Christine Stevens – Drumming & Sound Healing
Description Of Drumming & Sound Healing
Experience sonic alchemy as you receive and create healing vibrations to harmonize your emotions, liberate your spirit, and accelerate your journey to wholeness.
Discover that just as power animals are sought through shamanic journeying, we all have power songs that strengthen, transform, and inspire us.
In this brand-new 7-step musical journey with author, speaker, drummer, and music therapist Christine Stevens, you’ll be immersed in the healing vibrations of music as medicine with opportunities to listen, receive, drum (no skill or drum required), and tone using your own voice.
You’ll experience sounds aligned with the Music Medicine Wheel and nature’s four elements — Earth (rhythm), Water (harmony), Fire (melody), and Air (silence) — to discover and release stuck emotions for an inner tuning of your body, mind, heart, and soul.
As you find which melodies touch your heartstrings, you’ll discover that just as power animals are sought through shamanic journeying, we all have power songs that strengthen, transform, and inspire us — a concept based on an actual medical phenomenon.
And you’ll even discover the healing inherent in the silences between sounds, and the musical term rest as a metaphor for the powerful practice of resting — inviting you to make space between the notes of your life to breathe, take in, and integrate beauty.
What You’ll Learn In Drumming & Sound Healing
During this uplifting and self-empowering new program with Christine Stevens, you’ll:
- Experience a sound bath for purification and healing
- Learn how to use sound to impact your immune system and your brain’s pleasure system
- Feel how rhythm, flute music, silence, and song provide self-healing
- Find the instrument that most resonates with your needs
- Discover your personal medicinal music to awaken your inner music
- Design a way of greeting the day to anchor gratitude, peace, and harmony
- Discover the bhakti (devotional energy) of call-and-response in kirtan chanting
- Learn to turn a favorite poem into song through a Radiance Sutra Jam Join in toning Ohm to experience a roar of joy
- Learn to play singing bowls and other instruments of silence
- Discover how to feel into your own rhythm for expression on drums
- Explore how music can connect with nature and be an offering of healing to the planet
- Discover ceremonies, songs, and rhythms for healing nature and the planet
- And much more…
What You’ll Discover in Drumming & Sound Healing
In this Drumming & Sound Healing course, Christine Stevens will guide you as you immerse yourself in the healing vibrations of music as medicine — to release stuck emotions and experience an inner tuning of your body, mind, heart, and soul.
This Drumming & Sound Healing course will feature teachings, training sessions, and experiential practices with Christine Stevens. Each session will build harmoniously upon the previous ones, so you’ll develop a complete holistic understanding of the practices, tools, and principles you’ll need to harmonize the dissonance of your emotions, liberate your spirit, and accelerate your journey to wholeness.
Module 1: Healing Yourself With Music Medicine
Modern science is demonstrating what Indigenous cultures practiced and knew; that sound is an essential tool for cultivating emotional release, relationship building, healing, and spirituality.
In this opening session, you’ll experience sounds aligned with the music medicine wheel and become aware of your own inner tuning with the four elements of rhythm, melody, harmony and silence — correlated with body, mind, heart, and soul.
The wheel is an ancient form of wholeness that appears as the mandala for Tibetan Buddhism, the medicine wheel for First Nations People, and the Celtic Tree of Life for Druidic cultures. We will experience the four elements of sound and how they correlate with nature’s elements — Earth (rhythm), Water (harmony), Fire (melody), and Air (silence).
In this session, you’ll:
- Experience a sound bath for purification, release, and healing
- Learn leading-edge science that documents how sound impacts the brain, the immune system, and the brain’s pleasure system
- Feel how rhythm, flute, silence and song offer self-healing
- Identify the instrument that is most resonant to your needs
- Discover your personal medicinal music — and awaken your own inner music
Module 2: Rhythm, the Element of Earth, as Medicine for Your Body
We are incubated in rhythm. Your mother’s heartbeat was your first concert in the womb. Rhythm reaches the inner heartbeat that is the drum within us all, a sound felt and heard from a time before birth. Rhythm is everyone’s homeland. Your body is wired for rhythm. You are a walking, talking, ticking, tocking polyrhythm. Rhythm calls the body to dance and the tribe to gather. The unstoppable drum plays, and the dance goes on.
The drum shows up when people are transforming because drumming is an evolutionary driver. The Hindu deity Shiva, lord of the dance, holds a drum. Scientific studies have shown that the impact of just one hour of drumming on the immune system can even reverse stress-related genomic codes.
In this session, you’ll:
- Learn a drum massage for full-body healing
- Explore the principle of entrainment — and how it operates in your body and sonic field
- Learn to create rhythm using drums and body percussion
- Explore the intersection of rhythm and silence for expansion and meditation
- Invoke the element of Earth to stay in rhythm with the natural cycles
Module 3: Melody, the Element of Fire, as Medicine for Your Heart
The Lakota Nation carries a musical creation story that highlights the spiritual journey of melody. They say “First Born emerged from quivering mud to the rhythm of his own heart. Afterwards, man learned to use this rhythm for making songs. Certain ones discovered the true power in song; the power for making spiritual contact.”
From Krishna’s flute to the Native American flute, the magnetic energy of a serenade calls a longing heart into the chamber of the Beloved.
Like power animals, we all have power songs that strengthen, transform and inspire us. We are moved by melodies that pluck our heartstrings. We all have an innate songwriting instinct — childhood development studies show that all children make up songs around age two, without ever being taught. And in the principle of sonic alchemy, we can transmute emotions and literally take a sad song and make it better.
In this session, you’ll:
- Experience a personal power song practice
- Awaken your voice through the 4 keys of song
- Discover the true nature of the pentatonic scale, where there are no wrong notes
- Design your own way of greeting the day to anchor gratitude, peace, and harmony
- Discover the bhakti of call-and-response chanting in kirtan style
- Learn to turn a favorite poem into song in the Radiance Sutra Jam style
Module 4: Harmony, the Element of Water, as Medicine for Your Soul (March 24)
Life wants to harmonize! Just as melody helps us find our individual voice, harmony helps us discover the power of togetherness — from me to we. We are all wired for resonance in the principle of sympathetic vibration, in which a guitar string on one instrument resonates an unstruck note on another instrument.
Science is now finding how “mirror neurons” demonstrate how much we are wired for connection. Worldwide studies of choral singers demonstrate that they experience greater health, better mood states, and a sense of belonging from singing together on a regular basis, which is something being embraced in the UK Ministry of Health’s “social prescribing.”
The Hindu deity Saraswati, goddess of audible arts, comes from a river and embodies the divine element of harmony and water. We literally flow together into duets with nature and friends as we experience the music bridge, transcending language barriers and leading to the heightened spiritual state of unity consciousness.
In this session, you’ll:
- Discover what instruments reach your soul — and give you “soul bumps” like goose bumps
- Learn a practice to harmonize with nature
- Learn a practice to be in harmony with all of your relations
- Experience the music bridge
- Experience the thumb piano and strumstick — easy instruments of harmony
- Create a global ensemble for transformation using zoom
Module 5: Silence, the Element of Air, as Medicine for Your Mind (March 31)
It is said that before there is sound, there is silence. The Lakota Nation have a word for the silence that originates all sound: skan-skan wakan. The musical term “rest” is a metaphor for the powerful practice of resting, making space between the notes of your life. Silence gives music space to breathe, and gives listeners time to digest, upload, and integrate beauty.
The four types of musical silence help us track the space between sound and incorporate the principle of resting for integration and meditation. Ironically, a listening study showed that the space between music offered the most impact in terms of heart measures of relaxation. The Buddha best represents the element of stillness and air — the breath that creates meditation and mindfulness.
In this session, you’ll:
- Learn how to play a singing bowl
- Be given tips on practicing silence
- Experience a guided meditation on listening to Nature and the element of air
- Discover tools for cultivating inner silence — the neuroscience of quietude
Module 6: Inner Music, the Element of Ether, as Medicine for Your Spirit
St. Francis of Assisi said, “Make me an instrument.” Now that we’ve experienced the four elements of sound healing, we’ll step into the medicine wheel mandala for our personal healing and embodiment — becoming music. What is your pitch, your tempo, your vibration, your timbre? What is the music you are here to play? Your inner music is a place of rejuvenation, a “muse” of inspiration, helping you discover the creative force within you.
Scientific studies demonstrate two key principles for activating your inner music, based on MRI brain studies of jazz musicians. The first is permission, not perfection. The second is creativity; not complexity. We will explore the principle of resonance and how to bring your core into attunement — body, mind, heart, and soul.
In this session, you’ll:
- Experience the healing benefits of the 4 elements of music within your inner world
- Join a toning practice with the seed syllable OHM, the roar of joy that set the world in motion
- Understand how to use the wheel for personal healing
- Experience how it feels to sit with your own rhythm, melody, harmony, and silence
- Discover the sounds of the inner realms
- Be inspired to make your own personal sound-healing practice
Module 7: Eco-Music as Medicine for the World
Music is the global language, a tool for planetary transformation ushering in a time of harmony in our new co-created world. Richard Rudd’s “Gene Keys” predicts three stages of humanity’s awakening sequence; from the Harmonic Convergence in the ’80s, to the second stage of the Melodic Resonance in 2012, to the upcoming stage known as the Rhythmic Symphony.
In the movie 10 Questions for the Dalai Lama, His Holiness is asked what we can do to create peace. With a huge smile on his face, the Dalai Lama says, “more music festivals.”
In this session, you’ll:
- Discover the balance of inner and outer music
- Establish your practice of becoming shamans of a new consciousness
- Explore a menu of musical service ideas — knowing what is yours to do
- Understand how to become the highest practitioners of sound healing
- Discover ceremonies, songs, and rhythms for nature and the planet
About Christine Stevens
Christine Stevens is an internationally acclaimed speaker, author, drummer, and music therapist. Holding master’s degrees in both social work and music therapy, Christine Stevens inspires people all over the world with her message that music promotes holistic health, spirituality, and wellness. Christine Stevens taught her Shift Network courses, Awaken Your Rhythm and Awaken your Healing Rhythm, to over 1,000 students from 36 countries last year.
Christine Stevens is the author of Music Medicine, The Healing Drum Kit, and The Art and Heart of Drum Circles book and DVD. She’s recorded three play-along CDs: Reviving Rhythms, Drumming Up Spirit, and Drumming Up Diva. A leader in the music and wellness movement, Christine also serves on the editorial board of Explore: A Journal of Science and Healing.
Christine Stevens is the founder of UpBeat Drum Circles, offering training programs and online courses around the world. She’s trained facilitators and led workshops in more than 20 countries, including Iraq, Hong Kong, Brazil, South Africa, Japan, and Western Europe. Through Remo, the world’s largest drum company, Chrsitine co-created the HealthRHYTHMS evidence-based group drumming protocol, used in schools, medical centers, and veterans hospitals worldwide.
Christine’s work in Iraq was featured in the book and DVD Discover the Gift. Televised media credits include PBS, NBC, KABC-Los Angeles, KTLA – Los Angeles, Tournament of Roses Parade, London Tonight, Living Better TV, Discovery Health, and Hong Kong News. As a contributing writer, Christine’s work has been featured in Fitness magazine, Spirituality & Health, Body & Soul, Fast Company, First for Women magazine, The Oriental News, The Christian Science Monitor, US News & World Report, Yogi Times, and Natural Beauty and Health.
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