About 2 years ago, after an 11 month North American Tour with Blue Man Group, I put myself through 40 Days of nothing but eating, sleeping, and most importantly drumming.

Thanks to the good grace of my parents, they put me up in the second story of their beautiful home in Caldwell, ID, (which my father built), and fed me for 40 days, while I played drums all day long.  I mean, the patience of my parents to put up with that!

During the entire 40 Days, I cut myself off from all contact with the outside world.  This meant no internet, no social media, no email, no phone calls, and as a matter of fact, no speaking to anyone.  I communicated with my mom through notes.  She was delivering my food 3 times a day to the door of the upstairs room, and would leave a note on the tray.  I would sometimes answer, if I needed something.  Other than that, it was just me and the drums.  —and of course, all the noise in my head.

So much of the journey was about dealing with the different layers of my psyche, and it got pretty crazy-  at least I felt like I was going crazy at times.  But I was determined to take myself all the way through the process, and I’m glad I did.

Since completing the 40 Days, my life has been constantly moving and shifting.  It’s been a grand adventure, and I’m grateful for all of it, but I haven’t had too much time to let absorb the lessons that I learned from the 40 days.   I’m finally back in my house in Orlando now, and getting around to working on and implementing a lot of the things that I learned from doing the 40 Days.

In hind sight, and if I had it to do all over again, I would have created a better “landing pad” for myself.  You see, when I finished the 40 days, I went directly into helping my parents prepare for a mega-garage sale, and almost didn’t play drums for the week following the 40 Days.  I went back to Orlando just after that, but my house had been rented out, so I was basically put to the task of moving back in to my own house.  No place to practice, minus some practice pad work…  So I hadn’t really planned out my landing pad- my “after the 40 Days” very well, and probably some of the work that I did was lost during that time. But I don’t regret having done it, and have still learned a lot from doing it.  And now, almost 2 years later, I’m finally getting around to really trying to integrate some of what I learned during that time.

So here’s the video-  it’s about 25 minutes long, so it’s no quick watch.  And keep in mind, that this is me trying to sum up what 40 Days of experience after being locked in a room by myself for that long…   and I get pretty heavy with it!