Chapter One

My Story

­          The first time I heard a didgeridoo was in the early 1990’s at Yoshi’s Jazz Club in Oakland, California. I eagerly investigated the lineup of instruments featured in the band until finally, by process of elimination, I identified which instrument was making such an incredible sound—it was the very long tube-like thing that looked like the branch of a tree. Before leaving the club, I had the name of the instrument to go along with the deeply moving sound but little else.

A decade later, I began participating in a monthly group that meets for healing and peacemaking (BayAreaDare.com). We use musical instruments to tune into each other, to our personal and spiritual ancestors, and to create sound healing. Remembering the sound of the didgeridoo, I knew we needed that instrument’s vibration. After unsuccessful efforts to bring in didgeridoo players, I decided to learn to play it myself. From the time I knew that I wanted to play didgeridoo, many synchronicities began to occur and I simply followed where they led.

First of all, I had no idea how to find an instrument or a teacher, but I put out the word that I was looking for both. For Christmas, my sister gave me my first didgeridoo made out of bamboo. I taught myself to play it from the three lines of instruction that came with the instrument. It read:

“Buzz your lips to get the drone.

Use air from your cheeks to keep the drone going

 while you breathe quickly through your nose.”

I produced the sound rather quickly and easily then began working to produce longer unbroken drone sounds. In music terminology, drones are a sustained sound or the continuous repetition of a sound without much variation. I began my daily meditation period by making the sounds I had been craving for so long.

Once I could consistently create a drone that lasted for about fifty seconds, I began working on circular breathing, technique that allows you to sustain a continuous drone over a long period of time because you are not having to stop the sound to take a breath. Again, this came rather easily to me.

For a year, I played in my attic where no one could hear me. Finally, I brought the instrument down and began playing it at the monthly gathering. It was immediately well-received. That ancient drone sound elicits many responses and feelings. The most common response is one of relaxation. Some feel they are being taken on a primal journey. I describe it as a sound that makes me feel held. The low and resonant drone provides a baseline or foundation that allows people to enter into a more relaxed or meditative state. I loved playing it at the group and felt I was making a meaningful contribution.

Another six months to a year passed. I was with a friend who wanted to do something for my birthday and had a little extra cash she had inherited.  We came up with the idea of visiting Clarion Music in San Francisco and buying didgeridoos for ourselves.  Unbeknownst to me, my friend had been playing for a while but her instrument had developed a crack.  She had not yet mastered the breathing, and I told her I would teach her in exchange for helping me buy what turned out to be a fairly expensive didge. My new six-foot-tall didgeridoo, made out of yucca, was light-weight. It was hand-crafted and painted by a didgeridoo player named Peter Spoecker.  I didn’t know who he was other than the description on the didge which said that he had passed away. 

With that new didgeridoo, I could produce more complex sounds and began bringing it to the healing circle. The bell shape at the end of the didge meant that I could aim the vibrations and healing energy out into the world and not straight down. It was light enough to bring directly to a person who needed healing so that he or she could experience the vibration directly. I experimented with holding it up to a place on the person’s body where he or she were experiencing pain or discomfort.

Next, I decided it was time to search out a teacher to help me expand what I was doing. Alan Tower lived on the western boundary of San Francisco, right where the city meets the Pacific Ocean. It took two hours each way on public transportation to arrive at his studio, but I decided that this was not just a didgeridoo lesson but a pilgrimage to a spiritual mentor. Since the yucca is six-feet tall and rather delicate, I decided it would be too dangerous to take on public transportation. For my first lesson, I took the bamboo didge in a carrier that I slung over my shoulder. I got strange looks from people who maybe thought it was some kind of weapon, but no one asked me directly.

At this first lesson, I was told that I had learned the instrument intuitively and that what I needed to do was become more analytical.  I had to laugh. I said to Alan, “That’s the first time anyone has ever told me that!”  As a philosopher, I tend to lead with my analytical brain and have had to work at becoming more intuitive. I was happy to discover something that had come to me intuitively instead of analytically.

For the next lesson, I arranged to drive and take the yucca didge.  When Alan saw it, he laughed and said, “I used to own that didge!”  He was the one who had sold it to Clarion Music.  He took it from me and started to play.  I am not sure why he sold it but it might be because it does not play a true C#--its pitch is instead between C# and C.  It works fine so long as I am not in a band trying to harmonize with other musicians. Alan told me that Peter Spoecker, the maker of the yucca didge, had died when, hiking alone, he had ventured onto thin ice and fallen thrcircular ough.  He is now in the realm of the ancestors.

A year or so later, I was informed that an acquaintance of mine, Zelma Brown, had died from sleep apnea. She had been diagnosed but could not afford the CPAP machine and did not have insurance to provide it. She was taking over-the-counter medication for sciatica which depressed her breathing so much that during one sleep apnea episode, she did not resume breathing. Soon after that, I read that Lancet, a British Medical Journal, had published a study entitled: “Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome: randomised controlled trial.” The study suggested that the technique of circular breathing used in playing the didgeridoo could alleviate sleep apnea. I felt Zelma nudging me from the other side and immediately dedicated myself to teaching didgeridoo to people with sleep apnea and to making the teachings affordable.

Around the same time, I had a dream in which I was in Costa Rica at a healers’conference and an elder man handed me a spiral didgeridoo painted with brightly colored animals. This person instructed me to heal people using it. So I began my adventure of teaching didgeridoo, especially those with sleep apnea. I took my dream as an affirmation, perhaps from the Aborigines themselves, that I had permission to play their ancestral instrument.

I received yet another nudge from the other side when I was writing the first draft of this book. I had decided not to put in the reference about Zelma nudging me to teach people with sleep apnea—I thought it might be too unscientific. The next day before continuing writing, I was meditating and an insistent rhythm came to me. It was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. At first, I didn’t know if it had words or was part of a musical piece without words. As I sat there, small clues floated into my mind. For instance, I got one of the words—it was “I” and then there was a verb after it that I could not bring into focus. I sat there much longer than I normally would, compelled to figure this out. Finally it came to me. “In your shoes I walk, sister. In your shoes I walk.” These were lines from a poem that Zelma had written and had been part of a performance piece called My Sister, My Sister developed by Zelma Brown and Meredith Stout, a photographer. I had just received another nudge from the other side and decided to come clean about the nudges. While I am including this in the book for the reasons I have described, if you are skeptical about such things, just ignore this part of the story! It is not necessary that you believe such things to study and learn the didgeridoo.

The synchronicities and nudges from the other side were mounting when I learned that my good friend Peggy had been diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. She was also suffering from asthma and anxiety and was in particular trouble because she couldn’t manage wearing the CPAP mask. She kept tearing it off unconsciously during her sleep after only a few hours.  She desperately wanted to learn the didgeridoo to help relieve her symptoms.  I lent her the bamboo didge, and she started to learn. Within weeks, she noticed that she was better able to use the CPAP machine. A few weeks after that, her asthma symptoms were less severe and soon she was able to go off of her asthma medication. 

I began telling people about the connection between sleep apnea and didge playing, and all of a sudden there were any number of people who wanted to learn circular breathing.  I went on Craig’s List and bought two additional didgeridoos which I thought I could lend out to people who wanted to learn.  My classes grew and with them grew the demand for more practice didgeridoos.  When I learned that didgeridoos could be made out of PVC pipe, I thought that people could learn on “starter” didges that I constructed. Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is used as pipe for irrigation or sewage to pass through. It is an inexpensive and resonate material that creates a resonate didgeridoo sound.  Later, if students wanted something more organic, I suggested that they could invest in a wooden didgeridoo. They would be able to play the instrument before buying it in a store or from Craig’s list to make sure it was well-suited to them and not faulty in some way.

When I decided to make didges out of PVC, I went to Urban Ore, a Berkeley warehouse that take up a full city block and carries recycled building materials.  I strolled up and down the aisles and identified several different materials, including recycled PVC of the two-inch variety that would make perfectly reasonable didgeridoos.  I also found a fifteen-foot long metal pipe with a flare on the end.  I asked if they could cut it for me because it wouldn’t fit in the car.  They said no, they didn’t provide that service, then directed me to the hack saws on aisle five.  Right there in the store, I hacked that pipe in half and it became a wonderful, sturdy didge on which Alan (the first person I taught to circular breathe) learned. 

Peggy (my friend with sleep apnea) got her own didge after a while. She had gone to Hawaii for an extended visit with her mother and had been unable to take her didgeridoo. While she was away, I had an intuition to look up Craig’s list in Honolulu and sent her a link to an advertised didgeridoo that looked intriguing. It was a wonderful didgeridoo made of redwood that she bought and which has served her well.

Peggy and I began making didges: sawing them to the right size, cleaning and sanding them, putting on a base coat of primer and then painting designs on them.  We soon realized we were going to have to get more PVC since the didges we made sold quickly or were given away.  I again went to Craig’s List and in the “free” section I typed “PVC pipe.” A man in San Francisco was giving away 25 ten-foot long pipes that he said were four-inches wide.  He provided a picture of the pipes which looked as if they were not four-inch but the two-inch pipe we needed.  We took a leap of faith and in Peggy’s pick-up truck, crossed the bridge to meet him at his storage unit.

Sure enough, the pipe was exactly the right size. He had used the PVC in a structure at Burning Man, the madcap art festival held every summer in the Nevada desert.  I got the impression that he would have liked the pipes to be used at Burning Man again, but his wife was insisting that he clear them out. With his help we loaded all the pipes in Peg’s truck and set off carefully back across the Bay, the pipes sticking out the back. Later, I learned that one of my students took her didge made from that recycled pipe back to Burning Man: A circle completed.  

I am telling this story for several reasons, first of all to show the spiraling, non-linear way that this didgeridoo project has come about. In a way, the adventure has echoed the technique of learning circular breathing itself which is also a non-linear, almost magical process. Secondly, I want to share my current study of Aboriginal thinking.  Because I had such a strong and intuitive interest in the didge from the beginning, I wondered if I was being “led” to uncover for myself the philosophy of the Aboriginal people.  I feel a responsibility to learn about these people while I also found fascinating overlaps with my own philosophy called the Philosophy of the Between. [For more on this, you may want to visit my website: www.elisepeeples.com]

I once heard Jon Young (jonyoung.org), a naturalist and promoter of deep nature connection, describe himself as a “re-bundler.”  Trained in the legacy of Native Americans, he mentors others on ancient wisdom that has been passed down from generation to generation. Elders from whom he has learned have described how bundles of wisdom from each indigenous culture were once held tightly but now they need to be offered up: at this crucial time in the history of humans on this planet we need to take what is needed from each bundle in order to re-balance our world. This task must be handled in the old ways, with full respect and with honoring of the ancestors who carried it for so long. Now is the time to share and re-bundle their wisdom. 

In this book, I consider my task to be one of re-bundling.  I am not asking readers to believe in the Dreamtime, the basic belief that forms the core Aboriginal world view, but I do ask that we credit the Aborigines for inventing such a magical instrument now called the didgeridoo[1]. I encourage readers to learn about these amazing people and to honor their wisdom tradition.

There are many parallels between didgeridoo playing and spiritual growth. If you are on a spiritual path, you may find your own parallels between what is learned in order to play the didgeridoo and other spiritual teachings. Some of those parallels are presented in this book. If you are not interested in such things, please feel free to skip those passages. Spiritual growth is not a requirement for learning the didge, though the didgeridoo has a special way of promoting positive changes in those who learn to listen to it or play it.