Yoga + Joyful Living : Yoga Rock Stars

Yoga Rock Stars

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Yoga Rock Stars
A Special Report by Anna Dubrovsky

There’s a rave-like atmosphere in the ballroom of a Florida hotel and a group of musicians onstage, but this gathering of hundreds isn’t a party or performance. It’s a spiritual practice. The yoga conference participants singing and dancing late into the night are engaged in bhakti yoga, the yoga of joyful devotion to God.

Bhakti yoga isn’t a recent import. Many Westerners got their first taste in the 1960s, when shaven-headed Hare Krishna devotees took a bhakti practice called kirtan to the streets. Kirtan is the chanting of God’s names and attributes, often in call-and-response fashion. In 1969, Beatles guitarist George Harrison produced a recording of the Hare Krishna mantra, and bhakti debuted on Britain’s Top of the Pops. Around the same time, former Harvard psychology professor Richard Alpert returned from India with a new name—Ram Dass—and the message that psychedelics were poor substitutes for divine love. He taught ancient Hindu chants to hippies.

Recent years have seen another surge of Western interest in bhakti yoga and particularly devotional chanting. Longtime “kirtan wallahs” such as Jai Uttal and Krishna Das (Americans both) have graduated from living rooms to concert venues that seat many hundreds, achieving the status of rock stars in the yoga community. These days, it’s rare to find a yoga conference without communal chanting on the program. The Omega Institute’s annual “Ecstatic Chant” weekend grew so popular that this year the retreat center scheduled two chant-a-thons. There are kirtan camps for those seeking in-depth study and kirtan ringtones for cell phones. The Canadian music company that manages Avril Lavigne and Sarah McLachlan recently signed half a dozen chant artists to its label. “It’s a bull market,” quips Shyamdas, who has led kirtan for a quarter of a century.

Read More of this article at Yoga+ Joyful Living’s website

Anna Dubrovsky is a contributing editor of Yoga+. Last year, after returning from seven months of yoga study in Chennai, India, she settled in Pittsburgh, where she also teaches yoga.

Spirit Voyage Artist’s Featured in this Article:
Snatam Kaur

Click to See Snatam Kaur's Profile

Snatam Kaur’s day begins at a time when many musicians are heading to bed. At 4 a.m., she and her husband begin morning sadhana, two-and-a-half hours of Kundalini Yoga and chanting and prayer in the Sikh tradition. When she’s on tour, they’re joined by bandmates and crew. “As an artist, a lot of my inspiration comes at that time, a lot of the tunes and ideas for future albums,” says Snatam, who has churned out six solo albums since 2002. “It’s my well that I draw from.” Snatam’s parents turned to Sikhism shortly after she was born. She learned kirtan from her mother and musical improvisation from her father, a former manager for the Grateful Dead. Her kirtans include Gurmukhi chants drawn from Sikh scriptures and English aphorisms composed by her spiritual teacher, Yogi Bhajan, who brought Kundalini Yoga to the West in the 1960s. Between chants, she teaches yoga and meditation. “I look at each concert as a full experience of healing. The words that we share are considered to be a technology of transformation—almost like opening up a medicine cabinet.”

Home Base: Espanola, New Mexico
Website: www.snatamkaur.com
Can’t Miss: Snatam will be among the musicians performing from the world’s most mystical sites as part of Project-Peace on Earth, a globally telecast event scheduled for September 2009. www.project-peaceonearth.org
Coming Soon: She will release a children’s album that includes “Feeling Good,” a song Snatam wrote at 15 and rediscovered while flipping through old journals. An accompanying DVD will feature an interactive yoga class for children.
Click Here for Snatam Kaur’s Music

Dave Stringer

Click to see Dave Stringer Profile

Dave Stringer didn’t go to India in 1990 to find a guru. He went because he was broke and couldn’t refuse a job shooting films for the first Siddha Yoga ashram. “All the images of people sitting in meditation ‘blissed out’ were actually a turnoff
for me rather than an enticement,” he says. At the ashram in Ganeshpuri, the skeptic became an enthusiast in short order. “The experience of chanting, which was at first total nonsense to me, was strangely compelling, not only musically but in terms of how I felt—completely ecstatic,” says Stringer, a trained jazz musician. About a decade after returning to Los Angeles, he traded his career in film editing for one in kirtan. “I don’t ask people who come to my kirtans to believe in it. I ask them to suspend their disbelief for a long enough time to give it a go and see what happens.”

Home Base: Los Angeles, California
Website: www.davestringer.com
Can’t Miss: Stringer will lead chanting at the Big Island Retreat with Ram Dass and friends in Pahoa, Hawaii, Nov. 5–10, 2008. www.ramdass.org
Coming Soon: His fifth album is scheduled for release in September. Stringer’s spring 2009 tour will be recorded for a live album to be released the following fall.
Click Here for Dave Stringer’s Music

Also featured in this article:
Krishna Das: Bhakti With a Dash of Blues
Deva Premal & Miten: At Home in the World
Wah!: “If It’s Playful, I’m There.”
Jai Uttal: In the Footsteps of the Minstrels
Seán Johnson
Wade Imre Morissette
David Newman aka Durga Das
Shyamdas
Benjy and Heather Wertheimer, aka Shantala

The Neurology of Ecstasy

I would like to share some very cool work that Dave Stringer is doing in the field of measuring brainwave activity and shifts in collective consciousness during the course of a group kirtan/chant session.

For those of you unfamiliar with Dave, he is an amazing musician and visual artist. For the past 10 years he has been recording and performing kirtan around the world…in fact he has likely seen the insides of more yoga studios than anybody on the planet. There is an energy and dynamism to his music that is unlike anything I have ever experienced. Spirit Voyage had the privilege to work with Dave on his last recording, Divas & Devas, and continues to support him as he shares his unique style of kirtan with growing audiences from Boulder, Colorado to Sydney, Australia and all points in between.

Dave is currently working with a team of scientists and technicians to mount an exhibition at a number of prominent art institutions in 2009. He plans to equip a crowd of people who are chanting together with wireless EEG headsets. Summing their brainwaves together, he will obtain a signal that can be said to represent the collective consciousness. He will then use the shifts in that signal to drive changes in various media, with the intention of enhancing the effects of the experience. Essentially, he will create a crowd-driven biofeedback loop.

Specifically, Dave will be working with a call and response form of chanting such as Kirtan. He is particularly interested in changes in the brain activity both during and after chanting and how the brain wave patterns of people in groups tend to synchronize, and what happens subsequent to that entrainment.

From Dave:

“Art has always had the capacity to bring people together in a unified experience. Yoga has always had the objective of knowing and mastering the mind. We are gesturing toward a future in which art will be used explicitly toward these ends, using people’s brainwaves as the medium.”

The Spirit Voyage team is very excited about this project and I will be sure to pass along reports from the field as Dave delves deeper into the experiment.

I would definitely encourage everyone to check Dave out next time he is in your town. I know he will be performing tomorrow night (Friday, July 18th) at Exhale in Venice, California as well as several other cities throughout California later this month. Beyond that you will have to check his tour schedule – the man is constantly on the move.

Ditta