The Chakras of Earth are the Root Chakra, Sacral Chakra and Solar Plexus Chakra.
Those three Chakras are related to the abdominal breathing which is used to play shakuhachi.
Meditating on the Chakras of Earth will improve your awareness of your abdominal breathing. If you practice them regularly you will feel more grounded and you will be able to connect to your breath more easily in any situation.
Beside the physical awareness, the Chakra meditations also work on an emotional level, which will be also explained.
Chakra Meditationwith shakuhachi is a meditation technique I have been developing in the last few years and started to share online this year during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is inspired by Chakra breathing meditations but its purpose is not to provide Sound Healing, nor it is a musical practice. It is a technique to improve and go deeper into your daily meditation with shakuhachi.
Practitioners do report feeling better afterwards. And it can help you a lot to improve your shakuhachi playing through increasing your physical awareness and relaxation. All you need is a few minutes a day… and a shakuhachi.
In these challenging times of Covid-19 pandemic, I notice that meditating on the chakras with shakuhachi gives energy and helps people to feel more grounded and better prepared to tackle negative emotions. I experience it myself every Monday evening with my online group during our common shakuhachi meditation.
“Can you hold the body and spirit as one?” Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu
WORLD SHAKUHACHI DAY on October 8 – Let’s blow 108 RO!
Blow away Covid-19 !
This week there will be the first World Shakuhachi Day. We will blow 108 R0 to “express condolence with victims of Covid-19, sympathy and encouragement to infected and hospitalized patients, and to dedicate a heartfelt thanks to the medical staff and hope for a solution to fight back the disease. Let’s blow 108 Ro with the spirit of bowing away this global pandemic.”
As my ROBUKI practice lasts normally around 10 minutes, I trained counting until 108 RO and it took me 27 minutes (4 RO / minute). I didn’t have difficulty to count, putting a mental mark every 12 RO up to 9 times. Keeping a regular breathing rhythm and relaxing in the sound help me to stay focused.
For my following sessions of 108 RO, I put on the timer on 27 minutes, with a bell ring every 3 minutes (=12 ROx9). This helps me to hold on to my rhythm of 4 RO / minute and enables me to notice immediately if my breath becomes a little more shallow or my lips tense up.
On Thursday October 8, I will be celebrating the World Shakuhachi Day online at 8:30 PM (UTC+2) with a ROBUKI of 27 minutes (108 RO). If you would like to join, just contact me. All you need is a shakuhachi and a computer or a tablet with a webcam. Let’s blow 108 RO together!
Next to this event, ROBUKI is is part of my regular shakuhachi meditation. I like to put on the timer instead of counting how many RO I blow because it allows me to concentrate fully on my favourites meditation practices, which are the Loving-Kindness and the Tonglen Meditations.
When you start practicing honkyoku (traditional zen pieces), you will discover soon enough that none of them are easy. But some of them are short. These are called “Chōshi” or “Chō”. These short pieces are meant to warm up and tune in with yourself, the room and the audience if there is any. I like to call them “Meditation preludes“.
In the tradition of the Meian school of shakuhachi, the performer first warms up the bamboo and settles the mind for spiritual practice through the playing of a short introductory prelude piece. Expressing the essential spirit of Koten honkyoku, Chōshi (literally, small melody) serves to establish the pitch and to center the musician. This piece is characterised by a pure focus on breath.
While having to keep physical distanciation for who knows how long, meeting online via Zoom or Skype has become a good alternative to connect to each other.
Earlier this year, the “RO-BUKI Wave Across The World” gave me the idea to create a Shakuhachi Online Community to blow and meditate together once a week. During the sessions, the focus goes inwards, to connect to your body, to your inner peace through your breathing, and to blow with full awareness what your heart tells you (solidarity with the world’s sufferings, healing, compassion, love, emptiness, silence,…), uniting your sounds and efforts with those of the other participants.
The experience of the last months – before the summer break – worked beyond expectations (I didn’t have any actually). It brought a new dimension in my shakuhachi path. Meditating together is not teaching, it is sharing. I deeply enjoyed the connection to fellow shakuhachi players from different countries. Level doesn’t matter. Some participants are my students, some are not. How good this feels.
Once a month, we had a Q&A session which brought very interesting reflexions and interactions in the group.
So it’s time to resume the weekly meetings, starting on September 7, 2020. Grab your favorite shakuhachi and let’s RO together!
My first debut CD (or single) is released!! It features 3 compositions for solo shakuhachi in which I explore my African roots as well as the relationships between Japanese and African spiritualities. It is now available online on all digital platforms like Spotify, iTunes, Amazon MusicDeezer, etc. In the coming months, the music notations will be available as well.
It was a huge work, the musical result of which being only the tip of the iceberg. I was dreaming of recording a CD already for years. Honkyoku? Modern music? Birds? At a point, it became obvious that my first recording should be my own compositions. Who I am. Where I come from. And what I can do with a shakuhachi.
You might have noticed that, since the third anniversary of my blog, I added a “support” button on my home page and at the end of each post. A few people have started to donate and I am very grateful to them. The decision of adding a “Support” or “Donation” button was not an easy one . When I started this blog, I had no idea whether I would stop after 3 posts nor how it would be received. And here we are, more than 3 years later, and I am very proud to say that my blog is being read every single day somewhere in the world (in more than 100 different countries) almost since the beginning!! This is the greatest support I could ever have dreamed of and this is way beyond my expectations. However, to reach this state and to be able to continue to develop the blog, I upgraded the free version to a paid one, as well as for my Soundcloud account, on which I uploaded dozens of recordings in order to help my students to study the repertoire and also to share our Hijiri-Kai music on this website. Upgrades cost money, and the writing of the posts plus the recording and editing of the music, cost time and energy. Time and energy that I am more than happy to spend! But as a professional full-time freelance musician, I also need to earn my living.
The alternative to offering the possibility a voluntary donation would be adding ads. It is not what I want for this blog and I will keep it “ads free” as long as possible. The donation fits better to my shakuhachi philosophy: I feel connected to the Komuso (begging monks) tradition through this online version!
When you subscribe to my blog, it is actually called a Membership. As I like this idea a lot, I have been thinking about it for a while – especially since the global lockdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. In these particular and difficult times of social distancing, I feel even more how we all are connected, and how important it is to keep blowing together and stay in touch. So I have come up with a few ideas to make possible that a donation through my blog becomes a real Membership. After the amazing experience of the Robuki wave across the planet, I would like to use this opportunity to set up an English and a French community group!!
As it is difficult to make long term plans at the moment, I’d like to start with a trial period of 2 months (May-June 2020) and see how it goes.
When most of us on the planet are more or less locked down at home due to the Covid-19 pandemic, when lots of stressful information are endless released all around the world, I was wondering “what can I do, as a shakuhachi player?” And then I got this message from Kiku Day:
“We are a group of shakuhachi players who did a little brain storm andwe came up with the idea of a ROBUKI WAVE. We suggest to make a ROBUKI WAVE across our planet as a gesture of solidarity, contemplation and healing of the situation with Covid-19 we are in at present! Join us playing ROBUKI at 12 noon your own time for as long or short as you want. We start tomorrow Monday 23rd March 2020! We will at least continue for a week and see if we continue further. Imagine as the Earth rotate there will be people playing robuki at 12 noon across the whole planet. […Facebook event details…] We will try to make a video with ROBUKIi across the whole planet afterwards.”
I immediately loved the idea of blowing RO together to connect and join our efforts and thoughts for the planet. I passed on the message to my students and friends in the Netherlands & Belgium and some of them reacted with a strong enthusiasm. This made me think that it would be nice to meet up online to blow together. I had never used ZOOM before, so it was a good opportunity to learn quickly how to use it and set up a daily Robuki-meeting!
Last year, I presented the fantastic work of my colleague and friend Fiore Seichiku De Mattia: “Floatings Souls” (Anime Fluttuanti), a project conducted as part of the Music Research Laboratory in Psychiatric Community, Fondazione Emilia Bosis (Bergamo). Since that time, Fiore made and uploaded 3 new videos about this project, chosen as the most representative ones. In these videos, he plays original shakuhachi solo compositions of Fukuda Teruhisa: Kanjinhijiri, Roro no Shirabe and Hijiri.
The spiritual inspiration of Fukuda sensei’s compositions, the “floating sounds” of the shakuhachi and Fiore’s profound reflection about the mystery of the other guide us to find the connection to these “floating souls”.
It is moving and beautiful. Continue reading Floating Souls (2)→
We don’t really like to think about death. Although death is part of life, it is quite taboo in our society and a difficult topic to address. Like it would bring bad luck.
Two and half weeks ago, I gave a shakuhachi presentation in a zen center in Rotterdam (The Netherlands). I gave explanations about the history of the instrument, played a couple of honkyoku, and guided the participants to make their first sounds on the shakuhachi. We also had a very nice talk about the relationships between shakuhachi and zen meditation. It was a very rich experience for all of us. At a moment, while I was playing, one participant became very emotional. Afterwards, the organiser of the workshop, who is one of my students, told me that when I was playing, he was thinking that shakuhachi would be very appropriate to be played during funerals. “Actually” I answered, “I played a week ago during the funeral of my cousin. I am quite used to play at family funerals. Before, I used to play the flute, but now, playing the shakuhachi adds a spiritual dimension I really appreciate and need myself.”
I also told him about the time I was asked to play for a nature funeral of a total stranger.
During my demonstration at the zen center, the piece the participant became emotional with was Azuma Jishi (Azuma no kyoku). Was supposed to be. I did start playing it, but in the middle of it, as I was playing by heart, I mixed it up with Kumoi Jishi, which was the piece I played for my cousin’s funeral, and couldn’t come back to Azuma Jishi anymore, so I ended up playing Kumoi Jishi.
My student’s comment about thinking of a funeral while I was playing and the participant’s reaction during this piece make me think that there was still a lot of my sadness from the death of my cousin in my shakuhachi play on this day. Continue reading Playing shakuhachi at funerals→
Hélène Seiyu 聖 優 Shakuhachi 