The concept of rhythm derives from Greek (ῥυθμός), rhythmos, meaning “any regular recurring motion, symmetry”
Conscious awareness of rhythm plays a significant role in expressive arts, such as music, dance, and visual arts. It can convey emotions, create a sense of movement, and add structure to artistic expressions. In music, rhythm is fundamental to creating melodies and beats. In dance, it’s essential for choreography and conveying feelings through movement. Even in visual arts, like painting and sculpture, rhythm can be represented through patterns and repetition of elements. In other words: rhythm helps artists express themselves and connect with their audiences on a deeper level.
Furthermore, rhythm plays a vital role in the inclusive arts. It serves as a unifying element that can be experienced by individuals of all abilities and backgrounds. Inclusive arts aim to create an accessible and equitable environment for everyone to participate and enjoy.
Rhythmical awareness can:
Facilitate communication: rhythmic patterns provide a structured and non-verbal means of expression that can be understood and enjoyed by individuals with diverse abilities.
Promote social interaction: inclusive arts often involve group activities where participants can synchronize their movements and actions to a shared rhythm – fostering social connections.
Enhance sensory experiences: rhythmic elements, like drumming, wood carving, dancing (even digging a hole or kneading bread) can stimulate the senses and provide a multisensory rhythmical experience.
Encourage physical activity: moving to a rhythmic beat can be a fun and inclusive form of physical exercise that promotes well-being.
Create a sense of belonging: inclusive arts use social rhythmical engagement to bring people together, fostering a sense of community and belonging among participants.
Overall, rhythm serves as a powerful tool in the arts, helping individuals of all abilities to connect, express themselves, and enjoy creative experiences together.
Rhythmical awareness, and in particular drumming, is an ancient approach that uses rhythm to promote healing and self-expression. From the Shamans of Mongolia to the Minianka healers of West Africa, therapeutic rhythm techniques have been used for thousands of years to create and maintain physical, mental, and spiritual health.
Current research is now verifying that drumming and any other conscious engagement in rhythmical patterns accelerates physical healing, boosts the immune system and produces feelings of well-being, a release of emotional trauma, and reintegration of self – it has therapeutic benefits.
Studies have demonstrated the therapeutic and healing effects of hand drumming on Alzheimer’s patients, people diagnosed with Autism, emotionally challenged adolescents, recovering addicts, trauma patients, and prison and homeless populations.
Study results also demonstrate that physical rhythmical engagement (such as drumming, audio therapy, dancing, wood carving, rhythmical painting of patterns and throwing a pot on a wheel to mention a few) is a treatment for stress, fatigue, anxiety, hypertension, asthma, chronic pain, arthritis, mental illness, migraines, cancer, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, stroke, paralysis, emotional disorders, and a wide range of physical disabilities.
Conscious movement reduces tension, anxiety, and stress
Research has confirmed that hand drumming, and any other art promoting general rhythmical consciousness from the participant themselves, induces deep relaxation, lowers blood pressure, and reduces stress. Stress, according to current medical research, contributes to nearly all disease and is a primary cause of such life-threatening illnesses as heart attacks, strokes, and immune system breakdowns. A recent study found that a program of group drumming helped reduce stress and employee turnover in the long-term care industry and might help other high-stress occupations as well.
Actively engaging in rhythmical aspects of music and the visual arts helps control chronic pain
Chronic pain has a progressively draining effect on the quality of life. Researchers suggest that rhythmical work serves as a distraction from pain and grief. Moreover, it promotes the production of endorphins and endogenous opiates, the body’s own morphine-like painkillers, and can thereby help in the control of pain.
Repetitive rhythmical movement boosts the immune system
Medical research indicates that repetitive rhythmical movement boosts the immune system. Led by renowned cancer expert Barry Bittman, MD, a study demonstrated that drumming and repetitive rhythmical movement actually increases cancer-killing cells, which help the body combat cancer as well as other viruses, including AIDS.
Musical experiences, dancing, drumming and consciously being aware of rhythmical patterns accesses the entire brain
The reason rhythm is such a powerful tool is that it permeates the entire brain. Vision, for example, is in one part of the brain, speech in another, but rhythmical consciousness accesses the whole brain. The sound and feelings of rhythmical patterns generate dynamic neuronal connections in all parts of the brain even where there is significant damage or impairment such as in Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). According to Michael Thaut, director of Colorado State University’s Center for Biomedical Research in Music, “Rhythmic cues can help retrain the brain after a stroke or other neurological impairment, as with Parkinson’s patients…” The more connections that can be made within the brain, the more integrated our experiences become.
Consciously being aware of rhythmical patterns also synchronizes the frontal and lower areas of the brain, integrating nonverbal information from lower brain structures into the frontal cortex, producing “feelings of insight, understanding, integration, certainty, conviction, and truth, which surpass ordinary understandings and tend to persist long after the experience, often providing foundational insights for religious and cultural traditions.”
Rhythmical awareness creates a sense of connectedness with self and others
In a society in which traditional family and community-based systems of support have become increasingly fragmented, engaging in social rhythmical experiences provides a sense of connectedness with others and interpersonal support. This provides an opportunity to connect with your own spirit at a deeper level, and also to connect with a group of other likeminded people and alleviate self-centeredness, isolation, and alienation.
Music educator Ed Mikenas finds that social rhythmical experiences provide “an authentic experience of unity and physiological synchronicity. If we put people together who are out of sync with themselves (i.e., diseased, addicted) and help them experience the phenomenon of entrainment, it is possible for them to feel with and through others what it is like to be synchronous in a state of preverbal connectedness.”
References:
1. Bittman, M.D., Barry, Karl T. Bruhn, Christine Stevens, MSW, MT-BC, James Westengard, Paul O Umbach, MA, “Recreational Music-Making, A Cost-Effective Group Interdisciplinary Strategy for Reducing Burnout and Improving Mood States in Long-Term Care Workers,” Advances in Mind-Body Medicine, Fall/Winter 2003, Vol. 19 No. 3/4. 2. Winkelman, Michael, Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing. Westport, Conn: Bergin & Garvey; 2000. 3. Bittman, M.D., Barry, “Composite Effects of Group Drumming…,” Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine; Volume 7, No. 1, pp. 38-47; January 2001. 4. Winkelman, Michael, Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing. Westport, Conn: Bergin & Garvey; 2000. 5. Friedman, Robert Lawrence, The Healing Power of the Drum. Reno, NV: White Cliffs; 2000. 6. Mikenas, Edward, “Drums, Not Drugs,” Percussive Notes. April 1999:62-63.
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