The Spiritual Power of the Receding Hairline

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

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

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

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

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