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

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

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

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

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