Winter Solstice Gathering

Please join our drumming circle for a Winter Solstice Celebration, December 20, 2011 starting at 6pm. We will begin with a dish to pass followed by a ceremony to honor the Solstice and the return of the light. Bring food or drink for the meal, a story, poem, or joke to share in circle and of course your drums and rattles.

Call 279-0444 for directions or more information.


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There will be no drumming circle this coming Tuesday, November 22

THE ART OF BLESSING THE DAY

This is the blessing for rain after drought:
Come down, wash the air so it shimmers,
a perfumed shawl of lavender chiffon.
Let the parched leaves suckle and swell.
Enter my skin, wash me for the little
chrysalis of sleep rocked in your plashing.
In the morning the world is peeled to shining.

This is the blessing for sun after long rain:
Now everything shakes itself free and rises.
The trees are bright as pushcart ices.
Every last lily opens its satin thighs.
The bees dance and roll in pollen
and the cardinal at the top of the pine
sings at full throttle, fountaining.

This is the blessing for a ripe peach:
This is luck made round. Frost can nip
the blossom, kill the bee. It can drop,
a hard green useless nut. Brown fungus,
the burrowing worm that coils in rot can
blemish it and wind crush it on the ground.
Yet this peach fills my mouth with juicy sun.

This is the blessing for the first garden tomato:
Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store
sells in January, those red things with the savor
of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name.
How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,
warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.
You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.

This is the blessing for a political victory:
Although I shall not forget that things
work in increments and epicycles and sometime
leaps that half the time fall back down,
let's not relinquish dancing while the music
fits into our hips and bounces our heels.
We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.

The blessing for the return of a favorite cat,
the blessing for love returned, for friends'
return, for money received unexpected,
the blessing for the rising of the bread,
the sun, the oppressed. I am not sentimental
about old men mumbling the Hebrew by rote
with no more feeling than one says gesundheit.

But the discipline of blessings is to taste
each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet
and the salty, and be glad for what does not
hurt. The art is in compressing attention
to each little and big blossom of the tree

of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,
its savor, its aroma and its use.

Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new.

Excerpted from The Art of Blessing the Day by Marge Piercy. Copyright� 1999 by Marge Piercy. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Photo credit: Debbi Milligan.



Visit Marge Piercy's Web site: http://www.capecod.net/~tmpiercy/

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Group drumming and the Immune System

Hi All,
This article validates what we already experience and know from our weekly drum circle. Please join us this Tuesday, September 13, 2011 for a special drum healing for me before my surgery next week.
Many blessings,
Pat



New Medical Study: Group Drumming Boosts Immune System


A brand new medical research study indicates that group drumming boosts the immune system. Published in the January, 2001, issue of Alternative Therapies, the groundbreaking study was performed at Meadville Medical Center's Mind-Body Wellness Center, Meadville, PA, by a team of MDs using control groups and blood tests.

Led by well-known researcher, author and cancer expert Barry Bittman, MD, CEO of Meadville Medical Center's Mind-Body Wellness Center, the study showed that group drumming actually increases cancer-killing (NK) cells which help the body combat not only cancer but other viruses, including AIDS. In their findings titled Composite Effects of Group Drumming Music Therapy on Modulation of Neuroendocrine-Immune Parameters in Normal Subjects, they found that one group drumming method in particular correlated with increase in NK cell activity, Lymphokine-Activated Killer (LAK) cell activity and chemical changes that together signal a strengthening of the body's natural immune response and a direct connection between the external senses and the natural immune system. (For details of this research study see http://www.amc-music.com/drumstudy.) According to Dr. Bittman, "Group drumming tunes our biology, orchestrates our immunity, and enables healing to begin... When our hands connect with a drum that vibrates with energy, vitality... and unity, we become whole again." Dr. Bittman's weekly radio program, Mind-Body Matters, is syndicated nationwide on NPR. For more on Dr. Bittman: http://www.mind-body.org/bittman.htm.

This new medical research follows recent biofeedback research showing that even brief heartbeat drumming can double alpha (a light meditative brainwave) and reduce stress. We now know that stress depresses the immune system and has been linked to nearly all diseases. Drumming has also been used successfully with Alzheimer's patients to focus attention, with war veterans to end trauma, with addicts in recovery from drug and alcohol abuse, and with prison and homeless populations to enhance self-esteem. Progressive corporations like Motorola, AT&T and Levi-Strauss have drummed with middle management to promote team spirit building. Widely published research also indicates that playing musical instruments increase children's learning abilities. This appears especially true of those instruments that can be played intuitively, like the drum. Qualitative studies have shown that drumming enhances right-brain functions such as intuition and creativity.

"The beauty of drumming as opposed to other activities is that you can take it anywhere, teach it in only a few minutes and offer it to groups of ill and well people alike," Bittman says. "Composite drumming enables people to enjoy myriad psychological and physical benefits. While immersed in this form of music making, their tension is rapidly transformed into a joyful, moving and enlivening experience. I believe group drumming should become an integral component of whole person care."

"The drum is the Great Spirit's favorite instrument That's why we were all given a heartbeat..."
- Mano, Navajo Elder



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Flower Power in July

This is a photograph from the second apprenticeship gathering last weekend. Flower essences being solarized in the labyrinth!


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Sandra Ingerman's Transmutation News

For those of you not familiar with Sandra's Medicine for the Earth work here is her website for Transmutation News. Written monthly she gives many suggestions for journeys or meditations we can do on a daily basis to heal ourselves so that we may heal our Pachamama. I hope you will check it out as a way of continuing the awesome work we do in the weekly drum circle.
http://www.sandraingerman.com/transmutationnews.html

Summer solstice is on Tuesday, June 21st. Drum circle will be meeting at 6 with a dish to pass followed by a fire ceremony. Hope to see you!


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We will be in the Yurt tonight!!

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After drumming circle last night I found this article to share

Shamanism and the Spirits of Weather
By Nan Moss and David Corbin
© Shamanism, Fall/Winter 1999, Vol. 12, No. 2


"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."
— Charles D. Warner Dudley editorial in the Hartford Courant, August 24, 1897


Inuit Song
The arch of the sky
And mightiness of storms
Encompasses me,
And I am carried away
Trembling with joy.1

More Pieces to the Puzzle

It is Saturday afternoon at the Pathwork Center, deep in the heart of the mysterious Catskill Mountains of New York. Twenty-three people lie quietly on the floor with bandannas over their eyes. The resonance of drums fills the room with harmonious and compelling vibrations. I am drumming with David in the center of the room by a simple altar cloth and lighted candle. We are drumming for people who vary in their ability and level of experience, but all have done this before — the celebrated shamanic journey to the nonordinary realms: worlds of compassion, wisdom, and grace. Today they are attempting something new: a search for a spirit of weather, and if they find one, each has a question to ask on behalf of our circle. The excitement is palpable.

Our drumming continues and I am somewhat surprised to feel the familiar desire to journey also, even as I drum. I gaze around the room and everything seems peaceful. I look at David, his eyes wide open and watchful. I indicate I wish to journey and then close my eyes as I drum and drum and drum...

I journey to the Upperworld with several of my power animals, asking to meet the Spirit of Weather. I do not know why, but I feel ecstatic. We fly through a layer of storm clouds, up and up, searching until we finally are face to face with a "cloud being." He is imposingly large, with lightning shimmering in his eyes, and when he speaks, snowballs tumble from his mouth. I feel glad to have my power animals nearby. I introduce myself and respectfully ask the cloud being for a teaching for our community. I am genuinely surprised, even dismayed, as he "lets me have it." He is unmistakably annoyed! He tells me that our culture has essentially forgotten him; that in times past, people all over the world spoke to, prayed to, and worked with him. Now he is ignored. Now, our science and "knowledge" attempt to depersonalize and de-spirit him. So he creates aberrant, rough weather to get us to take notice, to puzzle over, and to know that we do not know. As I feel this spirit's mood, I am speechless. I offer only a "thank you" for his teaching and promise to share this with the circle and community.

This journey left me much to wonder about. Though I have held a passion for weather all my life, and thought I recognized the aliveness, the spirit in all things, I saw that I still carried our culture's world view of weather as purely physical forces—awesome forces—that we were getting better at describing and predicting. Although some still notice connections between moods and weather conditions, and we personalize hurricanes and typhoons with our own names, this is the limited extent of our understanding beyond the physics of weather. Without realizing it, I had been participating in the collective cultural arrogance that leaves little room to see, hear, or feel spirits of weather. The extravagant concepts of rainmaking or weather-working were considered taboo by me, elusive in a realm betwixt and between myth and that which is too complicated and too dangerous.

Why explore or even attempt to relate to the spirits of weather? Is this merely a tangent of more important spiritual endeavors and truths? Each of us is profoundly affected by the weather, though we may only be minimally conscious of this. How many of us are aware of how our moods, behavior, and physiology change in response to the weather? Behind many of our most powerful experiences with Nature are forces of weather. A weather event has the capacity to draw us out of the relative isolation of our daily routines. It brings us together, all sharing the experience. And interestingly enough, weather is the one subject that we usually feel safe and willing to comment on with strangers!

Journey Suggestions for Working with Weather
For those who are interested in exploring their relationship with the spirits of weather, here are some journey suggestions:

What would an alive, harmonious relationship with the spirits of weather be like?
How can I prepare myself to harmoniously and effectively work with the spirits of weather?
What are the ethics of working to influence the weather?
Consider how we, collectively as well as individually, may affect the weather. Not only by the vast amounts of pollution and resource depletion that sustain our huge population and modern life styles, but even by our psyches and emotions, and sense of connectedness or disconnectedness from the natural world. There are indigenous and non-western people who recognize this connection and live in the truth of our relatedness to all. They embody what our ancestors must have for a very long time: an alive relationship with the spiritual forces of weather. This relationship is expressed in the principle of reciprocity: as above, so below; as within, so without; which is real and operative in our world and lives, independent of our conscious understanding.

To embark on a path of exploration and conscious relationship with the spirits of weather is to walk on a path of spiritual learning and experience that helps us relate to our sense of connection with all of Nature. In so doing, we can heal the rending wound of disconnection with Nature from which most of us in the modem world suffer. Along this path we encounter profound opportunities to experience and foster harmony in ourselves, and hence, in the Universe. It is a way to go somewhere following the lead of the spirits, and to enhance our own well-being, that of others, and of our Mother Earth along the way.

A Salish word from the Pacific Northwest, skalalitude, describes what life is like when true kinship with nature exists: "when people and nature are in perfect harmony, then magic and beauty are everywhere."2





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