I was in shavasana when I first heard an ocean drum. The teacher walked the room with it slowly, tilting it, and the sound moved through me the way the ocean does — that low rolling shhhh that isn’t quite water and isn’t quite wind. I felt the medicine of it immediately. A few years later I bought one. A big one, twenty-two inches across. I told myself I bought it to share with clients during healings, and that was a true reason. I played it for a week or two and then I put it on a shelf, where it lived for three or four years.
I never developed a relationship with it. That is the part I want to say plainly, because I don’t think I understood it at the time. I bought the drum the way most of us buy the things we believe will deepen us — I approached it with how can you serve me. Not in words, not consciously, but in the underlying posture of the purchase. I wanted what it could give. I did not ask who it was. I never sat with it long enough to learn its breath, the way it wanted to be held, what it actually had to say when it wasn’t being asked to perform. It was on my shelf the way most of our medicine is on most of our shelves — present, available, untouched.
I don’t think this is because we are careless. I think it’s because no one ever taught us how. When I trained in Reiki, I learned the hand positions and the symbols and the sequence. I followed the steps. For a long time I thought I am doing this — I am moving the energy, I am performing the healing. It took years to fully understand that I was a conduit. The energy was moving. I was the place it moved through. No one had taught me to ask where I was in the equation, because the training was about the technique, not the relationship. This is how most of us are taught: we are handed the action steps and we perform them, and we don’t notice that we ourselves have been left out of what we are doing. We learn the mantra without learning who is speaking it. We learn what to say to the crystal without learning who is in conversation with the stone. We buy the rose quartz because we want love and the selenite because we want clarity and the drum because we want to offer sound. We do all the right things with them, and we still feel unmet, because we have not put ourselves in relationship with any of it. We have only acted on it.
There has been a quiet movement in me lately to release. Not a purge, not preparation for anything, just a steady nudge — a rattle, another drum, books I bought because I heard they were important or that I needed them to understand but I never opened them. Stones I’d been keeping because they were beautiful even though they were only sitting around. When I sat with what was leaving, I noticed something: these were the things I’d never met. I had them but I did not know them, and there is a difference.
The ocean drum was one of them. Once, about a year ago, I had tried to sell it and was met with no interest, and I’d read that as a sign that I was supposed to use it. However, I still didn’t use it. I took the listing down, and the drum stayed. It was only later, when this quieter movement of releasing began that I understood what I was actually doing, and so I offered it again. A woman came for it who was learning sound. I shared with her about greeting the drum, about how it breathes, and I could see the words pass through her without landing. That knowing arrives when it arrives. It didn’t land for me either, for a long time. The drum sat on my shelf for years before I understood it was asking anything of me at all.
I know what it is to be in relationship with a drum, because I have been in relationship with one for more than a decade. I bought my first drum in Peru in 2012. I was going to a shamanic practitioner then, not to study but for help — I was in a marriage that had stopped fitting and I was looking for something I couldn’t name. I wandered into a small shop cluttered with shamanic things. I can still remember the sights, the smells, the way I moved through the shop, the way I stopped, the way I knew before I knew. I saw the drum and I felt how it resonated. I wanted it for reasons that had nothing to do with service or use. I even remember the vendor trying to steer me to buy a different drum and our full interaction. That drum has hung on my wall ever since. But I have played it from time to time. Two others have arrived in the years since — one I made with my own hands, and another - a painted Peruvian drum that arrived when I was ready for it. Each of them I met before I knew what they were for.
The Q’ero I have walked with don’t accumulate. They have a mesa, coca leaves, prayers, an instrument. They speak to all the allies - stone, water, Pachamama, the Apus. They are not collecting medicine. They are in relationship with what is already there, and the medicine moves through the relationship.
I am not saying don’t take the class. I am not saying don’t buy the drum. The trainings teach us, the tools open us, the gathering is part of how we learn who we are. But there is a way to do it that includes you, and a way to do it that doesn’t. The question I wish someone had asked me earlier is not what is this for, but who am I as I sit with this. Who am I as I learn Reiki? Who am I as I hold the drum? Who am I as I place the stone? The teaching is not the thing on the shelf. The teaching is what happens between you and the thing on the shelf, and if you are not in the room, no teaching can occur.
If you are reading this with a drum on a shelf, or a stone in a drawer, or a teaching folded into a notebook you have not opened — the question is not what to do with it. The question is whether you have met it yet.
I wish you much love and many blessings as you walk your path,
Susan
To schedule a session please email me at susan@susanhharris.com or visit my website - www.susanhharris.com