HeartBeat

The Healing Power of Rhythm

Meditation: Let your head quietly slip back in a soothing bath, until your ears are underwater. Quiet your thoughts and listen. What do you hear? The rhythmic beating of your heart (pumping blood through your inner ear). This is just one clue.

"There is no more obvious evidence of connection between our heart and energy outside the body than our heart's response to musical rhythms.....Our heart is the metronome of our body's biorhythm, and health happens when we are in rhythm within ourselves, synchronized with other living systems and moving to our preset beat rather than trying to respond to the driving beat of the stressful outside world....Healing, then, becomes the ability of our heart to improvise and develop its own new rhythms to the chaotic rhythms that continually emerge in our daily life." --Paul Pearsall, Ph.D., The Heart's Code: Tapping the Wisdom and Power of Our Heart Energy, p. 222

The drum is a heartbeat of creation, and represents our connection with the mother, the source...and with our own mother, the echo chamber of the womb. With mother earth, and the beat of the sea. The pounding surf, the crack of lightning, the wingbeats of migrating birds. The turning of the seasons, the sound of our own breath. The moving feet and pumping arms of a runner; the rhythmic stride of a long-distance walker. The movements of lovers, and people working the fields. All the sounds of all the movements we do to keep alive and to express our joy, and even our pain; the insistent clockwork of stress, the innocent soft lapping of a kitten's tongue.

The drum heals our connection with each other when we play it together. It brings to our attention what works between us and what doesn't. It shows us exactly where and how we harmonize and where we don't. It makes us attune to the invisible world of the energy between us: this becomes more important than what we think we see, what we wish for or regret. What's real is happening right now, in the moving moment. And when it's gone, we have only to look for the next to get back on; this time we ride.

Read more in my latest African drumming blog...