self expression

A Practice to Energize You

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Drum! if you don’t have a drum get a wooden spoon and cooking pot lid, an old wooden box, a metal wastebasket…

You don’t need to be a student of percussion, you don’t need to have any practice or expertise, you don’t need to be good at it, you don’t need to perform for an audience.

Now begin! Match the rhythm of your heart as you beat your homemade drum. Now add your feet and get moving. Let your body sway and express what you are feeling. Let your whole self dance and move and twirl and stretch and twist and flow with the beat. You need this!

Try new patterns with your makeshift drum. Go slow then speed up, start with a simple pattern, moving into more tricky rhythms. Try multiple noise making objects that you can beat on shake or rattle without breaking or damaging them.

Now as you drum and move, let yourself vocalize and sing. Make beautiful sounds and not-so-beautiful sounds, let them express what you are feeling- joy, freedom, frustration, anger, fear, worry… happiness…

Try growling like a tiger, singing like an angel whooshing like the wind through an evergreen tree. Make up new words, create personal lyrics, specific to your life, or have no words, just the sounds of your voice.

Go high, go low, spin your voice like sugar, let it slide and play. Cut loose and let yourself be one with the sound that originates deep within you and continues outward into the web of life.

Celebrate your life with sound and drumming. Get your heart and body and voice activated. Energize yourself!

Raise up your deepest requests and desires on this wave of heartfelt sound and rhythm. Ask for the world you wish to see and for the life you wish to live. Ask for all the inhabitants of our dear planet, animal vegetable and mineral to prosper with full and robust health, for the web of life to be repaired.

Red winged blackbird

When you drum and sing with focus and heart and sincerity, the spirits cannot fail to hear you and be moved by your requests.

Personality

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All things have an attitude, a habit.

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Grandmother Cottonwood

Growing things prefer shade or sun, rocky soil, swampy soil, rich soil. We can be expansive and confident, shy and retiring, showy and extroverted. Some of us thrive in the shadow of larger plants, some tower above the surrounding growth and reach higher than the others… like yours truly.

We may pelt you with hard nuts in the fall, or allow the breeze to blow our cottony seeds miles distant. We may be upright or prostrate, we may prefer to grow wild, or to live tame in your yards.

You too display your attitudes, your personalities. You may prefer to be quiet or lively, you may wish to dance in the street, or curl up with a novel. You may keep things in, or spill everything you know. Trust in yourself even if “Mom or Dad” want you to get out more or quiet down a bit.

Express who you are in the way that makes you happy and energized and satisfied. Do not ask for permission to be yourself! The world needs your unique attitude, for you fill a need here, just as each plant fills their unique place in nature.

The wall and the water

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A creek in central Iowa

The facade, the wall you’ve created to protect yourself and your heart must crumble. It has become the most poignant of prisons. Built to keep yourself safe, but in reality, hemming you in, trapping and keeping you a captive.

Can you feel the subtle tightness in your neck and chest? It restricts your expression, your voice and breathing, your experience of life. Feel the tense muscles in your gut and back and butt that create a sense of heavy armor… As if the tight energy could keep an arrow or mean word from penetrating the tinder pink center of your being.

Only you know how to open this prison and set yourself free. I know you can pretend. You did it as a child, and you were really good at it. Who did you pretend to be then? Who are you now?  When did you build your wall?  Do you know your wall is optional?

Practice becoming water, waves on a lake, ripples in a stream, falling rain, a drop in the ocean. Don’t just think about being the water, become the water, the flow, pulled by gravity. You can’t be water and be tense. You can’t be both water and a wall at the same time.  Become water each day and feel the walls of your prison dissolve and wash away.

Aging

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GCW speaks of getting older

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Grandmother Cottonwood

Surrender, my dears to life. Life moves you downstream on the river finally to merge with all that is.

Perhaps you’ve awakened from sleep and seen a gray haired man or woman looking out of the mirror at you, or lines on your face that you can no longer pretend away. Perhaps the dreams you’ve held dear since childhood no longer feed your soul. Can you find the gold in this mud?

Can you let go of those dreams, desires, beliefs that once seemed so vital and precious but are now hollow and stale, outdated and obsolete?

Can you conjure a new dream for this time of your life? What desires still hold your heart’s attention?

What new dreams will carry you to the end of this life and beyond – with eager anticipation, passion and delight – so that as your body ages your life’s true work comes into focus, your spirit feels joy, your heart sings? For your heart can sing now in older years, without embarrassment, with true wisdom and beauty, the song of your soul.

Embrace yourself as you are with a whole heart. Live from the inside (soulside) out for the outside of you is just a temporary wrapper for the spirit.

Your wild nature

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Cottonwoods at sunset

GCW speaks of your wild nature

Reclaim the wild heart of you. Not wild like “crazy”, not wild like “out of control”. Wild as in expansive, trusting yourself and your gut feelings. Wild as in feeling your bodily sensations, trusting your body, knowing what you feel, and expressing that with power. Wild as in free, unrestrained by shame in your self expression. Wild as in living by the beat of your heart – not the worry and doubt of your brain. Wild as in the ancestors who painted on cave walls, delving and digging deep into the soul of the earth, drawing up their sustenance from the heart of bedrock, soil, mud, rooted things, fast moving streams, and the flesh and blood of the animals that share our planet.

As you make your way in this earth of windswept beaches, unexplored ocean depths, icy mountain peaks, ancient forests, trackless deserts, know that this is your home, a mirror of you.

You are too tame

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Flying crow

GCW speaks:

You are too tame. You are ruled by the clock, not the sun and moon. You follow rules written down by others, some thousands of years in the past. You color inside the lines with such care, when the entire page is white and open and ready to be filled with jewel-like rainbow colors. You allow yourself to be fenced in by the lines.

Can you see: your life is the coloring page. Are you extra careful to stay within the expected parameters of your family, your town, your nation, your religion? Do you long to range freely without society’s boundaries hemming you in? Do you shut off the vital gutsy sometimes messy parts of you that seek expression? Your rainbow is not complete without those colors too. Your page is meant to be colored from edge to edge with bright, dull, soft, vibrant, messy, colors, every hue and shade and tint imaginable!! You are meant to work with every color of the rainbow, the full spectrum.

Grab some colors in your hot little hand, and go to town!