We take up the caxixi, a Brazilian basket shaker used across healing traditions. Through shaking, we begin to localize sensation in the body, sensitize ourselves to left and right, and attune to the four directions as an inner map.

The voice enters as our deepest instrument. Through slowly shifting vowel sounds and vocal long tones, we deepen the breath, quiet the analytical mind, and begin to access the expanded states that rhythm makes possible.

This week, we explore the drum as our first language — the Ursprache, or preverbal tongue, encoded in our cells long before words existed.

Through vocal percussive breath techniques, we'll practice sounding and drumming together as shamans, mystics, hunters, and priestesses have for millennia: creating wordless transmissions that resonate directly with the nervous system.

Dr. Jason Konner brings a rare vantage point to this work: two decades as a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering, sitting with patients at the edge of life and death, followed by a deep turn toward psychedelic medicine, nature, and contemplative practice as pathways to healing. As a licensed clinical psilocybin facilitator and founder of Chaloka, his work lives at the intersection of science and the sacred — exploring how rhythm, resonance, and altered states of consciousness restore what illness and isolation erode. He brings that same inquiry into the drum circle: rhythm as medicine, sound as the body's oldest language.

Using the traditions of the ancient world as our reference and inspiration — Mesopotamia, Egypt, ancient Greece, and Southern Italy, alongside the healing circles of medieval Islamic Andalusia and the Americas — we recreate and reimagine the shared rhythm and breath practices of these ecstatic traditions for our modern lives. Glen shares his pictorial research to guide our deep dive into this inner world of rhythmic exploration. We explore how rhythm carries memory, identity, and the sacred across millennia. We are riding a wave of 4,000 years of frame drum tradition.

In our final session, Glen guides us through an extended rhythmic journey — integrating everything we've cultivated into a full embodied experience of trance, presence, and inner listening. We close in community reflection and shared silence.