EverydayBliss: Mystical Rhythm, Punk, & Health

The natural rhythm of symmetry is calming.

Listening to right now: Shanti/Ashtangi

Today's Happiness Formula: A post about drums is a great way to start your day!

Following My Bliss by: Monday's are my reading and "gathering" day mixed in with lots of yoga and walking. A day of thinking and developing and "composting," like I call it. I will also work on revisions.

The Hindu tradition, in its practical understanding of sound
in the mystical life, tells us that music is God
when it reaches its ultimate purity, focus, and effectiveness
in opening the heart, mind, and spirit.

--Russill Paul, The Yoga of Sound

And what is more pure, focused, and effective than drums? Percussion? Rhythm?

It has taken me some time to understand my love of drumming, my need, really, for music pared down to the essential.

About 15 years ago, I was in the midst of a dark night of the soul. I prefer to call it that than label it "depression." It was an opportunity. The moment in my life when I got to choose between living and being one of the walking dead.

At first, I did what most people do. I turned to "modern" medicine. This lasted about three weeks before my partner took the pills away. They made my mind feel empty of the crap, sure, but they emptied me of me.

But during the third day of this pill taking, we decided to attend the local Unitarian church for the first time. I could barely sit up. Everything seemed fuzzy.

It so happened that when we attended the minister was away and so the members of this church decided to have a drum circle.

I never went back.

It totally freaked me out -- all those people sitting around "playing Native American." That's how I saw things like that then. I had a ways to go.

Fast forward a few years and I'm getting things under control. No drugs, lots of yoga and journaling and talking...simply put, lots of "doing the work." I got a job with Pax Christi USA, the national Catholic peace organization. I went to their yearly meeting in Minnesota -- the Abbey of St. John, a most magical feeling place.

The last big mass of the gathering, there were drummers in the lobby of the magnificent church. They were local natives -- literally. And after mass, you had to walk through that lobby with them drumming.

It was like walking in water; pushing through the heavy sound, you were enveloped. I could have stood there forever, bathing in it.

Ablution. Baptism.

Fast forward some more years, and I am getting closer to being "me." Closer every day to health. Closer to bliss.

We went, by a friend's request, to hear Yamato, Japanese drummers. I didn't know what I was in for.

I was to learn that my heartbeat and the heartbeat of the universe and the heartbeat of music are all one in the same. That when we pay attention to this simple fact, when we open our hearts to the heartbeat of music, we are healed.

Those people at the Unitarian place were onto something.

Just recently, I have discovered my love for punk drums. Not the fast, crazy, I'm-so-angry punk drums, but the punk drums that say life is play -- the drums that wash over me like wave after wave, like the ocean on a windy but sunny day.

(For some of my favorite drumming ever, watch this. Go to the "Mediate" section at minute 3:24.)

And like I've mentioned before, this is important -- pay attention to the type and quality of drumming, of music, because the wrong kind, the chaotic kind becomes noise, becomes harmful:

"So sensitive we are to sound that noise pollution has been called the most common modern health hazard," writes alternative physician Dr. Larry Dossey. "High levels of unpleasant sounds cause blood vessels to constrict; increase blood pressure, pulse and respiratory rates; release extra fats into the bloodstream; and cause the blood's magnesium levels to fall." (From The Yoga of Sound)

The throbbing, pulsing tin can of a car sitting down the block; the screams of the angry mother across the street; the revving of the motorcycle in desperate need of a better muffler; the car alarms...

(The car alarms. I just watched a trailer for a movie called Noise with Tim Robbins.)

All of this illustrates how important it is for us to think about our own sound environment but to also keep in mind our effect on the sound environment of everyone around us.

Our health depends upon it.

Perhaps if the car alarms sounded like drums we wouldn't get so angry...

BlissQuest: Got Yoga?

Some of my favorite yoga DVD's being watched over by Lakshmi.

(Yoga teachers in above photo: Mantra Girl, Ravi Singh and Ana Brett, Gurmukh)

Listening to right now: Mantra Girl's Truth

Today's Happiness Formula: A picture of a grumpy black and white kitten staring at me, barely 2 months old, a kitten who just passed away this January but whose 16th birthday we celebrate today.

Whether we believe in a creator God or the power of the Universe or our own innate Godliness or the Spirit of the World, we all believe in something larger than ourselves. True atheism (as opposed to agnosticism) can be a hard stance to maintain, and from personal experience, I think, it comes from a closed heart -- or one that, for whatever reason, wants to be closed, wants to deny hope.

But we are hardwired to look for meaning, to hope for hope, to believe, to have some sort of faith, whatever form that may take.

The denial of this is very much a part of the darkness in the world today -- though there always has been darkness and light has always won out -- or we wouldn't be here.

And there have always been negative people saying the world is about to end -- now we just think we have the technological and scientific basis to say it and so we think we are smarter than people before us who just thought an angry god would be doing them in.

Meaning. Hope. Belief. Faith.

We all need a path, a map, a guide, and in our quest to be fulfilled, happy humans, this is a huge piece of the puzzle -- a piece many people are overlooking or not bothering with because it can be hard work -- this thinking-for-ourselves thing.

I have come to accept that I am, at my basic essence, a Seeker, but I do think I finally have some sort of grasp on what works for me (after many, many years of reading and trying and getting frustrated) -- and for me, it's a mix of ingredients.

The main ingredient is daily yoga.

At first, starting about 14 years ago, it was Iyengar yoga. Erich Schiffman. Whom I still adore. (I heart his book and highly recommend it.)

But that type of yoga seemed to quickly evolve into another form of fitness, seemed to lack a more direct spiritual experience (and for some people, this is the exact opposite of the truth; this is just my opinion).

I also found myself constantly surrounded by competitive, ex-dancers. I myself am an ex-dancer. We are competitive. Period. Put us in a room together and it quickly turns into "who's the most pretzel-y."

And we push and push...until someone hurts herself. And that's the thing, instead of finding some calmness at my center, I was always hurting myself. I needed a change.

I think, based on how long we've been in this sweet house, I did Kundalini yoga for the first time about 8 years ago. I don't know how or why I came to it.

But I have never looked back.

There was chanting! And so many types of breathing! And the movement was unlike any other yoga.

Other forms of hatha yoga emphasize the hips -- stretching, splaying, twisting the hips. Not good.

Kundalini yoga emphasizes loosening up the spine -- the place that needs to be in alignment before anything else works properly -- and it focuses on strengthening your center, your gut.

(Of course, this is also about chakras, which maybe I will cover in some other posts.)

You sit in Kundalini, almost the entire time.

The first time I did Gurmukh's tape, I felt like someone had just pumped fresh oxygen straight into my brain. I was so high!

It reconnected my head to my body.

And then I crashed. For days, my body detoxed and it wasn't pretty or fun. It was sweaty and felt like the flu but wasn't the flu.

So I went back to Gurmukh but took her in smaller doses.

Then I eventually found Ravi and Ana, a husband and wife team. And now, they are almost all the yoga I do.

So much chanting!! I discovered that I love to chant! It makes me happy. It fills me with joy. It cures whatever ails me. (Nothing quite as annoying as a convert, is there?)

(For great chanting, Mantra Girl's DVD or CD are both quite wonderful -- modernized and fun yet it maintains its dignity.)

Kundalini keeps me in my body, in my life. That's the point. It keeps me connected to and desirous of my bliss. It shows me how to get there and how to stay. It is a great and accurate map pointing to all that is possible and good within us.

Because that's what a religion or a philosophy is supposed to do for you -- show you the way. Not close off your options. The map is not the territory. Yoga is not me -- it is a way to get to me.

Besides daily journaling, there is nothing more important that I do to keep me from drowning in today's vast and deep sea of noise, activity, information...

Yoga is my life raft.

How about you?

EverydayBliss: Singing Your World into Being

Some of my favorites:
Azam Ali, Vas, Niyaz, Dead Can Dance

These past two weeks in the morning, I have been doing something unusual: I don't turn on any music.

It is that rare time of year when it is warm enough to open all the windows and doors and the children are still in school. And so, my morning music is the birds singing and perhaps a neighbor using a hand-pushed seed spreader.

These sounds and my small white cup of Italian espresso combine to make me feel spoiled in this place of peace.

According to a very old Celtic myth, the world was not created or spoken into being, but it was sung into being. I love this. If we are made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe, then we are made of song, melodic vibration, harmony.

In groups, we are a chorus.

Birds know this; they recreate the world every morning with their songs.

How do you create your mornings?

By the time a lot of people I know arrive at work, they are already grouchy, already aggressive, already ready to see the world as against them. Just picture what most people look like in their cars: hunching forward, looking for that spare inch of space that might allow them to beat the light.

Why are they like this? They have not been singing their worlds.

Instead, they treat sound as another source of junk food -- to be consumed quickly with no attention to nutrition.

Their TV's are turned on with breakfast and the noxious ramblings of what passes for news is the first thing they attempt to digest. And they say, "well, I don't really watch it; it's just on for company." But they are hearing it.

They get in their cars and turn on talk radio or thumping club music. They get to work and put on more talk radio or fluff music interspersed with people who are paid for their "wit."

Years ago, a plumber came to our house to do some work that had him walking up and down the stairs, through the living room, and in and out of the house, over and over. At one point, he stopped and stood in front of me.

"It's so peaceful in here. Then I realized you don't have a TV."

Exactly. And he noticed. And he was smiling.

I think the only reason I finished the first draft of a very long novel is that every time I sat down to write, I put on the same CD (the soundtrack from the move Frida). Whether I felt like it or not, the writing came. I can't listen to that CD now without getting the urge. And now, I've managed to train my brain that any sound will do as impetus, as long as it us not chaotic.

Chaotic sound makes for chaotic feelings.

But peaceful sound makes for transcendent feelings.

Last spring, we were fortunate enough to get tickets to hear Azam Ali sing with her group Niyaz. They take the works of Rumi and other Persian poets and create a world beat based music. It is all sung in Persian.

If you have never heard Azam Ali sing, you are missing one of the world's most beautiful birds.

Sitting there, being washed over by her voice, I realized that I felt like I was in church, that I felt like I was witnessing someone pray.

Now that is how to start your day.