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5th Annual Winter Solstice Blessing from Drumming The Soul Awake

So you have your buffet of traditional holiday fare the Nutcrackers, Scrooges and sentimental holiday shows. But if you crave a non-traditional but spiritual holiday experience, Jaime Meyers Solstice Blessing might be the alternative for you. Solstice Blessing is part theatre, part laugh-until-you-hurt storytelling, and part shamanic ceremony. It has played to sold-out houses for five straight years. Everyone in the audience plays drums or rattles supplied by Meyer. Dancing and ecstasy are encouraged but not required. The evening blends Meyers seminary degree with his 23 years of studying indigenous spiritual traditions and trance-inducing percussion. He draws mainly on his own Celtic and Nordic roots, and on the ancient earth-centered spiritual practices in those cultures.

Solstice Blessing focuses on the image of the reindeer as the great beating heart of blessing at the center of creation. He first encountered the spiritual reindeer while studying with a shaman, an ethnic Samithe indigenous people of northern Scandinavia. Meyers fascination with the reindeer as a spiritual image, and how that image has been converted into the story of Rudolf led him to create this winter solstice event.

The show includes a chorus of women chanting mysterious Nordic melodies with a dark and ancient feel, songs that, as one audience member said, Lutherans dont learn. The evening culminates with a shamanically inspired ceremony of blessing from the Great White Reindeer.