Daniel Hirtz

Edwin Rutsch14min

Cara Wilson

00:00

It is now my pleasure to bring up Daniel hertz coming in with a group. Daniel is a musician, teacher, a workshop leader. He focuses on fostering wholeness, connection and peace through music, breath and energy work. He produces the breath for peace album produced conscious breathing and drumming courses online and in person, and developed holistic tuning. Today, Daniel is going to talk about the music of empathy circles. Take it away, Daniel.

Daniel Hirtz

00:35

Hey everybody, what you see and welcome. I'm excited to be here, and I'm talking about a topic that I'm still is very fresh to me, the connection between empathy circles and drum circles. Even while I'm preparing for this, preparing for this presentation, I get constantly kind of new ideas. So it's just a little image, a little what's the word? Flashlight on the momentary development on this, and here in the background, you can see, this is last night downtown Phoenix. I've been doing this for I talked to some people for about 25 years, maybe even 30 years when we lived here. Pretty much every month, on First Friday, people come together here in Phoenix. Phoenix is a weird city. You cannot walk around. It's all too big and too hot and whatever. But so this is a special time. Everybody comes out and and again. Yesterday, we brought together people from all regions of life, with all skin colors, all levels of class, all ages, everything you you have moments. We had a moment yesterday where I would think this was probably 300 people with the circle of drums. Inside the circle were younger people doing their collective dancing thing, a thing I've never seen in the way they do it now, but they were totally engaged with us. We were making the music for them and around us. We had people participating with little shakers and I'm watching it. It's just a feeling of a global village right there, and it's produced through the music and the drum circle. So I want to share one little thing with you here. You probably don't see my drum because with this weird thing of my the background you hear it is it flashes in and out. Here we go. Let me know if you hear it.

Daniel Hirtz

03:01

So that's one example. It's a steady beat. And in general, what I know is that people enjoy a steady beat. It's very relaxing. It does something to us when we rock a baby. Steadiness of that rocking of the beat is extremely important now, compared to this, you

Daniel Hirtz

03:33

so obviously you can tell the difference Between a steady beat and this sort of noisy, chaotic randomness. And when I first heard about empathy circles from Ingrid, she brought empathy circles, like so many things she brought into my life. And when she described it, I immediately thought that the component of keeping time and speaking in the rhythm around the circle that it reminded me of drum circles, because it's a beat, and what is a beat that in itself, took me a long time to realize that the beat really in its Heart, is predictability for us in our consciousness, when somebody plays a beat, we start to see that we can connect with that beat. We can predict that beat, and because of the predictability of that beat, now I can start my own beat, and I can join in with that person so we play together. Now, if a person plays some beat and changes it constantly, which happens in the bickering drum circles, where people are not really trying to get together, but to play at each other, just to intersect this. You know, when somebody plays like that, you cannot really connect any moment it changes. Um, it's becomes unpredictable. And I leave this up to you to reflect on our political sphere and our way of living right now, how much unpredictability is in there by design, so that we're not relaxing and not really getting together. So the this where my point is that the two tenets that I would connect, both drum circles and empathy circles with is, one is total inclusivity. Everybody who sees included, nobody will be told, No, you cannot speak because you don't have the right attitude, or whatever it may be. We include everybody. We want to listen to everybody. And that's a core tenet that is kind of 100% for me, at least you. I leave that up to you, but for me, it is, I got to include anybody and everybody, no matter how they show up. That is also true for for drum circles, for me, total inclusivity and listening to everybody. The other aspect is the beat. In the drum circle, the beat is essential. And in an empathy circle, I and this is kind of the point of my talk, the beat as we go around. And for those who have done a number of draw of empathy circles, you know the feeling when it sort of feels like it's, it's, we're getting into a rhythm, the listening and the sharing and becomes like a rhythmic thing, and it is so comforting, it produces a very relaxed foundation in which the speaking occurs and the listening occurs. And I believe that the beat is an essential part of that. And so in a way, you could say what, what the empathy circle taught me about drum circles is that drum circles is all are also just like a way of structured relating with each other. And I shared this with some of the drummers, and everybody goes, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So we get together as humans, and we agree, okay, we stop talking, and now we get into the beat. And what that allows us is that we, all of a sudden, we're in a space where all kinds of people have space. Everybody can drum with me. It doesn't matter what political orientation have. Doesn't matter what they believe in. Doesn't matter if they're super well at drum or super good at drumming or not, the drum circle is different. It's an invitation to use the beat to get along and to feel a sense of community that is otherwise very hard to accomplish, because music, and when you think about it. Music is a way how we all can speak at the same time, especially if it's communal music like that. So everybody has a voice, and yet at the same time, we have a sense of being connected. Now it turns out that just recently, science has pretty much with very little doubt around it, with so much great with great assurance, determined that we made music long before we started talking to each other, and that from the very initial, very rudimental music that we developed something They call, actually, musi language, or something like that. And that's what you all can imagine, that we communicated in very simple symbolic language, just basics of life with each other, and that the idea that the rhythm of the music is the container that brings people together, and then, of course, singing together is just the same thing, just on a different kind of level. So

Daniel Hirtz

09:14

the interesting, amazing thing about drum circles is, and you can see this easily, is that we combining individuality with communal, communal aspect. And while you're in a drum circle, you sort of have to negotiate that all the time. So let me take just a moment to tell you what a drum circle is a little bit more specifically. Basically, we we're setting up a circle of drums and a circle of chairs, and then we try to play together. An interesting thing is you can bring people together that never drummed before. Last night, there were people who said, I never drummed that sit down. They drum for the first time. And it's just an amazing thing to watch when they trust there's. Sense of beat, they can participate. And that obviously is not the same thing, like standard music, is it? Is it? Is what I call music for the people, or not people for the music here, we don't get together to make a fixed idea of music, and then fulfill that ideas as much as possible. And, you know, have a product, sort of like a music, a product, which is what, 99% of the music we share in this world are products transactional, are sold and bought and pushed and all these things and commodified and most of all, they're very competitive. Musicians compete a lot against each other to get the higher space on the pay scale, or even on their attention. Well, drum circles on music for the people is completely different. Has nothing to do with that. We actually use the music to get people together, to include more and more people, and to create a sense of this communal field that when we when, when we stop in the end, we carry that feeling with us. I still carry it today, that tremendous feeling of community that's to me, always felt like I'm charging my batteries, I'm resetting myself, I'm working through stuff, I'm opening up, and it's actually very therapeutic. And to me, that's also a link to the empathy circle, because for me, and I leave that up to you, I shared this with numbers of people we shared it while we were in the circle that we have an increased sense of being connected even when we are online with each other. How that exactly works, I'm not sure, but it is clearly there that when we are circling with each other, that I feel different at the end than I felt in the beginning. Toward the end, I feel this sense of connectedness, which I actually think is because we're all sharing a space internally that is in connected in ways that we still just find out. So I want to there's so much more that I could talk about predictability, all kinds of things that I have to manage in my head, because I've only got a couple of minutes left over. I want to just say this, I think we have a listening crisis in the world. We world. We are in a situation where it's very, very difficult. In our political sphere, there's no listening right now. People don't even want to negotiate any longer. And it's, it's, it's a breakdown. And for me, what we're doing with our music and with the empathy circles is reversing that listening trend and opening the listening space bigger and bigger in our world. And I think this is a really amazing and wonderful mission. And the last thing I want to say is something practical. So if you drumstickle, facilitate an empathy circle facilitator, when you're afraid to interrupt somebody because they keep talking, or when things drag on too much, and think a little bit about keeping the beat for everybody, maybe that helps you to feel the authority to say, hey, let's take a moment let the person reflect, or let's switch to the next speaker and this kind of thing. It's all about keeping the beat. Thank you for this, and I'll be I'll be back with more. You.

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