New Year’s Eve Drumming with Sani.

New Year’s Eve Drumming with Sani.
$15.00 Suggested donation
Experiencing Sani – Drum as One

The drum is known as Kabu Iyecen Sani (Kah boo - e yeh say neh - Sah nee)
Mdewin-Lakotah meaning ‘Drum as One’. In time, her name has evolved into just “Sani”.

Background: Sani was created over a six-month period in 1991 by Embryo GREX, a twelve member spiritual community under the auspices of The HEALthySELF Foundation, facilitated by their heart shepherd Marshall Wright. The drum has 13 facets displaying the personal totem of each GREX member around its’ circumference. Each 2” thick by 13” long facet was cut from the same white pine tree logged in the Big Sandy Lake area of Northern Minnesota. Sani’s skin is a buffalo hide, the only one large enough, given the name Ferdinand by the GREX after spending hundreds of man-hours scraping her hide.

A totem, quite simply and poignantly, is a picture of your ‘window to God’. Like all windows the light goes both ways. It is not just about how you see through to God, but also what God reflects back upon you as her child. For many, creating their totem is a soul-searching process about overcoming their fears and walking into the mystery of a relationship with spirit.

The ritual of creation for Sani involved creating an individual totem, ceremonially gluing the totems together to form a circle, cleaning a buffalo hide, then stretching that hide over their circle to give it voice.

During the Summer Solstice celebration in 1997, the community gathered under the dome at Lake Harriet Spiritual Community with Sani for 33 hours of drumming and celebration ending with the normal Sunday service.

The Experience of Sani – Drum as One: The drum was created out of a sense of having lost touch with the natural rhythms of our bodies and our world - The age-old human habit of vibrating as a community – as one. The drum grounds us to our primal relationship with each other, mother earth and the natural laws that govern the universe. The loss of rhythmic rituals has sped up the breakdown of our communities in the West. Today we ingest electronic rhythms, passively and often in isolation. We ride, run and walk encapsulated in a private beat created for us by professionals.

Sani speaks to the power of 13 different individual’s facing the fear of giving up their individuality to bring voice to a community - empowering us to vibrate as one. Hanging inside the pyramid formed by the lodge poles, this sacred space entreats us to walk into the mystery of breaking down our individual boundaries to become one. If we are to evolve, the harmony that we are all deeply interconnected with one another and all else must be embraced.

A suggestion for an energetic invocation while playing the drum is to bring the Father Sky energy down through your fontanel to your heart while at the same time bring the Mother Earth energy up through your rooted feet to join Father Sky in your heart. Then visualize the energy from your heart flowing out through the drum-beaters into the sound of the drum. Hold the drumstick in your hand very lightly; Sani has a powerful voice that somehow seems inverse to how hard you try to beat her.
Sani presents the opportunity to experience this feeling of community at a deep, visceral level. We can find this space as a community if we step out of the control of our egos and adopt the intent to listen and witness. Some clues about those aspirations; first, Listening:in words or vibrations, if you are thinking of a response you are NOT listening. Listen to the beat, let it carry you, become entrained with the vibration. A drum circle is a collaborative self-organized event created “in the moment” by all the people who participate. When we share our spirit in the form of rhythm, it changes our relationships. We give ourselves a rhythmical massage empowering an emotional release and a healing. The release and healing is different for every person that is in the rhythm circle, and it happens whether we are in the circle drumming, or standing outside the circle.

Witnessing is embracing another or an experience in love without judgment. If you are in that sacred space, indeed, if you are in the universe, it is impossible for you NOT to participate. As community, however we need your aspiration to be with us wherever we journey. In terms of the drum that means, if we cannot hear you, you are hiding from us in some form of shame or fear. On the other hand, if we can hear you above others, you are in your ego, trying to control, in Native American terms “pushing the string”. Occasionally, you will hear and feel an ego in the sound of the drum. Please do not give them your power by reacting – instead hold them in love and invite them to return to the community.
It is vitally important to embrace that this experience is not about quality, nor about expertise in rhythm. . Sani is not a musical instrument in the classic sense; she is a vibrational vessel which can hold all in community. The essence of the experience is the relationship of the people in the circle. There are magical moments where one powerful voice is created out of the many. Players stop worrying about keeping time because time, as they know it, has stopped. In its place is a living breathing entity, expressing timeless joy, passion and release through the power of rhythm.

Do not believe for an instant that because we are a leaderless community of sound that the rhythm and volume will not change. Given time, a collective consciousness will begin to take the community on a journey into the mystery. There have been many instances where the beat transitions from loud and vibrant to quiet and slow in one stroke; when it happens, your heart will smile, and you will have experienced our oneness.

Another aspect of Sani’s experience is lying under the drum for a drum wash. Please allow the vibration of the rhythms to massage those stuck places in our lives, in our hearts, in our souls; bringing them back into movement and health. Lack of the movement of energy creates dis-ease. Movement of energy facilitates healing. When a group of people come together in a circle with focused intent, they facilitate the flow of the power that makes things happen. When you add drums as a vehicle for that focus the drums enhance the power to improve our health, our lives, and the very essence of our beings.
Prior to drumming, if someone has special concerns, they can share those with the gathering. Asking that the hold those concerns in the light when they are under the drum.