by Sarah Bowen
First, you’ll likely be singing in Sanskrit (since the practice originated in India over 2,500 years ago). Second, no one will laugh at you for getting the lyrics (or tone) wrong. Sometimes the words are provided on paper or appear on a screen. More likely, you’ll follow along by ear. But don’t worry, you don’t need to know Sanskrit. Just repeat what you hear. The vibration of the sound is more important than the meaning of the words. (If you develop a kirtan practice, the understanding will come—a core set of mantras, phrases, names, and words are often repeated.) You can even try just humming along to each tone. The rhythmic vibration of the sounds can calm your mind, help reduce stress, and provide more balance to your nervous system.
Author Anodea Judith has a good deal to say on the power of sound on our bodies, in her amazingly thorough book Eastern Body, Western Mind: “We experience resonating wave forms in many ways. When we listen to a chorus of voices or a troupe of drummers, we are immersed in a field of resonance that vibrates every cell in our body. Such a field influences the subtler vibration of consciousness and we feel pleasure, expansiveness, and rhythmic connection with the pulse of life itself.” Have you ever chanted “Om” at the end of a yoga class? Kirtan is like that sound immersion—multiplied.
Here in the U.S., most conversations about kirtan eventually contain the name Krishna Das, the “Rockstar of Yoga,” so dubbed when nominated for a 2013 Grammy Award. This nickname is well deserved. Krishna Das’s life-changing 1970s journey to India led directly to the popularization of the chant style in the States.** In his memoir, Chants of a Lifetime: Searching for a Heart of Gold, Krishna Das notes that one of the goals of kirtan is to experience the Oneness, the pure awareness, that connects all of us: “We can’t think our way out of feeling desperate, but when we do a practice, the walls we’ve constructed around our hearts begin to get broken down. We become more ourselves, not less. What do we lose except fear and unhappiness? Everything that has held us back or limited us begins to disappear from our lives. We become peace.”
HOW IT WORKS
1. Determine your optimal listening set-up. This is about sound—so you’ll need speakers or headphones connected to a device that can connect to the internet.
2. Find a space where you can make noise without offending anyone. (Full house? A parked car makes an excellent listening chamber.)
3. Go to spiritual-rebel.com/kirtan, and select a piece of music from the links list.
4. Get your chant on. The tracks include a chorus of imaginary friends who will help you along. Close your eyes. Meld into the sound. Sing along as you feel comfortable. The longer you chant, the more likely you are to enter into the vibrations.
5. Notice and reflect. After the song is finished, sit for a bit in silence. Notice how your body feels. Notice what’s going on in your mind. Use the Reflections & Ahas pages in the back of the book to jot any profound thoughts.
REBELLIOUS VARIATIONS
Noise check: Take a quick inventory of what you audibly digest on a typical day. What is helpful? What inadvertently might be adding stress, anger, or diverting your focus?
Full-body Oms: Sit in a comfortable position. Picture the cosmos at its inception, before everything we know today existed. Now, chant the three syllables represented by the mysterious OM (pronounced A-U-M) slowly, letting each syllable transform into the next:
• AAAA – Feel this in your abdomen.
• UUUU – Notice the vibration of your voice move up to your chest.
• MMMM – Let the sound pulse in your throat and on your lips.
• Repeat three (or more) times.
Mary had a little Kriya: Clinical research on a specific exercise called Kirtan Kriya suggests that practicing it for just 12 minutes a day can improve cognition, ease depression, and activate parts of the brain that are essential for memory. Softly chant “Saa, Taa, Naa, Maa” (which represents your highest self or true identity) using the first four tones from the “Mary Had a Little Lamb” song. With each note, touch each thumb to a subsequent fingertip. (For Saa, touch your thumb to your index fingertip. Then for Taa, your middle finger, and so on.) Repeat for:
• First two minutes: Sing normally.
• Minutes 3-4: Sing in a whisper.
• Minutes 5-8: Say the syllables silently in your mind.
• Minutes 9-10: Sing in a whisper.
• Minutes 11-12: Sing normally.
Take a deep inhale, stretch your hands above your head, and then sweep them down and out slowly as you exhale.
DISCOVER DEEPLY
• Download the Insight Timer meditation app for access to kirtan on your phone. At the Explore screen, enter kirtan in the search field.
• Read Chants of a Lifetime: Searching for a Heart of Gold (with CD) by Krishna Das, or check out his Chai’n’Chat podcasts at krishnadas.com.
• Read Eastern Body, Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System as a Path to the Self by Anodea Judith.
• Learn to play kirtan songs on harmonium or guitar at bhaktibreakfastclub.com.
NOTES
* Kirtan derives from the Sanskrit word for praise. However, kirtan differs from standard hymns. Rather than telling a story or moral lesson, kirtan is about sinking into a praiseful feeling.
** Devotional chanting has been embedded in Indian spiritualities since the proverbial “Primordial Om” of creation (or at least for the last few thousand years). Kirtan in the U.S. owes its original roots to Paramahansa Yogananda, who led 3,000 people in chant at Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1923 as part of the first migration of Eastern thought to the West. More than 40 years later, the Beatles’ George Harrison launched the “Hare Krishna Mantra” onto the airwaves and into the hippie culture. As yoga culture swept through New York and California in the 1980s, chant gained popularity. Krishna Das’s melding of pop, rock, and gospel with traditional Indian devotions took hold in the 1990s, fueling modern kirtan popularity. These days, kirtan is an integral part of most yoga and music festivals.
Wonder-filled Wednesday
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WEEK 2: SEE THE INVISIBLE
Alexander Calder’s gigantic Five Swords sculpture sits in the fields of Storm King Art Center, nestled among the hills of the Hudson Valley. Created in 1976, the imposing, yet graceful, structure is constructed out of steel and painted a bright orange-red. Calder is one of my favorite rebels. Sure, he may not seem so now, but in the 1930s he was downright revolutionary, inventing the art mobile: a wire sculpture of multiple independent pieces that rotate gently in a breeze or with a light touch. Today they’re everywhere.
But his mammoth metal work does not, obviously, move in the breeze. Which is terrific, because it gives people the chance to do the exploring. As I walk around Five Swords, each step provides a slightly different perspective. Because of its 3-Dness, it is impossible to see the entire thing at one time. I’m just too small in scale. It soars over 18 feet into the sky and is around 29 feet at its base. So I give up on trying to see the whole, and focus on what I can see from each shift in viewpoint: What if I crouch down low? What if I step back? Look what happens when the clouds pass! Look at the play of light and shadow!
What I love about the Storm King Art Center—and frankly any sculpture garden or art museum—is choosing which pieces to engage with, and how to engage with them. Plus, with art, I don’t feel compelled to have to explain rationally everything I am feeling or thinking. My husband is an artist, and I always laugh when people ask him, “What does this painting mean?” He’ll often get a perplexed look on his face and be unable to answer. Not because the painting doesn’t have meaning, but because the interpretation transcends words.
We humans are always trying to describe things using language. But when it comes to art—and by art, I include not only painting, photography, and sculpture, but also architecture, music, poetry, dance, and so on—words pale in comparison to the original creation. A gorgeous sunset photograph looks neat on Instagram, but it rarely looks or feels the same a
s the actual sky experience did.
It dawns on me that Calder’s Five Swords is what divinity is like. I can never see the whole—it’s just too immense, and I’m too small in scale. Instead, I interact with pieces, each one giving me a different perspective. We’re all just moving around this thing, seeing it through our own individual eyes. Accordingly, we each have preferences. You may like the sculpture from the left side. I may like it from the right. You may want your spirituality to feel more grounded. I may want to be more transcendent. (And we might switch those roles next week.)
Spirituality is like art—there is a world of difference between studying it and experiencing it. Predictably, artists agree. Wassily Kandinsky said, “Color is a power which directly influences the soul.” Pablo Picasso offered, “The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” These masters of the visual remind us that art is about more than what we see. Yet so often, we whip through life, spending only seconds looking, missing the opportunity to engage with the wonder. Especially when it comes to art.
Consider the Louvre. As the largest art museum in the world, it covers 782,910 square feet of space and contains 38,000 pieces of art. The National Museum of China is just slightly smaller in size, but its permanent collection includes over 1 million pieces. Closer to home, The Met in New York features more than 2 million items. When visiting, we speed through, glancing for a second or two at each piece, perhaps longer for the most famous ones. We miss the spiritual moments hiding in the paint.
Spirituality and art have been connected since humans started drawing on cave walls. Sacred art appears around the globe, from thangka (sacred Tibetan Buddhist painting), sand mandalas, Islamic calligraphy, Byzantine mosaics, and murti statues of India to the influential paintings of the Renaissance masters and rebelliousness of contemporary outsider artists.
Visio Divina (divine seeing) is a style of looking at art from a sacred perspective. Traditionally, this practice used religious icons, but many of us may not be particularly comfortable with overtly religious imagery. Growing up Protestant, I developed a discomfort around religious art and icons in particular. I just wasn’t quite sure what to with them. Were icons the same thing as forbidden idols? Why did they seem to stare so intently at me? What exactly are you supposed to do with them?*
With some investigation, I learned that icon is the Greek word for image. Interestingly, icons are “read” rather than “viewed,” since they usually illustrate a piece of a sacred book. Thus, an icon is a visual interpretation of sacred words. Icon painters are trained through lineages, learning specific symbols, figures, and styles. In traditional icons, there is not a particular light source—so you won’t see shadows. Instead, the light permeates the entire piece, suggesting the uncreated light of divinity. Usually the focal point is a face, with eyes designed to gaze at you, as you look back. The mouths are closed, inviting us to stare in silence.
The goal of Visio Divina is not to be just a drive-by art viewer, but to build a relationship with the image through meditative gazing. This practice can be expanded way beyond traditional religious icons, of course. Art museums, sculpture gardens, and illustrated books can be excellent places to engage in a sacred moment.
For example, in his stunning art book Yoga: The Secret of Life, Francesco Mastalia captures a mystical state of being through the 19th-century labor-intensive—and incredibly fragile—photography technique known as the collodion process. His antique camera is a sight to behold, standing tall on three legs, made from gorgeous wood framing a black, expanding accordion. The process begins by pouring an emulsion and light-sensitive salts onto a sheet of black glass. Rather ceremonially, the plate is then bathed in a solution of silver nitrate to render it sensitive to light. The plate is then inserted into the camera; with the subject holding perfectly still, the lens cap is carefully removed from the antique brass lens, and the plate is exposed to light for up to 10 seconds. Next, the glass plate is developed. Originally appearing as a negative, the plate is immersed into a fixing solution, and as it clears, the image magically comes to life.
Through this intricate process, Francesco’s incredible photographs are not just instant snaps, they are sacred art. Since the light exposure is longer than that of our ultra-fast modern cameras, collodion-process images capture the play of light, matter, and motion in a distinctive way. It’s as if a twinkling of divinity has been caught—the invisible made visible. Francesco suggests, “The charismatic force of the collodion process propels us into the union of a known and unknown world.”
Francesco described for me why he thinks this is: “The world is constantly moving, nothing is ever stopped. In the origins of photography, they always used time to capture an image. And now we just use a fraction of a second. We’re just freezing a moment in time, and so we’re unable to capture the energy that takes place over a 10-second exposure.” Eventually, our conversation headed towards the metaphysical: “Light is energy,” Francesco told me. “There’s energy coming from the sun, which comes down to the Earth, which I feel comes through the subject, which comes through my lens onto the glass plate through me to the person who is viewing it. And it is all just one exchange of energy. It’s the flow of life.”
He hits on an important point here. Often, in the West, yoga is lumped into the category of exercise or wellness. (And I admit, I spend a great deal of time each day walking around in comfy “yoga” pants, which are honestly also my sleepy pants. The irony of that is not lost on me, since the guys who invented yoga didn’t even wear pants.)
Though it is true that yogic poses can have amazing benefits for the body, the true spirit of yoga is connection to [x]. The postures use the body to prepare the mind for spirit. Francesco’s work helps remind us that the word yoga means union and connection. In fact, for many who practice yoga as a spiritual discipline, the most important pose is sitting on your butt in meditation, connected to something bigger than ego.
So I wasn’t surprised when Francesco noted that many of the 108 yogis and yoginis featured in his book did not want to be photographed in a challenging asana (pose), but rather in the act of yoga as spiritual connection. In my humble opinion, those photos are the most compelling. Rather than having the “Wow, that guy is super bendy!” reaction I have to the full-body photos, when I gaze at Francesco’s close-up portrait images, I feel that I’m connecting to the divine energy coming through the sitters’ eyes. As with our first Sangha Sunday practice, I get the feeling that I am relating to something vaster than me. I enter into a relationship with the subject, the photographer, and the energy flowing through the exchange, in visual union with the invisible.
Today, dip into the age-old practice of divine seeing, using your modern device, putting it to a wonder-filled purpose.
HOW IT WORKS
1. Grab your phone or computer and “silence all alerts.”
2. Close your eyes for a moment and tune in to the flow of life force within yourself. Breathe to get your flow going. Recall Week 1’s Mindful Monday gazing.
3. Go to spiritual-rebel.com/visio.
4. Select an image from the links list.
5. Gently direct your gaze to the image, which will serve as your icon for today.
6. Approach the figure with reverence and openheartedness, and gaze upon it in silent meditation.
7. Next, explore the icon. Move your eyes around for a while. Focus on different parts. Alternate between softening your gaze and sharpening it. Look for the invisible.
8. When your practice feels complete, close your eyes and sit for a few more moments in silence.
9. Record any reflections or aha!s. Note how your mind and body feel.
REBELLIOUS VARIATIONS
Get into the groove: Add some Audio Divina to your gazing, recycling yesterday’s kirtan hits or a favorite track from your music collection.
Art immersion: Head out to an art museum. Give yourself permission to spend an obscene amount of time in front of any single piece. You may
even vicariously impact those around you to slow down (and get a bonus chat from that nice security guard).
Go outrageously orthodox: Check out local religious stores or scour Etsy for a classically-styled icon. On a recent trip to Greece, I visited a studio. Passing by Jesus, Mary, and an inexhaustible pile of saints, I found one of my favorite badasses: Mary Magdalene. Clearly, I’ve overcome any early Protestant icon angst, as she sits on a shelf in my writing den.
Make it personal: Draw or paint your own sacred image. Consider people who have been influential in your life. New Mexico iconographer Fr. William Hart (“Bill”) McNichols includes in his portfolio contemporary saints such as LGBTQ+ movement inspiration Matthew Shepard and peace activists Philip and Daniel Berrigan. And very close to home (actually in my house), Sean Bowen creates figurative pop-art portraits of iconic people who have influenced his own journey, including Black Elk, Bob Dylan, and Martin Luther King Jr. (And he painted me a damn fine Princess Leia that I like to pretend is my portrait.)
DISCOVER DEEPLY
• Read Yoga: The Secret of Life by Francesco Mastalia.
• Take an iconography writing workshop.
• Read Image to Insight: The Art of William Hart McNichols by John D. Dadosky and William Hart McNichols.
• Read Mother of God Similar to Fire by Mirabai Starr and William Hart McNichols.
• Watch Ron Fricke’s Samsara documentary chockfull of stunning sacred art and architecture from around the globe.
• Read Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeline L’Engle.
NOTES
* For those of you who struggle with the terms idols and icons, note that we are not engaging in this exercise to worship the images that we are gazing upon. Instead, we use the images as pointers for connecting with something deep within or that which we consider greater than ourselves.