Imagine more than 70 heartbeats made audible by the pounding of drums. A middle-aged man, with tattoos and a hoop earring, leads the drumming while students, faculty and members of the Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor community follow along in Eastern Michigan University’s orchestra classroom. They are fearlessly communicating without having to utter a single word.
Last Saturday, EMU’s music therapy department hosted an event with certified music therapist and professor at Radford University Jim Borling in a workshop titled “Conscious Drumming: Drumming from the Heart.”
During the event, participants learned his therapeutic technique called conscious drumming, which he uses effectively in both large and intimate groups of people coping with trauma. His expertise is working with adults with addictions, but the drumming circle technique can be used in many settings.
He held one with students on Radford University’s campus in the wake of 9/11, when the first shots were fired in Iraq and when things got especially close to home in the campus shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007.
Borling led the drumming in a simple time signature. This part of the process is called the warm-up. Everyone gets some sort of drum, and they get comfortable playing with each other. They then come together and are in sync and equal. Some experienced drummers might go off into more elaborate variations of the rhythm, but its intention is that everyone in the room starts to really let out all the nerves and get into the sameness of it all.
At the end of the warm-up, Borling went to the front of the room again and had everyone quiet down their drumming until it was a quiet mimic of a heartbeat rhythm.
He gave examples of how drumming circles have been sacred rituals throughout time.
“Ritual is designed to communicate indigenous knowledge,” Borling said. “We need to come together. We are gregarious by nature.”
He also went into depth explaining how trauma affects everyone, and how it is an event that overwhelms the nervous system. He also explained how there is a cycle of crisis.
To counter this, Borling emphasized that what people need, and ultimately get, from the drumming circle experience is safety with music and rhythm as the container, predictability and emotional expression.
“There has to be a spine in circle drumming,” Borling said.
After a break for lunch, the group came back together to experience the last phase; the actual “Conscious Drumming.”
In native cultures, an individual can go to the center of the circle, take the “talking stick,” and say whatever truth he or she would like to bring to the circle. The idea is partially inspired by different native culture’s ideologies that every person in the tribe holds his or her own part of the truth.
The truth isn’t just contained in one individual. At this particular session, Borling invited all of the music therapy students, faculty and practicing music therapists from the area come to the center of the circle and share their courage.
It started off with a very precise question: “Why did you choose music therapy? And what does it mean to you?” and evolved into something beautiful and honest and personal. It was mostly students who shared their very personal stories of suffering and how music has helped. There were tears of pain, grief and sorrow, but also of relief and hope.
It takes a safe place of support that you can fill with the rhythm of the drums. No religion, no agenda, no socioeconomic or political divisions. We are made equal by the ultimate equalizer, music. In this world of grief and violence, confusion and aggression, the group was made aware of each other’s spirits in the container of the orchestra room, in the steady rhythm of their heartbeats.