Barbelith Underground > Temple > Drumming and Trance

I don't know whether the following will be useful to anyone besides me. The approach I take is nowhere near as considered as those others mentioned here.

My recipe for trance drumming is to not eat a great deal that day, to make sure I play with an empty stomach. I smoke lots of cigarettes (rollies) and if I can afford it that night I drink lots of coke and/or vodka, although I usually have to skip the vodka 'cos I'm driving. Fresh orange juice is also good. Depending on my frame of mind I might also want to cut out all social interaction.

Actually, before all this in the daily preparation stakes... it's always good to have done exercises that morning, even if you haven't done them in a while.

Right before I play, I finish all my pre-checks (I can't have something avoidable going wrong with my set up during the session), make sure there's plenty of water on hand and then usually get alone, do stretches, warm-up exercises, pray in Tongues, do breathwork to raise energy, jump up and down, pace around, hit myself in the head. The important thing is to go purely physical, to get rid of your conscious thinking. That's semantically ill-formed, by the way: you have to think of thinking in order to negate thinking, which is a stumbling block for a lot of people. If you know NLP, recall an ecstatic state and build some kind of physical anchor for it. Aim to give yourself an experience rather than remove one. The last thing I do in the immediate lead-up to playing is strip down to my cacks.

The most important thing about the actual drumming itself is the physicality of it. I need to be able to hit fast and like a train collision. And this is where there is no substitute for preparation. If you're going to attempt a rhythm then LEARN IT first. And I don't mean *intellectually* learn it - that's exactly the last thing you should do. Nothing, and I repeat nothing about the act of ritual drumming is intellectual. It's fine to think things through in the early preparation stages, especially if you need to break something down that's easy to learn. Metronomes are fine as long as you don't lose your looseness and fluidity, some people become very martial and rigid with them. But the actual act of drumming is purely that Zen Hulk Smash moment. No brain allowed.

No, when I say learn it, play it until the point at which it's in your muscle. Play it until it's locked into your physical frame, until your body takes over completely. It should be as natural to you as walking or wanking, dancing or fucking, so that when you play it is you. If you're doing it right then the rhythm you create, paradoxically to it being an expression of you, should feel like a living entity outside of you. It should writhe around, threaten to break out of control, you should feel as though you're riding it rather than creating it.

It's very important that you are in pain during the process. Make sure that you break through the pain barrier until you only feel your energy rising the more you play. With hand drums this is easy, you just pound them until your hands get swollen and break and bleed. They'll go numb pretty shortly after that. With sticks it's essentiall that you no longer notice the sticks in your hands, that they become a part of your arm/wrist/hand. With sticks you'll just have to hit hard and fast until the lactic acid builds up and it starts to feel like you can't go on, and when you feel like that throw yourself into it a little more. It should feel like you're in Bleach, constantly breaking yourself and then raising your reiatsu.

Other things that help: throwing yourself into walls, onto the floor, breaking things around you, breaking the drums, drawing on all that James Brown primal sex stuff, beating your chest, biting something/someone, hitting yourself in the head, singing at the top of your voice, screaming, shrieking.

All that should get you there, and is all fun in it's own right. You can feel very variable afterwards, sometimes drained, sometimes emotional, sometimes eurphoric and energised. If you've properly pushed yourself past the edge of what you're capable of then the minutes that you lie drained on the floor after the act are great for shamanic journey work.

This is how I do it, hope it's helpful to someone at least.