excerpt: “History of the Groove” Russell Buddy Helm ©2014 all rights reserved
I was starting to see real things materializing after we drummed on them. It became a regular part of the drumming sessions. People came into our store in Santa Monica to ‘drum on something’ that they wanted to have or something that they wanted to happen. It started with an elderly cancer survivor who wanted a special person in her life. She came and drummed on it then said one week, “He’s here! But I wish he was a little taller..” She hadn’t drummed on that specific aspect. I noticed that people wanted good things, I didn’t mind drumming for them. Good job, good apartment, good car, good friends, forgiveness, healing, acceptance, stress and fear relief. I was discovering simple manifesting grooves, usually in three or six beats that ‘hit the note’ as Duane Allman might have said. It accessed a certain energy portal. It was getting to be like a cosmic cell phone. We could dial the right numbers and program the universe. It got so workable that I would do a ‘systems check’ every once in a while just to see if the manifesting was still working. I would come up with an outside chance type of manifesting; something that would not have the odds in it’s favor. A long shot. The final time I did this, I got in too deep. I felt like the sorceror’s apprentice in the Disney movie. My outside chance was to get the universe to deliver this woman that I had gotten involved with then separated from in emotional scenarios. “I am very flattered,” I explained as resolutely as I could, to her smiling hopeful beautiful face, “But I am not the guy for you.” But I had drummed on it; a singer songwriter I could work with who could also play great guitar. It was a perfect fit for what I needed, but there were other factors that I had not taken into consideration. There was my fear for starters.. It had happened unannounced without my instigating anything. She wanted what really wasn’t there or what I could not be. It was finally over and she was living in the rural back woods of northern Florida. I decided to see if the universe could bring her to Santa Monica if I drummed on it. A few months later I got a text message from her; “Leaving Florida, moving to Santa Monica. Maybe you will see me around.” She had met a musician in Florida that lived two blocks from our store. She was suddenly in the neighborhood and it spooked me completely. I realized I was in over my head. I felt I was working with energies more powerful than I understood. Then I realized that these were the energies that I had always worked with in my life. I was a drummer; this was part of that consciousness. I struggled to understand my place in all this new information. There was at least one aspect that I did not understand about this drumming manifesting: Love. I did not know or respect what love was, and also how it figures into the drumming manifesting. My dispassionate scientific research into the energies of the drum came crashing down around my head in a rubble of imagined emotional culpability. Rhythmic intention is a powerful force. Love and rhythm are the most powerful elements in the universe. But what we fear is also powerful.
“The greatest challenge for a yogi is the Dakini; the young maiden who reintroduces him to the distractions of the world after he has mastered the body and all of it’s devices.” Lady Sogyel; the first woman yogi in Tibet said it best; “Most Yogi’s fail at this last attempt at mastery.”
excerpt: “History of the Groove” ©2014 Russell Buddy Helm