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, and this is no small thing. 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 reorganising itself around the spiral of the breath rather than being forced into it.

There's a sensation of a pillar pressing down through the oesophagus, 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?