Manders Mindset
Are you feeling stuck or stagnant in your life? Do you envision yourself living differently but have no idea how to start? The answer might lie in a shift in your mindset.
Hosted by Amanda Russo, The Breathing Goddess, who is a former Family Law Paralegal now a Breathwork Facilitator, Sound Healer, and Transformative Mindset Coach.
Amanda's journey into mindset and empowerment began by working with children in group homes and daycares. She later transitioned to family law, helping people navigate the challenging emotions of divorce. During this time, Amanda also overcame her own weight and health challenges through strength training, meditation, yoga, reiki, and plant medicine.
Amanda interviews guests from diverse backgrounds, including entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, and wellness experts, who share their incredible journeys of conquering fears and limiting beliefs to achieve remarkable success.
Hear real people tell how shifting their mindsets and often their words, has dramatically changed their lives.
Amanda also shares her personal journey, detailing how she transformed obstacles into opportunities by adopting a healthier, holistic lifestyle.
Discover practical strategies and inspiring stories that will empower you to break free from limitations and cultivate a mindset geared towards growth and positivity.
Tune in for a fun, friendly, and empowering experience that will help you become the best version of yourself.
Manders Mindset
From Drums to Dharma: Clementine Moss on Rhythm, Meditation & Inner Joy | 157
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In this soul awakening episode of Manders Mindset, host Amanda Russo welcomes Clementine Moss, founding drummer of the Led Zeppelin tribute band Zepparella, solo artist, author, and certified spiritual counselor. Clementine shares how her unexpected path into music at age 27 unlocked a deeper connection to joy, breath, and presence and how the drum kit became a gateway to spiritual discovery.
Listeners are invited into a conversation about the intersections of rhythm and mindfulness, the power of silent retreats, and how Clementine’s journey from literary ambition to stage performer ultimately led her to a more grounded, awakened life. This episode offers a powerful reminder that transformation doesn’t follow a timeline and that curiosity, breath, and self-trust can guide anyone to their most aligned path.
🎙️ In this episode, listeners will discover:
🥁 How Clementine discovered drumming in her late twenties with zero formal background
🧘♀️ The life-altering insights from 10-day silent meditation retreats
📚 How literature and psychedelics sparked early spiritual curiosity
🎤 The link between meditation, rhythm, and inner stillness
🌟 A new perspective on imposter syndrome, self-judgment, and creativity
💭 How thought awareness, not control, is the real key to healing
📖 The inspiration behind her memoir From Bonham to Buddha and Back
⏰ Timeline Summary:
[0:00] Introduction to Clementine Moss and her multi-faceted journey
[3:20] Rediscovering joy through meditation and childhood reflection
[10:10] Growing up as a bookworm and curious learner
[14:45] Bartending in NYC, picking up drums, and choosing passion
[20:30] Silent meditation, internal voices, and the start of spiritual practice
[30:15] Playing drums as a form of meditation and embodied presence
[40:00] Navigating imposter syndrome as a late-blooming musician
[47:10] Her memoir’s message of integrating mindfulness into daily life
[52:25] Becoming a certified spiritual counselor and healer
[1:00:05] Releasing ambition and embracing gratitude as a way of being
To Connect with Amanda:
Schedule a 1:1 Virtual Breathwork Session HERE
📸 Instagram: @thebreathinggoddess
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Welcome to the Manders Mindset Podcast. Here you'll find both monologue and interviews of entrepreneurs, coaches, healers and a variety of other people when your host, Amanda Russo, will discuss her own mindset and perspective and her guest's mindset and perspective on the world around us. Manders and her guests will help explain to you how shifting your mindset will shift your life will help explain to you how shifting your mindset will shift your life.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Amanda's Mindset, where we explore the power of shifting your mindset to shift your life. I'm your host, amanda Russo, and I am so excited for today's episode. And I am here with Clementine Moss, and she is the founder and drummer of Zepperella and she has had a busy solo career as a singer and a songwriter. She's also an author and we are going to delve down her journey today. So who would you say? Clementine is at the core. Oh, boy.
Speaker 3:I feel like I fought the core of Clementine for a long time. But sometimes when I, you know, in meditation I'll kind of go back and just go to the you know, try to find that, that spark of me. And I always come up with this image of me as a three-year-old and I'm just a really at the core, a very happy person who sees life in a happy way. And there have been years where that was definitely clouded over and I did do a lot of struggling in my life. But when I come back to that kind of intrinsic joy within myself, I feel like the truth of me.
Speaker 2:Can you take us down memory lane a little bit? Tell us about your childhood family dynamics a little bit, however deep you want to take that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I grew up in Southern California, very middle-class suburbia, and I am the oldest of three. I have two sisters. There are three of us. I grew up with my sister Daphne, who's three years younger than me, and I was the four of us until I was 16 and my mom had my sister Jessica.
Speaker 3:We had a really lovely family dynamic, my sister Jessica, we had a really lovely family dynamic and actually now I think that my family is the number one thing in my life that I'm grateful for because they're infinitely supportive. I realized, as I've kind of come to be a spiritual counselor for people and just having lived in the world as long as I have now, I see that when you have parents who put your life, your priorities, first in their vision, you've kind of won the lottery. You know, and even though there were struggles and difficulties and all of the stuff that we go through growing up, that core of knowing that there are people who believe in me and love me I don't take that for granted because I know how rare that is in this world to have that that's beautiful.
Speaker 2:I agree with you in terms of feeling like you won the lottery. With them being supportive, my mom was, and still is, the biggest support system I could have ever asked for. That's amazing, though. I love that for you. So how was schooling for you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, schooling. So I was the nerdy kid who loved school. I loved learning. My friend, who is a year older than me, when I was about three years old, taught me how to read because we used to play school all the time. I actually learned to read very young because I was with somebody who was really excited about reading and she taught me how and it just kind of set me off into this ravenous desire for information. You know, I think I was always that annoying teacher's pet kind of kid because it really was just out of this like complete enthusiasm for books and information. So you know, when I got to junior high school and high school, socially I had a hard time but I just kept diving into the study. To me that was kind of like my salvation. I'm a real big book person, so that was really that formative. Like when I think of my childhood I think of my nose in a book all the time. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So after high school, did you go to college? I did.
Speaker 3:I went to see Santa Cruz in Northern California and I studied literature, american literature and creative writing, and I graduated in three years. When I went there I really thought I was going to be on the track to become a professor and a writer. That was my goal. And then, after I don't know, after a year or two, I started really getting an itch to live a life I identified as a writer and I felt like I just hadn't lived. I'd been very isolated in my experience of the world and I really knew that I wanted to move to New York City and so I almost left college after two years and I figured out that I had taken some tests when I was in high school that got me college credit, so I ended up being able to graduate a year early. So I moved to New York when I was 21,.
Speaker 3:When I graduated and I moved to New York City and I really thought that I was going to be a writer. But I really didn't know how to do that other than to write. And you know, more and more I started feeling like I hadn't lived enough to write anything. You know it was. I felt like I was kind of spinning my wheels and I didn't have a lot of connection to the world of writing. So when my as I was kind of floundering around being a bartender, I was hanging out with a lot of musicians and I started to kind of dabble in singing a little bit and friending a band and then one day we lost our drummer. I sat down at the drum kit and my boyfriend of the time was there and he said, hey, I'll show you a couple of things. And I kind of started to play and he said, actually, you have kind of a good sense of rhythm. And then I thought, well, I'll just start, maybe I'll just take a drum lesson. And I took a drum lesson and that was it.
Speaker 2:Had you ever done, taken a drum lesson before or used to play the drums before ever done taking a?
Speaker 3:drum lesson before, or used to play the drums before. No, no, no, no. And I had. You know I'd play piano as a kid and so I had a bit of a musical background, but it never was. Once I left childhood I didn't even think about really doing that and it was. I attribute it to one being kind of lost and kind of looking for something and two, taking a lesson with this teacher. It was a private lesson and he and I just hit it off so well and I just got really excited about drums really fast.
Speaker 3:And you know, my boyfriend at the time, who I was living with, was a recording engineer. So I was in recording studios and I was kind of starting to get the idea about how music is put together and what it looks like to be a musician. And then I was 27 years old and I thought, well, I feel like I have to pick something. I actually went to a psychic at the time and she said you have a lot of different ways you can go and you just have to devote yourself to one thing. Just pick one thing. You know for a couple of years, just say this is what I'm going to do and see where it takes you. So I thought, okay, that's good advice, I'm just going to do drums, why not?
Speaker 3:You know, it was very interesting to me. I had a kind of facility for it and yeah, that just kind of went along with it. Yeah, and kind of, you know, going back to the idea about having parents who are very supportive, you know, I think that people who do have that kind of baseline feeling like it's okay to try things, it's okay to do things, you know that you have a support system, even if you fail, I think you know, when I say I won the lottery, I think that those are the kind of things that I am so grateful for, because I really did think like, why not? You know, what else do I have to do? I might as well, it's interesting, I might as well do it. You know, I didn't have a lot of baggage around what I was supposed to do.
Speaker 2:No, you said you went to a psychic around then and they told you to just pick something.
Speaker 3:Yeah, did you have a lot of things you were trying to decipher between? Well, it was definitely writing. I was definitely thinking about writing. I was thinking, well, maybe I'll go and get my master's degree in writing, and was looking at a college in Vermont that I was considering going to. You know, just kind of floundering around like really just not being able to figure out what is really lighting me up. You know what is really. I want to go where I feel a passion for it and in a way, I felt like going back to school was a little bit of a cop-out. You know that there was something else. Maybe that was calling me. So I'm lucky I found it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you felt comfortable to just try it. I love that. Yeah, is there anything else that helped you decide that this is the path at 27?
Speaker 3:Honestly, I think I've always just been somebody who never really had much of a plan, you know, as somebody who thought that they were going to be a writer right, it's already a kind of you know profession that isn't really. You know, that's very questionable, right? Like you can be a writer in many different ways, and a lot of my heroes were people who lived outside of society, lived outside of the norms of society, like be writers and be poets. Those were big influences in my life when I was 15, 16. So I always had the sense that life could be something other than what was prescribed by society. I didn't have the sense like, okay, now I have to graduate college, and now I have to get married, and now I have to have a family, and now I have to get a career Like I didn't have that.
Speaker 3:So I think that really that kind of childlike approach to things, it was good. What kind of immaturity. I guess you could say, in a way, it was a benefit for that, because I started thinking well, you know, if I was a musician, then I could travel, and I really do want to travel more and I can have a job while I'm traveling, you know, and I kind of had that thought before I even really took a drum lesson, like I was thinking like, oh, musician, that sounds like a good job. That sounds like it would be kind of a fun job. I could be creative with a group of people, I could be in collaboration with people. Well, yeah, let's see if I can play an instrument. So goofy when I look that no, I love that.
Speaker 2:I love that. It almost seemed well, even for myself. I won't speak for you, but like, the societal pressure of like, following the norms, like because you have such acceptance and support from your parents, it doesn't matter as much. You know like this is what society says you do at X age. You know like, I'm 28 right now and not married. I don't have kids, but I live a life that not a lot of people would understand, but my mom is the biggest supporter and I don't care about the like. I haven't checked the box, I haven't gotten married, I don't have kids and I've got a support system behind me.
Speaker 3:I'm so happy to hear that for you. I think that you know if we can have an influence somewhere and I think that people your age these days, I think they have more of a sense of that, you know, really following their heart more than following the norm. You know. You know, when I was at that age I didn't have a computer, I didn't have the Internet Right, so it was not like I could see the like. When I was in college I didn't have the Internet to see all of my options, to see, oh, this person's a writer and oh, I could do it that way, or oh, I could get a job, like that. I didn't have those things. I kind of was flying by the seat of my pants, Like maybe I would meet somebody who would tell me some information, but if not, then I was just kind of like spinning around trying to figure stuff out.
Speaker 3:And you know, fortunately or unfortunately for me, it was books like On the Road which were really influencing me, which are people who decide that they want to live in the moment and they don't need to follow society's norms, Right, and so from an early age those were the kind of writers that I really identified with and and so I had a very romantic view of what a life like that would be and I was okay with being very, very, very poor. I was really poor for a long time and, you know, things are okay for me now. But I feel like at some point in my early adulthood I beat a vow of poverty in some kind of way, and that was okay with me. Now, as you know, a grown up, a little more grown up, I look back and I think, God, you know, there wasn't anything that I could have done, that could have made a little money like that I would have been interested in, you know, but instead, like I was kind of anything that came to me, like I was offered a job in an investment bank once and I remember just being like, oh no, like you know, and now I don't wish that I had done that, but just that you know, if that job was offered, maybe there would have been another job that maybe I could have, like actually, you know, put some away for retirement or something.
Speaker 3:But that's hindsight and I'm happy with my life. So, you know, I can't really say anything bad about it, but it did mean years of like really scraping by, but I'm doing a lot of dumb jobs that I really didn't care about, you know, and I think, well, maybe I could have spent that time doing stuff that I would have liked to do better, you know.
Speaker 2:So after you did that first drum lesson, then how did you go from there? Did you get right into it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I started taking drum lessons and I had a little drum kit in the apartment and my boyfriend would kind of show me things and I was taking lessons and pretty quick I thought when I got home from work that was what I wanted to do. I just wanted to sit down at the drums. It made me happy and after a bit of time I started. Then I started kind of jamming with him right, like we would just, you know, he would play guitar, bass and I would play drums, and so early on I kind of got a sense of what it's like to play with another person, right. And then one day he said you know, know, I never would have thought that because he had been playing his instruments since he was five or something. And he said I never really thought when you started playing drums that maybe we would play together someday but and maybe we should, you know, start a band.
Speaker 3:And so we kind of started a band and you know, I'd been playing for maybe about a year and maybe like a little over a year when I started that band and started playing some shows and then that kind of fell apart and I was looking for something else. I played in another band for a while, like with a singer-songwriter, and then I met this woman who was in a pop punk band but who wanted to play really heavy music, heavy rock music, and we started playing together and we formed a three-piece heavy rock band and that band I was in for eight years and toured really extensively Like one year in the year 2000,. We played over 300 shows in a year. So that was a big experience, yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. So I know you're also into meditation and mindfulness. When did that come into your realm?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, that happened early. When I was in college, I was reading books about meditation, and when I moved to New York, I would go to the.
Speaker 2:Was that before you did the drum lesson? Sorry to interrupt, yeah, okay.
Speaker 3:So I was reading about it without really following through on it, just kind of reading about it and getting an idea about what meditation was and that kind of spirituality. And then when I moved to New York I would go to the Zen Center which is in the East Village. I would go there sometimes and meditate. And then when I was about 26 or so, right before I started playing drums, I went to my first 10-day Vipassana meditation. So I went in and took a vow of silence for 10 days and meditated and that really was a profound experience for me and kind of set me on my path of a regular meditation practice. So that happened around the same time that drums happened for me.
Speaker 3:You know it's funny because I had my rock and roll self and then I had the meditation self, right, and they were these two parts of my personality. Now that it's all kind of. One thing you know, which is what my book is about, is how spiritual practice, contemplative practice, can be in a life that includes sitting behind a rock and roll drum kit. You know, it doesn't matter what you do in your life for it to be helpful.
Speaker 2:I love that. Do you remember what made you pick up a meditation book back in college? What sparked that interest?
Speaker 3:I'm sure it was through literature. You know, I loved JD Salinger and there's a lot of philosophy like spiritual philosophy in JD Salinger's books and then reading Herman Hesse, that was also. There was a lot of spirituality in those books. So it was through literature that I started to kind of feel like there was this bigger thing that I really wanted information about. And I don't know why I picked up this book, but it's called the Three Pillars of Zen. I don't know how that book came to me, but that was really a big book for me. It was the first book where they really went into a Zen monastery and they interviewed people who were in the experience what it was like for them to be there living at the monastery and what their meditation practice looked like and what their interaction was with the teachers, and I don't know it. Just it was really.
Speaker 3:You know, the thing with that stuff is it feels very. It feels like something very familiar to me. That stuff is it feels very. It feels like something very familiar to me. When I was a little, very little kid, I would have kind of these ecstatic experiences, you know, where I felt a big part of something inexplicable, and so I think I've always been a little open to that and then in my late teens in college, doing LSD and kind of psychedelics, that also kind of opened up this idea of oneness and the way that it does. So I think I was always kind of a spiritual person and then I just had these little guideposts, you know, along the way. That appeared when I needed them, I guess, which I think is the way it happens for most people.
Speaker 2:No, you said psychedelics. You did psychedelics before you started meditating.
Speaker 3:Definitely yeah, you know, when I was in college and then late teens, early twenties, I think I did a lot of psychedelics.
Speaker 2:Do you think they helped your meditation practice at all?
Speaker 3:Well, I guess it helped in some ways where I kind of knew that the ultimate goal was that opening up of the heart that we can experience sometimes in using plant medicine and psychedelic experiences, that sense of everything vibrating as one thing, that feeling that maybe everything is the divine. I had those kind of ecstatic moments when I was doing those substances silent meditation, retreat and I had a big experience of kind of the falling away of Clem for even just a split second. I recognized it as that place that I had been when under those hallucinogenics. I don't know if it helped it, but it definitely felt like it was showing me some of the same things.
Speaker 3:For me, meditation is much deeper than those experiences, because you know when we're in meditation we're sitting with the uncomfortable right and we do that with plant medicine and psychedelics as well where it can get kind of scary for a minute.
Speaker 3:But in meditation you know you're sober, you're sitting there and you have to sit.
Speaker 3:When you really don't want to sit there, when things come up that you don't really don't want to look at or remember, when the body is in pain, when it's physically uncomfortable, when there's so many other things you'd rather be doing, meditation means that you're sitting there and allowing yourself to be with those things. And I think that lesson is the greatest lesson we can take from meditation is to be able to confront the uncomfortable. I think that when we look at society right now, you know we're all kind of trained from an early age to run as fast as we can from the uncomfortable, run from pain, run from, you know, sadness, run from sorrow, and push it all away. And I don't think that really serves us in our spiritual path and in our daily lives. So you know, I kind of went deep there for a minute. But I do think that meditation is a much bigger benefit in knowing the self than I think those substances will give you a big experience. But then I'm not quite sure that long-term understanding of who you are really comes through as much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, would you say that meditation has helped you with playing music.
Speaker 3:Oh gosh, yes, and music has helped me with meditation, yeah. So when you sit in meditation and you're trying to focus your mind on one thing say you're doing a meditation where you're watching your breath and your front attention is focused in on the breath the more focused you can be on that one point in space, the more the background attention, that awareness of everything comes into focus. Right, the more we dizzy the front mind attention, the more the back awareness of everything attention comes into focus. And playing a musical instrument is that way too. We sit and we're doing one thing over and over and over, trying to get it into our body, trying to make sure that we're playing it smoothly and easily and effortlessly. It's like muscle memory we're focusing and yet our background attention. You know, especially playing drums, when I'm playing I'm playing with four limbs, right, and so if I concentrate just on one of those pieces, it's not going to be as good as if I'm focusing on the whole, on all four moving together, right. So it's a good metaphor for the way that our mind works. If we're focusing too closely, then we can kind of get distracted. If we're not focusing enough, then our minds wander.
Speaker 3:So it's this play with attention, focus and awareness, and I think we find it in meditation. I think we find it in sports, you know, when people are trying to do physical activity, and then we find it in playing music too. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 3:I really think I've learned a lot of lessons about attention and focus and peacefulness and breathing when I'm playing drums that I then can take to the meditation mat and it's almost as if I'm looking for that same place, that place where your mind sits in the middle of everything, you know, quiet, still part of yourself that never changes, while the hurricane of the mind is moving, while the physical body is screaming at you, while your emotions are rising and falling. There's that still center of yourself. And it's the same as sitting on the drum kit, where I'm sitting in that still center of myself, while the guitar amp is screaming and there's a crowd applauding and there's, you know, a lot of noise and lights and I'm playing and trying to make sure that everything that I'm playing is in time and doing it well. If I'm in that still center of myself, everything feels effortless, right, everything moves of its own accord and it's easy, yeah, and joyful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm curious what has drumming taught you about breathing?
Speaker 3:Well, you know, with your breath, when you do breath, I know you do breath work, but you see that when there's tension in the body, you can breathe into that tension and open it up. And so when I'm playing drums, so when I play shows, I'm playing for two hours and that's a long set. There are some songs that are extremely exertive and my muscles have to be. You know, there's a tension in the muscles because I'm doing something that's difficult. I'm playing something I think about the song. You know I play in a Led Zeppelin band so I'm thinking about the song. Rock and Roll, right, so it's five minutes and there are little stops in there. But you know it's a quick song and so my hand, my wrist, can get very tense right as I'm playing, as I'm doing this thing and trying to make sure that it's in time, and that thought that maybe I'm going to lose the time is a tension.
Speaker 3:The thought that maybe it's a difficult song creates tension. The part of me that wants to do it and knows that I'm never going to do it as well as it was done originally is a tension, like there's all this tension that's building up in me, and so my breath is crucial. You know, if I notice myself in tension, I just try to breathe as much as I can into my belly, try to breathe into my wrists, try to breathe into my body, try to breathe all the way down my muscles. I almost see it as my breath is like a river kind of running through me and in that I start to be able to feel bend. It's almost like if you start breathing almost in a circle, it's like your body now is moving freely. It's not a tight like trying to do something. There's an ease. There's an ease that comes with the breath.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's crucial to drumming. You know it's such a physical activity. It's like a sport, right. So you know you think about how in sports it's so important for people to just keep breathing and even doing weights. I had a workout today and it's like I noticed that. You know it's like I'll hold my breath while I'm doing something. You know that's not going to help me.
Speaker 2:So many of us do, and like we don't even realize it, but like you, becoming aware of it. That's the first step.
Speaker 3:you know, meditating for 11 hours a day and sitting there and I noticed how deep my breathing became. You know, in that first 10-day meditation retreat you take a vow of silence so you're not speaking to anybody. You're in a little silo of your own mind and after a few days I remember thinking I don't think I've ever breathed like this before. I don't think I've ever breathed so easily and deeply all the time, because you just become this breathing machine as you're sitting in meditation, rising or thought forms start rising and it tenses up the body and how your, your breath becomes shallow.
Speaker 3:I mean, you see it so clearly? Yeah, the breath is a great gift, you know, for us to understand ourselves you know, really, really shows us what we're feeling when we can't access how will you feel in post this 10 day silence meditation?
Speaker 3:oh, oh well, those 10 day retreats, they're pretty amazing. It's generally accepted that on the sixth day everybody falls apart, like the sixth day is the hardest. That's the day they always bake brownies for everybody because they know they're going to have a hard time. I don't know what it is. A lot of emotion comes up by then and by the seventh or eighth day I always feel like my body is vibrating because I've just been so focused in this silence. So, yeah, when I get picked up at the end of the 10 days, your mouth is running like a million miles a minute right, because you haven't been speaking and you've been having a lot of really profound thoughts. So it's like you kind of go through that a little bit, but the high lasts quite a while.
Speaker 3:You really feel very in touch with who you are and who. I don't know what everything is. You know it feels very beautiful, it's pretty profound, although I met somebody once who went with. She had convinced her partner to go with her and you know men and women are in two different areas so they didn't really see each other until the end of the 10 days and you know she'd had all these big insights and she said how was it for you? And he said I rewired our whole house, like we're going to have the best house this time. He's been like doing all of these calculations and I understand that. I redecorated my whole apartment once, like my mind needed to go somewhere and I just like I had all of these color schemes and the way I wanted it to look, and it was just like I spent a good couple hours on that. So, yeah, your mind is a trickster. Like I spent a good couple hours on that.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, your mind is a trickster. It sounds like it was very transformative for you.
Speaker 3:Have you only done that once? No, I've done five of them. I'd like to go back. It's hard to find 10 days, you know, to block out in a life and it's, but it is. It's a difficult, a difficult. You know. I always tell people it's like the hardest thing I've ever done, but it's also the most rewarding yeah, that's so fascinating to me.
Speaker 2:Did you notice a difference over time? Like so we've done five, like the fifth one? Was it different compared to? Like after your third one?
Speaker 3:yeah, it really has to do with what you're going through in your life at the time, you know, and kind of where you are. The first one was really big for me because I had one of those big kind of dropping away of the self moments in it and it really set me on my path, I think, for spiritual practice. And then the second one was after I had gotten off the road for a year, and so that one I remember it being very nuts and bolts of just trying to remember myself, and then, yeah, other ones. It's like a great reset in your life, I guess I would say.
Speaker 2:I love that. Now I want to transition a tad, but I'm just curious did you face any fear or imposter syndrome of stepping on stage and performing?
Speaker 3:stage as much because for some reason, you know, since I was a really little kid, I just felt really comfortable on stage. Any opportunity when I was a kid to be on stage, I would be on stage, and I don't know why that is. I don't feel like I'm, you know, somebody who needs to be the center of attention, but for some reason stage has always been a very comfortable place for me. It wasn't so much about being on stage, it was more that I had started playing drums so late and everybody that I knew at that point had been playing for 15 years or 10 years or 15 years, and so for most of my career I felt like an imposter because I felt like I didn't do the things that most people did. I mean, my nephew now is 16 years old and he's in jazz band and marching band and orchestra in school. He's a drummer and he's getting that education that a lot of musicians get in school.
Speaker 3:So I always felt a bit of an imposter in drumming, but in a way it was also very freeing because I just kind of made my peace with okay, I'm always going to be the worst musician on stage and in any show that I'm at, because I will have been playing less than anybody else on stage. So just do what you can, do your best. And I didn't have to compete with anybody. I knew I'd lost. You know, there was no competition. I always knew I would lose because they'd been playing longer. So it was kind of free. I think maybe if I had learned when I was in high school then I would have been in competition with all of the other musicians who were coming up at the same time, but I didn't have any. I had no peers, so it was easy. Yeah, it relieved me of that feeling.
Speaker 2:Now did you feel relieved of that feeling like right away or over time?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think so. I think I did. I think I just felt like let me just do the best I can and hope that I don't embarrass everybody that they actually asked me to be here, you know. So I worked hard, you know, to try to be okay.
Speaker 2:So have you experienced any self-judgment from yourself on stage?
Speaker 3:Well, not on stage. On stage I feel pretty free and happy, but you know the feeling of not being good enough, not being worthy and having a very negative internal voice. In my life. That's been my big cross, that I really had to bear for many years. And now I see it as a way even though it was so painful to have that, in a way it was a bit of a gift because it did bring me to spiritual practice and therapy and all of these places to try to figure out myself.
Speaker 3:Why did I have a negative voice? Why did I think that I was not intrinsically good? Why did I think that if people really knew, they would see that I wasn't good or that I was bad? And I don't know where that voice came from, but it was pretty screaming in my head for a very long time. In fact, that was a big benefit of going to the meditation retreats. When you take a vow of silence, after about three days, all you hear is your voice, like a megaphone talking to you in your head. And that voice was very loud and I was like what the hell is that Like? Why I that's what I've been listening to. Why do I have to listen to that and where does it come from and how do I get rid of it? And that kind of set me on a seeking journey for many years to figure that out. Yeah, let go of that.
Speaker 2:That's amazing, though, that you were able to bring that awareness and then let it go. It took a while.
Speaker 3:It still rears its head sometimes. Yeah, mostly, it's mostly gone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but the silence, you think that helped.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think when we can see our thoughts, when we can really hear our thoughts, and then we can realize that we really can't about controlling thoughts, it's about seeing them and not reacting to them, and that was a big shift for me. For a long time, I thought that it was my job to control those things and get rid of them. And when I realized like, oh, now I don't have any control over those, they're just going to rise up and I'm just going to realize that they're telling me lies and they're doing that to try to keep me safe, but I don't need to listen to them, then things really shifted for me. Yeah, I think we hear a lot oh, you got to control your like, this is the way we control our mind, and I just don't think we can. I think that's a fallacy and it'll cause us a lot of pain trying.
Speaker 2:I get what you mean, so I'd love if we could transition into your book that you wrote and you could tell us a little bit about. Have you always planned on writing a book?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I thought I was going to write a whole bunch of books when I started playing music. I kind of stopped writing for a number of years and then writing kind of started coming back in my life. I started to have a blog and during the pandemic I kind of looked at the blog and I thought, you know, maybe this is a book. And I thought at the time, okay, I'll just find my favorite blog pieces and I'll put them together in a book. And then I was like actually no, you have to write a lot more and make it into a book, which I did. And the book is called From Bonham to Buddha and Back, and it's really about that. It's a memoir, it's about that process of finding drumming when I was older than most people do. And then it's also about what we've been talking about, about how meditation and drumming are connected and how I started to see the lessons I was learning on the drum throne as so similar to the lessons I was reading about in meditation books that I thought you know there aren't a lot of books about.
Speaker 3:Okay, so we sit for 10 minutes every morning and we meditate, but how does that affect our life? You know what happens in our life when we're in traffic and we see anger rising up in traffic or we haven't slept enough or we have to do something really difficult and there's all these obstacles in front of us. How does meditation help in those situations? I thought that I would write about being on the road and how I could see all of the mindfulness I did off of the road seeping into my road stories of having to drive all day and then get out of the car and unload the equipment and set it up and soundcheck and find dinner and then play a show and then break everything down and go to the hotel and wake up early and drive the next day. It's just, you know, on the road. It's an intense life and how does meditation help me in that? And maybe that would help other people see how meditation could help them in their lives, no matter what they're doing.
Speaker 2:That's beautiful. So you said you had planned on writing a lot of books, but now this is the only book you've written so far. Right, Do you see yourself writing more?
Speaker 3:I do. I have. There's two things that are kind of percolating in my head. So we'll see. I've been writing a lot of songs in the past few years. My output kind of shifted to songwriting. So I have a record coming out. I just put out a record. I have another one coming out at the end of May. So songwriting is really kind of after the book was done. That's what kind of grabbed me to do. So that's where I've been focusing a lot of my energy, that I'm playing shows and working as a spiritual counselor.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Now, as a spiritual counselor, how did you get into that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I've been thinking for a long time. I get to be a musician. I love being a musician, but I wish that I could do something that was a little more tangibly assisting other people. And so I took a two-year certification in contemplative psychotherapy so like Buddhist psychotherapy and at the end of that it was suggested to me that I go to investigate this shamanic program in Berkeley, california, and so I went to a course. The shamanic journey was the first course that I did, and when I walked into the class there were about 20 people in the class.
Speaker 3:I sat down and the drums came out and suddenly all these light bulbs came on in my head.
Speaker 3:Like, oh, wait a minute, like I think maybe I'm supposed to be here, like the drum is a spiritual instrument for me.
Speaker 3:The drum kit is and I never played, you know, a frame drum, but when that came out and I understood it you know all of the benefits of using that a meditation and journeying. Yeah, I felt like maybe my life had been bringing me to this place. I started studying with the teacher there the name of the school is the Sacred Stream and the teacher's name is Issa Gucciardi and she's developed a couple of wonderful modalities and she's developed a couple of wonderful modalities and one of them is called depth hypnosis, which and then she also teaches a form of shamanic counseling, using shamanic techniques in a therapeutic environment, and so I was certified as a shamanic counselor as well, and then I became a minister of the sacred stream and I got plant medicine certification so I can help people understand their plant medicine experiences and a couple of others wonderful healing modalities, and so I do that when I can to help people. Depth of Gnosis is a really wonderful therapy for people with PTSD, anxiety disorders and depression. So those are the kind of situations I work with.
Speaker 2:That's beautiful. It all seems so synchronistic.
Speaker 3:Doesn't it, it does, it does Strange. Yeah, I know, I know, it's funny.
Speaker 2:That's so beautiful though.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know I'm so grateful for drums. You know, I feel like drums have given me so much in my life. You know, I don't know I'm really I love drumming have experienced at some point in their life.
Speaker 2:A lot of us have experienced multiples, but I'm curious if you've experienced a big, your biggest aha moment where you shifted internally with things around. You shifted an aha moment.
Speaker 3:Let's see, boy, I feel like I've had many of them. Um, I've had many of them, you know. I think it was when I realized that there was a part of me that was really happy and peaceful and that I didn't need to do anything else, I didn't need to keep striving. You know, most of my life I was hell bent on the future, right. I always had things that I, you know, I'm an Aries, right? So I'm always moving forward. I'm always going towards something you know, always feeling like there's something else, there's something necessary, there's something more I need to heal from or learn from, or get better at, or be better or be a better person. And I feel like there was a moment and I can't even tell you when it was where I really just was here and I felt like all of that fell away. And I remember saying to some of my friends I feel like I've lost my ambition. And it's funny, because when you say that to people, especially in America, where ambition is what we're all like, you know, it's our forward movement, it's our energy, our ideal, in a way, to say, that is almost like a sacrilege, like wait a minute, you don't have anything you're working towards or anything. And it wasn't that I didn't have things that I was working on musically, or goals or things that I'd like to see happen. It was more that I lost that kind of nebulous feeling of moving towards something that I always had to be moving, and instead realized that I could just sit in appreciation and enthusiasm and that now my forward movement was out of just a gratitude and enthusiasm for what was present.
Speaker 3:I feel like I'm a different human being after I made that realization. I feel like I changed everything. I feel like I started to be able to say I'm happy. And even that feels hard for a lot of people to say. It feels like we shouldn't be allowed that or something, especially when we look in the world and there's so much suffering and it's like, oh, if you're happy, you don't say it, because how come you get to be happy and there's so much suffering?
Speaker 3:And yet when I let all of that noise go and just be in the center of myself, in the center of this moment, like I'm happy, I'm grateful, and yeah, there are things. You know finances are always a catastrophe and you know I don't have anything of value and you know that stuff. But like all, all of that it's completely blows away in the wind of being present and happy. So I can't tell you when that moment was, but I remember coming home one day and being on the top of this hill and suddenly it just falling on me like oh my gosh, I'm a completely different human, like I see the world and myself completely differently now. And it was through the work that I did the shamanic work, I did. The depth hypnosis work, I did. The personal work I did. The years of meditation all brought me to that.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Amanda. Thanks for the great questions. I really, really love talking to you.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh. Of course I love talking with you too. Now have you heard of a man named Jay Shetty?
Speaker 3:Ah yes, who is?
Speaker 2:that he's an author formal monk. He's got a podcast called On Purpose. I'm a big fan. It's okay if you're not, but he has a podcast and he ends his podcast with two segments and I stole them and I incorporate them in my podcast, so I give him a little bit of credit of credit. The first segment is the many sides to us and there's five questions and they need to be answered in one word each. Okay. What is one word someone who was meeting you for the first time would use to describe you as Smiley? What is one word someone who knows you extremely well would you use to describe you as Goofy? What is one word you'd use to describe yourself Happy? What is one word that, if someone didn't like you or agree with your mindset, would you use to describe you as Flaky? What is one word you're trying to embody right now?
Speaker 3:Gratitude.
Speaker 2:Second segment is the final five, and these can be answered in a sentence what is the best advice you've heard or received?
Speaker 3:To follow your enthusiasm.
Speaker 2:Why is that the best advice?
Speaker 3:Because our enthusiasm is our. It's connected to our life force, our creative force, our life energy, and I think that's connected to our purpose, our reason for being and the thing that will bring us to our highest self, our happiest self.
Speaker 2:What is the worst advice you've heard or received?
Speaker 3:Worst advice that it has to do something with money, that money is the be-all and end-all of life, that things and money are the purpose of life.
Speaker 2:What is something that you used to value that you no longer value?
Speaker 3:I think it's not that I don't value it, but maybe I have a different relationship with physical beauty.
Speaker 2:If you could describe what you would want your legacy to be, as if someone was reading it, what would you want it to say?
Speaker 3:I would like to think that I inspired people to find what makes them happy.
Speaker 2:With that, if you could create one law in the world that everyone had to follow, what would it be? And I want to know why Everyone had to follow what would it be?
Speaker 3:And I want to know why the law would be to. Let's see, how would you put it, gosh? I mean, I'm thinking of political laws, but I guess it doesn't have to be political law. It can just be a law which would be to see everyone as a part of your family, to see everyone you meet as someone who you cared for the way that you would care for somebody in your own family, because I think we all are kind of family, to be empathetic and compassionate. I don't know how you would word that law, but yeah, anything like that.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for speaking with me, Clem. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Amanda. Thanks so much. Yeah, of course. And where is the best place for listeners to connect with you?
Speaker 3:And where is the best place for listeners to connect with you? You can go to clemthegreatcom, and every aspect of me is there.
Speaker 2:I will link that in the show notes and I do like to give it back to the guests.
Speaker 3:Any final words of wisdom you want to leave the listeners with no. Thank you for listening to all of this and I hope everyone has a great evening day. Wherever they are, they see the world with a little light.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much, clem, thank you Amanda, and thank you guys for tuning in to another episode of Mando's Mindset. In case no one told you today, I'm proud of you, I'm booting for you and you got this, as always. If you enjoyed the show, I would really appreciate it if you would leave me a five-star rating, leave a review and share it with anyone you think would benefit from this. And don't forget you are only one mindset. Shift away from shifting your life. Thanks guys, until next time.
