Whether you’re new to drumming or refreshing your foundational skills, Christine is generously offering this optional, pre-course session so you can learn (or review) basic strokes on the hand drums — including the buffalo drum, frame drum, and djembe-style body drum.

All levels of experience are welcome — even those playing body percussion, bucket drums, or jugs! (Three- or five-gallon water jugs sound great upside down!)

During this pre-course module, you’ll:

• Learn about drum care and techniques for holding and playing
• Explore 3 types of hand drums — frame drum, buffalo drum, and body drum (djembe, doumbek, and congas)
• Discover how rhythm patterns are learned, remembered, and notated

One quality of an awakened heart, mind, and spirit is awareness that our human connection expands into a vision of all our relations.

With Christine’s guidance, honor the teachers and sacred traditions of global drumming as you embark on this journey.

Begin with a drum blessing using the chant, “Blessings on the Drum,” infusing your drum with your intentions and gratitude.

Play heartbeat rhythms from the Lakota Sioux Native American tradition, adding your creativity and exploration to the beat and sending it out to the world. Let the rhythm ground you and set the foundation for learning, growing, and creating a sense of oneness and community.

During this module, you’ll:

• Participate in a drum blessing by setting your intentions with your drum
• Learn a drum blessing chant
• Explore 3 ways to play the heartbeat from Lakota and Navajo Native American traditions
• Add your own creative energy to the beat with a practice of embellishment

As we journey through the awakening process, we inevitably navigate challenging terrain. Prepare to move forward with your community of drummers!

Rhythm is defined as “the element of music pertaining to forward motion.”

In one of the oldest passages about drumming in the Judeo-Christian book of Exodus, the Prophetess Miriam plays her drum, celebrating freedom at the crossing of the Red Sea.

Explore how drum rhythms can help you move through difficult times. Christine will also share about the practice of drumming for celebration and spiritual connection.

During this module, you’ll:

• Learn to play “Miriam’s Beat,” inspired by the Prophetess Miriam crossing the Red Sea, with permission from Eliana Gilad, Voices of Eden
• Connect with the medicine of rhythm to move your body through different grooves
• Experience the celebration of answered prayer and spiritual growth

In the journey of awakening, it’s also important to cultivate greater self-love and compassion and allow it to radiate out to the world and all of humanity.

In Buddhist language, this is the Bhodichitta energy of loving-kindness, or Metta. Combine the practice of Metta with drumming to amplify the intention of healing the collective.

Christine will guide you to bring up the energy of the earth through the drum and join in a Nigerian chant and rhythm to affirm your body’s wellness. She’ll also teach you the formula for creating healing rhythms.

During this module, you’ll:

• Connect with the sacred, steady, and gentle pulse of Mother Earth
• Learn a healing rhythm and chant from Nigeria drummer Babatunde Olatunji, “Ara Mi Le” — which means “My whole self is well”
• Experience a rhythm diagnostic to discover where you need healing
• Expand the boundaries of your world and connect to a greater frequency

To go into your shadow is a pathway of liberation that can be intense, dark, and scary. Shamans travel on the drum into the underworld as an initiation into true spiritual power.

The drum is your companion though difficult emotions that you might tend to repress, which often leads to depression — the antidote is expression.

While releasing anger, pain, and frustration isn’t always a productive way to have your voice heard, the drum can take it — without taboo or judgment.

In this year of the snake — the year of transformation — it’s time to break free of the weight of global challenges, the plight of animals facing extinction, communities facing persecution and tragedy, and the chaos of natural disasters.

Rather than bypassing your painful feelings, you can, instead, express emotions beyond words through the language of the drum.

During this module, you’ll:

• Learn the key tools of shadow drumming in the drum language
• Bring your voice into ritual with sounds of release
• Explore the practice of pacing in ceremonial rounds to modulate emotions
• Discover the cathartic power of the drum, whose strong skin holds space for our deepest expression

Along the path of spiritual growth, it’s important to take time to look inward for integration and reflection.

Drumming can be a tool for balance and meditation. Using the polarities of sound and silence, and rhythm and movement, honor the tantric pull between opposites as you expand and integrate, as Christine says, “in-to-great.”

This is the beauty of rhythm patterns that mark moments of transition — growth and change. Learn how to speed up, slow down, increase the volume, decrease the volume, and fade into silence, feeling the shimmering emptiness that follows your full creative expression.

Christine will share a chakra beat — a rhythm that emerged through her — that honors each center, balances the subtle energies, and matches your own body’s energy.

During this module, you’ll:

• Learn to play a chakra beat to honor the subtle energy centers
• Explore the rhythm of Ayub, an Arabic trance rhythm, to go within
• Feel the inner shift of remembrance with a Sufi beat, “Hey Allah,” which honors spiritual connection with the Divine through repetition
• Balance rhythm and silence in a drum meditation

There are rhythms that help us become more present, joyful, and grateful — qualities that are evidence of our awakening.

Christine says that 2025 is predicted to be the year in which we enter our third phase of awakening, so this is a great year to bring more drumming into your life!

She’s created a rhythm to help you in that awakening process, inspired by Gene Key 55 — which represents our ability to transcend fear, scarcity, and limitation, paving the way for an evolutionary leap into joy, abundance, and higher states of awareness.

You’ll learn two additional rhythms for awakening, presence, and joy. Christine was taught and given permission to share a Jamaican drumbeat, “Nyabingh,” by Fantuzzi, her teacher in the Global Rhythm Sangha. And, you’ll practice a Native American prayer beat.

You’ll discover:

• A rhythm for awakening based upon Gene Key 55
• The “Nyabinghi” beat from Jamaica
• A Native American prayer beat
• Drumming to support prayer, scripture, and poetry
• A visualization process to initiate you into service, raising the bodhichitta in loving-kindness to all our relations

Explore the polarity of individuality and collective energy, creating your own personal rhythm of awakening and using an affirmation beat of “I AM.”

Merge it with the rhythms of your co-participants in a powerful drum circle. A drum circle is defined as “a collective container for individual expression.”

As you chant to the Orishas (divine spirits of West Africa and the diaspora) of Ashay, the primordial force of creativity and self-confidence — Axe — will arise and move you forward in the samba beat of rhythmic processional.

It’s your time to join the groove of life. Celebrate, resonate, and let your body feel the joy of being alive today — in this moment.

During this module, you’ll:

• Explore your own personal rhythm in a collective online drum circle experience
• Learn to jam on the rhythm of Ashay (Axe), honoring the force of the Orishas of creativity
• Play the rhythm of samba, a parade rhythm from Brazil, to step forward on the path of personal drumming

Drumming Up Spirit!
Audio Tracks From Christine Stevens

This acclaimed CD gives you nine chants and sacred rhythms to use in spiritual events, drum circles, sound healing, and daily life. These are designed for you to sing along with or play yourself. This multicultural offering, inspired by agape and Rev. Michael Bernard Beckwith’s process of affirmative prayer, is woven through drumming and chant. Start your day with any one of these drum songs and carry it in your energetic song book of life!

Cultural Appropriation vs. Cultural Honoring – Video Teaching
Video Interview With Sue Greg Wilson and Christine Stevens

How do we handle the issue of learning cultural rhythms while making sure to avoid cultural appropriation? In this important conversation with Christine and drum master and educator Sule Greg Wilson, author of The Drummer’s Path, they share powerful information about how to ethically carry cultural rhythms in your life and work. Sule offers insights into the basic steps of honoring the source of each rhythm and the person who taught it to you. This teaching will help you become a cultural ambassador of correctly honoring rhythms from other traditions.

This upbeat, play-along CD includes five long-play tracks to awaken your rhythm, jump start a drum circle, or just uplift your spirit. It features an inspirational introductory teaching from Christine. This CD includes “Juicy Jam,” “Succulent Samba,” “Lively Latin,” and “Beatin the Blues.” Each track runs for 12 minutes, and you’re invited to use any drum or your voice — or dance. This bonus is bound to enliven your soul with rhythm!

These lessons will help you, whether you’re brand-new to drumming or a seasoned drummer wanting to explore other types of world drums. In these interactive videos, Christine covers the basics of how to hold, play, and learn a pattern on three drums. She features the buffalo drum with a mallet, which has Native American and shamanic origins… a frame drum played with your hands from Middle Eastern traditions… and djembe or goblet shaped body drums of West African origin.