Finding the Frame Drum

Finding the frame drum...unearthed and nourished lost parts of myself.

As a young woman, I was seeking ways to live and create a livelihood in this amazing, beautiful, but often confusing and intimidating world.

It wasn’t only that playing the drum and making music helped me connect more deeply to the flow of creativity, but also seeing art history and images of women drummers from ancient times stirred something deep in my soul.

It awoke in me what depth psychologist, wilderness guide, and agent of cultural evolution, founder of Western Colorado’s Animas Valley Institute, Bill Plotkin, refers to as one’s ‘Mythopoetic identity.’

I didn’t consciously know it then, but I’ve come to understand that the mythopoetic identity was exactly what I needed to nourish the muse within me.

According to Bill’s work, one’s mythopoetic identity is often discovered through a soul-initiation process that can ultimately lead a person to a more fulfilling and authentic life.

From the very first stroke, playing the frame drum has been an initiation.

Playing the frame drum has long been known as one of the original technologies for transforming consciousness and awakening symbolic thought, along with deeper flows of creative insight through rhythmic entrainment and brainwave stimulation.

It tracks if we remember that to be in rhythm is preverbal and prelinguistic.

Not only did humans most likely drum and create rhythm and song before the advent of language, but we each gestated to rhythm in our mother’s womb prebirth.

Those primordial rhythms have left deep energetic, psychic, and neurological imprints.

Since those early days, I’ve often pondered what it takes to create a life of conscious design and to be in tune - and stay - in tune with one’s soul rhythm and unique cadence.

In a world that often demands we “keep up” with the external clock and society's modern timing, many of us feel a primal spark to co-create to the pulse and pace of our own innate rhythm with life and nature.

In fact, our mythopoetic identity is “intertwined with understanding one's place in the ecosystem,” and by ecosystem, I’m going to take some creative liberty to suggest that ‘ecosystem’ is a vast landscape, both inner and outer, that includes and transcends the place we currently inhabit.

As it turns out, humans have always been co-creating and shaping inner and outer ecosystems. From the inner landscape of contemplative wisdom and abstract thought to the rainforests, sacred groves, and gardens of the world, humans have been cultivating, crafting, and weaving their mythopoetic identities into and within ecological tapestries.

There are metaphorical, rhizomatic, and mycelial networks of symbols, archetypes, and myths that make up the fruting body of your mythopoetic identity.

If you view your life story as a mythic journey, adorned with symbols and archetypes, some of which require excavation or reclamation, they will begin to reveal deeper truths about your existence.

Pay attention to and cultivate symbolic expression, dreams, art, and personal myth as they can guide you to a life of creative exploration, intuitive insight, and embodied self-expression.

You can gather symbols up like seed pods to plant in the soil of your mythopoetic ecosytem, where life can truly bloom and fruit and flourish.