For the love of kirtan and in dedication to my teachers & students I'm starting this blog. If you care- more info about me can be found on www.Raghunath.org
Kirtan is the singing of Divine Names Of God (or gods) with love & with joy and is at the heart of bhakti yoga or the science of cultivating divinity in our lives. Actually -we already are divine but according Vedic literarture of ancient India,we forget and we act on our baser material desires which never fulfill our heart.
Part of our healing in yoga is the shedding of the false ego. ahamkara (false ego) is this force field around us-it's a projection of who we want people to think we are. It's a costume. When it's exaggerated people use the term, "pretentious" to describe us. But there is a real us. There is a genuine ego underneath the bravado. That vulnerable self is called the jiva or how we say in the west. "the soul". My mother always taught me that we have a soul in our bodies. Basically we're a body with a soul. The Vedic paradigm is different. We ARE a soul that has a body. One of my teachers in India stated that even a newbie (he didn't use that term) can experiences the highest limbs of yoga during kirtan.
If you're new to chanting it may seem embarrassing to sit around with a bunch of friends and sing. You may not even have such a great voice and here's some yoga teacher asking you to sing out loud-perhaps the first time since grade school national anthem at an assembly. Immediately you re-coil. Your mind says "oh can't we just do yoga?"
First of all even if you've merely come to yoga for health & well being-even if the chanting doesn't give you "transcendence" as promised by Vedic litertature-singing is downright healthy. This has been proven again and again. (go ahead-google health and singing) But here's where it gets interesting. When you sing...publicly, especially if you're not that good of a singer-you really have to let down your false ego. It immediately starts to cut through your false ego! You can witness this. You become vulnerable. This is a good thing for a yogi. To be vulnerable-to be open. To be authentic. To be genuine. We start to refine our attention and our intention.
I'm writing this not as an observer-but as a practitioner. I can actually feel kirtan having such an effect on me-from the first time I did it. it was truly magical. Now when i lead kirtans-i'm often forced to close my eyes. I do this not to look "deep" but to zone out my "entertaining nature" and keep it as a private prayer.
On this site i'm going to publish some great video clips of my favorite kirtan leaders or kirtaniyas and discuss it as a traditional art form as I've studied it as well as a living practical positive joyous meditation.
www.raghunath.org
www.advancedyogastudy.com
www.hometoindia.com
