You don’t need a drum, you can drum the table, your thighs, tummy, chest or pure air.
There are two components to trance drumming, pattern and freeform.
First take a left/right hand pattern in a particular rhythm. Play it over and over and over and over until you can keep playing it while you are thinking about something completely different. It has to become like learning to tie shoelaces, an ingrained motion of the hands that needs no attention from us whatsoever - it just rolls on.
That should take about a month of dedicated work for a simple pattern.
Second, drum the rhythm without the pattern. Drum anything, start like a bit diffident just hitting out the occasional note, but feeling the rhythm in your body/mind. Then play no rhythm, just hit drum no groove. Get the picture? Wean your way out of that rhythm you have been incessantly playing for the last month, and just hear the sound of hand or stick on surface.
Third, mix the two: drum the pattern for short batches, then break into patternless for short bursts, back and forth from pattern to freeform, keeping the rhythm behind all the time.
The pattern drumming is the trance drumming, but adding the freeform interspersing allows for the insertion of spirits into the music - one reaches out and grabs passing moods and feelings, weaving them back in via the pattern again. Sessions should last at least half hour, but for best results, a few hours (in India i heard a drumming student practicing the same pattern all day, morning to night, and I didn’t even hear him stop).
That’s how its done, in life to build power, we weave patterns, learned techniques like recapping or remembrance, with freedom of action, freedom of expression.
Pattern also means teachers, submitting ourselves to a rigid will that says, no, don’t go off and do your own thing, sit here and do your mathematics or whatever - teaches teach us tools that we can revert to for power.
Then leave the teacher, toss the teaching, and walk into the world unfettered by expectations and the will of others. Reach for each passing blossom, shrink at each pain.
Standing unaided, you can choose what you want, its no skin off my nose, but I chose to balance it - I returned to the patterns, the teachers, the teaching, the most knowing admonitions. But skipped out the door into freefall, then back again.
To believe in individualism or discipline alone is not the best fun, that’s my advice.
What marks out the sage is his or her ability to bring down the gifts of the spirit we find in our flights into the unknown, the unstructured, down into the foundation of our being, as is demonstrated in our life, the actions and effects of bodily walking the ground. Like in your job, your relationships or your joss. Then with that gift absorbed into us physically, we fly again with even greater power to find even more beautiful gifts.
