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!

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

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.

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

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.