You can drum yourself into a trance that rests your mind and heals your body, just like Open Focus does. In this blog we introduce how you can drum on everyday objects and review 3 foundational practices: Vagus Nerve reset, straw breathing, and Jappa meditation.
In season 2 of our podcast, Kat and I turn to an ancient trance technology: Drumming! And by “drumming,” we mean tapping your feet or hands, grabbing a nearby box of tissues or your keys and playing along. Any motor engagement with a steady rhythm will increase the effect of that rhythm, and the effects of rhythm are powerful. Rhythm entrains neurons in the brain and synchronizes heartbeats. Rhythm organizes and synchronizes the whole brain and connects you to others without effort or words. Here’s a video of a cricket’s neuron synchronizing with James Brown’s “I Feel Good.” (The video and audio are both terrible, but show clearly how quickly the brain responds to rhythm.)
Trance, entrainment and whole-brain synchrony are words we use interchangeably. Humans require trance/entrainment/synchrony to rest and consolidate experience and learning. These states enable us to have even a difficult time in a relaxed state, skipping the wear and tear of stress on our minds and bodies, and healing from the stress we’ve already accumulated.
I wish I could point you to all the research that supports this, but there isn’t much. Les Fehmi used neurofeedback equipment to verify that his Open Focus technique generated a synchronous – or whole-brain-alpha frequency, and observation and survey to establish the effects of time spent in that state (a refuge for the mind and healing for the body). Fehmi noticed an abundance of theta brainwaves and theorized that his ADHD hyperactivity might be an attempt to break through all that theta into a more focused and productive state, such as high alpha or low beta.
There are studies of long-time meditators that document their brainwave patterns, and the ancient use of drumming in ecstatic trance ritual is well documented in Layne Redmond’s book, “When the Drummers Were Women.” Neurologic Music Therapist Michael Thaut is currently researching the effect of rhythm on the brain in rehab settings, and neuroscientists are beginning to write about the need for more research. But so far, no one is tying all this together with trance and healing. So we’re going back to using some ancient practices like drumming and the I Ching (more about this in future blogs) and combining them with more recent innovations like Open Focus. As one participant in one of Liz’s drum circles said “That was like taking a vacation on the inside.”
Next week we’ll get into the nuts and bolts of drumming, This week we’ll review three of the foundational practices we use in our Open Focus Friday meeting, or what we think of as pre-practices: The Vagus Nerve Reset, Straw breathing, and Jappa meditation.
The Vagus Nerve Reset is the brainchild of Stanley Rosenberg, a cranial-sacral therapist. Liz first learned it from his book, “The Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve.” It leads to huge yawns and feeling peaceful. It’s described here.
Straw breathing is a super-simple practice of noticing your breathing as it is, then putting a straw in your mouth mid-exhale and pulling it out just before the exhale if over, then watching your breath again, with this important instruction: DO NOT CHANGE YOUR BREATH DURING THIS EXERCISE! Repeat this process as many times as you like. This is a subtle, subtle exercise that leads to yawning and deep breaths and eyes watering, and the clearing of sinuses and throats, which frees up the entire breathing apparatus so that it can work better.
Jappa meditation is rest for the mind. It’s works quickly, and is super-simple: Take a word or phrase* and repeat it at a speed that interrupts your current (repetitive, stressful or even panicked) thought flow. If your thoughts are taking root, simply speed up until there is not space for them. You can say the word of phrase out loud or silently. As you can, slow down the word/phrase and increase the pause between the end of your word/phrase and the beginning of the next one. Eventually, the space between will lengthen and be filled with silence and you’ll feel your mind unwind.
(*The word or phrase isn’t the point. I use Om Nama Shivya because it’s meaningful to me, but I am not meditating on it. I’m simply using it to interrupt my thoughts. A client of mine uses “broccoli,” and uses it to put herself to sleep when her brain won’t shut off.)
That’s it for this week. Find yourself a box or an egg shaker or a bunch of bamboo skewers to tape together, or grab your keys. Next week we’ll get into making a rhythm together, then adding Open Focus.
Here’s the transcript:
0:00:00.5 Kat: In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller.
0:00:04.2 Ferris Bueller: Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
0:00:11.1 Kat: But is there an art or a science to stopping and looking around once in a while?
0:00:16.8 Liz: I’m Liz.
0:00:18.1 Kat: And I’m Kat. And this is Beyond Resilience. Welcome to season two of Beyond Resilience, where we continue our exploration of trance inducing practices and how they might promote physical, mental, and emotional healing, enhance creativity and inspire liberation. In this season, Liz will guide us through using percussion to embody trance, and we’ll learn how to drum the ancient Chinese divination text the I Ching. Please join us as we explore percussion and learn about how a daily practice can enrich our lives. Hello, Liz.
0:01:00.3 Liz: Hey, Kat.
0:01:01.7 Kat: I would like, I’m not the first, I’m sure, but I’m the first in this podcast to welcome you to 2025.
0:01:09.9 Liz: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.
0:01:13.7 Kat: 2025 is one of those years that I feel like we’re just, well, ever since, what was it, 2019 when Blade Runner was set we’ve been in the future.
0:01:29.3 Liz: We’ve been heading there.
0:01:30.3 Kat: Yeah. We’re just living in the future in the day to day. So we’re still just living in the future.
0:01:39.4 Liz: Yeah. We’re in the future. Yes, we are.
0:01:42.2 Kat: Yeah. So 2025. And we’re also, I’m going to welcome you to season two of Beyond Resilience. And so last season we were exploring open focus as one of the tools for exploring trance. And then this weekend or this season.
0:02:12.7 Liz: 2025 is getting off to a great start. Don’t you find?
0:02:14.6 Kat: I know. Yeah. Yeah. We’re like less than a month into it. And I am already moving for the weekend. Right. I’m all lover, boy. Everybody’s working for the weekend. Okay. So talk to me about what we’re gonna explore during season, thus.
0:02:36.1 Liz: Yeah. Well, when we did season Uno. Great. So can’t even get English to work, so let’s try a language I don’t speak. Open focus is one of those things that if not kept alive can become a relic. And it’s such an easy and simple and portable, I guess, way to add space and get your brain waves to shift into a synchronous alpha or even theta state, which we didn’t call it trance in season one, but that’s what it is. And so season two, where we’re gonna be a little bit more, we’re gonna use the T word, the trans word because trance is a natural state. And our brains need trance. We seek trance all the time. And there are all kinds of everyday occurrences that invoke trance in us, that send us there. And so we’re gonna be a little bit more explicit about trance technologies than this season. And the primary one we’ll focus on is drumming. It’s a rhythmic trance technology. It’s quite ancient.
0:03:52.5 Liz: And so this is in the BCE era. Women were drummers and they were priestesses to goddesses, and they had all these trans rituals using frame drums. So it’s a really ancient technique. And most cultures, oddly enough, except for the United States of America, white culture have… They have a trance drumming tradition Native Americans do with the medicine, that hoop drum that they play with a beater. And it’s the thing about that technology is it’s very much about inducing the kind of trance that invites a vision of the journeys that you take. And it’s makes this direct link between your conscious and unconscious mind and helps the energy of the unconscious come through to guide you, which is the purpose of trance. So we start to get slightly more psychological, except we won’t, because that’s not my purview at all. Where we are going with trance and drumming is what I can best describe from a participant in a drum circle I led who said, after the experience, he said, this is like getting a massage on the inside.
0:05:14.2 Kat: Ooh, I like that.
0:05:17.2 Liz: Yeah. And that’s the kind of, so the thing that so open focus is really good for creating a refuge in your mind, and it helps to create space between you and another or you and others, the whole in which you can connect. And by connect I mean in which information, sort of from the unconscious mind, which holds all the cards, has a lot of info and energy can come through most easily. So that’s the connection between open focus and trance. They’re both sort of a portal that allows us to make that connection.
0:05:54.9 Liz: Drumming has done that for a long time many, many thousands of years. It’s been kind of the go-to technology. My understanding of Native American drumming is that before a council would meet to make decisions for the tribe, they’d drum together for quite a long time, even hours, until they really felt that they had joined up with each other. And drumming more than open focus will not only synchronize your brainwaves, like open focus does, it will synchronize your heartbeat and connect you to others. So it’s a little more of a community oriented and connection oriented practice and done properly drumming invitations to drum together can be very healing. Done improperly they can cause more stress. So if you’ve ever been to a community drum circle where everybody’s playing a djembe or a conga and it’s very loud, and then there’s someone on an agogo bell, or a cowbell just cutting through and it drives you, it will drive you into a trance experience. It may overdrive you and overwhelm you. But it’s very difficult to get in. And even if you started playing a drum, you maybe couldn’t even hear yourself. So it’s not the most welcoming experience. And we wanna be on the healing side of playing together and inviting people into rhythm together. So that’s what our focus will be. You don’t have to be a musician. You don’t have to be a drummer. You just have to be alive. If you’re alive, you are rhythm.
0:07:43.7 Kat: Whether you like it or not.
0:07:45.8 Liz: That’s right.
0:07:47.8 Kat: So one of the big kind of like is it sort of primary elements of beyond resilience as a whole, and then kind of what we’re exploring is accessibility and so we were just talking before beginning. I had been gifted, gosh, now this is gonna age in about 30 years ago with a drum that has…
0:08:14.7 Liz: So you were three.
0:08:16.3 Kat: Yes, exactly. It was before I was born, actually. I was a sparkle in somebody’s eye, but is is largely been a decorative item in my life. My son for a while would try and play it and cause chaos and things like that. But if you are not blessed with a Nigerian drum in your collection what kind of things can you use to play along with us and go on this journey with us?
0:08:46.8 Liz: Anything. Anything. If you have a Kleenex box that will work. If you have keys that you can jingle rhythmically, that’ll work. These little egg shakers that are ubiquitous they’re like, oh, they’re hard to play. No, we can make them easy to play. You just hit them, hold them in one hand and hit them against the other hand, very easy. So literally anything, if you have an Altoid tin you can put rice or lentils in it and make a shaker.
0:09:13.8 Kat: I love that.
0:09:15.4 Liz: There’s stuff in your kitchen that you can play. There’s all kinds of things that make a sound in there. I really have a preference for cardboard boxes. Like if you’ve gotten anything from Amazon and you have a box, small smallish box, you can get a couple, two or three different sounds out of that box, just like you can out of a drum. And it doesn’t matter, even if you can just get one sound, all that matters is you’re actively engaged in playing along. You are participating in your own entrainment to the rhythm. That makes you a part of the whole in a different way than passively listening does. So anything, anything. And you don’t have to be a musician. You don’t have to worry about keeping the beat. I have no sense of rhythm. Sure, you do. If you ever saw the the Broadway show, it’s been all over the country. I think it’s gone now. It was called Stomp.
0:10:11.7 Kat: Oh, yes. Yeah.
0:10:14.1 Liz: And it was rhythm with everyday objects, including plastic bags. Plastic bags, which are now banned in California. But I bet you still have one ’cause I know I do, but you can rub them together rhythmically. You can…
0:10:31.5 Kat: California didn’t know was inhibiting the creativity of musicians everywhere.
0:10:37.2 Liz: Yeah, exactly. That show it’s probably why it’s no longer playing anywhere is there are no plastic shock backs. Oh my God. Another tragic consequence. So really, literally anything that makes a sound or can be made to make a sound. I have this plastic water bottle here. I’m sure I could hit it with this pen and get something to happen. I might not really love the sound, but I’m participating. So yeah, that’s how that will go. So we’ll start really very simply. It’ll be very easy for you to catch on and participate in the rhythm. We’ll be using rhythms from the itching, which is another ancient technology.
0:11:21.7 Liz: This one happens to be an Oracle technology. And a few years ago actually maybe over a decade ago now, Melinda Maxfield, a PhD student, was studying drumming and the entrancing and entrainment effects of drumming. And she was looking, doing an I ching reading. She was throwing, casting an I ching for herself. And she thought, well, that’s interesting. Every I ching reading is you get a hexagram, it’s three, sorry, six lines. It’s either one solid line or a broken line. That’s a rhythm. That could be a rhythm. So if I’m getting water, for example that’s broken line, long line, broken line, broken line, long line, broken line, that’s the hexagram of water. That’s a rhythm of Mm mm mm mm mm. You can play that on a drum. And when you do, you are participating in the energy of that particular rhythm. Water is a rhythm that’s about persistence through difficulty. And who doesn’t need that?
0:12:33.0 Kat: Yeah. Exactly.
0:12:35.4 Liz: And the inevitability that water finds its way through, it’s kind of the inevitability of water finding its way through. As you know if you’ve had a leak in your house you know all about the persistence and inevitability of water. When you go to the beach and you see sand, that’s the persistence of water.
0:12:55.3 Kat: The Grand Canyon, there you go.
0:12:57.8 Liz: The Grand Canyon. The persistence of water. Yeah. So the power of something fluid like that. So we’ll be kind of imbuing the trans technology of drumming with some meaning as well. Be playing each of the eight seed rhythms for the the I ching. So there are only three lines, so it’s not gonna be six lines. So relax, take a breath, only three lines. And drumming those over and over, or rhythmically joining each other over and over. We might do some other practices. It can be very powerful to drum your name or have other people drum your name. So in open focus Friday, we’re gonna start adding these rhythmic practices in. So if you want to join us at 12 o’clock on Pacific Time On Zoom, you’ll be welcome. We won’t have a total community experience ’cause that is painful on Zoom. We cannot play together sadly but you’ll at least be playing with one other person and be able to hear that person probably me most likely join you in drumming your name, which is a powerful experience. So there are all kinds of ways to enhance the connectivity of rhythm. What else?
0:14:17.5 Kat: Can I just ask a quick question about, so in open focus in our practice there we were… Or the practice basically gets one into the sort of alpha brain wave state. Is that similar to when you talk about in training brain waves and rhythms and things like that? Are you in that same brainwave area or different ones or does it depend on the circumstance? Like if you’re in a chaotic drum circle, like in some hippie festival, are you guys all in beta? ‘Cause you guys are just in chaos mode, so you’re all in training into, but so does it depend on what everybody’s at kind of when you’re in training? Or you kind of all settle into one common brainwave?
0:15:14.0 Liz: You will and train, and we’ll put this in the blog post for this episode and in the substack, there’s your neurons entrain your brainwaves, entrain to the beat period, no matter what it is. We’ll put an image of a cricket neuron in training to James Brown, I feel good. It’s hilarious. It’s a horrible video and it sounds terrible, but it does. So I just want to prepare you for the delicious experience. We’ll be sending you away, but it’s hilarious because this little cricket and this little, it’s like it starts to hear the music. It’s like… And then it boom, boom. It just fires. It is very obvious, even with a crummy video and lousy sound that the cricket is in training to James Brown. So it’s a physiological response that happens. We are so trance prone.
0:16:08.2 Liz: We are frequency everything, our brainwave frequency, the rhythm of our walking, the rhythm of our heartbeat. People are like, I’m not musical. I can’t drum, you are rhythm. You are rhythm. There’s no way you can’t avoid it. So there’s a rhythm to your speech. There’s a rhythm to your breathing and your heartbeat and your walking and your thoughts. And so there’s a rhythm to your days. There’s a larger rhythm that we’re all a part of. And so all we’re doing is bringing that forward. And now I don’t remember your question. Oh, yeah. Okay. Here’s the problem. So open focus very…
0:16:45.0 Kat: I was gonna say, the rhythm’s gonna get you. The rhythm’s gonna get you.
0:16:48.0 Liz: You got me. Open focus was done with neurofeedback. So they track the brainwaves. Right now, like literally right now, neuroscientists are panting, salivating over the power of rhythm. And everybody wants to define what it is and what it means. There’s not a lot of research right now. There’s a lot of papers that say this is a really interesting area of research and it seems to really matter. Well, it does really matter. There’s sound medicine, not like sound healing, sound bath stuff. I don’t mean that. I mean, actual application of frequency to destroy cancer cells. For example it’s super fringe. But if you see the videos of those and no, I’m sorry, I don’t have them, but I’ll look for them. It’s a frequency that we can’t… It’s not even an audible frequency. But they found frequencies and overtones of frequencies, which are, let’s not get into that right now.
0:17:49.9 Kat: Well, but that’s what they do for kidney stones.
0:17:54.7 Liz: Yeah, exactly.
0:17:56.6 Kat: Yeah, is sound waves.
0:17:58.3 Liz: Sound waves. Yeah. So powerful, powerful stuff, and nobody’s figured out yet what I think the ancients knew and are a part of a lot of cultures that it does put you into a trance. Is it exactly an alpha brainwave state or theta. Native American drumming drives you into theta. It’s a very fast beat. It’s at the theta brainwave of like four beats per second. It’s intended to generate a theta brainwave state. And it does. So that’s really fast, that’s not super musical to listen to but boy does it get the job done. If you’ve ever done that kind of journeying to that kind of beat you’ll just go and…
0:18:49.8 Kat: Yeah. So in one of my wayward youth, Liz, I lived and traveled in Ireland, and there’s actually this really amazing festival, I’m assuming it still happens. It’s called the Willie Clancy Music Festival that happens every year in West Ireland. And basically it’s two weeks long musicians from all over the world who play Irish trad music converge on this tiny little small town pop up tents. And all of the pubs are just people basically go in and sit down and they just play and keep playing, and there’s passing out and then waking up again and continuing to play. Now, I was always under the impression that the passing out was going hand in hand with imbibing, but now what these people might have just been in a deep trance, and I didn’t give them credit for that. And so I would like to offer an apology to all the people I didn’t talk to and weren’t aware that I had made this poor judgment of them. But it is very much that way where every group of people would get in and they would, those, those the, where they call them flaws, where they come together and everybody just sort of grooves for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. So yeah. Yeah.
0:20:22.3 Liz: It happens. It’s funny you should mention the difficulty distinguishing between trance and drunkenness. That is a feature, in Egypt there are these, or sorry, Brazil, there’re these buono, my boy, there’s these whole festival where they use polyrhythms, which will really drive you into trance quickly and intoxicants. So there is a connection between those two things.
0:20:48.5 Kat: Well, as anybody who lived in the ’90s and went to raves absolutely.
0:20:54.4 Liz: Exactly. Exactly.
0:20:54.9 Kat: Yeah. It enhance that. Yeah.
0:20:58.4 Liz: You don’t actually need the drugs to do that. We have these other practices that are really very trance inducing and beneficial so you don’t wake up with a hangover the next day. But there is a use for that, within the framework of a ritual that drug use has a different meaning. It’s not an addiction that then gets outta control. It’s there for a specific purpose. We won’t be getting into that. So microdosing is not on the menu for us.
0:21:33.2 Kat: At least we won’t be talking about it. We won’t be talking about it. We’re not committing one way or other if it’s happening.
0:21:39.7 Liz: That’s right. We’re not gonna mention, we really won’t speak of it again.
0:21:44.8 Kat: Okay. So in preparation, like, what do I and our intrepid listeners, what do we need to do?
0:21:57.7 Liz: Grab something. So for next week we’ll start the actual rhythm part and just sort of get warmed up. So we won’t be playing any particular rhythm, but just practice drumming names, practice just playing your drum. There’ll be a little audio demo, which is too bad should be video. Maybe we’ll put something on the website. She said, looking at Kat meaningfully who looked back at me meaningfully.
0:22:31.9 Kat: Yeah, exactly. I’m like, I could do whatever. Maybe we can actually do a video version of our podcast, Liz. I’d have to dress up for it. I can’t just be in my fleece onesies all the time.
0:22:47.2 Liz: Right. Exactly. Anyway, so we’ll start that next week. This week what I’d like to do is remind you of a couple of like pre practices. So one of the things that can happen with, oh, there’ll be a musical performance. Hmm. No, it’s not a musical performance. It’s just gonna be you with you. That’s the beauty of Zoom and the curse of Zoom. Or really you, with you and me probably ’cause you’ll be hearing me or hearing possibly Kat will unmute for that. So what about our pre practices? So we have talked about three practices, three practices in open focus Fridays. If you’ve been coming to those we talked about the vagus nerve reset. Now, man. Oh man, it’s a vagus nerve having its 15 minutes of fame.
0:23:39.0 Kat: It’s all over the place.
0:23:41.5 Liz: Everyone’s talking about what to do. A vagus, this is like not a 30 day program to totally change your life. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about something.
0:23:49.3 Kat: Become smarter, grow taller.
0:23:51.7 Liz: That’s right.
0:23:52.5 Kat: We weep tall buildings in a single bound. Yeah.
0:23:56.2 Liz: Yeah. We really, beyond resilience is just about how do I take the natural rhythms of my body brainwaves and such, and find the beneficial uses for them in my everyday life. So beyond resilience is I don’t want to toughen up and be a real marine. And in resilience what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. It’s not about that. It’s how can I go through even a difficult experience calmly and peacefully? That’s what we’re looking for here. So it’s really much more in the moment than realizing your life dreams.
0:24:39.9 Kat: It’s like a… It’s coming at life from like a homeostatic perspective.
0:24:46.7 Liz: Yeah. Yeah. How do we stay in kind of in that zone? And how do we understand better what that zone is, which is what open focus is all about? So a couple of things. Vagus nerve reset really quickly so easy. You can lie or sit down with your head erect and not moving. And then you look out of all, it’s so easy. You look out of the corner of your eye. So both eyes move to one side or the other. And rather than trying to focus on something over there, which doesn’t, you’re not gonna do that. You can’t really focus that way. Just try to look at the, literally at the corner of your eye, like I’m going to the left first. If I do not move my head to the left, but look at the left corner of my eye very quickly, within a few seconds or a minute at most, I’ll either stick an in deep inhale and sigh it out or I’ll yawn. Or sometimes I’ll have weird twitching or stretch. There will be a response. And Stanley Rosenberg, who is this cranial sacral body worker, believes that that is your vagus nerve responding. His test is to look at your uvula, that little thing that hangs down in the back of your throat before and see is it hanging down evenly? Let me save you some time. The answer’s no.
0:26:06.7 Kat: I’m like, I don’t know if I can see it. I have to get one of those little dental mirrors.
0:26:11.4 Liz: You need to like a flashlight. Use your phone flashlight. So just look at your little uvula laying down there. It’ll be off to one side. It won’t just be super symmetrical. After you do this vagus nerve reset on both sides, your uvula position will be improved. That is his evidence that this is actually doing something. My evidence that it’s doing something is after I look to one side and yawn or sigh, and then I look to the other side and yawn or sigh and I really almost have to turn my head the opposite ways to correct the tendency to turn it to one side. So now, I’m looking to the right corner of my eye very gently. I’m not forcing my eye. I really have to kind of almost push my head to the left a tiny bit so I don’t just automatically turn. After I do that on both sides I feel peaceful and I love having that experience every day.
0:27:05.9 Liz: So that’s one daily practice that will help you not flip out about drumming and help you not flip out about anything. Another one is straw breathing, which again we’ve gone over in open focus Fridays. And it’s also super simple. Get a straw. Take one out of your water bottle if you can’t find one. And all you do is just watch your breath. Don’t change it. Just watch your breath and then take it just natural, normal breathing. Take a breath, start the exhale. And a second or so after you start your exhale, you just stick a straw between your lips and keep exhaling without changing anything. And then you take the straw outta your mouth just before you finish the exhale.
0:27:52.1 Liz: And then you pay attention to your breathing again. That is the whole practice. It sounds like nothing. But here’s what’ll happen. You will repeat this like maybe five times. It takes some time ’cause you’re watching your breath, sticking the straw in the middle of the exhale, taking it out before it ends, watching your breathing. What starts to happen is you start yawning, and then your eyes start watering, and then your nose starts running, and then your throat starts clearing. So all of the apparatus of breathing will start to clear out. It’s a ridiculously simple practice with profound results. So again, also really relaxing to be able to actually breathe it lets our bodies know that we’re safe.
0:28:35.3 Kat: I was like we do this, do this straw breathing, and then your evidence is you just start leaking.
0:28:41.1 Liz: You’d start leaking everywhere because it’s like you are clogged up sister. You are clogged.
0:28:46.9 Kat: Ain’t that the truth?
0:28:49.7 Liz: You got gunk. So that one…
0:28:51.0 Kat: So, we have our vagus nerve reset. We have our straw breathing. Now, do I wanna do all of these before I start or just pick one or does it doesn’t matter?
0:29:01.0 Liz: I try to do these every day. I definitely do the vagus nerve reset every day before I get outta bed and straw breathing whenever I see a straw. I have straws all over my house. Whenever I see a straw, I’m like, oh, I gotta do straw breathing. So I just…
0:29:14.5 Kat: I love that. You’re like, I just allow chance to be the guy here. But funnily enough I have hung straws in every possible room in multiple places.
0:29:27.0 Liz: That’s right. It’s random but available. So those two things will help you. You don’t have to do either of them. You can just show up and the drumming will take care of it. There’s one other thing I’d like to mention just really quickly. We haven’t gone over it anywhere. Not on open focus Friday or anywhere else.
0:29:49.3 Kat: All right. Breaking news.
0:29:50.7 Liz: But what I’m noticing, it’s breaking news. It’s another ancient technique though. What is it with me in ancient techniques? I don’t know. It’s like this has been working for thousands of years.
0:30:00.0 Kat: It’s so interesting too, because you’re only in your early 20s. You’re just so wise for your age, Liz.
0:30:05.1 Liz: I know. I know. Yeah. I just got outta my teens early.
0:30:09.2 Kat: Old soul, Full soul.
0:30:11.4 Liz: Yeah. That’s it. My soul is ancient. But it’s called japa meditation and it’s a mantra meditation. And people get all spiritual about it. Like, oh, it has to be the name of the goddess or whatever. Sure. Whatever. Can be whatever you want. The mantras are not really the point. It’s the use of the mantra that’s the point. And if you are in as some of us are lately in one of those, like, I just can’t stop this thought. It just keeps recurring a doom spiral, for example. It’s just a thought. It’s just a train of thought, which is something that we learned about in open focus that the brain thinks that’s what it does. It’s okay. It’s okay. Put some space around it. Put some space between the thoughts, fill the thoughts with space, fill the neurons, neurons that are firing with space. Give yourself some space to let the thoughts arise and fade in space. Another way to do that is japa meditation. So you can take any phrase or word, you can take the word chocolate.
0:31:16.5 Kat: I was gonna say cheese. If you’re talking about items of worship.
0:31:21.2 Liz: Items of worship, you might say Parmesan cheese. Parmesan cheese, Parmesan cheese, Parmesan cheese. So you need to say that phrase with no space between syllables or phrases so fast that you cannot get a thought in edgewise. So if you’re having these repetitive thoughts and you’re like, if you can’t put space between them, if you don’t have time for that, you can just japa it out. So Parmesan cheese, Parmesan cheese, Parmesan cheese, Parmesan Cheese, Parmesan Cheese, Parmesan Cheese, Parmesan Cheese, Parmesan. You might find something. You can say it out loud or quietly if you’re in public.
0:31:56.2 Liz: But you have to interrupt your thoughts. And what happens is a thought can’t take hold and then you can slow it down. Parmesan cheese, Parmesan cheese. Oh, not fast enough. Parmesan cheese, Parmesan cheese. Speed it back up. Eventually, and this can take a few minutes, your thoughts are like, that’s too hard. I’m gonna stop. I can’t get purchase here. And then you can slow it down. Parmesan cheese, Parmesan cheese, Parmesan cheese. And as you slow it down as that, so if something starts to come into those spaces, speed it back up again. And you can give your mind a rest by doing that. It doesn’t, again, not gonna change your life. This is not how you’re gonna become rich and famous. It’s not. It’s in the moment how do I give my mind a place to rest? How do I send it home?
0:32:57.9 Kat: Give your mind a deep breath.
0:33:01.3 Liz: Yeah, exactly.
0:33:02.9 Kat: And so you just, there’s no kind of like, you do this for 10 minutes and you do that. You just do it until it works.
0:33:10.5 Liz: Yeah. And open focus, same thing you do it until it works. Drumming is gonna be the same thing. You do it until it works. So we’re always in training or in trance in tune with something. So beyond resilience is about giving us a way to choose our trance, to interrupt the one that’s taking us over in a way we don’t want and choose a more beneficial trance experience.
0:33:37.6 Kat: So I wonder, ’cause like that is something you often contend with when you’re in facilities with people struggling with like mental health is this repetition thing? Phraseology repetition. So I wonder how that is like… What the correlation is between that if there is any.
0:34:00.6 Liz: It’s a great question.
0:34:01.3 Kat: I just only thought about it because there… I don’t know if you remember the movie 12 Monkeys from years and years ago. It has what I think is Brad Pitt’s second best performance. And he plays a guy who’s got…
0:34:16.3 Liz: Captain movie critic weighs in.
0:34:19.6 Kat: Exactly. Well, his first best performance, his best performance is in true romance because you know the Honey Bear bong. But he just keeps saying over and over again, and it’s like a time travel movie. And I can’t remember all of it ’cause I saw it only when it came out. And that’s been 20 plus years ago. But he keeps saying $5,000, $5,000, $5,000, $5,000. And then you learn in the future Bruce, like there’s something with the $5,000 and that’s what he has stuck in his head, is this $5,000. So you said that with Parmesan cheese and I’m like, how many times have I seen people struggling with different conditions and they’re doing this repetition thing? So anyway, there’s a little sidebar.
0:35:01.0 Liz: There’s some thought about that recently and maybe research about that, that the brain is always listening to us.
0:35:08.1 Kat: That’s true.
0:35:08.6 Liz: So a way to interrupt your thoughts is japa and your mind can be at peace and that becomes part of your brain’s learning. That’s as far as I’m willing to go.
0:35:21.0 Kat: Like we said we weren’t getting into any sort of psychological diagnostic area. Again, Liz and I are not professionals of any kind. We do some professional work. Well, Liz is, I’m more of a hack than Liz, let’s be honest. But Liz has got some skills.
0:35:42.6 Liz: Don’t compete with me about being a hack.
0:35:46.9 Kat: So cool. I’m excited. I’m excited for season two. And so next week you said we’re going to get in with kind of starting to do some rhythm, some percussive stuff, just kind of certain play.
0:36:00.9 Liz: Yeah.
0:36:01.4 Kat: All right. So our homework between now and next week is to just find an Altoids container and fill it with some rice.
0:36:08.6 Liz: Yeah, something like that. Anything you, if you like the sound of something, bring a box, bring it out and bring something, bring a shaker. Bring some skewers tape together. We’ll go over more things that you can find in your house or make.
0:36:24.3 Kat: Cool.
0:36:25.0 Liz: It’s gonna be fun.
0:36:29.0 Kat: I’m excited. All right. Till next time, Liz.
0:36:31.8 Liz: Alright, thanks Kat.
0:36:33.4 Kat: Peace.
0:36:35.8 Liz: Peace out.
0:36:38.0 Kat: Interested in learning how you can incorporate trance practices like drumming into your daily life consider joining us for our weekly open Focus Friday group session at 12:00 PM Pacific on Zoom, where we’ll explore percussion, open focus, and other techniques for grounding and balancing our bodies and minds. Registration details and more information are available on our website beyondresilience.io. Thanks for listening to Beyond Resilience, which is hosted by Liz Williams and Kat Oak, and produced by Liminal Nation. Neither Liz nor Kat are trained medical or mental health professionals. And all of the ideas, techniques, resources, and tools we explore in the podcast reflect our own personal perspectives. Special thank you to Stephen Cary for our musical ambiance and to John Hughes and Paramount pictures for the excerpted audio of the preeminent philosopher of late stage Capitalism, Ferris Bueller. All rights where appropriate are reserved. Until next time, stay open.