, humans, insects by the million, also the wheeling sun and moon;ages go by, and it goes on
Everything is swinging: heaven, earth, water, fire,and the secret one slowly growing a body.If you see that for just fifteen seconds, it makes you a servant
for life.
-- Kaibr, India, 1398-1518.[1]

The two paintings posted are by Mark Rothko.

[1] Tr. Robert Bly, The Kabir Book, (Beacon Press 1993)
I have altered the poem in two ways. First, I added the lines “Between waking and dreaming,
Between this world and the other world.” I wanted to open the ideas from being purely psychological. Since I deliver this poem orally, and usually with a drum playing under, I like to establish a swinging feel and these slightly repetitious lines help to do that. Second, I altered the last line from “Kabir saw that for fifteen seconds, and it made him a servant for life.” I think Kabir would be okay with this, changing it from the descriptive (“I saw this and aren’t I amazing?) to prescriptive (“If you do this, you could be amazed.”)

2007-12-31T12:35:00.000-06:00

Dear Drummers,

We don’t have a drum until January 11, but I thought I’d send you a new year’s wish. I hope my email finds you in good health and good spirits. As the sun begins its slow climb back into re-activating the land, this is a good time to contemplate our path, our directions, and our actions in the world.

I read recently that Rumi, the magnificent 13th century Sufi saint, once said that you should make a list of the three things you most want in your life. If any of the three conflict with one another, you’ll have a lot of trouble. This is a wonderful meditation for the New Year. For me it seems so much friendlier than “resolutions” which carry the fragrance of sin, and the heaviness of lawmaking.

So you may ask yourself what are the three things – or perhaps three “energies” – you most want to become active in your daily life as the year makes it way out of this round of darkness. Or you may want to pray for help or strength to bring these three things into your life without conflicting with one another.

For me, I’d like to pray more. I’d like to invite the energy of prayer into my life. I’d like to pray in a classic way, on the knees, in the dark, with words, no drum and no joiking; pray for help and strength for that which is most tender and vulnerable for me in particular.

Last night I prayed for the three things I want most in my life:

For my wife and kids to be healthy and curious;
For me to not become restless within the small container of my life but to have the courage to uncover the depth and beauty inside this container;
For me to wisely expand my skills and abilities as some kind of conduit for Spirit for our drumming community.

William Stafford (1914-1993), wrote a wonderful meditative poem called Ask Me. I pass it on to you, along with my best wishes for a wonder-filled new year.

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We
knowthe current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

See you all soon,

Jaime

2007-12-21T00:41:00.001-06:00

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. Moderns have to do some impressive interpretive gymnastics to make these ancient runes wholly relevant today. There is nothing at all wrong with interpretive gymnastics. Anyone trying to forge or maintain a connection to a religious text written long ago needs to learn some serious bending, splitting and balancing.

How these runes came to me
Well all of this made me realize that what was really needed for my solstice event was a smaller set of runes created specifically for our purposes together. I asked the reindeer about this and the reindeer gave me eight rune sayings. As I worked with them, they began to fall into a melody. Barbara McAfee helped make the words to the runes fit better to be sung, and that is the song she sang during our solstice show.

After the reindeer helped me make these rune sayings it helped me make the visual runes to go with them. My 8 year old son and I went out to a little place by Minnehaha Creek near where we live, to a clearing with these tall elm trees who we call the nine sisters. Near that place grows two immense willows. Lukas gathered up two handfuls of the slender leaves from the willows, and after doing some singing and praying, we went through each of the rune sayings and cast willow leaves onto my prayer rug to ask for the designs for each rune. We looked at the way the leaves fell, and we tried to see the design for the rune. We went at dusk—the time when it is not quite day and not quite night, the “between place” so important to all myth. And the full moon was rising in the east as the sun set in the west. So that is where these runes came from.

Yes, you can do this in the middle of the city. People walking by with their schnauzers or jogging with their I-Pod, traffic cruising by. You can commune with the sprits right there.

My musings on the runes
I’ve only lived with these runes for a few weeks, so don’t expect that I will have great deep wisdom about them. And y interpretations do not matter as much as your own. Below I’m just sort of shooting from the mythic hip. If you meditate and muse on them you may see much more in them than I see now.

I see in these runes powers of the creator – given to us now, at this darkest time of the year when we need this life force energy the most. These powers exist in the outer cosmos as well as inside each of us. Any time you select a rune of any kind – even if that rune is a bible verse, or a poem or an omen hunt among tree branches, or tea leaves, or Tarot cards or whatever, the assumption is that rune that falls into your hand is the one the Divine wants you to see and muse upon, and perhaps act upon. It is up to you to decide how seriously you want to take this message from beyond. The way the runes are worded they imply someone is taking an action. Perhaps this is the action the Spirit is taking in the world, and just wants you to behold. And maybe it’s the actions the Creator wants to take in you, if you allow it, if you say yes. Perhaps it the action the Spirit wants you to take in this world.

Click on the rune picture to enlarge and see the visual runes...

Moves the dark wind through the sky bones.

I see the sky bones as the bare limbs of trees—like the bones of hands reaching up. The sky bones are also the supporting structure of the sky—the structure of creation. The sky bones are also the bones in you that are not physical bones, but your spiritual structure. The dark wind is one type of wind or breath that the creator blows through all sky bones. Maybe this breath brings a different kind of life to us than the breath God gives in the book of Genesis. Maybe this is a night wind that calms the heat, or takes away what needs to be taken away from us. Maybe it is a wind of death and winter which we see at work at the winter solstice, but which is also part of the breath of life, the part that brings on rest so that sprit may come again and new life will once again emerge from the sky bones. Maybe the dark wind is dreams. Maybe it is the element air in one of its forms.

Flows the a silence from the unknown

The original text here was “flows the silence from the unknowns (plural).” We changed it to “unknown” for better singing. The plural implies a pantheon of spirits or gods which flow through the world doing things, in this case delivering silence. The singular implies a unified Spirit, perhaps who dresses up in myriad costumes as it flows through the world. Either way, silence is a rare and powerful presence in our world. My daily world is really never silent, and my kids will grow up in a world that attacks their silence even more. A lack of silence creates anxiety and neurosis, there is no doubt in my mind about that. So silence is a critical gift of the spirit. As anyone who does silent meditation can attest, there is enormous power in entering into silence for us. It is such a simple sounding act, yet so radical and difficult for one who lives in TV/billboard/IPod land as we do. Of course silence is also reminiscent of death - a power also close to us at this time of year. And the word “flow” connects this with the element water, which, when it flows is never silent, but when we sit by a running stream it takes into a state of silence. Curious.

Flickers fire in the cold hearth

I see this as the actual element fire which cooks food and warms the house, and makes us feel good to be near. But it is also a gift of internal fire that can warm what needs to be warmed inside us, and it is imagination, Spirit, and it is also the fire of justice-making in the world. Maybe there is a part of your hearth that has grown cold, and this rune helps rekindle the proper fire there so food for the world may be cooked and served. Maybe this is an affirmation of home, our center, and that we must remember not to let to let anything, no matter how alluring, put our central fire out. Maybe it is a reminder to stay centered and grounded. Maybe this is the Celtic Goddess Bridget, who is connected with the element fire, and with healing, poetry and metal working. Maybe it is the sun coming back at the winter solstice to warm the earth.

Drums the thunder under earth
Originally this line was “Drums the thunder under old earth.” We cut out the world “old” to be sung more gracefully. The drum opens the religious imagination, and it connects us to the element earth. It opens visions and calls power animals to us. It is inherently an instrument of community because one can only drum alone for so long before the need to combine with the rhythms of others takes over. The drum is subversive to the powers that want to control us or hem us in, because the drum calls wildness into us, and it calls change into old earth. The drum cracks the layers of mud and concrete slathered onto us by the world and it calls us out to dance, renewed, and be authentically ourselves in this mysterious world. This drum is also the reindeer’s beating heart at the center of creation, as I related in the show. It is the pulse of the earth, the deep rhythm of the cosmos, perhaps the Schumann Resonating Frequency, more ancient than “old earth”—more ancient than all of our religions and all language and all thought. Perhaps it is the Logos of the Greeks, which was absorbed into Christianity, perhaps comparable to Wyrd in the Scandinavian tradition- the fundamental weave of creation.

Breathes light into the star room

I see this as an image out of the book of Genesis - the creation of the universe – the immense se “star room.” So perhaps this rune refers to an immense elemental power of air. But the star room is also the womb where human life is born, and the place of any new life that begins in the dark. Perhaps it is the imagination that is also a cauldron or star room of new life, because everything we do begins in the imagination. So maybe this is a fertility rune in one way or another. The star-room is also ceremonial space, or prayer space. So perhaps this rune is asking you to become fertile in your prayer life, that that fertility will result in new life.

Weaves the ice on winter’s tree loom
Weaving is an immensely mythic act – bringing together what is separate into a form that is useable and that transcends the nature of its parts. Maybe this rune affirms that winter is not the “bad” to the good of summer but one of the many ways the earth is woven, or one of the many ways the Great Weaver is at work – or at play – all around us. There is an affirmation of pain or suffering in this rune—that suffering is part of the weave of the whole, as winter is part of the weave of the whole year. We may not see the whole of what is being woven, but maybe this rune encourages us to try. There is in this rune maybe an affirmation that we are not in a world of caprice and luck, but a world that is artfully woven season by season, strand by strand, and so too are we individually, or as James Hillman says that we are “soul making” at each moment. Maybe we look at a stripe of horrible color in the weave and say “how could the creator let this horrible color happen?” but as we see more and more of the weave, perhaps that color becomes something else in the larger context. Perhaps this rune asks us to ask ourselves what world we are weaving. What pattern are we laying down with our actions each day? What is our Wyrd?

Calls the song back from the deep dark

I can’t help but see this as healing rune, a rune of what the shamans call “soul retrieval” - the act of calling, or singing, our soul back from exile. Many indigenous cultures encourage people to find their “power song” – that song that is given to us by the spirit world, and, when sung, brings a bit of that power into this world, and is also a prayer of praise that we carry with us through our daily lives. To have a power song or spirit song is to access a personal connection to the deep - a connection beyond words, a connection to the other world. That song allows us to carry that connection with us in this world and call on it simply by singing. Perhaps this is the rune of the Nordic Joik (pronounced “yoik”) the wordless praise song sung by so many indigenous people.

Flies the arrow to the heart

The spirits help us hunt. If we are respectful in many ways, the spirits will lead us to the food we need. Spirit helps guide the arrow to the heart
. This visceral image is wonderfully challenging and physical, for we live in this world, and we live by consuming other forms of life. We live in a trade-off of course - we use other forms of live to live each day, and we promise that one day we will die and become the food so that the next generation may live off of us. On an inner level, if we are respectful and trusting, Spirit will help us target what we are truly after, what we truly need. But there is a warning in this rune, as perhaps there is in all runes: when we identify as spiritual beings, we may be presenting a target to Spirit to come and strike us with power. If that happens, our lives may change, and we may see that change as a kind of death. Eons of spiritual love poetry romanticize this, but when it happens it is hardly ever truly fun.

So that is what the 8 runes given to me by the reindeer are. They are gifts to you from the reindeer goddess, gifts to remind you that the universe is not closed, that change is possible, indeed radical change is possible. And that you are loved by the cosmos.

Please feel free to leave your comments below in the comments section!

Jaime

2007-11-21T20:34:00.000-06:00

Jaime Meyer and Wisdom Ways
to present
Winter Solstice:
Drumming & Ceremony

December 20,21, 22, 7-9 PM
at Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality
Cost: $20
Reservations urged
by phone: 651-696-2788
by email: wisdomways@csjstpaul.org
The event is located at Carondelet Center
1890 Randolph Avenue Saint Paul, MN 55105

Following last year’s sold-out phenomenon, BLESSING, Jaime Meyer returns to lead you through another uniquely powerful winter solstice experience combining an evening of drumming, women’s chanting, and deep ceremony drawn from Celtic and Scandinavian shamanic traditions. Be prepared to drum, laugh a lot, and enter into a profound sense of mystery.

“It’s impossible to describe the experience! Jaime took the whole audience to another world, and we came back filled with wonder, love, and healing.” (audience member from 2006).

Meyer’s work is part theatre and part shamanic ceremony, part storytelling, mystical experience, and irreverent laugh-fest. The evening blends Meyer’s seminary degree with his 23 years of studying indigenous spiritual traditions and his many years of performing improvisational street theatre in the USA and England. He draws mainly on his own Celtic and Nordic roots, and on the ancient earth-centered spiritual practices in those cultures.

Everyone in the audience plays drums or rattles supplied by Meyer. Many people also bring their own drums and other instruments. Last year’s show played to about 110 people per night for six nights. This year’s show is only three nights. You are encouraged to make reservations soon if this kind of experience interests you.

“Something so inexpressible and utterly mysterious happens when people drum together,” says Meyer. “As Sun Bear said: A sacred space develops. Everything outside of that space shrivels in importance. Time bends. Emotions flow more freely. The bodies of participants become filled with life energy, and this energy reaches out and blesses the creation around them, and inside them. They become part of the earth rather than tourists or visitors. They bless and become blessed by the deep beauty of the living earth.”

He adds quickly: “But besides all that, studies show that drumming makes you sexy. It raises the energy that the Greeks called Eros—erotic energy. I learned that the very first time I drummed, and it never ceases. One ancient Greek also said that men with too much Eros lose their hair because it rises up inside them and burns the roots of the hair from the inside. I learned that too late.”

Meyer fills his serious spiritual theatre work with just as serious humor. “The day I stop laughing at my own absurdities is the day I become a dangerous spiritual person” he says, “and we have too many of those already.”

Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality, a ministry of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, is producing the event. For 13 years Wisdom Ways has presented conferences and artistic works with internationally acclaimed theologians, ecologists and artists. Wisdom Ways seeks to nurture and sustain an ever-widening circle of conversations, explorations and practices that promote spirituality within contemporary culture.

2007-11-14T20:04:00.000-06:00

Dear Drummers,

Whenever I look at my two boys, I think about dying. After the lights are out and everyone is asleep in the house, I sneak upstairs to my 8 year-olds room and watch him sleep. I’m filled with wonder at the unnamable, ungraspable life force moving in him, shaping him from within, this “Secret One slowly growing a body” as the Hindu poet Jabir once wrote. I can’t help thinking though that someday this boy will have to go to sleep without a father. I often wonder if he’ll take up either of my ceremonial drums or if he’ll hang them on a wall (which I consider a sin) or, like my brother did with our father’s watch and dog tags and turquoise rings build a glass case and display them with his 14 guns, a mausoleum devoted to Yang.

I move downstairs to the three year-olds room and gaze at him sleeping with his mouth open and limbs splayed out in three directions, totally safe and open to the world. I wonder if I will die before the point in his life that that he has memories of me. I wonder if he will take my prayer rug, the rug that all of our ceremonies are conducted on; a rug so full of what the Mayans call Its (remnants of spiritual effluvium) that I think maybe it should not be left in this world when I am gone.

The habit of sneaking in to watch my kids sleep and meditate on my death began when my first son was a week old. I watched him in his darkened crib, a stunned and dizzy new father, repeating to myself again and again, “Don’t touch him...he’ll wake up…you’ll be sorry…up all night like last night…don’t…don’t!” And of course I do. I reach out and take his tiny hand in mine. I hold it and close my eyes and then I feel someone taking my other hand. It is my father, and his other hand is held by his father, and I see a line of men holding hands, generation after generation, passing this bluish glow from hand to hand and into my infant son. And I see that I am not really what matters, the glow matters.

I think constantly about the unfathomable mystery of how we pass through this world, from darkness to darkness (although we really don’t know about that) from sleep to sleep (again, who knows for sure?) carrying the glow through this place we call Earth, how we nurture that glow or how we wound it and twist it. But ultimately, the glow is untouched by us somewhow and yet in some mysterious way it learns through us, or experiences through us, blesses and forgives us and heals us. I think about how if we are lucky and if we are courageous, and can get out of its way, we let it speak through us, and sing and move and love this world through our actions. And I think about John Muir’s lovely words--when we truly look at the world we see that everything is connected by luminous strands—glow connected to glow in every direction, and it all passes, all passes away, and is replaced.

I’m not morbid; it’s just that every night and every morning I think about dying.

So I don’t really need autumn to remind me to meditate on the great mystery of passing in and out of this world. But here we are, surrounded by the riled grey skies and exfoliating air reaching down to pluck the last breath of green from the lavender, that tease of first snow behind every gust. So here we are, in autumn, and we cannot help but meditate on the passing of all things, including ourselves.

The Japanese poet Kiko (d. 1894) says:
That which blossoms
falls, the way of all flesh
In this world of flowers.

And Minamoto-no-Shitago (d. 983) summarizes my life in a few words:

This world-
To what may I liken it?
To autumn fields
Lit dimly in the dusk
By lightning flashes

What the shamanist in me loves about autumn is the knowledge that we need regular exfoliation (losing of the leaves or bark, or more mythically, cleansing of the ever-streaked and pitted surface to allow new life to emerge). One of my favorite shamanist phrases: what happens in nature happens in us.

So as we gather this Friday we will call on our electrical potential to generate a few lightning flashes over our autumn fields using our drums as conductors. We will follow the words of another Japanese poet, Hamon (d. 1804):

In stillness I,
Light-bodied, set out for
the otherworld

See you on Friday,

Jaime

2007-11-02T13:02:00.000-05:00

Dear Drummers,

I’ve mentioned before in my email missives that our drum groups provide me an incredible opportunity to put my theology into practice, because each time a drum approaches, the pressure builds on me to try come up with something brilliant to say and some kind of awesome ceremony to conduct. Of course, whenever I try to be brilliant, nothing happens. And the pressure builds, and I try harder to think of something profound and soon this dull hum begins to rumble just behind my mind’s eye, and before long, I am making those puffing, squeaking rodent sounds of a man who has lifted the veil of pretence and seen himself as he truly is: witless, ugly and worthless to the world. And so, in panic, I go to my library or the internet to find a poem or story, or I go to my behemoth of a book that I’ve been writing for two years, and I try to find something – anything that will look like a spark of spiritual radiance to offer you. And nothing happens. Because I am empty Tupperware, with that slight odor of old food.

So I am faced with three choices. 1) Stay home and sulk on Friday. 2) Do nothing and trust the Spirit—which all of you carry with you from various corners of the Twin Cities as you make your way to the drum—trust that the spirit will bring what it wants to happen, through all of you. 3) Go to nature, become open and ask for guidance.

Today I chose #3. I write this from upstate New York, and today was blessed to go on a long hike through Watkins Glen Gorge, a truly amazing staircase of waterfalls and foaming water cutting its way for 10,000 years down through 400 feet of shale and sandstone to create a primeval, wet, mossy gorge two miles long. I entered the gorge distracted and depressed but after only a few steps I began to feel that crushing presence of failure begin to crack and splinter, and after awhile those clay shards flaked off and fell into the water, where they dissolved and were carried away.

Here is what the earth taught me to see today. We are like this land: layer after layer of time pressed together – each day, each month and year overlaying one another, each love and anger and envy pressing down on one another, shaping our inner landscape. And we often feel trapped inside the crush of layers, and we spend our energy trying to scratch our way out, and we are immobilized. But is there not in us somewhere this very water of spirit cutting its way through all of the old wounds and all of the old pretences and failures, and prides and sins, and past loves and dashed hopes and shattered illusions? From down here, near the rushing waters of Spirit, those many-layered canyon walls gleam wet with dappled sunshine and new life sprouts from the fissures. It is here where that “now-moment” lives in us, that moment that mystics and sages have told us about for eons, the place of the Presence, the Shaper and Transformer, the Watery One who says you are new and new again each day, who says give me your old clay and I will carry it away.

The drum—the spirit in the drum—comes to extract us from between these layers, and take us to that place where the waters of spirit are continually at work on us, making us Gorgeous.

This Friday we will thank this Spirit. If you’d like to bring an offering to this Spirit—something biodegradable—please feel free. Compost, dirt, water, flowers, herbs, tobacco, flour, cornmeal, whiskey, milk, poetry, song, whatever. If you want to make this offering carry a prayer of something you’d like the Water of Sprit to carry away, please feel free.

See you soon.

Oct 30 2007 / Bi-Spiritual

2007-10-31T16:15:00.000-05:00

October 30, 2007

Dear Drummers,

We often hear that at this time of year the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest, and that is why we speak of the spirit world and do ceremonies for the spirits at this time. This phrase is said so often that it borders on neo-pagan dogma. We hear it, we read it, we repeat it, but what does it really mean?

I’d like to offer this to you: the difference between spirituality and magic is where you locate the action. If you locate the action outside you, then this time of year becomes magical, because some inexplicable veil that science cannot detect and that keeps spirits at bay the rest of the year becomes thin for some ancient reason; the ancients probably knew why, but we don’t really. And so at this time of year the spirits may penetrate through the veil, slipping through to prowl your neighborhood asking for food, and if you don’t disguise yourself in a mask and costume to look like them they may eat you. This is a magical viewpoint.

If we locate the action inside us, then we arrive at this: during most of the year I am able to distract my attention away from the mysterious natural forces of death and dissolution, but when the whole world around me appears to die, the inner veil between me and my comforting distractions is weakened and find myself unable to distract myself from these powers that I know will one day consume me and everyone I know, and all things that will ever be. With my distractions removed, these powers seem very close indeed at this time of year. This is the spiritual viewpoint.

I have two people inside me – the 21st century Carl Jungist who adopts the inner, mythic, poetic, spiritual viewpoint because it is reasonable, yet arty. But I also have the shamanist in me who says that the world inside the human is certainly not the entirety of reality, that there is a world outside us – alive, conscious in some way that my small human consciousness cannot comprehend, powerful, beautiful, dangerous, deadly and therefore deserving of my reverence, attention, and ceremony is the way I give that.

This is why I call myself bi-spiritual. I swing both ways; between the psychological and shamanic, between the goddess and the god, between the reverent and irreverent, on and on, I blend these worlds.

For me “earth-centered” or shamanic spirituality has but one core purpose – to forge a sense of connection with this world – the visible and the invisible (to me) parts of this world, here and now. By virtue of being born into, or currently living in American culture, we are trained daily, down into our very bones, how to disconnect from this world, how to deny this world its life and breath and beauty. The wild man artist William Blake said that the main job of the prophet is to interfere. If, through our gathering together, we can interfere in the daily operations of a culture of disconnection, we are doing good work. If we can interfere with those voices implanted inside us that coax us to disconnect in myriad ways, we are doing good work.

Well, one way or another, this time of year interferes with our ordinary frame of mind. The spirits of death and dissolution come calling, singing their haunting song that reminds us that the earth waits to receive us back into itself, that the worms are gazing lovingly at our sweet bodies.

I look forward to gathering with you this Friday to do some good old fashioned interfering, some connection-forging, some boom-bada-boom-bada-ta-ka-ta-ka bi-spiritual swinging!

Jaime

2007-09-07T19:40:00.000-05:00

Dear Drummers,

As summer wanes and autumn emerges, the Celtic shamanic tradition tells us that we are entering into the mythic west—the direction associated with dusk, the horizon where the sun vanishes, with the element water, with grieving and letting go, and with the theological ideas of destiny, fate, mystery and faith in that which lies beyond the horizon.

Religion is often framed as the path to inner peace, and perhaps it is as long as you don’t say yes when beauty comes dressed in clothing from outside your religious box, or as long as you don’t follow those strange tracks into the woods. Truthfully, I do not believe there is anything wrong with loving your religious box and dedicating yourself to living firmly inside it. As a Rabbi told me once: Adhering firmly to the Law (the hefty set of strictures in Judaism) frees you because it draws in your limits so you can focus yourself and become deep rather than wide and shallow. I understand that. I’m not built for life in the box, and perhaps that is why I am wide and shallow, and I only really object to other people’s boxes when they demand I live in it with them, and they control an army. That makes for trouble in the world.

Perhaps life in the box (or a more gentle term: the walled garden) brings peace of mind. To be religious and to be a seeker are not the same thing. To seek, to be a prayerful pilgrim through this life, is to invite inner struggle.

In every time and every place, to be alive is to struggle. It does not matter who you are or what advantages you were born with or what has been held back or stolen from you. Every one of us struggles through this life, each in our way. Yesterday at the gate to the driveway I looked down to see two tiny black ants dragging some kind of moss green winged bug across the crack in the sidewalk. The winged thing wriggled frantically. The unflustered ants bore it over what, to them, were huge boulders, down into the deep cavern and up again, over the mammoth dried leaf, the winged thing writhing the entire way. Certainly the ants were asking “why must we struggle so merely to attain a meal for our family?” And the winged thing: “Was I born merely to struggle and become food for moronic goons?” And into the west, beyond the horizon, they dragged him.

All religion tries to answer the question of why we struggle, and then tries to provide frameworks to soothe the suffering we all carry. All religions are full of stories of humans struggling with the Holy, for all sorts of reasons and with all sorts of outcomes. But I believe there is a common thread through the stories of humans struggling with the divine: the struggle transforms the relationship—and perhaps it is only through struggle that the relationship between humans and Holy can evolve. Perhaps the Holy recognizes this about us, and therefore regularly delivers new struggle to us.

I believe the entire human race is at a point of transformation in our relationship with the Holy. There was a time when we did not bury our dead, and then we did. This was a major evolution of the relationship between us and the Kosmos. I believe you and I are alive smack at the fulcrum of an equally momentous transformation. The human mind and spirit is on fire right now, and I hope you will try to remember that as you move through your day wondering why everything feels so screwy, why it feels like you are being dragged across the cracks by ants.

A hot new You Tube video says that we are living in “exponential times.” The 8 minute video is called “Shift Happens” (or “Did You Know”) See it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbI-363A2Q.

Here are a couple of the tidbits from the video:

· There are 540,000 words in the English language today…about five times more than in Shakespeare’s time.
· More than 3,000 new books are published….daily.
· It’s estimated that more new information will be generated this year than in the previous 5,000 years.
· New technology is allowing the transfer of ever more information through existing fiber optic lines. The capacity is tripling every six months and will continue to triple every six months for the next 20 years.

And on and on it goes, blowing your mind with just how on fire the human mind and spirit are right now. We are radically reforming our consciousness, not only the consciousness of an isolated tribe or nation or region as has happened so often before, but of the entire human species. So it’s okay to feel a little geschmoofelkuntzed.

I made that word up. Now there’s 541,000 English words.

When we gather this Friday, we will celebrate the end of summer, and the transition into early autumn, from the dancing of the bright-lit south to the mystery of the dusky west. We will do this with at least one wild whirling exponential throb and at least one sonic wistful meander. In hour two, I hope to tell you a story or two of struggle with the divine. And I hope to set in motion an experience for you to move into the mythic western geschmoofelkuntzen kerfluffle.

See you soon,

Jaime

2007-08-30T20:01:00.000-05:00

Dear Drummers,

One of the main pastimes of shamanist folks is to read signs from the spirit world—to try to understand what Spirit(s) is saying to them, and what Spirit wants from them. We read coincidences, we link disparate events together into a narrative, we try to spot the unusual occurrence and discern what Spirit is telling us through it. We interpret reality against the backdrop of our own mythic structure. An eagle flies overhead and circles a far off rock across the water. It wants us to follow. Or it wants us to stay away. Or it wants us to see the face in the patterns off the rocks. Or it wants to tell us it approves of our actions. Or disapproves. Or a hundred other things. And on it goes.

Bible waving yahoos spend their time looking for signs too. So if you are a dedicated shamanist, don’t let yourself believe for a minute that you are all that different from Jack Van Impe and his perfectly coifed wife, Rexella, who operate the Bible Prophecy Portal of the Internet (http://www.jvim.com/) and whose weekly TV show is a masterful and hypnotic hour-long Ferris wheel ride through this week’s news stories as interpreted through bible passages taken out of context. Every show proves that we are in the last days and Jesus is coming very soon, and this makes Jack and Rexella giddy. By the way, Jack is living proof of that old adage “the nicer the hair, the holier the evangelist” and he also shows that holiness is directly proportional to how fast you speak. Lovely Rexella is the calm in the storm, the perfect foil for Jack. Her wide, blank eyes wobble with renewed amazement at each fulfilled prophecy Jack explains to his electronic flock.

So to be religious is to, in some way or shape, look for signs.

And in our mainstream American religion which we call psychotherapy, we look for signs too: patterns in our behavior or sudden anomalies, memories and feelings that burst forth, images that spontaneously flare either in waking or dreaming. As I have said before so many times, the only difference, between religion and psychology is where you locate the “one who generates the signs.” If you locate the progenitor outside of human consciousness you are religious; if you locate it inside the human mind, you are a devotee of psychology. But they work the same mysterious magic and we communicate with either with the same ritualistic structures.

Spirit never seems to speak clearly, and this is one of the enduring mysteries of the spiritual life. Prayers never seem to be answered in the language in which they are uttered. Once I was graced with a dream: A spirit being came to me and handed me a tin can. I could see that the tin can was attached to a long white cotton thread that stretched up into the night sky, away, presumably to the ends of the universe. The spirit being motioned for me to put the tin can to my ear, presumably so that I could hear God speak to me. I warily drew the can up to my ear, and yes! I could hear the voice of the Creator speaking. The creator said to me: “Mrrmphallopenoffennnbobbleontkinginy. Dopplinglywhooffert. Obeerinddyloppingloggnommnotemevvverboooovvv.”

There are countless examples in traditions of the divine speaking in riddles, in absurd logic, in truncated blurps, in non-verbal events or unfamiliar languages, the voice from the fog. Why is it that the less clear God is, the more authentic God seems to be? And the reverse is true as well; when in a scripture or story God speaks clearly with no nuance and no chance for misinterpretation, we tend to see the human hand of the priest or the editor at work, and we trust less in the revelation.

I don’t know why it works like this, but I have two guesses. One is this: Spirit is speaking in perfect clarity, but our human minds and senses are too narrow to understand it. That narrowness comes from being young, or distracted, or in pain, or egoistic, or undisciplined or frightened or a hundred other things. Each religion picks a reason why we are limited and cannot understand what Spirit is saying and then offers ways to move around or through these human limits. Sometimes the solution is obedience to an authority, submission to a teacher or orthodoxy, or a certain kind of discipline, or it’s dancing naked, or reading, or it’s silence or chanting, or working in community or working alone. The solution is going to the wilderness, or the solution is not having sex, or the solution is Olympic-level sexuality, or artwork or a refraining from images, or it’s a time for one and not the other and soon it will be a time for the other and not this one. On and on the Ferris wheel goes. For some reason the drum has been a pretty good solution for me to work with my multiple and severe human limits to hearing Spirit speak. Perhaps the drum is a solution for you right now, too, and that is why you are drawn to the drumming group.

The other guess is this: What Spirit(s) wants most for us is to awaken our sense of beauty. Beauty is not a static objective state, but an ephemeral human skill that must be learned. We have to learn how to see beauty, how to perceive it with more than our eyes, how to hold it and enter into it and how to live in it. The primary skill involved is the ability to hold more than one meaning at a time, to put away our fear of ambivalence, and to resist the temptation to slice away and burn what we don’t understand. Spirit wants us to learn beauty, and so it teaches us through ambivalence and nuance and images that carry more than one meaning. The purpose of our life is to walk in beauty. That lovely sentimental phrase is loaded with intense theology. If you agree with this, this is why you feel like an alien in this culture, which systematically violates all the preconditions for walking in beauty.

So on we go looking for signs, and listening for the garbled rumblings through the tin can.

This week’s drum will focus on this idea of signs. Of course we will renew our ears and eyes with 90 minutes or so of drummin’ thrummin’ tum-tum-tummin’ fun. Then we’ll move into a ceremonial environment where we will seek signs from that Original Voice at the end of the string.

Until then,

Gruffleumlehobbinropple, mrvvillquiddleffitch.