The Drum Dance: Gateway to Global Transformation
Article Submitted to Indie Shaman 2024
I knew it was madness, but I wanted to do it anyway. I was curious to see if it was even possible. ‘Dance for three days without food and water’ – that’s what the poster said, calling people to join the Drum Dance. I’d been taught that a human couldn’t live longer than about three days without water, but the crazy part of me felt drawn. It sounded like an extreme initiation.
That’s how I found myself in a car bound for the north of Scotland for the first Drum Dance in 1992. As we arrived in the pine wood where we were to dance, I noticed a tightness in my stomach and a tremor in my hand. But soon I was setting up camp, helping to gather wood for a sweat lodge fire and meeting the Dance Chief, Beautiful Painted Arrow. I felt reassured by his warmth, confidence and humour.
Beautiful Painted Arrow – also known as Joseph Rael – is a visionary, artist, teacher and healer. He received a vision of peace chambers and inspired people in various countries to create them. These are circular chambers in which people chant, sing and dance to raise the resonance on this planet. Over seventy have been built.
But he was also inspired to share sacred dance ceremonies with the whole rainbow of humanity, all races and gender affiliations. These include the long dance, which is generally overnight, the Sun-Moon Dance, which is held in a circular arbour over four days, and the Drum Dance. The aim of these ceremonies is to enable dancers to go beyond limits and push the edge of consciousness for the whole of humanity. The vehicle for this expansion of consciousness is the intentional suffering of long-distance dancing without food and water.
We set up a string with feathers between two trees and a shelter for the drummers. After a short sharp sweat, we dancers lined up between the line of feathers and the drum, each of us choosing a feather to dance with. The dance chief stood to the side, managing to look ethnic even in a plastic poncho tied with orange binder-twine. He told us that this was a commitment to participate in the Drum Dance each year for six years. This would be an energetic process to take our consciousness into expanded wholeness. For the first dance we were to dance in place to enable our placement on the Earth.
My day job at the time was campaigning with Friends of the Earth to save the rainforest. Among various activities, this involved lobbying the World Bank to stop funding projects that caused deforestation. I’d written letter after letter to the bank’s president, Mr Barber Conable, urging him to stop using UK taxpayer’s money for eco-destructive schemes. I’d even told him that rainforest destruction for short-term development gains was like killing the goose that laid golden eggs. But none of our letters seemed to have any effect. The bank kept going like an ocean super-tanker, inexorably taking us towards the rocks.
The pattern was maddening. First, the bank would propose a development project. Then activists like me would point out the environmental and social destruction the proposal would cause. Next the bank would go ahead and fund it anyway. Once the project had been completed, the bank would express surprise that it had been a disaster after all. And then they’d do the same thing again with another scheme. Trying to reason with the World Bank felt like bashing your head on a brick wall.
I felt anxious about the ecological catastrophe taking place, and when I saw the Drum dance poster I thought it might be a way of calling in help from the unseen forces of the Universe. So I wrote once more to Barber Conable, this time letting him know I was undertaking this arduous form of spiritual practice as a prayer to halt the deforestation.
We started late on a Friday afternoon, danced for a while and then went back to our tents to dream. Then the drum called us back to dance again. The ceremony continued between rounds of dancing and resting until some time on Sunday morning. Actually I lost track of time and entered the timeless ever-present, experiencing a pasty tongue, rumbling stomach and tired legs but also dreamscapes of bizarre beauty. There were times when I wasn’t sure if I was lying in my tent dreaming of dancing, or the other way round.
I dreamed of colossal serpents emerging from caves in the hillside opposite the dance. I received weird geometrical shapes and colours more intense than any earthly hue. I felt the Spirit of the Dance with me, gaily decorated with feathers tied at wrists and ankles. I fantasized about the drinks I was going to have and then remembered the myth of Tantalus, chained up with water just out of reach of his tongue. I meandered through dream realms, slipping between awake and asleep and back again. Then I’d hear the drum calling and rouse myself to come back to my feather.
When you dance into physical exhaustion and beyond, you become aware of your spiritual vitality. After a while, your ordinary thinking mind becomes bored, gives up and subsides into silence. You then connect with the depths from which profound insights emerge. It’s as if your personal self moves aside, allowing the Infinite Self – the Essence Self at the centre of your circle – to take over. In this visionary state you start to receive information from realms of consciousness that are way beyond our usual experience. Some of this inspiration may be for your individual self, but much of it flows through you into the collective human consciousness.
We live in a vast, alive, intelligent ocean of energy-consciousness in which all things are interrelated. Everything is alive with energy-consciousness, and everything is affecting everything else. Our thoughts, words and actions generate ripples in this ocean, and their echoes come back to us. When we go beyond our ordinary mind and offer our prayer dance from the depths, we open ourselves to the unseen powers and call in help to meet the challenges of our global crisis.
At some point the Dance Chief told us the dance was over and that in a short while we’d meet to break our fast and share our experience. Before this we were given a glass of water to contemplate in our tents before drinking. In ordinary mind ‘water’ would be nothing more special than H2O, but in the miraculous state of holiness we’d danced into, it had transmuted into an elixir of crystal light.
After that first ceremony in Scotland, I joined the Drum Dance a further five times, and we danced in Wales, Ireland, Norfolk, Devon and Hereford. I also joined the Sun Moon Dance and danced four times in the parched desert of New Mexico. At the end of the last of these Beautiful Painted Arrow asked me to take up the Drum Dance in UK, and I’ve been holding it here every year since. My friend, John Wilson, has been responsible for the Sun Moon Dance.
All of the dances I’ve taken part in have been tough and challenging at times, but all have led to a touch of the transcendent and timeless. I’ve dreamed of things from beyond this world, felt the heart of the Mystery and glimpsed energies that love us beyond all understanding. It was this that made me want to come back year after year.
I can’t say the dances have had a direct causal effect on global development, or even if Barber Conable took any notice. But I believe they have contributed to the evolution of our collective field of consciousness.
There are many aspects of our global crisis – ecological, climatic, social, political – but in essence they are effects caused by the level of our collective human consciousness. The world is the way it is because that’s the way we’ve been dreaming. Fortunately, human consciousness is quickening. There is a growing awareness of the living Earth, a maturation of our emotional intelligence and an expanding sensitivity to our impact on the delicate fabric of life. We don’t hear about this evolutionary unfolding in the ‘news’ because it’s happening at a deeper level of mind.
It’s been many years and many dances since that first one in Scotland. From a certain perspective of course it was madness, but perhaps a homeopathic dose of insanity is needed to bring a world that’s gone mad back to sanity.