Cosmic Drum Vision
Everything around us is moving in rhythm—our breath, our blood, the tides, the stars themselves. I’ve come to feel that rhythm isn’t something we...
Resonance Magic
If we are to save ourselves and this planet from continued chaos and destruction, we must raise our vibration. It's a matter of consciousness,...
Giants of Consciousness
I sense that something fundamental is changing in us as human beings, and much of it can’t be seen with the eyes. Indigenous wisdom has language...
Stellar Origins
I’ve always been struck by how many indigenous traditions—across continents and centuries—carry the same quiet remembrance: we come from the...
Indigenous Wisdom
Whenever I’m in the presence of indigenous people, something unmistakable activates in me. There’s a vitality there that can’t be ignored, a...
Transformative Journeys
TRANSFORMATIVE JOURNEYSHOW IT WORKS Welcome! I created these poetic, alchemical experiences to guide you into inspired and elevated states of...
African Alchemy
An inspiring short film about the things I love the most: Africa, drumming, and alchemical transformation. Run time ~ 10 min. Enjoy!
The Promise of Prosperity with Rev. Michael B. Beckwith
It was an absolute pleasure and honor to join the Reverend Michael Bernard Beckwith on his podcast Take Back Your Mind.
My co-author Mark Victor Hansen and I discussed our new book, my father's biography Rev. Ike: An Extraordinary Life of Influence, as well as the my dad's teachings, the promise of prosperity, and how these teachings can rapidly change one's life.
Boys to Men: The Rhythm of Initiation
In the above video I share the West African rhythm, Soli, which is a rhythm played for initiation rituals inaugurating a boy’s passage into manhood.
Initiation is a specialized type of ritual activity important for the same reasons myth is important: providing controlled access to numinous energies and guidance to effective use of archetypal patterns. There is a vast and ancient tradition of initiation the world over. Tribal societies from time immemorial have used rites of passage events in order to mark the movement from one phase of life into the next.
The wisdom of the ancients is not just something for interesting ethno-anthropological studies, read by academics secluded from the societies in which they are rooted. Rather, these studies are ways of mapping the future for one’s own self, family, and society. As in music, without a conscious attempt to integrate rhythm, all that one creates is noise.
Moribayassa: A Rhythm of Gratitude
In Africa, rhythm is an important feature of daily life. It is also experienced as an expression of the elemental energies of the worlds of nature and spirit. West Africans of the Malinke culture and their predecessors have played specific rhythms for thousands of years to accompany, underscore, and perpetuate various aspects of life.
Music is often used in ceremonies and celebrations, wherein musical pieces are danced and played with drums and other instruments. These occasions mark the progression of people’s lives from birth to death and instances in between, such as initiations and rites of passage for youth, warriors, numerous guilds, and societal sub-groups.
In the above video, Xavier plays the ceremonial rhythm for the Moribayassa, a sacred rite of passage for West African women who have endured and emerged from a challenging circumstance or life storm, such as infertility or grave illness. The women dance in celebration and deep gratitude to their deity, Moriba Yassa. Through ritualized power of drumming and ceremonial theater, these dancers harness rhythm, vibration, and collective energy to produce alchemical magic and initiation.
Power of the Dark Feminine
In this thought-provoking video, Xavier takes us on an inspiring journey into the heart of the “Dark Mother”—the primal, creative force that is life, death, and the Great Mystery.
Xavier speaks to the complexities of patriarchy and masculine domination in our society, rooted in the insecurity and fear of the feminine.
The key to our collective transformation lies in surrendering to the mysteries of the creative, imaginative space within us all. Instead of relying solely on intellect and Western technology, we must embrace the wisdom of our common ancestry, rooted in indigenous cultures and practices.
Watch the video and unlock the transformative power of the dark feminine, and her place in our individual and planetary healing, unification, and a reawakening of human consciousness.
Shine Another Light
The world needs my light. It needs your light. We come in with a particular vibrational frequency to give. And if we don't, if we really don't shine our lights, if we don't step into the destinies that we're meant to live to at a soul level, the world is sunk. So it's crucial we do this. This is the time to do it.
Shine Another Light is a very special song that took 10 years to fully manifest. My producer Mars and I created the music video above, dedicated to my friend Peter, and his village in Kenya. They have struggled with years of a terrible drought which nearly decimated the village and the land. The miracle of a donation to drill a borehole just brought the mercy of water and new hope to their community.
A Decade in the Making
The song’s lyrics first appeared in my mind when we lived in Malibu, back in 2013. I was sitting out on the deck and “Shine another light…. “ just wafted through my head. I'm like, "oh, that's a great chorus for a song." And so I started crafting verses and developing the song.
My wife Annette moved back to New York in 2013 to manage all of three of the facets of business and operations at the United Palace and Cultural Art Center. At that time there was a lot to oversee: television and film shoots, events, and concerts were large and continous. Artists like Adele, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and everybody in between have performed there. It was an unbelievable amount to hold.
In 2015, I felt my soul needed to create my music again because dealing with those three businesses at the United Palace was crushing me. I reached out to my friend and Producer, Mars Lasar in Napa, California. We hadn't worked together since, year 2000. . I could feel myself needing to get back into writing and creating music, and Mars is my guy for that. He just has a way of working with my ideas, massaging them, and arranging them brilliantly in terms of his theoretical knowledge, chord construction, and layering different of orchestral sounds with instrumentation.
So we started, as I say, throwing the football back and forth coast to coast. Shine Another Light was one of the first three tracks that we were working on. And, I wasn't really finding the form that I wanted for it. It was a slow progression. It was just one of those things. We would work on it for a while, then set it aside. And then he and his wife Cindy came out to New York.
I said, "Hey Mars, you're coming out and we have this amazing band, (which I think was my favorite part of being there, working with the band and the kids) it would be great if we could actually do some recording while you are here." So we arranged to have our singers and our band play the song. Our Musical Director helped with the vocal parts. And so we did this recording there on the stage of the United Palace, and that formed the basis of Shine Another Light. We worked with it and we got it to a certain point, and again, set it aside.
In 2017, Annette and I move out to Napa, next door to Mars. Now we get to sit together and work every week, which is just glorious. So we're working on it, and then Mayan's voice was singing lead with Anwar singing. For my singing part, my sense was to just introduce it, to set it up, and sing the first verse and let the "real singers" carry it through. In my mind, I wasn’t a real singer.
We worked that formula as best we could, and got it to a certain point, set it aside, and started working on some other stuff.
Now it's 2023, and we came back to it again. I was like, "oh, damn, I've gotta sing this song now." I have to sing it. I mean, really sing it.
It's been such an in-depth learning experience it's pulled a lot out of me. One of the core movements in the song is a bridge that is all about the surrender, and releasing, releasing all of our fear. "Surrender so the soul can draw near you. Surrender, let go of the fight. Surrender, remember the light." That is an expression of what I've been going through with my spiraling down and spiraling back up now with this song.
There's a lot of different meanings and interpretations that I receive from this song. Creativity is living and it's active. It flows through you, it changes you. Shine Another Light - the idea that the light of the divine is always there within us, around us. And we forget it. That's part of the song also: forgetting and coming back to it and remembering.
There's also the light, our light that the world needs. The world needs my light. It needs your light. We come in with a particular vibrational frequency to give. And if we don't, if we really don't shine our lights, if we don't step into the destinies that we're meant to live to at a soul level, the world is sunk. So it's crucial we do this. This is the time to do it.
Let's shine it! Turn the lights on! We need it now. This is what the third act or the fourth act… 11th hour so to speak. We have a responsibility.
And also we're allowed to have our little "wrestling a crocodile" struggles too. When I hear the words "shine another light" I think of the reinvention too. This is the light I was shining before, and now I'm gonna shine another one. I'm gonna shine a different one. I'm gonna shine a new one. I'm gonna embrace a new take on this.
Perhaps it's an additional light. An extra light. A light that we haven't shown before from a depth we haven't yet opened to. Or maybe again, the Divine is ready to give us light that we weren't able to receive before. Because all of our senses and our nervous system and all of those subtle systems have been preparing to receive more light and information. We are now able to take in more light now than we used to be.
We each have a real opportunity to begin again, start fresh, and step out authentically as you are.
Tanzania Journal: Arusha and Tengeru
While in the Tengeru region East of Arusha, our group we went to “The Small Things” Children's Center, which is inspired by Mother Teresa's quote, “We can do not great things, only small things with great love.” There we delivered some of the school supplies we’d brought to Tanzania that some of the travelers and others had procured by my friend Rev. Kevin Ross’s congregation at Unity of Sacramento—a very progressive metaphysical church that he pastors. The staff there gave us an orientation and introduced us to some of the kids; that was a beautiful experience and our first opportunity to be with a group of children. This is one of those places that takes in kids from all over the community, including those without families or with difficult family situations.
It was interesting because our group met on a little hill with the classrooms down below. You could hear the kids in the classrooms singing and dancing and doing percussion or reciting their lessons, which was a wonderful feeling. I felt the urge to grab my drum and join in with their energy, but I did not want to disturb their studies; plus, I also enjoyed seeing them in their daily activities. They seemed so happy and allowed just to be kids, and it felt good to hear kids feel safe, loved, and cared for.
Adumu Safaris Journey to Tanzania
In Summer of 2022, I embarked upon a life changing and profound 17-day excursion to Tanzania with a group of travelers representing Unity of Sacramento. Enjoy this short film documenting our group's experiences, joy, and adventure during our time in Africa with the social impact safari company, Adumu Safaris. I highly recommend this company for your trip to Africa!
Tanzania Journal: Winter Solstice & Coffee
On this first day of winter here, summer at home, I woke up at the Ilboru Safari Lodge contemplating the Solstice winds blowing in the night. Solstices mark endings and beginnings as we leave an old season and move into a new one, and I felt it in the air. This first day of a new season inspired a feeling of change. How apropos, as it would be a full day of unique experiences.
We began with a journey to an organic and fair trade community coffee plantation in the Tengeru region East of Arusha, and we were welcomed by being danced and sung onto the farm by old Meru women at the very hour of the solstice. This was our first initiatory experience. I’m brought back to the idea of “rejoicing in the presence” that I feel from the essence of Africa. That’s what welcoming is, and that’s what love is. The people of Africa know how to welcome you, which was a consistent, touching element throughout our sojourn. It was an honor to be so welcomed with song and dance, an offering of rhythm and spirit that pulled us in to participate as if we were long-awaited returning family members.
The Mouse and the Star
I got out of bed at 4:30 in the morning for some wee-hours playtime. I have a strange relationship with sleep; I joke that I was bitten by a vampire bat as a baby, and I’m only up that early if I haven’t slept yet. On this particular morning, I made my way through the house into my wife’s office and was visited by a mouse.
I glanced up at the early morning sky and saw Sirius for the first time in awhile, and it was accompanied by a shooting star descending past Procyon. It was what Dr. Amen calls a "micro-moment," or what I call an "enchanted instant." It’s always a big deal for me when I see Sirius in the sky again after about six months of absence during spring and summer. For me this star is a spiritual beacon with more ancestral meaning than I could communicate in writing, though I've tried and have spoken and written about it a lot in the past. In brief, from my personal cosmological standpoint as well as other traditions like the Dogon tribe of people in West Africa, Sirius pinpoints the place of origin and point of entry of all consciousness in this universe and maybe multiverse. It is where we all ultimately came from. Not as physical beings, but as consciousness, energy, light, soul-spirits.
As I looked east straight out from my front porch I saw Orion’s constellation in the sky and felt excited because soon Sirius would be rising through the tops of the pine trees that obscure my view of the horizon. The timing of all of this isn't subtle as we enter the hottest week of the year in Northern California. It is forecasted that some communities will reach 117 degrees, and it feels to be a time of energetic significance.
Tanzania Journal: Safari & Service
Whenever I go to Africa I am changed to my core. The journey is not always easy, but is consistently thrilling. There is an element of animism, a palpable sense of big spirit in all things including people, animals, and nature. There is also a sense of dynamism, a huge expression and interaction of the elements of earth, wind, fire, and water on a scale and magnitude that I have experienced nowhere else, and especially in wild East Africa.
The feeling is of a primordial Great Mother. This is a rich and dark space that bore the human race into being in ancient times after the conditions had been cultivated following eons of creative upheaval, yielding a terrain and terroir that could host our earliest ancestors. When I go to Africa I feel Her there, rejoicing in my presence and imbuing more life into me along our shared adventure.