Most of us think of meditation as a quiet practice.
Sit still. Close your eyes. Try to quiet the mind.
But some of yoga’s oldest contemplative practices do something quite different.
They give the mind sound.
Mantra has been used within Indian contemplative traditions for thousands of years, not simply because certain words are meaningful, but because yoga recognised something important: the mind is deeply influenced by what it repeatedly attends to.
Rather than fighting thought with more thought, mantra gives attention somewhere to land.
And when mantra is sung together, as it is in Kirtan, something else happens. The practice moves beyond the individual. Breath, rhythm, repetition, vibration and many voices begin to become one experience.
The mind takes the shape of what it repeatedly returns to
Yoga has always been deeply interested in attention.
Where does the mind go when left alone? What keeps pulling it away? And what happens when we deliberately give it something to return to, again and again?
This is part of the intelligence of mantra.
A mantra is repeated. Then repeated again. And again.
At first, you may still be thinking about dinner, tomorrow, the person beside you or whether you’re singing in tune.
But the mantra keeps giving you somewhere to come back to.
Eventually, you don’t have to work quite so hard to stay with it.
The repetition begins to carry you.
This is one of the things yoga understood long before we had our current language for attention and habit: what we repeatedly give our attention to becomes easier for the mind to return to.
Mantra isn’t necessarily asking you to stop thinking.
It’s changing what the mind is practising.
But mantra isn’t only happening in the mind
This is where the practice becomes particularly interesting.
You don’t just think a mantra in Kirtan.
You breathe it. You vocalise it. You hear it. You feel the vibration of your own voice. You hear the voices around you. You enter a rhythm and repeat it, sometimes for several minutes at a time.
In other words, your whole system becomes involved in the meditation.
Yoga has long treated sound as more than something the ears perceive. In yogic philosophy, nāda refers to sound or vibration, and traditions of nāda yoga explore sound itself as a pathway for awareness.
That gives us a very different way of thinking about chanting.
The sound isn’t simply background music for meditation.
The sound is the meditation.
There is something different about doing it together
You can practise mantra alone. Japa, the repetition of mantra, is traditionally practised in many ways, including silently or softly with a mala.
Kirtan brings another dimension: other people.
One voice begins. Others respond.
Gradually, the distinction between my voice and everyone else’s becomes harder to hold onto. You don’t need to sound good. In fact, that’s almost beside the point.
Your voice becomes part of something larger.
And perhaps this is part of why Kirtan can feel so different from sitting alone trying to meditate.
You don’t have to create stillness by yourself.
The rhythm holds you.
The mantra holds your attention.
The breath carries the sound.
The voices around you carry it with you.
For a little while, there may be less room for the constant narration of me.
And that is very much yoga.
Yoga has never only been about silence
We often associate spiritual practice with becoming quieter, calmer and more inward.
Yoga offers another possibility.
Sometimes we find quiet through stillness.
Sometimes we find it through movement.
And sometimes we sing until the noise that was occupying the mind is no longer the loudest thing in the room.
Perhaps that is one of the beautiful paradoxes of Kirtan:
We use sound to discover the silence underneath it.
Experience Kirtan in Manly
We’d love to create a regular home for Kirtan in Manly.
Our hope is to make this a monthly gathering where people can come together to practise mantra, sing, listen, connect and experience the unmistakable medicine of voices coming together.
Our next Manly Kirtan is this Saturday 12 September, 7–8:30pm at Power Living Manly.
Tickets are $15, simply to help us cover some of the cost of bringing our musicians in and keep these gatherings accessible.
No singing experience is needed. Sing loudly, quietly, move, listen or simply be in the room.
Everyone is welcome.
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