Drumming: Community Drum Circle

What is a Community Drum Circle? CDC

A CDC is joy made manifest! It is a group of diverse individuals who gather in a circle to create in-the-moment recreational music in a fun, supportive, safe environment. Drum circles are ideally facilitated by a professionally trained CDC facilitator who is passionate about bringing people together to lighten our load, lift our spirits and in doing so heal each other and our world!

With simple instructions we quickly learn to play drums from around the world and advance from directed to self-directed play as the drum circle proceeds; no experience is required and drums are provided.

A CDC attracts people from all ages and walks of life; it is diverse, it is about participation, creative self expression, flattening the hierarchy, equality, coming together rather than pulling apart, balance and wellbeing.

Why Drumming?

In today’s stressful world people need safe places where they can go to get out of the rat race, to be still, unwind and reinvigorate their tired bodies and minds.

Community Drum Circles are safe and welcoming places where you can express yourself freely, communicate authentically without words and feel the support of a community of like-minded people; they are places where you can explore your outer and your inner world.

People all over the world are waking up to the powerfully positive effect of participating regularly in a Community Drum Circle. Susan Faber has been trained by Judy Atkinson, Founder Circles of Rhythm

CDCs are being incorporated into the workplace as professional development for team building and stress relief, into the healing sector for emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing, and into the community for celebration and FUN!

For more information about how to introduce the CDC into your life contact Susan Faber or sign up for a Community Drum Circle today!

“Whenever people gather to play the drum the world is a better place. “ Babatundi Olatinji.

NOTE: We welcome all traditions of drumming - there are no specific rules, dogma or rituals. This is about Community.

Drums deliver healthy rhythm Tribune Review Monday, March 19, 2001 Robb Frederick

They sit in a circle, 10 women connected by cancer. They introduce themselves without speaking.

Sally Thorne smiles, her left hand smacking an answer to the right. She’s confident.

Anna Marie Constantine hesitates, and then pats once with an open palm. She’s not sure.

By then they’re talking. The usual topics: faith and fear, kids and career, cookbooks and chemotherapy. Only they say it all with the drums, with a beat that pulses, then shifts, gaining speed and splitting, racing, reaching, and then quieting, colored by the patterns played around it.

It centers them, this music. It focuses, relaxes, and ties them together. It may just keep them healthy. The ancient Greeks purified themselves by clapping chalkis during eclipses. Afro-Cubans cleansed the soul by striking water gourds at funerals.

In Greensburg, in a hospital waiting room and a YWCA hall, Dr Christine O’Brien takes on cancer. "It’s a physical thing," says Laurie Jones, the licensed music therapist who guides the sessions. "if you really give yourself over to it and let it run its natural course, you get to a point where you start felling something above the room."

There’s more to it than that, in January Dr. Barry Bittman, the neurologist who heads the Meadvulle Medical Center’s Mind Body Wellness Center, published a study linking group drumming to changes in the body’s immune system. Bittman isn’t claiming the cure for cancer. But he did chart increases in DHEA, a steroid that can reduce stress, and natural killer cells and lymphokine-activated killer cells which attack cancers and other illnesses. Bittman guided 60 healthy adults through a series of group drumming exercises. They passed plastic shaker eggs, sounded out their names and moods, and drummed along to a narrative-a calm story about a trip into the Amazon. After an hour, their DHEA and NK cell levels jumped. A control group , which listened but did not drum, showed no changes. "I really believe music gets through where words don’t," Bittman said. "This is something people never imagined they had inside them." A Medical Tool Bittman’s study was the first of its kind, a jolt of hard data in a touchy feely field. "It’s validation of the work we’ve been doing," said Barry Bernstein, a music therapist who has collaborated with Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. "It definitely validates this as a medical tool."

Bernstein, a Kansas native who has worked with veterans and Alzheimer’s patients- who can regain movement after exercising metronome-likens drum circles to boot-camp cadences. "They get out there and march, and they say these crazy chants," he said. "But they’re moving together, when people are drumming, they’re moving together too. And something happens. There’s an energy that is created."

At the Caron Foundation, a Berks County drug treatment center, Mark Seaman tries to teach addicts to harness that energy, his program "Rhythm and Recovery," has been picked up by the Pennsylvania prison system. "We’re trying to give them an opportunity to feel things again," Seaman said. "Once we get the rhythms going they just jump right in. There’s group dynamic that takes over. It’s somewhere between a tribal ritual and kids with pots and pans."

In a sense, the music doesn’t matter. "It’s really not about drumming," said Christine Stevens, director of wellness for Remo Drums Inc., the company that funded Bittman’s study, "It’s about people connecting. And rhythm is the portal, it’s immediate. It’s aesthetic. It’s physical." "It’s phenomenally innate," said Bittman. And that, he says, is why other instruments do not work as well. "It’s too hard to teach people to play the violin."