Native American-style Flutes, NAF Classes, Concerts, Recordings, and Books

Power, Meditation and Prayer through Sound

  The language of music is universal and timeless. The earliest primitive societies used melody and rhythm for communication, for celebration and for honoring life and death. We know from musical instrument artifacts that the native peoples of North America used music for thousands of years to express feelings and emotions. Today, those who are drawn to the compelling sound of American Indian flutes often speak of the power of this instrument to draw forth sacred personal and communal experiences.

 Is it the wood, is it the modes, or is it the simplicity of the native melodies that seem to awaken primeval memories locked deep within the mysteries of our souls? Is the experience of feeling summoned actually the ancients calling to us, or is it simply that our hectic lifestyles make our soul long for meditative respite? Perhaps it is both.

 Audience members often speak of feeling drawn into a trance-like state by the native flute's power to invoke altered states of consciousness. They speak of responses that include relaxation, visionary processing, space and time travel, memory regressions, improved states of physical/mental/emotional health, an abatement of strife, a feeling of inner balance and acceptance, and an overwhelming feeling of universal love for all life forms. There is a sense of the sacred that is almost whispered after hearing the American Indian flute. The significance of the experience is often revealed through tear-filled eyes.

 The sounds of the Native American flute unlock the gate into our subconscious mind. The encounter with the flutes' tones opens our personal psyche into awareness, allowing us to have deeper opportunities for clarity and understanding. What a gift this is!

 These experiences encourage me and many others to keep playing the Native American flute. The power of the quality of the sound moves the listeners [and often the performer] into connected states of meditation which can be described as prayerful. Being lead into the awareness of a spiritual presence beyond, and also within, ourselves is the gift of opening to the beauty of the Native American flute.

The body also has an experience of divine things,
When the passionate forces of the soul
Are not put to death
But transformed and sanctified.
St. Gregory Palamas

 The wood from which our flutes are made came up out of the earth. A tree grew and gave us oxygen to breathe the very air which produces sound as the air flows from our own bodies into the wooden flutes. We who have the eyes to see the beauty of the tree, also have the voice to speak for the consciousness, for the responsibility of protecting our sacred connections to all life forms. That voice is our flutes. We know it when we play and when we hear others play. We feel it in the breath which we give forth in tones of beauty through the wooden flute, crafted by human hands from the tree which grew up out of the earth.

 Sometimes it is almost as if the air remembers the sounds. Or maybe we hear the dead singing? Our hearts are filled with songs that only we can bring forward, with gentleness and passion, into the world. There is no wrong way to play the Native American flute, but there are innumerable right ways to play it. When anything is this right, the world benefits. When music fills the holes in our heart's colander, the bowl of love overflows and the dark chambers of our hearts become lighted by the fulfillment of our yearnings.

  The sacrament of playing the Native American flute is the experience of being tethered to the Great Spirit. We are free to float in our personal experiences of our own free will, but we always can have the tether to keep us safe, to keep us spiritually connected to the very source of our human experience on earth. The earthy wooden flute's quality helps us to connect with our soul in slowly unfolding but magnifying ways that allow us to live within the mystery of life's magic. The Native American flute brings us face to face with the Great Spirit, allows us to glimpse into immortality and to cross the space that Thomas Merton has described as the abyss that separates us from ourselves.

 When we become connected to our own inner core, we are then also connected more deeply to others. In my work I ask others to envision the tone quality as the soul, and the breath as the animating spirit which not only propels the sound outward, but vibrates and expands the psychic entity which we call the soul. According to John Keats, the earth is the Vale of soul-making. If soul-making is our life's purpose, then the Native American flute is a magnificent teacher and facilitator for our life's work.

 The Native American flute reveals and summons. It responds to our innermost longings and our most celebrated joys. The soft, sweet tone flows over us like honey, satiating our human longings. It comforts us when we need consolation, and allows us to simply be our most intimate selves.

 The Native American flute has brought us to our knees in gratitude, while freeing our souls to fly. If life is a divine dance, then being immersed in the rhythmical pulsations of music, made by our own breath through wood grown up out of the earth, must truly be Heaven! Creativity brings forth beauty, and your creativity expressed through the Native American flute illuminates our individual creative paths.

May you each walk in beauty!
Laura Lee Perkins, M.Ed.