We are made of rhythm. We have grandfather and grandmother rhythms laid down in our bones at conception — rhythms that sustain us, and upon which we build all of our other rhythms. Heartbeat. Breath — in, out, in, out. Sleeping and waking. Dreaming and dreamless sleep, alternating. Menstrual rhythms in women, and similar, less visible hormonal rhythms in men. Cerebral-spinal fluid swings in our spine. Electrical impulses fire in the nerves. Our insides are a polyrhythmic drum group rivaling any cluster of African master drummers. Inside we are one long drum ceremony. We don’t have rhythm. We are rhythm. We are made of rhythm. Saying “I don’t have rhythm” is a little like saying “I don’t have blood.”
We are also inside the larger rhythms of our cosmos: day and night, sun and moon rising and setting, the flowing and returning seasons, leaves dropping and appearing and dropping, the spinning of the galaxy, even the expansion and collapse of the universe itself, which the Hindus see as one cycle of the God Brahma dreaming and waking. Scientists have identified a universal vibration found everywhere — a hum (which is waves of sound — a rising and falling rhythm). Called the Schuman Resonating Frequency, it is the vibration found in the Earth’s electromagnetic field, in deep space and also in the brains of people in a deep meditative state (from 6 - 13 cycles per second).[i] When we drum, our brains slow from the faster Beta waves (12 - 16 cycles per second), to Alpha waves (8 - 12 cycles per second) where we breathe more slowly and deeply and begin to relax, and then to the Theta wave-state (4 - 8 cycles per second). Researchers have also noted the same wave patterns and frequencies in energy healers’ brains when they are at work on a client.[ii]
As our brain waves slow, we begin to “open.” Our bodies feel lighter; we begin to experience visual imagery. We go to a liminal place, the threshold between waking and dreaming, the conscious and unconscious, this world and the other world. Our brains now vibrate at the same rate as creation. We begin to sing along with the great song of the universe, what the Celts called the Oran Mor, the Great Song. We stand at the threshold between worlds where everything is swinging, inside and outside, heaven, earth, and it never winds down. If you experience this for fifteen seconds, it may, as the poem below says, make you a servant for life.
Between the conscious and the unconscious,
the mind has put up a swing:
all earth creatures, even the supernovas, sway between these
two trees,
and it never winds down.
Angels, animals, humans, insects by the million, also the
wheeling sun and moon;
ages go by, and it goes on
Everything is swinging: heaven, earth, water, fire,
and the secret one slowly growing a body.
Kabir saw that for fifteen seconds, it made him a servant
for life.
– Kabir, India, 1398-1518.[iii]
[i] See by Toni Bunnell, Ph.D., A Tentative Mechanism for Healing (http://www.positivehealth.com/permit/Articles/Healing/bunnell.htm), and River Geurguerian, (http://www.guerguerian.com/sharing.html), and Frank Perry (http://www.frankperry.co.uk/)
[ii] Dorothea Hover-Kramer, Healing Touch: A Guide Book for Practitioners (Thomson Delmar Learning, 2001)
[iii] Tr. Robert Bly, The Kabir Book, (Boston: Beacon Press/Seventies Press 1977) 11