Sometimes drums are medicine.
By Darin Fenger on YumaSun.com [6th April 2008]
PHOTO BY TERRY KETRON/THE SUN
A Yuma woman uses the pulse and pound of a most ancient sound to help people balance their emotions, find inner peace and even heal their physical woes. Healer Phyllis Magal says that drumming truly can take people to a spiritual place where all kinds of transformation is possible - plus it's fun and sounds cool, too.
"Drumming is one of the original spiritual technologies," Magal said. "Drumming helps people enter into a trance or visioning state, where they can have a direct experience with their own divinity and with spirit itself."
Magal explained how that trance state is where people can receive healing, listen for guidance from a spirit or simply begin to know themselves.
Indigenous cultures have been using drums as spiritual tools since ancient times, but suddenly it's all catching on more and more with modern people of many belief systems.
Magal stressed that you can find drumming circles in most American cities these days, too, ranging from gatherings at formal spiritual centers to get-togethers around someone's living room.Magal recently created a drumming circle that she leads at 7 p.m. each Wednesday at St. Paul's Cultural Center, 645 S. 2nd Ave.
"It's the most egalitarian spiritual path I've come across. It's open to everyone. Everyone can have their own direct experience with spirit."
The healer admits that she can't pinpoint exactly how drumming affects people on the spiritual plane. She instead points to a greater fact - that it works - but she still offers up a few guesses as to how this seemingly magic process works.
"Drumming a monotonous rhythm trains the brain to go into that dream state," Magal said, adding that drumming also sounds like the mother's heartbeat as heard from the womb. "Drumming is just one avenue, but it's a great one."
People can also reach that dream state where spiritual healing takes place, she said, through everything from plant medicine to chanting and dancing.
"Drumming is fun and it's easier. Not everyone can dance and get to that ecstatic place. Most people aren't going to seek out a shaman for peyote, either. It's danger. It's not easy."
Growing up in Virginia and Maryland, she is the daughter of a Christian father from Czechoslovakia and a Mennonite mother. Magal even lived in a Mennonite commune for some time as a young woman, a life lesson she likened to a monastic experience.
She began studying metaphysical spirituality 20 years ago, embarking on quite a different journey of belief than her familial tradition.
"My spiritual practice today is much closer to traditional people's practices, more indigenous practices. It's simpler. It's more primal. It focuses on direct experience and not on set beliefs or dogma or theology."
Magal started out with a master's degree of theology in art, then branched out to a less traditional education. She attended San Francisco's famed Berkeley Psychic Institute for five years, going through its clairvoyant program.
"Everybody's psychic, however. I'm just trained. It's all part of the work I do, integrated into my healing work."
She also studied with Hank Wesselman, a well-known paleo-anthropologist best known for his experiences with time travel. She worked with Wesselman for five years in California and Hawaii. While in the latter state, Magal also studied with a local kahuna or traditional spiritual leader.
Magal has made her living through jobs ranging from working with special needs children to creating pieces of ceramic sculpture for galleries around the nation. But today, healing makes up the bulk of her work experience. Her sessions are conducted both in person and over the phone.
"I know that I don't do the healing, though. The person coming to be me is the true healer. I just facilitate the process.
"When I give a healing, I just allow universal love energy to flow through my body and I flow it into that person's space and they can use it however they would like to use it."
Magal explained her approach, which can involve hands-on healing, visioning and drumming.+
"I get them in touch with their spirit guides, their teachers. Or we'll work on a dream, re-entering that dream through visioning. We can dream it forward or you can talk to any part of the dream."
Magal is quick to stress that she doesn't view healers as having any great power, either.
"Everyone's a healer. That's the bottom line. Now there are people that come into this life, in my belief, and they are more practiced. They have done it lifetime after lifetime."
That individual experience with healing is where drumming comes onto the scene. People become their own healers, even if they aren't musically inclined one bit.
"This is not about making music. Drumming is about the vibration and getting you to the right state.
"It's not about them actually making the drumbeat themselves even. Just being near drumming, the vision will happen anyway. It really is a beautiful experience."
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