Welcome!

We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.

Rumi

Adabakadi! Adabakadi! Good morning, good afternoon, good evening! Welcome to our circle.

So goes a traditional greeting of West African drum and dance culture. A true cultural masterpiece, the drum circle is an ideal practice for helping people grow and thrive. There’s rhythm, physicality, community and a real sense of inclusion. It’s a proven method and it’s no surprise that drumming has become increasingly popular around the modern world. In popular culture, schools and even in the workplace, drum circles are now widely embraced, not just as fun and engaging musical events, but as a powerful whole-body method for health-promotion and community-building.

Why it’s great

The beauty of drumming is that it serves as an experiential antidote to our modern state of distress and arrythmia. As many of us are coming to recognize, modern life has become increasingly chronic, static, and stagnant; a flat-line, high-stress experience in a cosmos that’s intrinsically dynamic.

Beginning with the obliteration of circadian rhythm by artificial light, modern humans have leveled out almost every rhythmic process in the natural world. Seasonal rhythms, nutritional rhythms, work and rest rhythms, and even our conversational rhythms have been crushed by always-on technology and 24-7 commerce. In short, nobody feels much of a swing anymore.

But when we drum, we experience an intimate physical reminder of the deep oscillations that animate the lives of every living being. Not only do we feel it in our bodies, we also get the metaphor and the message that goes with it. That is, there’s got to be a waxing and a waning to everything, a rising and a falling of energy and experience. We relax into the process, knowing that even if we’re awkward and out of step with the rest of the music, all we have to do is wait a bit. The rhythm will come around again and we can rejoin the action when the time is right. In the process, we feel a sense of relief. No longer do we need to strive in every moment; once we feel the beat, we know what we need to do.