By Jennice Vilhauer Ph.D. — 2018
Discover how 12 minutes a day can improve how you think and feel.
Read on www.psychologytoday.com
CLEAR ALL
Want to energize your spiritual life? Whether you’re melding your voice with a hundred others in traditional call-and-response or chanting mantras in your bedroom as a devotional prelude to meditation, kirtan can be a powerful and surprisingly effective form of spiritual practice.
Yoga is on fire in the West, and so it kirtan, or yogic chanting. Kirtan combines music and mantra — words and sounds that vibrate at the highest level of awareness. It is an effortless and joyful way to meditate.
An American kirtan revolution turns chanting God's name into something hip as well as holy.
As yoga has become increasingly popular in the United States, so has the ancient practice of kirtan (KEER-tahn), or yogic chanting. The call-and-response format of chanting is a type of yoga in itself and has many of the mind-calming benefits of a yoga class or sitting meditation.
In the 1990s, American musician Dave Stringer went to India for a pay cheque and came back with a calling. Hired by an Indian guru to make videos, he was tasked with translating the philosophy of yoga and the music of yoga, known as kirtan, into film.
Across the country and around the world, yoga practitioners are chanting in foreign tongues, including Sanskrit, Hindi, and Gurmukhi. They’re even chanting in English.
Anjula: For you who don’t know, Krishna Das is known as the rock star of Yoga. He’s a kirtan singer. Could you just break down a little what kirtan is? Krishna Das: Kirtan is a chanting practice. It’s a spiritual practice, a meditational practice, but it involves singing and chanting.
Kirtan master Krishna Das talks about what happens when he chants, what the mantras mean, and why sound is a powerful medium on the spiritual path.
When one hears a chant like Aum Namoh Bhagvate Vasudevaya, it is not a Grammy award ceremony that comes to mind as the setting of such chanting; but that is precisely what Krishna Das has been able to do—take cherished age-old Indian kirtans to a global stage such as the Grammys.
Krishna Das leads kirtan (chants invoking the name of God) all over the world. After meeting Ram Dass in 1968, he went on to the life-altering epiphany of being with their guru, Neem Karoli Baba, Maharaj-ji.