Shaking it off

NEW YORK -- Primitive pounding pulsates through Central Park, vibrating through the ground and up through the chest until it feels like your lungs have become drums. People from around the park drift to the source of the infectious beat, which turns out to be the weekly Djembe -- a jam session with African instruments.\nAs the music troupe plays at an exhausting pace, New Yorkers are stripping off extraneous clothing to dance to the music, taking time out to focus on sensations other than honking horns and neon lights.\nThaemus Maharriyamee, a spiritual healer, who looked like a cross between Daddy Warbucks and Yul Brenner, spent hours stepping in time to the music and said Sept. 11 sparked a spirit and unity in our country that had dissipated over past years.\n"This is a chance to get natural and get in touch with the spiritual," said drummer 'Jungle Boy.' "This is America, and people need to relax and heal. It's an opportunity to take the stress off."\nDjembe is not an elite party by any means -- it's a blur of work suits, Jamaican headbands, shell necklaces, married couples, braless women, comb-overs, sweat stains, dreds, tie die, rolled-up pants and both professional and rhythmically-challenged dancers.\n"I know how to shake, but it takes more than rhythm to do what they're doing," said 9-year-old Jazz Hooks, Jr., displaying the only shimmy in his repertoire.\nEven bystanders are at least tapping their feet in time and beaming at the dancers' flailing limbs and carefree abandonment.\nRonald Derisca expelled cigarette smoke into the dusk air as he said in his Haitian accent "I think it's great. I watch them from time to time every year -- it's happy people."\nSome of Djembe's regulars say they've been waiting all year for the temperature to get warm again so they could come out and dance their worries away.\nJazz Allen Hooks describes it as a multicultural "mecca" where people of every age, race and culture come together.\n"Music is universal -- it's a form of therapy," Hooks said. "You don't care about anything. You're here to have fun and communicate through movements. Communication can bring about understanding and trust, and everything else doesn't even matter."\nMaharriyamee said using this type of meditation can help people to see beyond the tragedy.\n"I think through a resurrection of the spirits, we learned to take the positive from it and not the negative," Maharriyamee said. "It was a great purification for our country. It taught us humility and compassion, and if we're wise, we'll learn from it"