Bliss and Drumming: The Slow Enlightenment of the Hard Rock Drummer

A quick 10-Minute Meditation! Check out www.patreon.com/clemthegreat for these to be delivered to your inbox weekly!

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece.

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I will say that when I found drumming, it connected with something so deep it was different than anything else. As if I had stumbled on a language that went beyond language, and yet one I just understood without learning. I have played drumbeats that felt like they were coming through me and were beyond my understanding. Not that they were particularly fancy or difficult, just that they seemed to have a transmission in them that reached very far back, and spoke to a connection far more vast than a rock song on a Saturday night. Little moments, little glimpses into vibrations choosing that moment to manifest and connect. A vibration of spirit, or an echo that took eons to slap back through those big floor toms.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece.

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When I first arrived 18 years ago I saw pretty clearly that one day the little town would become a quaint art community in the middle of suburban sprawl, and that’s what is happening, as Omaha has annexed its Western edge and development is razing the 20 miles of cornfield that used to separate the city from country. I could predict the future because this has happened in my life before, in my childhood Orange County, as orange groves made way for sprawling housing developments. It’s a dim glory, being proven right this way.

It used to torment me, the way ‘progress’ happens. In my hometown, the gorgeous country road on which we would rattle along back to Trabuco Canyon is now a two-lane bike path next to a six-lane highway. In Omaha, cornfields fall to yet another mini mall, or box store, yet more blandly unappealing industry.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece.

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We think of that neutral field of awareness as a kind of zombie-like state, with no feeling, but it is exactly the opposite. We feel every bliss and anxiety fully, and yet the neutrality comes in allowing these things to pass through without getting caught on them, without inviting them to stay and ruin the day. This is the glory of living, of being present in the moment.

The more we live from this neutral state, the more the subtle nuances of beauty can rise and be felt. The more the heart opens and love beats exquisitely. An example is like when you cut all sugar out of your diet, and then you eat a raspberry. The subtleness of the flavor has a depth never tasted before. In neutrality the subtleties of life rise and fall, and we feel them even more exquisitely.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece.

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I was thinking about perspective this weekend, on the road with the band for shows in Reno and Tahoe. Something has happened to Reno, Nevada. I remembered it as dusty and desolate place. This time, I found it thriving, with lovely stores and diverse cuisine and new places going in. A crystal store, a real record store, a legendary guitar store, music venues and coffee shops and vegetarian restaurants.

Mainly though, it is the people who are remarkable. Kind and open and in love with their town. Several people had moved back to Reno recently after years away and they were all so delighted with their decision. Folks seemed happy, and easy. “The sky is like that every night,” we were told proudly as we gaped at the sunset.

Now has Reno changed, or have I?

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece.

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We get injured and what rises up is stronger and more reliable than any structure that we have depended on before. We must be the most beautiful we can be at all times, until we are on TV with the world watching, our naked body riddled with bug bites and dirt and pus. It’s all been a façade. We say our strength is unexcelled until we haven’t eaten for eight days and sit sobbing in the mud. Who is it that walks the six miles through jungle, starving, broken, delirious? Not that self who was afraid to break, afraid to let down the façade of identity and step over the snake, swim past the crocodile and realizing the whole time your own soft, pink body is just another scrambling animal getting to a goal.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece: http://blissanddrumming.com/2018/06/awakening-the-cosmic-joke/.

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Music provides a great illustration of this. I am on stage, playing drums in front of an audience. My thoughts float through as I play the song: the stick in my hands, the flutter of worry about something tricky coming up, the way the other instruments are playing , the sound or lack of it coming through the monitor. I feel these things rise; I allow the twinge of worry, the irritation with the monitor, the doubt or focus. Rather than obsess or lose my place in the song, however, I fall into that open awareness, allow everything to rise and fall, while remaining fully present in the song.

When I play this way, I connect with each moment, each melody, while I am still aware of my technical being, and the other ears in the room hearing the song, and where I am in it. I am fully then in the center of the moment, experiencing it all and letting the song play me. I can rest in that wider awareness while the small Clem is counting the fill and adjusting her stick and allowing emotions and thoughts to appear, and it is all of utmost importance and of no importance at the same time. Duality is something we learn to discard in this practice. It is all relevant and irrelevant, trivial and the most important song that has ever been played. The only song, for that matter.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming, Clementine reads this piece.

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I spoke to my mentor, who asked me to do something very simple. Close my eyes, fall into my heart. Think of playing music and see how it feels.

I closed my eyes. Leaping into my vision was Clem, behind the drums. The vision was shining, sparkling, electric. I felt an overwhelming sense that Yep. That’s what I do alright. My whole being smiled.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece:

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Of course, as I experienced Cuba and this different way of seeing the world, I realized that everything I see, I see through my own history and DNA and bias, and that nothing I see exists the way I think it does. I am a political moron, a humanity-lover and a cosmic idealist. It was interesting to see my egoic self, and then practice what Robert Adams speaks of.

I fall beneath this bias, this ego, this Clementine. I ask, to whom do these thoughts come? To whom does this experience come? What is solid here at all?

I am a collection of molecules on a plane flying over the Yucatan peninsula, a little drunk on wine and looking forward to being in bed with a dog who smells like my childhood stuffed animals. I have been heartbroken and am coming out of a period in which I questioned my sanity and my motives and my choices in this life and yet here in my heart I can sit in stillness for long empty moments and trust that truth I find there.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this selection: http://blissanddrumming.com/2017/12/little-levitation-little-rock-roll/ ‎.

***

The shows last weekend included long drives at the beginning and the end. I drove nine hours up to Eugene on Wednesday, and then 11 hours from Portland on Sunday. At the last minute before the trip, I thought of downloading an audio book, and chose Autobiography of a Yogi, which was something that had been on my reading list for a long time, and it seemed like the perfect length for the drives. Which it was, as I finished on the return trip as I was passing through Redding.

The book was the first one written for the West by an Indian spiritual master. I love the film footage of Yogananda arriving in America in 1920, a sari-swathed, long-haired guru walking sandal shod through the streets of New York City. In a way, I feel that people were more open then. He was such an anomaly that folks seemed to welcome and celebrate him, and he was able to meet people and pretty instantly start spreading his teachings of Indian spirituality.