“I am not a victim” The good doctor drummed as she spoke, using mirrored hand activity.
excerpt “History of the Groove ” Russell Buddy Helm ©2014 all rights reserved
2001.
She spoke, “I am not a victim.” while hitting the downbeat with alternating hands on each word, using ‘mirrored hand activity’. She is a well known Phd in brain research who had a history of trauma and delayed stress. She came to me because nothing else was working as a therapy.
When our hands perform identical motions, the brain hemispheres go into a unique, balanced electrical exchange and our critical mind slips into a suspended state. The removed critical mind hears the unconscious speak and witnesses what needs to be dealt with, healed, resolved, released, accepted, honored or mourned.
Conventional therapy is like trying to fix your car while you are driving it; engaging the intellect to fix the intellect. We need that vocabulary to understand what is happening, but in drumming therapy, the intellectual mind is released from controlling, so it can observe how our belief system is really working.
There is discussion about ‘negatives’ not working in affirmations; the mind supposedly can’t hear the word ‘not’, instead it hears, “I am a victim”. I don’t know if that is true or not. Drumming affirmations are a form of computer programing; our own body and mind is a computer. “If X does not equal y then goto…”. is a typical subroutine using a negative. Very simple rhythms are the basic programming language of the human operating system. The command line being entered needs to be concise and repeatable, but slowing tempo is unique to the human operating system. We encode all events with an emotional value, slowing down tempo makes a positive and safe memory.
We often lose track of time while in the groove state because the critical mind can be controlled with rhythm. Advertising has known this for decades. I played drums on enough commercials to know that producers know exactly what they are doing when they request a rhythm at 60 beats per minute. Our critical mind is blindsided by rhythm so we will believe what the media wants us to believe; buy a Maytag, or go to war. We are rhythmic animals. We can’t help it.
George Lucas said it best; “The soundtrack is fifty percent of a movie.”
Most people don’t even know it’s there.
We rhythmically convince our belief systems to view past events differently. The belief system notices the new input; “I am not a victim.” so it comes up with its own conclusions that meet this criteria. The client doesn’t even consciously enter into the discussion, the details are resolved in the unconscious. The foregone conclusion has been drummed in, the system adjusts to accommodate the belief; even ideas that are not true or real such as “I have never been a victim”. Our belief system adopts it and works with it anyway.
In this case, the doctor became more in control of her situation, her stuttering ceased and she was not frozen in her past. Her present life took on new meaning where she could make decisions to improve her current well being. The past was not controlling her present. She became an advocate for this type of healing drumming therapy in her research for combat veterans suffering from delayed stress.
One other facet we worked on was anger; This was a different approach that dealt directly with the way humans ‘learn’ to get angry. We acquire a style of anger based on society, media, family, friends, events and beliefs. It may not always be in our best interest, but humans get angry. So instead of repressing, I chose to redirect the method of anger into something more socially acceptable. By slowing down the tempo while the client is drumming and saying. “I am angry” we witnessed a profound change in how the person expressed their anger. As the drumming tempo slowed down using mirrored hand activity while the person repeated the phrase, they inevitably started to smile. It is ludicrous to be or say you are angry while the tempo is really slow. As a result, their usual anger outburst changed; it became a calmer expression of anger. We have had more positive feedback from this single affirmation than any other. Slowing down the statement while drumming, “I am angry” redirects the electrical signals through the amygdala. There is an actual change in circuitry through the brain. The good doctor who had survived severe trauma and helped create a new form of healing defined this change in the brain based on her own research. The universe provides.
excerpt “History of the Groove ” Russell Buddy Helm ©2014 all rights reserved