Tao Drum Shamanic Practitioner
Tao Drum
Tao Drum: Shamanic Sound Healing, Spiritual Mentor & Teacher
In 1996 Tao began her serious training in ‘Core Shamanism’. For about 10 years she studied primarily with Michael Harner, Sandra Ingerman, Nan Moss, and David Corbin via The Foundation For Shamanic Studies. This included The Foundation’s Advanced Three Year Shamanic Training program and Sandra Ingerma‘s Shamanic Teachers Training Program.
In 1998 Tao began seeing clients for shamanic healing, including soul retrieval and has continued in one form or another since then. Currently, her shamanic teachers are the Web of Life, the mystical healing energies of music & sound, ‘the spirit which lives in all things’, and her own ‘helping spirits’.
We all have shamans as ancestors! It is the most ancient and global tradition of healing, spirituality, music, storytelling, and art with many flavors from peoples all over the Earth back to pre-history cave painting times. However shamanism in many cultures was forced underground or erased completely, thus their descendants were left without shamanic tradition. One of the experiments of 20th/21st century Core Shamanism is for the practitioner to learn directly from their ‘helping spirits’ and ‘the spirit which lives in all things in order to see what will evolve from a committed contemporary shamanic path without the mythologies/practices from another culture. This is exactly what Tao has experienced over the past decades of practicing Shamanism. She is a very contemporary person, firmly grounded in her experiences in our times.
Since 2017 Tao has been doing deep inner integration work of her life journey with eastern mysticism, music, and shamanism – especially as these inform and are the foundation of her work and practices for healing and well-being. She is energized to emerge after this period of integration with new work very aligned with her Being and excited to offer it to all who resonate.
Tao is also a multi-instrumentalist musician. She began at age eight by learning piano. Guitar followed a few years later. Drums 20 years later. During the 1980s, the same era she was a songwriter and rock musician, she witnessed and learned from the rise of ‘New Age” music. All along she created both types of music - rock and new age. All these years she’s been learning about and using sound for meditation, relaxation, healing, consciousness shifting, dancing … and of course rockin’ out.
In 1981 she first encountered music used in assisting the inner journey from Deuter, created for Rajneesh Meditations. She intensely experienced more music used in this way while living at Rajneeshpuram. From then on Tao continued to learn by reading, listening, experiencing various new age and sound healing teachers such as Jonathan Goldman, Kay Gardner, Russil Paul, Gabrielle Roth, John Beaulieu, Fabian Maman. She experimented with creating her own new-age music. She studied west African drumming and Indian tabla, along with various other types of drumming/percussion. Learning Shamanism in the late 1990s was a game changer and brought this all to the realm of healing sessions/events. Shamanic drumming expanded her use of healing music into consciousness-shifting rhythms along with vibrations of the gong, crystal, Japanese and Tibetan singing bowls, fairy bells, rattles, and more.
Tao considers the following to be important life events in also preparing her for this work with you:
1982 – given name Prem Tao by Osho and began a deep mystical path.
Training and deep immersion in drumming, rhythms, and other forms of sound healing.
A year after beginning shamanic training she was diagnosed with a very serious life-threatening illness that lasted five years. It was not expected for her to survive. Tao considers herself a ‘wounded healer’.
Being a Chaplain at a hospital and hospice.
Deep love and connection with the web of life, also known as nature.
2012 – the name ‘Tao Drum’ emerged while Tao was experiencing Hurricane Sandy.
This name honors the three healing harmonizing rhythms in her work and life –
mystical, shamanic, and sound. Thus the seed was planted of her synthesizing inner journey which led to this new work of Shamanic Sound Healing, Spiritual Mentoring and Teaching.