8th Annual Fall Drumming-Shamanic Retreat

Dark Mother Comes to Change You

Drumming & laughing, forest & lake, respite, hoo-ha & wahoo, soul-talk with fellow earth-loving-soul-seekers, comfortable cabins with private rooms and actual beds, sauna (otherwise known for this weekend as the womb of the Great Mother), rhythmic, sensual delight, freedom to let your wildness dance itself out of you, all under the half-moon heading toward darkness.

There is a simple, yet potent, intention for all of our drumming retreats: to offer you time away from the psychic clutter of your life, so that you may come close to Spirit in whatever way is right for you. The drum is a powerful, easy and fun tool that helps you shake off toxins and distress and open your heart, body and spirit to grace, forgiveness, insight, vision and wisdom. The weekend offers some structure, opportunities to go deeply into shamanic work, and to commune with people on the same winding, beautiful, frustrating, joyous, grieving spiritual path as you. There is also much open time, and you are free to engage with the structure and community as much or as little as you desire, and free to spend as much alone time, quiet time, or prayer and healing time as you need. We have always had incredible people come to our retreats - warm, loving, funny, devoted seekers of wisdom. The participants make the weekend what it is, and they often form lasting bonds. No drumming or shamanic experience is needed. Drums and rattles are provided, or bring your own.

Our ceremonial work this weekend will focus on the Dark Mother. She is the transformative power of autumn, a goddess figure appearing in every culture -suppressed and repressed in our culture. She is the power of dreams and intuition, the voice of the deep, the night wind, the song locked away in the abdomen, she is the tears that come when awe fills you, she is the song of loss, the feeling in the chest as the sun vanishes below the horizon in the west. She is often present in what we are told to fear. When she is denied she comes as a storm, when repressed, she appears as neurosis, anxiety and violence. When listened to, she offers us complete transformation and she opens us to our authentic powers. To connect to the power of the dark mother is to give ourselves a lifeline to the great unnameable, unclaimable, untamable creative Spirit - a lifeline to hold onto when we re-enter the clattering, nattering, spattering world of our day-to-day lives.

Crow Wing Crest Lodge near Akeley, Minnesota (about a 3.5 hour drive north of the Twin Cities). The Star Tribune calls Crow Wing Crest Lodge "one of the 5 best resorts in Minnesota." We will have the entire resort to ourselves. The usual price for the weekend would be around $500 per person. Our retreat Price: $275. Price includes all lodging, retreat fun and Saturday dinner. (Early bird special: Pay before September 15: $250. Wahoo.) Spaces are limited. Some scholarship places are available. To reserve your spot or ask questions, please contact Jaime Meyer: drummingthesoulawake@gmail.com or click on the blue box below. The best way to reserve a spot is to pay on-line by going to http://www.paypal.com/, click on "send money" and type in drummingthesoulawake@gmail,com as the recipient.

For more, click here.

Welcome, you pulsing seekers of experience, you sly dancers on the edges of reason, you lovers of the Holy in its uncountable costumes, oh you beautiful, extended tribe of drum lovers! Welcome to the drum this Friday, July 30, at First Universalist Church, located in cosmically enlightening Uptown Minneapolis! We have plenty of drums and other funkilicous items that you can play with, or you can bring your own wahoo-maker. We love it when people bring their musical instruments to add melody, and we love those of you who come to dance. Friends, the Great Wahoo has many faces, yes, yes it does, and we invite them all.

In 1819 the Poet John Keats wrote in a letter, "Call the world, if you please 'the vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find out the use of the world." He was saying that we are not a perfect soul imprisoned at birth in a naughty body, pining to be released back home to pearly heaven. Like fruit and grain, like metal tools, our journey through life shapes, refines and ripens the soul. We take in the energies and nutrients of this world, use some, toss off others, mix them, fire them, water them, heat and cool them, and we make a soul. I find that so beautiful, so mysterious and so right: we make the soul. If there is a motto for Drumming The Soul Awake, that little phrase of Keats would be in the top 10.

We are entering late summer, the time of the ripened fruits and summer storms, the time when the grain will soon be harvested. In the Celtic wheel of the year, the month of August is called Lunasa, after the god Lugh (pronounced LOO), the God of many skills. Lugh is the very image of the soul fully shaped and ripened. (More about Lugh here).

This Friday we will enter into a powerful shamanic experience on the idea of being shaped (and re-shaped) by Spirit. I will draw from two mythic pools - the Celtic and the Scandinavian traditions. It's one of the most powerful interactions I've been taught and I hope you will find it to be also.

If you have come to recent drums, you may notice how this Friday's drum connects backward to the Summer Solstice drum with the theme of "changing the story," and it will connect forward to the drum in August 14th (the Gathering of the Tribes,) and to the following drums in September and to the fall Earth Ecstasy retreat which, for now is subtitled "Oh Great Dark Mother Release This Love." I build each Drumming the Soul Awake experience as its own unique (hopefully useful and beautiful) experience, but I also try to build a year of experiences that you can connect together to shape for yourself a long, deep journey of soul-making, if you please.

Blessings of the summer thunder, the buzzing dragonfly and the sweet nectarine juice be yours,

Jaime

I have friends who are tech geeks. They think about gizmos all the time, and it's all they want to talk about. If you are not a tech geek, they sigh and roll their eyes and exchange knowing looks when you try to join the conversation. My 6 year-old is a Star Wars Lego geek. It may not be all he thinks about, but it's all he wants to talk about, and he, too, grows impatient when you cannot tell the difference between General Grievous and Count Dooku.

I fear I have become a Spirit geek. It's not all I think about, because I do think about sex and coffee. But beyond those, all I seem to think about is the mystery of Spirit, and particularly why, throughout human history, we have made Spirit so complicated, corrupt and cynical.

Everyone likes to criticize other people, and religious people top the list of gleeful finger pointers. I've studied many religions and it seems clear to me that at the core, all religions offer us the choice of how big or how small of a box we want to live in. All religions frame the box as immense, eternal, incomprehensible. And then all religions begin shrinking the box with stories, images and rules arising from two places: the culture and the landscape from which they arise. This is how the Creator Of The Universe somehow becomes so small as to worry that homosexuals will destroy even the Galaxies and spiritual writings from the people over the hill are completely wrong and dangerous. It's also why the God of the western world is founded on desert imagery, because that god arose from the desert of the ancient Near East.

So we call out to God, who brings us into immensity, and then we shrink god to fit our comfort zone and understanding. On and on it goes and human history is made on this shrinkage. But history is also made on the valiant attempt to resist that shrinking of Mystery - the compressing and compacting of God - and on and on this resistance goes too. In each time, in each culture, in each landscape we are offered the holy choice of how much shrinking of God we will allow and how much expanding of God we dare to embrace.

Drumming, for some incomprehensible reason, brings expansion, which is one ancient definition of "blessing." And that is why we drum.

Solstice Thanks

Dear Drummers,
Thanks to the 200+ of you who drummed, danced, wahooed, revered, wept, insighted, prayed and generally did the work of a gleefully serious spiritual human being at the two summer solstice drums this weekend. We were all incredibly blessed by the presence of that powerful band of women singers, The Idisi. And of course, the drum itself, our teacher and ally, was as gracious as ever to us.

It never ceases to amaze me how powerful these events can be, whether it is a smaller group at our monthly drums, or a larger tribal gathering at the solstices. If you were at either drum, please feel free to send me your comments and feedback. If you missed this one you did miss an amazing time, but do not worry, my plan is to offer larger events like these at each solstice, and at the two equinoxes, a weekend retreat. And of course, the Friday drums in between.

Blessings of Summer to you!

Jaime

Dear Drummers,

Join us this weekend for Summer Solstice Blessing!

The entire audience drums. Drums are provided, or bring your own! Dancing and ecstasy are allowed (but not required). Laughter and spiritual juiciness are virtually guaranteed.

I will weave storytelling, sheer wildness and shamanic ceremony from Celtic and northern European traditions into an inspiring, funny, and, if you are seeking it, healing evening. Idisi (a chorus of ultra cool, groovilly gorgeous goddessy women) will chant ebullient, earthy melodies that Lutherans are not allowed to learn. Idisi expertly calls in the sonic love vibes of the Divine Feminine. Everyone who wants to can receive a blessing from the powers of sun, earth, blossoms and the powers of change.

"Meyer’s writing is enormously seductive...farfetched whimsy with thickly textured thoughtfulness..." - Star Tribune

"It takes you safely into the Spirit world to romp, grieve and be healed, and then back out again..."-Past audience member

Dates: June 18 or 19 Time: 7:30 PM Place: The Minnesota Opera Center, 620 North First Street, Downtown Minneapolis. Ample free parking across the street, paid parking 1/2 away and on the street. Click here for a map. Ticket Price: $20 Order advance tickets online by clicking here (Or you may pay cash at the door.) House opens at 7 PM and the drumming begins! All seats are general admission and seating is limited. Past Solstice Blessing events have sold out quickly.