Frame Drumming for Inner Balance

Amber Tjeerdsma joined us at the studio for two group classes on frame drumming, and I've been thinking about them ever since.

A frame drum is a simple thing. A shallow hoop, a stretched hide, one hand or two. There's nothing to tune, nothing to plug in, nothing to get right. You hold it against your body and you strike it, and the sound goes through you before it goes anywhere else.

That's the part I want to write about.

The body hears first

We tend to think of rhythm as something we listen to. But when a drum is resting against your chest, the beat isn't arriving through your ears alone. It moves through bone and breath. Your heart is a drum, too, and it notices.

In the room that first evening, I watched it happen. Eight people, most of them strangers, each with a drum in their lap. Within a few minutes the separate rhythms started leaning toward one another. Nobody was told to match. It just happened, the way footsteps fall into step on a walk with a friend.

There's a name for that in the research — entrainment — and a great deal of science behind it. I'll leave the studies for another day. What I'll say is that I've spent twenty years watching nervous systems learn to settle, on the mat, on the table, in the therapy chair, and I recognized it immediately.

Left, right, left

If you've done EMDR work with me, you know we use bilateral stimulation — alternating left and right — to help the brain process what got stuck. Drumming with both hands is bilateral by nature. Alternating strokes, steady tempo, a rhythm the body can predict.

I don't want to overstate this. A drum circle is not therapy, and I wouldn't offer it as one. But I noticed how many people said afterward that they felt clearer. Lighter. Quieter behind the eyes. Those are the same words I hear at the end of a good session.

What I'm carrying forward

I bought a frame drum. It sits in the corner of the therapy room now, and once in a while it comes out. Sometimes at the end of a session, a few minutes of steady rhythm is a gentler way to land than words.

Thank you, Amber, for bringing this to us. And thank you to everyone who showed up with an open hand and no idea what to expect. That's usually where the good things begin.

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