The Eco-Somatics of the Didgeridoo

I did not come to the didgeridoo through music. Throughout school I struggled uphill with sheet music….the trumpet, the western analytical approach to sound. I was more sporty. Interested in the somatic. Moving my body on grassy fields and cross-country tracks. Feeling breath and body dance through space.

Later into my 20s I felt a gravitational pull toward the didgeridoo. The grounded presence of the teachers intrigued me. I resonated with how they spoke of it as a healing instrument that aligns the breath. I'd been practicing yoga for a couple of years by then, drawn to the power of breath and all the secrets it seemed to hold. I'd also just read a life-changing book called The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram. I was deeply intrigued by pneuma, by breath, and how spirit is intimately woven with the air around us. So I picked up a cheap second-hand didge from Gumtree and started to learn.

Circular breathing was challenging. The didge went down and collected dust in the corner of my room for a year. Eventually I came back to it, got playful with the vibrations, and through intuition alone learned how to circular breathe. It's more accurately circular pressure, a cavity of breath held in the cheeks, blowing air out while simultaneously breathing in through the nose. That's what allows the continuous sound and vibration to occur.

That's the key thing about the didgeridoo. It is an intuitive instrument. An exploration of one's breath, how it moves through the body, how it's amplified outward. Historically, and still today, it was for men only to play.

When you play the didgeridoo, your body becomes the instrument. The jaw, throat, and soft palate vibrate in a way that relaxes muscle and releases stored tension. The soft palate and pharynx are rich in vagal nerve endings, and the low-frequency vibration of sustained drone playing essentially massages the vagus nerve directly. The great wandering nerve. The one that threads down from the brainstem through the heart, lungs, and gut. It is the nerve of rest, digestion, social connection. When it's stimulated, the nervous system downregulates. The body exhales at a cellular level.

The breath deepens. You shift out of the shallow thoracic breathing most of us default to and drop into true diaphragmatic breathing. The diaphragm doming downward on the inhale, creating negative pressure that draws air into the lower lobes of the lungs. As this happens, intra-abdominal pressure rises. The deep stabilising muscles fire, the transverse abdominis wrapping like a corset around the trunk, the multifidus along the spine, the pelvic floor below. The postural chain activating. Not through effort or instruction but through breath. The spine lengthens. The pelvis grounds. Posture reorganises itself around the spiral of the breath rather than being forced into it.

There's a sensation of a pillar pressing down through the esophagus, lungs, diaphragm, belly, pelvic floor. Anatomically, that's not far from what's actually happening. The column of pressure created by diaphragmatic breathing and sustained exhalation against resistance loads the entire fascial and muscular chain from throat to perineum. The internal organs held, moved, massaged. In more energetic terms - a deepening and broadening of the central channel, out through the perineum and into the earth.

From the earth it cycles back into the breath. Like a frontal microcosmic orbit, as it's known in Taoist alchemy. This process shifts further when you move through different postures. From a squat to relax the lumbar spine, or various yogic positions.

Playing at sunrise when things are just awakening carries a quieter, softer quality. Other times the breath dances with the wind, or sits alongside birdsong. The pillar of breath extends beyond the self in a kind of macrocosmic orbit, one's breath reaches the whole landscape. You are breathing the land and the land is breathing you. One is being breathed.

The land has its own rhythm. You have yours. This is the unity of self and other. A merging. The serpent that winds through both breath and land….the great cosmic serpent. The foundational pattern of life felt in all moments and all things. The DNA spiral, the corkscrew of life, felt in the cyclical process of playing.

This union is a vulnerable place to be. You are exposing the deepest parts of breath and body to the world in an act of communication and exchange. Far beyond performance. It can reach trance-like states, the dissolution of self into an ocean of vibration. The rigid boundaries of skin and self seen as illusion. The vibratory, wave-like nature of consciousness directly experienced.

It is a deep honour to play the didgeridoo and tremendous respect must be brought to it. There are many ethical nuances and complexities to this instrument and to didgeridoo-like instruments of other traditions. Some people don't even like to call it an instrument, but a tool, with many sacred aspects. I approach it as a student. Conscious that as someone who is not an Indigenous Australian, this path is to be walked with humility.

Many thanks to Jon from Sound of Hemp, maker of the hemp didgeridoo I carry. A deep relationship with the cycles and spirals of land and ocean, a lifetime of intention woven into the crafting of these breath staffs.

I love hiking and playing the didgeridoo together. The puffing and panting of ascending hills pairs naturally with the cyclical breath of playing. When hiking you are submerged in the sensorial, elemental world…no escaping it, the nervous system deeply enmeshed. In that space the didgeridoo becomes even more poetic and powerful. A deep osmosis happens out there.

The didgeridoo is a portal, a way of life, a master teacher. Less about sound and more about breath remembering itself. It teaches posture, alignment, rhythm, and humility.

An invitation: How does your breath dance with the wider world?

The Rhythm of the Cosmic Serpent

I’ve loved exploring rhythm lately. As a virtue, goal, dance style, way of life and everything in between. It’s like a north star for me, and at times feel like in an age of division and separation, that rhythm can be a unifying force that connects us all together. All playing different instruments in the grand symphony of life, all with different sounds but part of one greater and broader poly rhythm.

It is easy to see that in nature, everything has rhythm - the sun, moon, tides, plants, bees and beasts. Over millions of years of creative evolution, the unconscious has quietly danced and attuned itself to these eternal and reassuring rhythms of the cosmos, providing stability and patterns for consciousness to structure itself around. Neurologically, when I am in accord with these rhythms the conscious mind is soothed, feeding back information to me that is familiar rather than threatening.

To attune to these rhythms in the modern world is to attune to the cosmic patterns and wider macrocosmic experience of wholeness (and consequent oneness). Connecting with the eternal experience of rhythm also attunes us to the emotional experience of our ancestry. I resonate with the definition of rhythm by Lexi Eikelboom as “the intersection of organized patterns through temporal experience.”

Rhythm is what makes the shared experience of life in this dimensional structure possible. By keeping us aligned with a coherent flow of events, the feeling of past, present, and future delivers a deep sense of intimacy – a belonging within the unity of time and space, spirit and materiality, that all organisms living on the planet speak of through their gestures.

Rhythm is a sacred substance that connects and dances body, spirit, organisms and geography. In short, it is the way of nature – something which encompasses a structure within fluidity. Rhythm is what supports fluidity – giving space for playful and adventurous feelings of the inner child to emerge, freeing us from the serious asceticism from our modern world that denies and suppresses the wider cosmic rhythms. And when we can slip and slide between the rigid boxes and matrixes of modern neon culture, we attain a divine, graceful and angelic lightness and levity.

Rhythm names a mysterious dimension of existence in which I am embedded but do not control. Attending to rhythm makes the world and source/great mystery encountered in and through this world strange again, and reminds me what it means to be faithful to my identity as a creature.

I get in touch with this mystical feeling of rhythm mostly by walking, especially on the Bibbulmun Track. Day after day of long walks the legs find their own logic and the mind settles and just starts moving in a cyclical process. Sunrise, eat, sleep, walk, sunset, repeat. The horizon is doing what it always does with a slight little variation each time.

The Waugal is the symbol we follow on the Bibbulmun Track. It is the indigenous Noongar name for snake or serpent and is central to much lore about the land. The serpent also shows up in my Natural Perspectives logo beautifully crafted by Aimee Vandersteen. It is this intimacy with the serpent which is the inspiration behind the name ‘Way of the Serpent’ which is the three day guided bush walks I run for Natural Perspectives. The serpent has also been a symbol of kundalini and my inner journey as I have explored my central channel through pranayama, yoga, qi-gong and musical instruments. Needless to say the serpent has been close to me, as I unfurl deeper in to the rhythm of my being and life.

After a while the symbol of the serpent shows up in moments of symbiosis and synchronicity. I keep meeting it on trail markers, on rocks, in the shape of rivers. After a while the serpent stops feeling like a symbol and starts feeling like a presence. Something that knows about return. It is a gentle nudge and reminder that cycles, spirals and corkscrews are nearby.

This ecological exploration of rhythm is what has led me deeper in to the path of music, sound and the bardic path. I’ve carried the didgeridoo and the Native American flutes whilst hiking for many years now. Out here the playing becomes something else entirely. You put the instrument to your mouth and the birds are already mid-sentence. The wind is already in the middle of something. You're not performing. You're joining. Rhythm held by the whole place, all at once, and you're just finding your part in it. Insects. Breath. The creak of a tree somewhere. Nobody is conducting this.

That is what is so liberating about rhythm. It is not something you impose upon the world but something you fall back in to, something you surrender in to. It is so somatic because the ancient primal body knows it before the modern intellect can get a hold of it. It comes from feet on the ground and the breath in the lungs. It is the old pulse of the universe that underlies everything, running like a current. Or a serpent winding through the fabric of the universe.

Looking towards the ancient Greeks, they had the word Rhuthmós. It meant shape in motion, something that shifts yet holds at the same time. Like a wave or a season. Ecologies run on this. Things repeat in patterns but they never are exactly the same.

Zooming in on the alchemists, they had the symbol of the Ouroboros, which is the serpent swallowing its own tail. It represents consumption and renewal as one process. The end folding back into beginning. Many indigenous cultures viewed life cyclically and it is only in more modern urban times that we have seen the world through such a linear lens. What I love about the ouroboros and the cyclical symbology of life is that it shifts our perspectives towards more matriarchal systems; which has been lost in an age of patriarchal reductionist, materialism and hyper-rationality. More on that for another journal post.

In summary, the serpent and rhythm has been a close ally and guide. Teaching me to stop interfering, managing, optimising and trying to get somewhere all the time. It reminds me to read the ground and stay close to the Earth. To listen to the quiet vibrations and honour the cycles and seasons of life.

Way of the Serpent bush walks are mostly sold out for this season, and I’m stoked to share the beauty of rhythm with you all this season. These hike are an invitation to stop walking in straight lines. To let the pattern underneath things become audible again. May we all walk the way of the Waugal.

The Alchemy of Hip-Hop

This week in Melbourne I stepped back into AmentiWorld for a five-day intensive, building on a two-day workshop I did with them earlier in the year in Perth. I already knew their work goes deep, so I wasn’t surprised by the impact, but there was something about being in the container again, with that collective, that opened a different kind of current. Before I get into my own experience, it’s worth giving a sense of who AmentiWorld actually are, because they’re not a typical movement school. They’re a community-based collective blending hip hop, Jungian psychology, somatic practice and ancient symbolic knowledge. Their approach is archetypal, elemental, embodied, and everything is done in groups because community is the architecture of the work. Movement becomes a mirror, and the body becomes a way of seeing. Nothing about it is performance, it’s psyche and soma and culture braided into one.

Stepping into that space felt like entering a lineage I didn’t realise I’d been orbiting for years. And it landed in an interesting way because on the Bibbulmun Track people know me as The Alchemist. The name stuck because hiking has always been where I explore the elements of nature and how they shape me, almost like the bush turns into an open-air laboratory. The forests, the weather, the terrain, all of it works on you in quiet, consistent ways, and walking becomes a slow act of transmutation, each step breaking something down and reshaping something else.

But this week was a completely different kind of portal. Instead of valleys and granite it was wooden floors, potent music, sweat, heat and bodies moving with intent. AmentiWorld opened the door and Gil walked me straight into initiation, not just into dance technique or choreography, but into hip hop as an elemental lineage. And that’s the part that struck me. I wasn’t learning moves. I was learning how to conjure, how to enter states, how to let movement speak from somewhere far older and grittier than thought.

The days followed the five elements. Earth as the layer of physicality, weight, shape, taking up space. Water as articulation, sensation, effort, the emotional residue living inside joints and muscle memory. Fire as direction and agency, the intensity that clarifies rather than destroys. Air as the social field and relational winds between people. Ether as imagination, symbols, the inner library. A perfect balance of theory and physicality, but never as ideas to sit with. These weren’t concepts, they were states. You stepped into them or they stepped into you.

Earth was a workout. Real grounding. Moving through space with weight in my bones, feet like drums hitting out a rhythm I could actually trust. Water opened the joints and pulled up sensation I didn’t know I’d been holding. Fire took me the furthest. Fast limbs, sharp breath, crumping patterns, grabbing, pushing, stomping, all of it anchored by that potent bass. It was dark, dirty and danky in the best possible way, and it pushed a part of me I didn’t realise was so ready to wake up. Air softened things again, reminding me that identity isn’t created alone, it’s created in the currents between people. Ether tied it all together, slow motion shapes, symbolic movement, tapping into imagination and pattern in a very grounded way.

Somewhere in the middle of all that heat and rhythm, something important switched on. Not a collapse of tension or a clean, spiritual softness, but the opposite. A permission to feel the tension that’s already there and move with it. A permission to be powerful. To move with intensity. To go fast. To stop hiding the parts of myself that feel raw or sharp or messy. It gave those edges a place to move instead of sit in my system like static.

What surprised me was how much of myself has been outside the frame of what I consider acceptable in the modern, polished world. The softer spiritual environments I spend time in have taught me a lot about stillness, but they haven’t always given much room for the darker, heavier, more chaotic parts of my expression. AmentiWorld did. Hip-hop did. The heat, the bass, the sweat, the aggression, it all made sense once I started moving inside it. I could feel parts of myself I’d sidelined, not because they were wrong but because they didn’t have anywhere to go. This week they had space.

I walked out of those five days feeling more expressive, more raw, more dark, more dingy, and a whole lot more alive. Not in a metaphorical way, in a very physical way, like my bandwidth for being a full human being just widened. My rough edges feel less like a problem now and more like fuel. The stuff creativity is born from. The stuff that gives movement its pulse.

If movement or dance or AmentiWorld are calling you in any way, or if you just have that intuitive hunch in your gut, check out their work. It is genuinely profound. Revolutionary in how it brings people back into their bodies, their power, their history, their imagination.

Massive thanks to the AmentiWorld crew. Gil, the walking hieroglyph. Alana. Kamile. Ruben. Elia and Neder. Legends. See you fellow alchemists in Bali in late January for the next round of teachings and co-creations.