Drumming The Soul Awake

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....

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 s...

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 m...

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, wi...

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...

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, ...

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 ( htt...