Drumming Workshop
Next Drumming Workshop with Ruach Rythmns
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Friday, December 30 at 7:00pm – Sunday, January 1, 2012 at 1:00pm
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Benwisken Eco Centre, Co Sligo.
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Drumming Workshop New Years Eve Winter solstice celebration.A time to gather together in community to celebrate the release of the old and welcoming in the new. Stepping into 2012 wth community an unity. In this communal drumming workshop we will be sharing our music, the power of storytelling stories and our wisdom. Bring your voices, your drums, your stories, your instruments, your laughter, your recipies and your heart. The venue is the Benwisken centre at the base of the beautiful Benwisken mountain outside Cliffony Co Sligo. The event is alcohol free, although we will be sharing a (mild) mulled wine over the weekend period. This is a family event and children are welcome. Cost of this weekend drumming workshop is €70 per adult and €20 per child. This includes excellent dormitary accomodation. A deposit of €20 is required to secure a place. If we get a full house then the cost will be reduced. Concessions are available on prior request only. To book contact: |
Reflections from a Drumming Workshop in Ireland
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Drumming has become a rhythm within my life. It happens within a circle within a circle within a circle. Having fallen out of what the mystic poet Jelalladin Rumi calls the Circle of Love deep into the Circle of Time, I have, ever since I was around the age of seventeen, had a longing to belong. Over many years I have journeyed through various stages of spiriutal development and journied within various kinds of groups looking for such a sense of belonging. Each of these groups and circles have held and supported me in their various ways. Each of these groups I have left. I have always left at a point when the group dynamic wanted to impose its group consciousness on the emerging individuality flowering within me.
Now at this point in my life I have come to a new community where I go to a regular weekend drumming workshop that includes communal singing and the power of storytelling invited around the fire late into the night. This drumming workshop and circle doesn’t ask me to believe in anything. This drumming circle simply asks me to come along and learn what it is to play a drum. It is the most eclectic of groups. There are young and old, black and white, men and women, single people and married people and too many religious denominations to mention. All of these people gather around in a large or sometimes small circle. The circle is the most powerful of symbols. It has no beginning or end. In the middle there is an emptiness which is full. It is full of unlimited potential. We gather in a physical circle of time and space and form. In the centre of the circle there is space and there is timelessness. Inside that space is an invitation. It is the invitation from the eternal Circle of Love. It cannot be grasped by the intellect. You cannot own it. It cannot be bought. It can however be known and felt and shared. Such is the nature of a drum circle.
This circle is a communal drumming group. Its emphasis is on promoting a sense of community and it will, if you allow yourself, take you into a real sense of communion. You will learn to fall into your unique rhythm. At such a drumming workshop this circle of community does not debate the rights or wrongs of the world. It simply plays drum rhythms that allow each individual to begin to sense a place of belonging and rightness within them. Out of this place where the drumming workshop takes them they are given the energy to become whatever creation intended them to become This place invoked from this drumming workshop is a place beyond the judgmental mind. The rhythm of the drum takes you into an awareness of the body beyond simply thinking about. It takes you into the intelligence of the body that many people in our day to day Western society ignore. If they do not ignore it they are intent in pushing the body into some kind of conformity.
For many, the body is an instrument that they feel to be wrong in some kind of way. Mostly this comes from cultural and religious stereotyping. This is particularily the case in that stage of stage of personal and spiritual development referred to as the Formal/ Institutional stage of personal and spiritual development. Many of us in our own way do not fit in. We are like the story of the dragon called Didnafitin who did not fit in. He was a square dragon in a world of round dragons. Except that most of the round dragons did not admit that inside each of them was a dragon who was, despite being round, all out of shape. Drumming does not ask the body to be a different shape. It helps you fit in. It awakens the body to its natural rhythm and balance. The first thing that is often noticed by a beginner at a drumming workshop is the fact that one hand is weaker than the other. In the beginning it needs practice to begin to awaken this non-prominent hand and bring both hands into balance. There is no judgment here. There is only the experience of the awareness that one hand is dominant that is developed at a drumming workshop.
This experience of dominance that is found amongst beginners attending at a drumming workshop reflects our approach to life. Our dominant approach to life is one of doing. This approach tends to be one-sided. We do much of our lives until we are done in. Unlike the unity of rhythmn found within the drumming workshop experience we live in the rhythm of the do and do and do more which is pushing our species to the place of extinction much like the Dodo bird. The experience within a drumming workshop invites a more natural rhythm. It invites the rhythm of do and be and do and be and do and be. This is the dobedobedo rhythm of life. It is opposite to the rhythm of most people’s lives which is geared to doing rather than movement from being. The rhythm of the drumming workshop and circle builds to a crescendo. It falls deeply for a short time into silence. This is the rhythm of doing and being and the rhythm of harmony that brings together a sense of communality. There is a collective experience of joining in and creating together a communal dance of sound. Then following that there is the individual sense of returning to ones own centre.
Drumming Workshop in West of Ireland
In this experience of a communal drumming workshop there is no requirement for me to believe that I need follow some idea that does not speak to my heart. No one, I think, will throw me out of the circle simply because I no longer believe that a drumming circle should conform to some group ideal. If that should happen then it will be time for me to leave and move in a wider circle that my beloved Rumi invites when he says,
There is a field far beyond right doing and wrong doing. I will meet you there.
This is the field beyond the duality of ideas of right and wrong that allows you to experience the rightness of creation. In this experience there is no sense of you being someone who has ever been away from the circle of Love. You cannot leave this circle because it is who you are.
Out of this awareness of who you are as an embodiment of Love communion happens. It isn’t so much that within the drumming workshop you have to find some kind of rhythm that fits you. Out of this awareness of the body that drumming invites you become what Creation has longed for you to be. It isn’t that you then do the dance of life but that you realize that life is the dance you are. The doing of your life, becomes not the do do do rhythm of living your life back to front, but the movement of your life as Love in action. This awareness, if it is genuine, will wake you up to the injustice of a world based on the idea that we are all separate. When you find the real rhythm that you have come here to be then you will begin to serve. You will do this because there is so much you feel that you have to give that to do other than this means you stop enjoying and being in the joy of who you are.
In a drumming workshop you are not asked to become a master drummer although there is no reason why you shouldn’t if that is what you are drawn to express. A communal drumming workshop uses rhythm to create the feeling of centeredness as a communal experience. The missing ingredient in our world of separateness is the direct experience of communion with that which is non-separate. It is that which is never born and never dies. It is that which we are and are here to be the knowing of. It is our true nature and our inheritance. I am writing this at a time when Ireland and much of the world is experiencing a time of financial crises. These crises, I think, mirror a more fundamental crisis. The system of regulation of financial institutions can be tightened but the regulation does not mean that the moral and spiritual bankruptcy at the heart of the crises will change.
Those who are in control of the major resources and who are living the so-called ‘good life’ are often divorced from the life of those who are working to make ends meet or on the margins of society. The real measure of a country is the level community and communion felt amongst its people and its relationship to the earth and all the creatures held within the circle of creation. One of those people who have inspired me is the English politician William Wilberforce. He had a circle of friends called the Clapton Saints. He, together with this circle of committed individuals over a period of forty years, brought an end to slavery in Britain. When he started out he was told by everyone that it could not be done.
He stayed true to the rhythm of a grace note given to him when he was twenty six years old. He never moved from that central awareness of sacred unity, the rhythm of sacred breath.. From that awareness he held his own centre. The person he came to when he was full of doubt was John Newton. We know John Newton as the man who composed the hymn Amazing Grace. A real sense of community is an amazing grace. It is what will and does make a difference. It begins with you and your intention. Often joining a drum workshop and drum circle happens because we want to find a group of people we can simply enjoy spending time with. We might join such a drumming group to learn how to drum. You might learn by going to a teacher but this will not be the experience of community that is available within a circle of people who start as separate individuals and within sixty minutes are playing as a community. They learn to do the rhythm and then come to be. They come to belong to a community. The journey into being is part of this invitation from a drumming workshop that becomes a community.
In such a way time stops and one enters the empty space at the centre of the circle to find the amazing grace that it is always full and awaiting to give you true fulfillment. You become like the apprentice in the Disney movie called Fantasia, only you know how to pour away the beauty that you are and that is central to who you are and your ability to commune. Come into the circle of Love it is the only rhythm worth playing.
Come out of the Circle of Time
into the Circle of Love
Jelaluddin Rumi
So it is that I continue with my attending at these regular drumming workshops that build my sense of community and my sense of belonging, not only to the drumming workshop rhythmns but to my personal and spiritual development rhythmns. Although these drumming workshops are titled workshops they are really more like playstops.
