The Story of My Story is My Story

Dear Drummers,

Welcome, oh you courageous explorers of the great, unnamable, untamable, unframable, undrainable, Mystery! Welcome to the drum, this Friday, May 14th, 7-9:30 PM at the Saint Paul Council of Churches Building, two block west of Snelling Avenue on Summit, in the very vortex of cosmic mystery: Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Humans are constructed less of bone, sinew and blood than of story. We are taught stories from the moment we are born. We are warned about which stories to grasp onto and which ones to flee from. We learn to tell ourselves stories. We swim through currents of stories our whole lives. Often we find ourselves flailing in the rip tide of the clashing mix of stories. Every action we take springs from the story we believe.

If the spiritual life is about a single thing, it is about freeing ourselves from the stories that poison us and finding the stories that bless us, that make us free, light and able to move through life with happiness. (That's a story too.) You - wild drummers of the Spirit - you value the work to investigate the Story and you work to summon the courage to deconstruct the poisonous ones and step into blessing stories. If you were not that kind of person, you would not be reading this email.We are each engaged in the task of reframing our story - many of us on a very personal level, but also on a cutural and species-wide level. We are in a great time of editing and revising. Someday, our ancestors will call our time "Draft 3."

Our focus for this Friday's drum: to ask the spirits of nature, the spirits of spring time, the Mighty Ones of the reborn, renewed land to help remove us from the stories that poison us and help us find the story that blesses us. If you'd like to bump it up a notch for yourself, shamanically speaking, healingwise, bring a marigold flower with you on Friday-maybe one planted in a little pot. You don't have to, but you can.

For the 17 of you who have signed up for the Spring drumming retreat May 21-23, this is the beginning of the work we will also be doing over that fun, friendly, freely funkelicious weekend. You don't have to come this Friday to get started, but I just wanted to let you know, you could start the work this Friday if you want to. You don't have to, but you can. There is still one spot available at the retreat; if you are interested, please email me: drummingthesoulawake@gmail.com

I look forward to seeing your radiant faces on Friday!
Joyful blessings of the greening trees be yours,

Jaime

p.s. Three brief items I'd like to pass along. I've done some work on my web site and added some new info. One bit is an introductory video. The intention for that is really simple: to let people who have never seen me see me. It's aimed at the person who is sorta, kinda interested in this drumming thing, but who is a little reticent to try it. If you know anyone like that, please feel free to send them the link to my video. I also have a page about shamanic services I offer. This is a new step for me. It took me awhile to come to an agreement with the spirit world about this. (Awhile = 16 years.) Finally, there is a page of "testimonials." These are also aimed to introduce people to the work we are doing together on these wild Fridays. If you have any comments, corrections or testimonials you'd like to send me about the web site, please feel free. Thanks.

I also direct your attention to the Drum Heart's 20th year celebration, June 5th. Sponsored by the Women's Drum Center, Drum Heart is a women's drum ensemble - very, very fun, cool and really good. June 5th offers a great drumming workshop for women and an evening concert for all.

Lastly, I hope you'll mark your calendar for the summer solstice weekend, June 18-19 for "Summer Blessing." It's the other side of the wheel from the winter solstice drumming event, which so many of you have come to. It will be at the Minnesota Opera Center, downtown Minneapolis. More details as they emerge (from my mind).

Celebrating the Sensous Earth

Dear Drummers,

Welcome one and all to the fruitful, fertile, funkified frenzy of Drumming the Soul Awake this Friday, April 30, 7-9:30 PM, in the very center of cosmic enlightenment, Saint Paul Minnesota (the St. Paul Council of Churches Building, 1671 Summit Avenue, Saint Paul - Summit Avenue two blocks west of Snelling (Click for a map). All are welcome, no drums or drumming skill neccessarry - all you need is is a desire for spiritual fun-making, a desire for connection to earth and earth-tribe, and a desire to renew your connnection to your own love of the Great Unbounded Mystery.

This Friday is a HUGE day in the Celtic shamanic calendar - May Eve, the night before May Day (Beltane in Gaelic). May Eve is traditionally associated with the celebration of pleasure, sensuous delight, and fertility. There is an old tradition that May Eve is a night for lovers to sneak away into the woods to embody for one another the springtime lovemaking between the sun and the earth. On May Eve, married men and women were allowed to remove their wedding rings - and the boundaries encircled therein - for this one night.

Traditionally, the men in pulpits have really, really disliked May Eve.

We Moderns are obsessed with accurate measurement, so we like to say May 1st is Beltane, and April 30th is May Eve. But Beltane is a loose time through mid May. Beltane is traditionally associated with the visible blooming of trees, with that tangible, heady fragrance in the air and with the first full moon after the sun has reached the midpoint between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. The moon is full this Wednesday, just slightly past full for us this Friday.

Beltane is the celebration of the sun's golden fingers easing open the small white buttons, his honey-sweet kisses awakening the long slumbering earth. It is the celebration of the land's wild craving to receive the seeds; it is the moon whispering:

Now, Love, at last I come
In warm fullness rising over you.
Let there be trembling in the soft hills
at the light play of my fingers
And sighing in the valleys.
Let there be glimmering of sweet dew
At the caress of my breath
And gleaming in the estuaries.
Let the hundred winged ones burst free
from your greening branches
Let there be heard swirling
Up to the joyous stars and
over the newborn land
Your aching song of Yes.

We will dedicate this Friday in Saint Paul, and the following Friday (May 7) at the Minneapolis drum, to this wild love of the irrepressible life force, this fragrant blossoming in the world, and in us. I would love to have a few people help me prepare the ceremonial aspect for Friday. Please send me an email if that interests you.

Lastly, if you are interested in attending our spring drumming retreat, May 21-23, there are a couple of spaces open still. Click here for more details. We always have a lot of fun at our retreats and I design them so that you can go as deeply into meditation, healing or contemplation as you wish.

See you soon,

Jaime

The Alternative Login

Dear Drummers,

Welcome one and all to drumming this Friday at First Universalist Church, 34th and Dupont, in delirious uptown Minneapolis. The letter for this week is below, but a note first: Please see that the dates of the spring retreat have changed to May 21-23. If you are interested, please make your reservations soon. Space is limited. At the retreat we will be drumming up what the Ancient mystics refered to as "profound wahoo," and, if you want, I'll give you the opportunity to look deeply at that one myth that guides your life that you may want to rewrite. Change the story, change your life as they say. And we will work with the magical properties of marigold which has been calling out. And of course, there's the sauna, the lake, the forest, the birds, the Spring, the away time. Yes, wa-hoo.

Now the letter for this week:

Today I tried to Login to Facebook on my phone and noticed a tiny link: "Having trouble logging in? Try alternate login here." I clicked and it took me to an error message: "You must login first." It's a funny tidbit about the frustrations of technology, but it made me think about Mircea Eliade, the great mid 20th century cultural anthropologist.

Eliade said that all religions acknowledge that that the world is profane, or un-sacred, and all religions construct a way to enter into that sacred place that is separate from the profane world. In today's words, all religions give you the web same address to the login screen to the divine. Each religion gives you a different password. So when you enter a church, you are crossing the threshold from this profane world to a separate, sacred realm - the house of God. Indigenous ceremonies where the natives drum and dance and cavort are about inviting the sacred to come crashing over that threshold from the sacred realm and into this profane realm. It's a compelling idea that makes a lot of sense.

Eliade's idea has been much criticized, in the same way that Joseph Campbell's ideas have been: white western academic (non-drumming) males trying to impose a universal world view on the thousands of cultures and tribes around the world and throughout history, as though all of us were really the same. The impulse to try to find that one thing that makes us all alike is a western, male impulse according to the criticism. For the "neck-up" western academic male, alternative logins do not really exist.

But what I see as the promise in the shamanic path is that there is not a separation between the sacred and the profane. Eliade was awesomely smart, but his cultural and intellectual foundation sprang from the idea that God lives elsewhere, or that God is merely an idea that everyone has. The shamanic view is that, even though it's often called "the other world," it is here now. The past and future are present now, all things are happening right now, or in theological language, the divine is "radically present." There is something in this idea that seems very right to me, and as Jesus said in the non-official gospel of Thomas, speaking for the Divine: "It is I who am all things. From me all things come forth, and to all things I extend. Split a piece of wood and I am there; lift up a stone and you'll find me."

The basis of so much shamanic healing is that even old spiritual wounds from years ago, even wounds from generations ago, are present now sometimes. Healing the wound now also heals wounds going back perhaps generations. Healing your wound now may heal your ancestors, and healing your ancestors may set things right for you. This is a very powerful and very beautiful notion for me, and I believe I have experienced it personallythrough shamanic work.
And that will be the theme of this Friday's drum. But not before we release ourselves as totally as each of you wants to, into the whoop-de-doo, whirling, swirling, sensuous delight of groovelicious rhythmocity.

I hope to see you soon!

Jaime

Link above: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return_(Eliade)

Dear Drummers,

Welcome one and all to the drum this Friday, 7-9:30 PM at First Universalist Church, 34th and Dupont, in ecstatic, mystical Uptown Minneapolis. Oh, what a Friday awaits you, you explorers of the soul-scape, you brave travelers on the unpaved road to Spirit. (Unpaved, but not un- traveled! Look there, food left for us by those who have come before! And look there! That bird is pointing the way, and so is that tree! Wa-hoo, I say. And I say again: Wa-hoo.

The magnolia tree outside my window has been speaking to me of boldness. Along with the siberian squill, the magnolia is the first blossom to boldly burst forth in spring in our landscape, confidently announcing its fragrance to the neighborhood. When I spoke to her about boldness she instructed me in the difference between boldness and brashness. Brashness comes from rebellion, from wanting to show authority that you are not obeying them. Adolescent brashness may mature into boldness, or it may devolve into the toxic addiction to confrontation like we see in television pundits.

Boldness, as the magnolia taught me, comes not as a confrontation to others, but as a natural expression of one’s joyful connection to Spirit. All too often we mistake brashness, rudeness, certainty and sarcasm for power when these are, in truth, expressions of fear and powerlessness.

Boldness is required of us at various times throughout our lives. We are called to boldness against toxic patterns, ideas, people and institutions, and boldness in the face of change. In our time and culture, we need boldness just to stay balanced and healthy in mind, spirit and body. If you are like me, you recognize the call to boldness and very often back away. Voices float in our heads, policing our call to boldness, whispering “be humble” “listen to the experts” or “don’t be a show off” or my favorite, “just who do you think you are anyway?”

This Friday, we will ask the spirit of magnolia to help us become bold, and if you want, you can be washed with magnolia blossoms. You don’t have to, but you can if you want to. First, we’ll drum up a whompin’ whoopin’ whirlin’ wahoo of Wyrd. I will forget to say it, but please, please, if you feel like dancing, leap up, leap up, and let the weavin’ wagglin’ woogglin spirit take you into the blue, blue breeze!

Here is what is weirdly cool about the shamanic path: after I spoke with the magnolia I did some research to discover that, in herbal healing, magnolia blossoms are used for self-esteem, loyalty, love and attraction. When I asked her about that she said (with some irritation) yes, it’s all true, but “loyalty” in this sense is connected with what the Celts called “sovereignty.” I’ll have more to say about that on Friday. In Chinese medicine, magnolia leaves are used on the physical level sinus and chest congestion and abdominal problems.

Be well, travelers, I hope to see you on Friday.

Jaime

Dear Drummers,

Though I no longer connect to my childhood's magic of Easter, I adore (and try to live by) the imagery embedded in the story: the power of all creation knows each of us, and loves us. It wants us to blossom in wisdom, peace, and love. It suffers with us as we fail again and again, as selfishness, envy and fear overcome our emerging wisdom. That power of creation is beyond our ability to comprehend, but we somehow understand that, to it, all things are possible. Death, which so terrifies us, loses its meaning when we are able to "open our eyes and ears" wider and feel this Presence of creation. When we become open, we can be transformed, utterly: reborn. We become able to "Fear not." Each time we make decisions out of fear and envy we perpetrate an inner crucifixion, and each time we make decisions from love and awe we roll back the stone for an inner resurrection. And whatever we accomplish on the inside radiates out from us in our actions, small to large, in the world.

The frightening, gloomy melody of good Friday and the shimmering tune of Easter morning that were so important to my childhood have been replaced by a steady, rhythmic Wonder at the unfathomable powers present in nature as wide and deep as I am able to understand it - from the quark to the ten dimensions of modern physics. And in between, miniscule me: my small human mind sparking faintly inside its clay cup, my tiny human heart playing its simple beat amidst the uncountable other instruments in the cosmic orchestra, trying my best to push envy and fear out of the way for a few moments longer today than I was able to yesterday, and let awe and love make more decisions for me.

I have not rejected the Easter story; I have drawn it inside and made it both more subtle and more personally meaningful. I have transformed it. Dare I say it has died and been resurrected in me in a new spiritual form, something Jesus promised would happen to all who followed him to the truth. In an article posted today, Dr. Jean Houston tells of the series of visions of Christ that came to the 5th century Augustine. As the visions began to wane, "...filled with anguish at the loss of the Beloved, the saint cried out to Christ to return. Out of darkness he heard the words, "I have disappeared right before your eyes in order for you to return into your heart to find me."

I have not given up on the magic in the Easter story. Actually, I find myself these days seeing more and more magic at work, experiencing it more viscerally and obviously. My eyes are opening to the evidence that we are surrounded by, penetrated, permeated and infused by miracle and what rightly can be called magic. I like to call it the "powers" or the "spirits" or the "energies" or a hundred other names to keep it from sounding anything like what the religious bureaucrats and scripture zealots call it, and I describe it as coming from inside the same place as the green leaves emerging from the reborn trees and the periwinkle Siberian Squill resurrecting all around my neighborhood.

On this beautiful early spring day before Easter, I wish for you what I see as the core of Christ's message: "Epatha!" (Greek for "Be opened!")

Jaime