BODY:
Where Our Rhythms Live
Unison And Presence
As drummers, we put heavy demands on our bodies to perform consistently, precisely, and musically in any environment. Practice that resources the needs of our nervous system is key to performing with resilience and excellence. Thoughtful attention to bodily rhythms and sensations in real-time offers a valuable resource called presence, unison between body and mind.
Our best drumming lives here.
Inhibit Tension,
Inhabit Intention.
Our tension habits are not intentional; they are habits that have outlived their purpose. Inhibiting our tension habits resources an awesome internal vista of feeling. What happens when we get out of our own way by relaxing our internal blocks, inviting unison and presence into our practice? We play and live better.
Practicing tension inhibition primes our internal rhythms and sensations to leave clues for us. Analysis and evaluation of these vital metrics provide a vehicle for our best drumming to emerge. Our practice becomes a device to measure cooperation between body and mind.
When we inhibit our tension habits, we inhabit intention.
Inhibiting our habits often confronts us with their origins- our biography. If our habits have outlived their usefulness it is time to grow, strengthen, and coordinate pathways for ourselves to live and drum with intention through purposeful practice.
Resilience
Healing In Real-Time
Most people measure resilience in days, hours, or minutes. The groove feels it in milliseconds. True resilience relies on our body’s capacity for rapid real-time rejuvenation in performance. Mental toughness alone pales in comparison to the power of embodied resilience. Awareness of our inner rhythms and sensations anchors us in our embodiment -the unison of body and mind.
Rhythm and sensation connect us with the deepest elements of our humanity. I tell you, no one feels rhythm more deeply than drummers. It is what we do and who we are. We have the most to gain by befriending our nervous system with embodied resilience. It holds the highest return-on-investment by universally empowering our drumming, our lives, and our joy.
For drummers, of all people, it’s a no-brainer. Yet it is conspicuously absent from our modern drumming traditions.
That is why I created my drum school: