Drums

Drumming activates the heart chakra, thereby balancing the descending higher chakra energies against the ascending lower chakra frequencies. From the heart, these harmonious energies resonate outward into the web of life. Researchers have found that drum rhythms affect the heartbeat. The heart's pulse may speed up, slow down, or gradually entrain with the pulsation of a drum rhythm until they are locked in perfect synchronization. In fact, many shamanic cultures use a healing heartbeat rhythm pulsed at around sixty beats per minute, which is the average heart rate of a person at rest. The heartbeat is one of the reasons that people so strongly and naturally connect to the drum. Each of us, after all, enters the world, having spent nine months listening to a heart-drum in the womb. We are imprinted with rhythm from the very start, and rhythm is the heartbeat of life. Shamans around the world believe that the drum is coming into power again to awaken our hearts, for we must now learn to live from the heart. We have been living from the navel center, using our ego and will power for mastery, control, and conquest. If we focus on the heart center, we can hear divine will. Our actions then spring from divine will rather than the ego. To live from the heart means to walk the "rainbow path," to walk in balance like the colors of the rainbow, to respect all pathways to wholeness. The rainbow symbolizes unity, wholeness, and balance. Mongolian shamans believe that this balance, called tegsh, is the only thing that is truly worth pursuing in this world. When humans lose it, they create imbalance within the web of life. It then requires the unity of all colors, all cultures, working together to bring the web back into balance.