Interviews and Book

 

"Your book is stunning, Jaime. Thoughful, insightful, practical and poetic at the same time, honest, brave, and, unlike any other book on shamanism, laugh out loud funny! Thank you!"  -Jeanne

Click the book to read an excerpt!

Thursday
May082008

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.

Wednesday
Apr232008

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.”

Wednesday
Apr162008

Join the fun on April 25th

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.

Sunday
Apr062008

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.

Thursday
Mar202008

Good Friday

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.