December 30, 2002

Dear Drummers,

Just a note as a follow up to last Friday's (Reindeer) drum. We don't have a lot of time to go into how to work with images that arise during drumming work, so I thought I'd take a few paragraphs here to offer some suggestions.

One of the amazing things, for me, about doing this kind of spiritual work is the breadth of experiences that people have. Everyone has different responses to this work, and I don't believe there is a right or wrong response. I also don't believe there is a way to fail or succeed with this work. Having grand visions of the other world or having a blank screen--neither is more successful. What matters, I believe, is 1) that you are doing this work with an open heart and mind and 2) how you decide to bring your experiences into your physical life.

If there is any kind of general rule to apply to working with imagery, it would start with “follow your impulses.” Then it would be closely followed by “tempered by reason and subject to feedback by your community.”

A volatile process of negotiation then ensues between the spirit world and the world of daily community. It is important to let your impulses guide you past boundaries that are set up by human society (all mystics must do this), but to avoid falling off the edge of the world into the abyss of self-referential dreaming, you must also allow your journey to be gauged somewhat by others in a community you trust. You must check your experiences against broader reality. This is the fiery joy of a devoted spiritual journey.

When an image arises in our work, the first thing to do is allow it its own life. If you are driving along a street, and you drive by an old woman sitting on the bus bench, eating a sandwich, that is an image. That old woman has a long history, inner and outer, that you don’t know because you are driving by. If you apply the same open-mindedness to an imaginal image, it gives the image its own life. When you give the image its own life, it will reveal more of itself to you—just as if you stopped the car and went to talk to the old woman on the bus bench. We are not trained in our culture to give life to images. Indeed, in recent times, the exact opposite is true. We are flooded with so many images that we learn—as a survival strategy—to ignore as much as possible. Since most of the images that flood us are used to get our money into the hands of the image-maker, the vast majority of the images we are subjected to deal with very basic energies (fear and desire). This makes it fairly difficult to work with images that want other things from us. It makes it difficult to trust the world of images. Or, at least, it has for me.

So the first act may be to trust the image, and to give it its own life. This does not mean that you need to like the image, or feel warmth and pleasure from it. Often the most powerful images are uncomfortable, or arouse complex emotions.

Once you trust the image, it will begin to tell you more. That “more” will come in the form of impulses. It is then that you can have a long journey of following (or not following) the impulses that arise from that dialogue. I have listened to the “Reindeer Spirit” for many years, and often done what it has asked. For example, stand in front of a group of people who don’t know me all that well, stomp my legs, shake my rattles and sing in a voice that certainly is not lovely—like I did last Friday. I didn’t ask why I should do this, or what purpose it would serve. It just became obvious during the few days before last Friday, and during the evening, that that is what the reindeer spirit required of me in order to complete the evening. This is an open trust in an image that I’ve worked with for a long time, and has delivered many demands and rewards to me. Did my reindeer song produce an effect in the world—was it valuable for the group? That is for you to judge, not me. (By the way, I hope you all know how grateful I feel each month when you allow me so much room to do this work that calls to me. I can only hope that my work is bringing some kind of value to your own work.)

That short, odd song on Friday was the result of much smaller bits of work over the years: drumming and seeing the reindeer, allowing it to conduct healings on me in a variety of ways, allowing it to take me to imaginal or other-worldly landscapes, following its request to start singing while I drum (something I have found to be incredibly daunting), and following its request to enter my body in a physical way, by dancing or otherwise moving.

I hope I’m making my point clear—that trusting an image and following it may take a long time, and it may take you into places that you would not predict. I would not have predicted two years ago that I would be facilitating this drum group, singing the reindeer spirit into our circle. That is a result of following its lead over many years.

Okay, enough writing! I just want to remind you that each month we are together, you have the choice of how (or whether) to follow an image, and if you do follow it, how far. When it comes to tempering your impulse through reason and community, I can only offer myself again as an example. When I work in front of our drum group, this is one way I am tempering my other world experiences. When people in the group say ‘That helped me” (or even on a more basic level of “that was fun”) it is the feedback I require to go on. If most of you started leaving the group, or saying “Jaime, what the hell are you doing?” it would offer me valuable feedback from the community. We all offer each other the “tempering” of community response to this delicate and ephemeral work.

Please always feel free to share your experiences with me and with each other. It is an important part of the long work of what Keats called “Soul-making.” He put it this way:

So call this world the vale of soul-making

And then you will find the proper use of this world.

Be well. See you in January.

Jaime

© 2002 Jaime Meyer

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