Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Well, I just like once a day to kind of stop and think, what if everything is okay right now? What if I am okay right now? What if I. What if I don't need to be different than I am? What if this is okay right? Here's it.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Welcome to supernormalize, the podcast, where we challenge the conventional break boundaries and normalize the seemingly supernatural. Join me, CJ, as we explore less uncharted realms of existence and unravel the mysteries of life. Experience. My treasured listeners, if you have a life story or healing modality or unique knowledge that you'd love to share, reach out to me at supernormalized. That's supernormalized with a z at proton me. Let's together embrace acceptance of the supernatural and unusual as what it really is. Completely normal. Today on Supernormal, as I talk with Clementine Moss, the founding drummer of the Led Zeppelin tribute band Zepparella, an all female band that covers all of the Led Zeppelin Rock foundations, really, she's a multifaceted individual who seamlessly integrates her roles as a rock and roll musician and depth hypnosis practitioner and has written a book from Bonham to Buddha and back. The slow enlightenment of the hard rock drummer Clementine eloquently explores in the intersection of her music career and spiritual journey. And in our discussion today, we talk about that from how this all happened and her early times in life, and how that all influenced her towards meditation and then finally into being in a band at the age of 27, which is a late start, but they're doing obviously really well. And if you look at some of the eclipse, you'll be amazed. This really, really good band and I'm sure you'll enjoy.
Welcome to supernormalized Clementine Moss. Clementine, you're in a band and you tour around and you cover Led Zeppelin with some friends, and that must be a hell of a lot of fun. But you're also person that gets into deep meditation and finds the truth in life through that as well. How did that all happen?
That's why.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: Yeah, well, let's see. We only have an hour.
It's a short description and a long description. Okay, so I'll do. The short description was that when I was around 27 years old, which I know for astrology fans out there as kind of an important time, a couple of things happened. One was I went to my first ten day vipassana meditation retreat and had kind of a big opening experience there. And around the same time I took my first drum lesson at the time I was living in New York City, and I had moved there to be a writer, and I was kind of floundering around quite a bit and really longing for some kind of creative output that involved other people. And I had musicians in my orbit one day thought, I've never ever learned anything about drumming. And everything kind of fell into place. I got a great teacher, and within a year and a half, I was playing in bands. And now, 30 years later, here, that's how I make my living, as well as being a spiritual counselor for others.
And so everything kind of converged in my life. I thought I was on two separate paths, contemplative path and music path. And over time, I've come to see it's just kind of all one thing, and I'm learning similar lessons, being in the world and then retreating from the world and going inside.
[00:04:54] Speaker B: Did it take retreating from the world to recognize that, though?
[00:05:00] Speaker A: Well, I think so. I mean, I'm so grateful for the practice of meditation, of insight meditation, which is what Vipassana is, because it really allows us to step back and observe our reactions.
And when I'm sitting behind the drum kit and playing a show, it's a very valuable tool to be able to see the ways that my mind gets pulled out of the moment and how my playing suffers in those moments where I'm not allowing the music to kind of flow through me much the way that when we're living our lives, we can really have a sense that we're in a flow. And then we notice the ways that we put up these roadblocks to feeling that way.
And so I feel like we're always kind of bouncing into the flow and bouncing out of the flow. And that is very apparent sitting on a meditation mat observing my thoughts and reactions. And it's very apparent sitting behind a drum kit as I start thinking, oh, gosh, what if I mess up this next part coming up and anticipating failure and then the feeling of failure after something messes up and all of those things.
And then also the life of a musician is really grueling.
I'm the driver of the band, so I'll drive 12 hours, get out of the van, set up my drums, and play a two hour rock show, and then break down the drums and get to the hotel room. And my ability to just kind of allow myself to be in the flow of life without stressing out too much about things like lack of sleep or the stress of timing or all of those things, the benefits of contemplative practice are just there are just so many.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it allows you to pull back from the immediate moment and your own internal panic loops around that moment if it's actually a bit stressful. I mean, I know yesterday I didn't get to meditate at all for the first time, and I really noticed it. And all of a sudden, traffic, phone calls all at the same time piling on each other while I'm trying to do something like, oh, no. And I totally flipped out. And my wife is like, yeah, just relax.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: Just come back to that moment. Come back to the zero, and things all fall back into place.
Now, I'm going to ask you, though, because you said you went to a Vipassana retreat in New York, and that was pretty much the seed of a lot of this life that you've led. What made you want to go to that?
[00:07:56] Speaker A: Well, I've always been a real, like, I've always been really interested in the big stuff, you know, the big questions. And as a child, I was such an avid reader. You know, I studied literature in school and in college, and it was really through literature that I started to really think about a lot of the big questions and was always drawn to stories of people on journeys to find answers in those kind of ways.
And then when I was living in New York, in my went several times to the Zen monastery in the East Village in New York City. There's a Zen center there. And went to some of the lectures and tried to sit in meditation. And I was reading a lot about Zen. I read a book called the Three Pillars of Zen, and that really got me excited about the idea of meditation.
And then I was working in a restaurant and a customer asked me what I had been doing, and I told him I had been going to the Zen center. And he said, oh, if you're going to do any meditation, you should start from the source and go to a Vipassana retreat.
And that was kind of how it happened, which is funny, because I really feel that in my life, when I have a question about the way to step on the path, something always kind of comes out and shows me the way to go. That happened with drumming, too. I was just kind of taking, kind of trying to teach myself. I had a boyfriend at the time who was kind of showing me some things, and I just mentioned it as I was working in a restaurant. Someone said, oh, you're playing drums. Here's the number of the best drum teacher in New York City.
I feel like being able to open to those suggestions and then just saying, okay, well, that's showing up in my life. Let me check it out. So that's kind of how it all happened.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: Excellent. I find when I get into meditation, that life, as a feedback loop starts to actually feed back that sort of Zen space to me as well. Do you find that, too?
[00:10:23] Speaker A: Yeah, it's kind of beautiful. When I started studying shamanism and shamanic practice, I really had a sense that I started recognizing that way of flowing with the world and becoming even more aware of the little synchronicities and the little messages that are kind of always coming to us.
And that sense of flowing with the world, I think it's like a heart opening. I think when we get in that place and even during difficult times, I feel like the difficult times for me are when I think that I start telling myself that there is no such thing as that flow state or there is no such thing as those messages. The conscious, critical mind comes in and tells me that I'm alone, that there is no help or there is no aid for me in the moments. Those are the times I think I suffer.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that inner critic is not very friendly and almost seems to be like a really staunch materialist atheist.
[00:11:50] Speaker A: Right? Yeah.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: You don't have to listen to it, really.
[00:11:56] Speaker A: I know. Well, actually, I kind of do value it in some sense, because I think it's very important to have a lot of discernment with what's presented for us.
I'm happy that I've never had to go down too many wrong paths in my spiritual journey, and there are quite a few that we can get caught in, and happily, I feel like I've lucked out to have great teachers and had a good feeling.
That kind of guided me to find those teachers.
[00:12:37] Speaker B: How does this all work with your life in Zeparella and influence your spiritual journey there? It must be interesting.
Are you the only person in the band that meditates? Or does everyone in a sort of zen sort of space as well?
[00:12:52] Speaker A: Yeah, everybody in the band has a really great practice.
They differ. Everybody is a different and unique person, and everybody has a different idea about what it means to be in that space. But all of the women in my band are very dedicated, disciplined beings who bring a lot of joy to the world.
I think that they all have ways of being able to really center themselves.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: Yeah, you can see that in your clips. You guys are just, like, so tight with framing the music. It's just perfect.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:13:35] Speaker B: You can tell you love what you do. That's what's cool about it, too. It's like, these girls love it.
[00:13:40] Speaker A: Yeah. How could you not love it? It's so fun. Yeah, it's really fun.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: So what pivotal moments or discoveries shaped your path towards enlightenment as detailed in your memoir?
[00:13:56] Speaker A: Well, like I said, in that first ten day meditation, something happened where I had one of those kind of falling away moments that you fall out of time.
And my experience of it was kind of as if I were becoming that endlessly closing and opening flower. Right. That's what it kind of felt like. Like the aliveness of all things was like a kind of motion that was outside of time.
It's always hard to describe those things, but it was a real sense of unity with all things, and I didn't have a framework for that when that happened.
I just figured that's just what happens when you meditate a lot.
And yet it really did.
I felt very different after that. I felt like I couldn't find some of the heaviness that I think I had been attached to, or the emotional content of my life felt different. And it was a big test. About six months later, my father passed away suddenly. He was 54, and it was a shock. And as I was going through that process of my father's passing, I really kept thinking, like, what is going on? Like, I feel so peaceful about this and really recognizing that if that had happened before the retreat, it would have been such a different experience. And I couldn't even really put my finger on it. But it really just did feel like that it was okay that we were in, that everything ultimately is okay.
And that lasted my whole life. And I have had other moments like that in my life. And I think that what that first experience was for was to set me on a path of understanding. It wasn't like, oh, okay, now I'm awakened, and now this is all that there is, and I have this secret information or something. It was more like it set me on a path to understand what was that?
And for a lot of years, I thought that it had been a fluke and that I tried to talk like that. We were talking about that materialist mindset, really was trying to talk me out of it, talk me into believing something about it, talking me into believing that sometimes even that it had been a mistake, that I had experienced it and that I wasn't worthy of it.
And over time, I realized that it was really just putting my feet on the path of trying to understand this lifetime of understanding, how to live from that freedom that was in that experience, that light, and that sense that everything is okay.
And sometimes I stop myself and just think, what if everything is okay as it is? And lately I've really been getting in touch with that feeling of that constant pushing forward that has propelled me through life, that gave me purpose and meaning in my life. And what if that energy of pushing forward just doesn't need to be here anymore?
It feels almost destabilizing. Like I feel dizzy sometimes when I tap into that feeling of letting go of that pushing forward energy.
But then I go back to that feeling that's always with me, that infinitely okay movement of total aliveness in each breath, each moment.
And that's where I can kind of find solace as I struggle with those things.
[00:18:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
That touching on the infinite touches you back and really does change your life. For sure.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: You've had those experiences, too. I've listened to the podcast. Yeah.
[00:19:06] Speaker B: When I went to the infinite light and came back in my experience, I found that it did make everything okay, as you say it does. It makes it so. Life is like everything just runs off your back. There's just nothing that holds on to you as much as it usually does or it usually could. I mean, occasionally I fall down by forgetting to meditate or just getting too busy. And it's crazy that I put it aside. But when I keep my practice up, it's like everything is really just calm. It stays calm. You can hear it in your voice that the calmness that actually pervades your life. And I have that too, from my meditation practice. And I think that's important for people, because then you have this extra resilience that you can't explain.
It just is everything is okay, and life is cyclic, and it's not always going to be like this. It's always going to change.
[00:20:03] Speaker A: It always changes. Yeah. What a great lesson for that. Yeah. And the purpose, I think, of all of this navel gazing I've done in my life, really, is to really come to a place where my heart is open, where I can be undefended. And in that way, then I see everybody with the same open heartedness, see into everybody's potential of being in that light.
I think the purpose of all of this is to be able to be open hearted with the other.
And that is kind of where.
[00:20:56] Speaker B: All.
[00:20:57] Speaker A: Of our solutions live, I think.
[00:21:00] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
It allows you to see, I personally find that it allows you to see that not only is everything okay, that even when people are having odd reactions around you, that you can actually just step back and go, I understand where you're at, and I really do understand where you're at.
You can flail all you like, but I'm just watching you flail, because that's a part of the story, too.
[00:21:29] Speaker A: That's right.
We can feel so deeply, too. I think for a lot of years, I thought that all of this, the purpose of it was so that I didn't have to feel. I didn't have to feel the difficulties, I didn't have to feel the pain, I didn't have to feel the heavy emotions, I didn't have to get frustrated. I didn't have to do all of this. And at a certain point, I thought, I think that's not the point. I think I manifest here to feel fully.
And I noticed that when I attach to the feeling, that's when the suffering begins. But if I just allow the feeling to move through, to witness it, to feel it fully, but not to put a story on it, I think then that's the practice, really. I'm not always great at it.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: We can't be perfect all the time.
[00:22:35] Speaker A: I've met some really amazing bodhisattvas in my life, but I know that even they get into little contractions of consciousness, of their personality.
That's why we're here.
[00:22:54] Speaker B: Help each other through.
[00:22:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: So what are the techniques you encounter in meditation, on the meditation cushion, that help you when you're playing your music? I mean, sitting in that zero state must actually help you to maybe erase that extra chattery mind, I think.
[00:23:12] Speaker A: Yeah, well, the first thing is breath.
Breath is such a beautiful tool. And the whole time that I'm playing, I'm usually very aware. I'm aware of my physicality. That's a beautiful thing about drumming, is it brings me into my body after all those years of trying to get out of my body, you know, through meditation, through intellectualism, you know, just trying to escape feeling. Right.
When I'm. When I'm drumming, I have to be completely aware of my body and aware of where tension is rising.
The breath is super helpful for me to be able to. I think that's where my stamina comes from. I start to feel tension in my shoulder, say, and I just breathe into my shoulder as I'm playing and imagine myself bringing breath to that area. And it relaxes and allows the muscles to feel supple rather than tense, which means that then I can play with power through the whole show, because the shows are like 2 hours. Right.
[00:24:24] Speaker B: And that's a lot of effort.
[00:24:26] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a lot of effort. So to be effortless is really the point. And breath is a big help with that. And then also just continually falling into that center place where I'm watching the thoughts, I'm watching the body move, I'm watching the experience, but I am distant from it, so that the music can really just kind of animate the body.
It's a funny thing, I think that this is a big dichotomy, isn't it? Because we're both stepping back and observing, but we're also feeling fully right. And so that dichotomy is really interesting in these contemplative practices, how we can both be the witnesser and also be completely in it at the same time. Um, I'm not quite sure how to describe that feeling.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like a dual experience.
[00:25:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:34] Speaker B: Wow, that's cool.
Okay, so that prompts me with the question of, you've talked about shamanism before. I know that you've studied applied shamanism. How does your shamanic practice connect with your music career?
[00:25:51] Speaker A: Well, I studied shamanism, applied shamanism. We called it applied shamanism because it's using traditional shamanic techniques in a kind of therapeutic setting. Right.
And I studied in Berkeley, California, with a teacher named Isa Gucciardi. She has a school there called the sacred stream. And she's developed a counseling model called depth hypnosis. And it combines traditional western therapeutic methods, mostly like, what's the word?
Well, so it's like a counseling model. Right. So we're using western counseling methods, such as the active listening and questioning, things like that. And then we use Buddhism as a kind of framework, especially tibetan Buddhism, because Tibetan Buddhism has a very strong shamanic history. It took on the bun tradition. Buddhism is really beautiful that way. It kind of takes on aspects of each culture it kind of goes to. Right. And when it arrived in Tibet, it took on the bun tradition there, which is the shamanic tradition, which there's a lot of light and sound kind of in that shamanic tradition of Tibet, and then traditional shamanism. And she combines it all into this really beautiful model, depth of gnosis.
And so I was trained in that and then trained in applied shamanism, which also teaches traditional shamanism. So I understand.
I would say the difference in depth hypnosis and traditional shamanism is that in traditional shamanism, the shaman is doing the journey. Right. The shaman is going to retrieve soul parts and power and in depth hypnosis. We're allowing the client to be their own shaman and doing their own journey, retrieving their own soul parts with the help of the practitioner.
Yeah. And I think that it really creates a balance of power. I think a lot of the problems in modern shamanism is a misunderstanding of power, where one person has all of the power and they're the ones who are kind of healing and doing all of these things. But I really connect to this model where the shaman is empowering the client to be their own healer.
And when I walked into the first time that I went to a shamanic journey class to learn the shamanic journey and the drum came out, I thought all of these light bulbs went on in my head, like, oh, yeah, this is going to make a lot of sense to me.
Yeah. And the fact that the drum is what creates the altered state in the counseling model, it seemed like I had been coming to this for a long time.
[00:29:38] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, drumming itself is a psychic driver and does put people into all the state of altered states of consciousness. Do you take that shamanic sort of drumming practice into your work on stage as well?
[00:29:50] Speaker A: I don't. Yeah. I don't.
Yeah. I feel like for me, the frame drum is really for healing, and I can't imagine. I mean, I know that there are people who play the drum on stage, but for me, it's really about interpersonal, kind of.
[00:30:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, what if your band actually was a healing band at the same time?
[00:30:17] Speaker A: Well, I think that it actually, not to get too goofy about it, but Led Zeppelin's music is really the music of some of the most important moments in people's lives. People tell me that their baby was born to a Led Zeppelin song or they got married. Somebody recently came and said that their father was in hospice and was in the process of transitioning, and he really wanted to come to the show and couldn't. And so she was holding the video up for him and it was giving him a lot of solace, the music. So all music has the potential for that, I think.
[00:30:57] Speaker B: Yeah, music has anchors in time and experience, and it's important to be able to go back to those times sometimes just to help relive them or to release energies or to even just enjoy the moment again.
[00:31:10] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
[00:31:14] Speaker B: Is there a goal to your spiritual practice, and how does that also connect with your musical goals?
[00:31:25] Speaker A: Recently I started to feel like, like I said, I was investigating that forward pushing motion in my life. And one day I had the thought that I think maybe I had lost all ambition, which, when I said that out loud to my friends, it was kind of like this guy said a dirty word or something.
In our society, ambition is what we all strive for, which we feel fuels us, and is that forward propulsion in our life. And if we don't have goals, then what are we? Then we're lazier. We've given up all of these things. And like I said, it kind of felt like when I realized I didn't have that energy in me anymore, I felt maybe like the ground had fallen out from underneath me is kind of my experience.
But I spoke to a teacher, a spiritual teacher that I have, and he said, it's not that you have no ambition.
It's just that the goalposts have changed.
Yeah. And I thought that was really beautiful. I was always going, I'm an aries, right? So I always had to be the first one. The first one.
My whole life, that's just me. I'm at the front of the line.
And I realized lately, like, where am I trying to go so fast? There's really only one ending here.
Do I really want to get there as fast as I can?
As far as goals go, the biggest goal, I would say, is just to be completely undefended, to be of service to all I meet, to transmit some kind of light to all that I see without judgment, without feeling that I know the best way for anything.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:55] Speaker A: So I guess if I could think of any kind of goal, it would just be to continue to open my heart, I guess would be the only way to say it. Yeah.
[00:34:09] Speaker B: The continuous opening of the heart towards greater understanding of self.
[00:34:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:16] Speaker B: Nice.
Okay, so how do you deal with self judgment and the judgment of the listener, viewer and audience? I mean, the meditation seems to be leveling that out for you. Is that right?
[00:34:32] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I think that internal negative voice that you were talking about, that internal self judgment, I think that that really was really my big point of suffering in my life.
One day, I realized that I had the most negative voice continually in my head. And my trying to figure out how to deal with that, how to let it go, what it was all about did begin my contemplative practice. What is that voice? Why do I hate myself? What is the ocean of shame that I open to when I sit in meditation? What did I ever do to feel like I was so bad? Like, just bad?
So that's been a lifetime of trying to understand that.
And in that coming to a lot of self compassion techniques and opening that up, and when I really was diving into that, I started to think, in a way, it's kind of a gift to have this, because nobody can ever say anything to me worse than what I've said to myself than I've anticipated other people saying to me, nobody can make me feel as bad as I make myself feel about who I am and what I am.
And I. I actually wrote about this in my book.
We have a video online that has quite a few views.
And I had never, ever looked at any of the comments to the video.
And one day, when I was really thinking about this, I thought, well, that would be a great test, wouldn't it? Because now I feel so. Like nobody can hurt me in this way. And I thought, well, how about if you go onto that video and you look at one of the 20,000 comments, right, and see if you can handle it?
And the thing I realized, after looking through, like, 400 of them, was that 95% of what people were saying were so kind and so positive, and that I had been robbing myself of feeling that somehow in my mind, I had told myself that humanity, if given the choice, would be cruel. And I really realized that was a big misconception. And it went back to being bullied in school and all of that stuff. You get this idea that and that lens of seeing humanity in this negative way.
I realized that about myself. I didn't like that.
And then I realized that the things that people did say, the negative things they did say, I thought, well, if they're calling me, if they say that I'm fat, well, I've been telling myself that since I was 13 years old. It fueled eating disorders. It fueled everything. Like, there's nothing you can say about my body. I haven't said worse.
And that's still a thing that I'm constantly dealing with. So it's like, nobody can really hurt me in that, because I've suffered so much that at this point, it's just like, who cares?
Who really cares what you say?
These practices have been just instrumental in me being able to feel free to just express myself and also to come to the realization that if I walk down the street, I can get along with 98% of people that I speak to. I really do love humans.
My husband is a lot more crotchety, and he's like, you're completely wrong. And I'm like, no, humans are wonderful. He's balancing you out.
We all need that, right? Yeah, I don't float away.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: Yeah. I can understand how you would have come to that conclusion, that maybe humanity is quite awful, but then realizing that it isn't, I mean, you look at how our minds are being colonialized with the idea that darwinism exists and we all fight tooth and nail to get to the top. And that's possibly a part of our drive. And that's probably why you can look back on your drive and go, well, I don't really need that because it's not even a story that we actually really need. And then that lumped along with materialism, it does make you give you a bit of a dark view on humanity when in reality it's not like that. We all actually are suffering in that same sort of consciousness at the same time and thinking we're living and being in it.
[00:39:56] Speaker A: I mean, when I think about Darwin and I tried to read the origin of species and I think I couldn't really follow it, but I have read that Darwin talks the word love appears many more times.
And I think that his ultimate conclusion, from what I understand, was that it really is our ability to get along with each other that forwards the species and that our base instinct is nurturing. The first thing we experience is care and nurturing, and we might want to move forward and be the best, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be at the expense of other people.
[00:40:49] Speaker B: Well, that does speak to the idea that maybe over time that's been distilled into another story that serves the control mechanisms of our mind and our world.
[00:41:00] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. And these are all lenses that we get to change for sure. We can change them in any moment if we decide. I remember when I was a waitress and I would go into the restaurant in the morning and I would be in a bad mood and I could see that I was kind of choosing to be in a bad mood and I was just going to be in a bad mood all day for whatever reason, and all day long stuff would happen and I'd just get madder and madder and just grumpier and grumpier. And if I got into the restaurant and I felt myself in a bad mood and I was like, you know what, just let it go and just put a smile on your face, even if you're not feeling it, and walk through the world. Imagical things would happen to me. People would be so kind, like great things would happen. By the end of the day, I would be happy. It's a choice we make. It's a choice we can make that.
[00:41:48] Speaker B: Choice in every single moment.
[00:41:50] Speaker A: That's right, yeah.
[00:41:53] Speaker B: And the resilience of, I think meditation, even just a mindfulness practice, assists in making better choices.
[00:42:01] Speaker A: For sure it does. And I think that for people like you and I who have done this kind of work, I kind of think it's our job to have the lens of positivity in a lot of ways, because I always think, and I tell this to my grumpy husband, like, if I lose that positivity, then we're sunk. Because I've had every benefit in my life. I've had parents who loved me and a good education and good health.
And if I can't get it together to see the world in a positive way, then nobody could.
And then it's not good. Yeah, it's my job to be Miss Mary sunshine. And I have to apologize to everybody that I know for that disposition.
[00:43:01] Speaker B: It's good that you embrace it. It's good that you embrace it for sure.
So you've actually done some other work with energy medicine, sound healing, and morphic awakening techniques. What is morphic awakening? What are they? And also morphic awakenings got my attention. Like, what does that mean?
[00:43:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I've had a mentor since I was 22 years old. I met my dear friend Surya Dean, and she's been my mentor all this time. And she's a wonderful spiritual teacher.
And she developed, it's a program that she developed morphic awakening, and I can never do it justice. But what it is is it really is tapping into the heart, into that healing space of the heart to promote healing, to let go of the barriers that we find in our physical bodies, in our spiritual bodies and our emotional bodies and clearing that out.
And she's really a master of it. And I bring the techniques into my other spiritual work with other people without really talking too much about it because I feel like I have an understanding of it that doesn't connect to my ability to explain it.
[00:44:36] Speaker B: You live it beyond words.
[00:44:38] Speaker A: That's right. So if you're interested, her at surreya, S-I-R-R-I-Y-A dean, D-I-N.
And yeah, she's a profound healer, and I'm so fortunate to have her in my life.
And then as far as the sound and energy healing, a lot of the energy healing I learned with isa Gucciarti at the sacred stream, it's part of the shamanism program and the sound healing, I feel like that I'm kind of on the edge of this vast well of knowledge that is coming to me. It's one of those things I feel is going to develop more and more in my life. I already use it to some degree in my sessions with people, but I have dreams being kind of shown about using sound as healing tools and stuff. And I feel like it's something that's coming to me.
[00:45:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:45:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:45:45] Speaker B: You're gathering all the tools now.
[00:45:47] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:45:48] Speaker B: Getting into it.
[00:45:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I know.
Yeah, it's cool.
[00:45:52] Speaker B: Have you done any sound healing baths for people yet?
[00:45:58] Speaker A: I haven't done baths for them, but in the course of a depth hypnosis session, at the end, I'll kind of use the sound to be able to seal in the healing, or sometimes just be guided by my guides to do certain use my voice and the drum and the bowl.
[00:46:22] Speaker B: So when you work with people, do you work mostly one on one? Is that what's happening?
Do you have any success stories with the people you've worked with that you can share without revealing their identities?
[00:46:37] Speaker A: Gosh, this work is subtle. What we're doing is we're undoing patterns of, we would call them karmic patterns, patterns that we've come here to unravel and to heal. And recently I had a client who was just describing, like, wow. I was in this interpersonal situation that before she had a real problem with being too porous, she would take on other people's suffering. And it was starting to kind of appear in all of these physical manifestations in her body, like, all of the stuff she had been holding as an empathic person.
And she told me, man, I was in this. Like, I got off the phone and immediately got a call about this thing. This person was suffering. And I saw how I used to respond to that by trying to take on her pain and how I couldn't do that now.
And that was really hopeful for me, for her life, that she had started to understand how to put up those boundaries that come when we're in our own power. There's a natural boundariness that happens.
[00:48:06] Speaker B: Yeah. Healthy boundaries are definitely something that we definitely must learn to use. Otherwise, you do actually take on other people's stuff.
It does seem like that a lot of empathic people are almost like latent shamans, because a lot of shamans actually do do that. They take it on and then they transmute it for the people.
[00:48:26] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:48:28] Speaker B: Empaths usually don't. They're like, oh, I'll just take it on.
[00:48:32] Speaker A: We'll just take it on. Yeah. That was such a big misunderstanding for me for so many years, and I have spent so many sessions letting go of so much junk that is not mine, because I've just spent a lifetime of taking thinking when I was a kid, I used to kind of, if somebody was sick, I would try to breathe their sickness into me because I knew I could handle it, that I was strong enough to handle it in order to help them. And later I realized it was a misguided buddhist practice called Tonglin, which is where we breathe in suffering and then we breathe out light. But I was kind of doing the wrong thing, which is to breathe in suffering and to hold on to it. Right.
And, yeah, that's a big misunderstanding that I've been healing from paying for for several years now.
[00:49:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I think we all do that in a different sort of way. Definitely. For sure.
[00:49:37] Speaker A: We do.
[00:49:38] Speaker B: Yeah. So you've written a book that you mentioned at the start, from Bonham to Buddha and back, the slow enlightenment of the hard rock drummer. Can you tell us all around this book? Because you released it last year and people should know about it.
[00:49:53] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you.
Let's see. Well, the title from Bonham to Buddha and back. Bonham is John Bonham, of course, the drummer for Led Zeppelin. I've played his music now for 20 years, and when I started playing drums, I realized how much he had influenced my listening and my love of drumming. And just being able to get inside of his drumming, inside of his body, basically, for the last 20 years, has been really just a wonderful experience. And he represents the drumming my music career at this point. And Buddha represents the contemplative practice. And the book is really a way of using my music career as a metaphor for spiritual practice. And I started off writing. I'd come home after a weekend of shows, and I would write about the difficulties that I had experienced that weekend and how my contemplative practice had helped me.
For instance, if I play at altitude, we play in Colorado at, say, 9000ft, and the body struggles to be athletic at altitude. And certain things happen to me as I'm playing drums. And because of the physical struggle, my mind starts to struggle. And so I wrote about how my contemplative practice really helped me through that kind of struggle. Right. So in writing about those things, I started to really see that how my whole life was one thing, the drumming and the spiritual practice, it was just kind of my life. And the lessons that I was learning both on the mat and in my music career were all kind of the same, bringing me to this open hearted place. So the book is about that.
It's a memoir. So it kind of talks about how I came to decide to be a rock and roll drummer at 27 years old, which is late for people.
And it's a bit of a love story to my father. He was a really big music lover. Kind of started me on my path of loving music, and he never got to see me play. He died before I. Before I was really a drummer. So there's that aspect of it. And it really is a love story to drums. I think drums, they're the first instrument, the first kind of sacred sound that we heard when we were 80,000 years ago. So it mimics the heartbeat of the planet and the heartbeat of ourselves.
And I just think drums are magic. So there's a lot of that in there, too.
[00:53:08] Speaker B: Very nice. Where do people find your book?
[00:53:13] Speaker A: You can find it on Amazon. I read it as an audiobook on then you know, my website is clementegreat.com, and that has every aspect of me links to every aspect of my life there.
[00:53:30] Speaker B: Excellent. Excellent. Is there any parting message that you'd like to give the listeners about meditation and life that you think might go with them?
[00:53:42] Speaker A: Well, I just like once a day to kind of stop and think, what if everything is okay right now? What if I am okay right now?
What if I don't need to be different than I am? What if this is okay right here?
And that striving, that feeling of not being good enough, not being worthy, all of those things are just stories told.
And right here, right now, is perfect for us.
I think maybe that would be something I'd like to say to everybody.
[00:54:20] Speaker B: Excellent.
Thank you so much for your time. Clementine, and your stories and understanding of meditation and life. It's been beautiful. Thank you.
[00:54:30] Speaker A: Thank you so much, CJ. Thank you.
[00:54:33] Speaker B: I'll say goodbye to the listeners again. It was a great pleasure talking to Clementine today and her understanding of meditation and how that can actually assist with being in the moment. And if you've enjoyed today's show, please like the show and share it to a friend that you think will enjoy it. And if you, like, come back again next week or actually next show, I'm doing two a week right now. And please, yeah, give us five stars. And if you're on YouTube, like, and subscribe, as people say. All right, thank you very much for your time, and thanks for listening, and bye for now.
