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

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine. For meditation guidance and energy work, go to www.awakeningthetrueself.com.

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You can tell me that it isn’t a concept that I may have trouble playing drums at altitude, that it is a fact: people have been carried out on stretchers doing so. However, I think, there are people who live about 12,000 feet who do just fine. There are people I can see, just past the stage, hurtling down man-made snow on skis and throwing themselves off ramps. Maybe they have been here long enough to adapt, or maybe they are just kids, so excited and on vacation and overcome with the joy of the sport that it doesn’t even occur to them to feel taxed. They haven’t attached themselves to that information that says they should feel compromised at altitude. So then, what are the facts? Aren’t they subject to our perception?

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine. She also refers to www.awakeningthetrueself.com.

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I realized that sitting in a café without looking at reading material was unusual for me. I had a sense that the only time I had ever just sat and witnessed like this was when I was waiting for someone. At first, I felt a kind of unease and self-consciousness. I was the only person in the room not occupying themself with a task or distraction, and it felt intimate, invasive, as if I was upsetting the balance of the room. I felt strange looking around at people. It was like breaking the fourth wall, somehow, to just be fully present in the chair.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine. She also refers to www.awakeningthetrueself.com.

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Who is the Clementine who gets sad and lonely? Just a fabrication, a ball of DNA and energy and an ever-changing mass of molecules that rearranges millisecond to millisecond. Somehow, I have woken in this plane of existence in which I believe this body is a solid thing when really it is 99% space and energy. Who is there to be lonely? Who is there to be sad? What is there but the energy of love that keeps it all together? How can pure, infinite awareness get lonely?

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, narrated by Clementine. She also refers to www.awakeningthetrueself.com for lessons in meditation and energy work.

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The next day, I woke and sure enough, it was the first thing that met me. I have been here before. The heavy feeling that makes me want to just never get out of bed. The grand excuses of why it happened and the conversations in my head with anyone who would tell me what they really thought of my playing that night. The flights of fantasy of what it would be like to just give up playing, give up the band, move to Minneapolis and become, I don’t know, some other person who has nothing to do with drums ever again.

I indulged all that for a little while, but I noticed that things have changed. The embarrassment was not so crippling, the negative tirades, not so sustaining. I felt drawn to go to work. I sat in meditation and invited the heavy feeling in to fully experience it. It didn’t stay long. I dropped through it, into the still, open plain where all ability exists. I realized what I wanted to do was to get to the studio and start smoothing out those troublesome patterns. I wanted to get to the drums. That desire split apart the feelings of unworthiness. I fell down again, and once again, I’m going to get back up. The drums forgive it all, once I get back to them and give them the respect and attention they require.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine. She also refers to this work: www.awakeningthetrueself.com.

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The chorus hits and I’m lying on the carpeted floor of a beat-up van hurtling to a barter festival in 1987. It’s pitch dark, and I know people around me are talking and laughing but all I can hear is Zeppelin, so loud I’m on my own rolling planet of sound. If this is the way I go, I think, well so be it. Transport me. A rumbling chaotic cocoon of music flying into the night, Immigrant Song carrying me into space, and I am overcome with love.

I will love this music like I love a person, forever. That girl in the van has dreams that never anticipate this stage tonight. It would have made her happy if she knew this was coming.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine. She also refers to this work: www.awakeningthetrueself.com

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I was rolling these things around in my head, and then two days ago, I had a dream. In my dream, I was thinking about this pressure, this force holding everything together and bringing reality into existence. Then, I started to be able to see right into the place where everything meets, the exact line where the force is applied. I was looking at people and things and could see a physical line dividing it all down the middle, where the positive and negative forces meet. I kept looking closer and closer, and suddenly realized that right there, in that place where reality was created, where energy becomes form, in that narrow space of pure pressure, there was no force and no pressure. It was completely free, an open and infinite consciousness that I could feel in my whole being. It was a release, a nothing and an everything. It was as if at the center of all pressure and at the bottom of all reality was total freedom, total peace, devoid of any of this perceived force or battle or however I would describe reality.

In my dream, I opened my eyes and was overwhelmed with the beauty and vividness of the landscape around me. I was laughing, thinking that this had been all around me, this vibrant color, this gorgeous reality, and that I had never really seen it. I was zooming around and brilliant emerald mountains with flowers all over them were flying by and I had never seen such color. I had never felt so free. I woke up joyful.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine.

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Then, Sunday, late morning. Stepping into the bright San Francisco street with the old man and the pug, heading to our favorite diner in Fisherman’s Wharf. Suddenly, I remembered my Wednesday night phone call, and I stepped out of the river rushing above me into quiet. My steps fell on bright white sidewalk, the cream and blue buildings reflected a shimmer in the air, and the blue sky dressed up in a mosaic of white cloud lace.

It was almost a physical sensation, this stepping out of the river of thought, as if was stepping out of water perfectly dry. For most of the walk, thoughts came in and blew through as I walked right in the center of the morning, and I couldn’t stop smiling. The poor old man.

Clementine reads this piece from the blog www.blissanddrumming.com.

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The only thing I can come up with is to see the good in every being I interact with. I don’t know how to do anything else. Seeing the good, believing the best intention, finding the light in the darkness, I don’t know what else I can do that will matter. The fear is there, the pain is felt, but when I merge with the light of each moment and with the magic at the heart of each person I encounter, these emotions move through and don’t stay. Nothing stays but that which is beneath, that infinite stillness that is within me, within each being, within the seconds and microseconds of silence that hang in the center of every minute.

This is a 30-Minute meditation for you to enjoy. From Clementine at www.awakeningthetrueself.com and www.blissanddrumming.com

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine. She also refers to this work: www.awakeningthetrueself.com

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It has been slow going for me, recognizing bird song in this city. I know the crows of course, and the jays, the twit and scream of the hummingbird, the robins, the parrots. I think that sharp yelp I hear is finch cry. I don’t know what those mottled black birds prancing near us in the grass sing.

Parrots fly overhead in a big flock, and they stagger en masse noisily across the sky of the park. I love how they seem as though they’re arguing as they go. I love how they seem to blink in and out of the air, looking like still-frame animation flipping pages across the sky.