Healing Sounds, Kirtan and Metta In Motion

Music is both a centering meditation and a lively joyful expression of the life experience.

Healing Music and Movement utilizes music from many cultures including Native American, West African Jewish and African American. All draw on universal themes of love, grace, peace, reconciliation, forgiveness of self and others and integrates this through voice with chant, tuning, toning and mantra and movement in circle dances and unstructured free movement. Kirtan is also part of this musical experience. A simple call and response repetitive structure in Sanskrit, Kirtan is from the Bhakti Yoga tradition, the yoga of devotion. Integrating Sound and Music together with your body and voice is the opportunity to find the ultimate in self expression with a tool you always have, your body. With Sound and Movement we marry spirit and body, wisdom and love, letting go and adoration. This is what we call a Tantric practice in Yoga, embodying the physical with the spiritual in a joy filled centering practice! These tools of breath, body and voice can be used to experience the acceptance, compassion and love that surround us always. This engagement has the potential to release us from our fears and surrender into Love.

Kirtan

Kirtan is from the Bhakti Yoga tradition, the yoga of devotion. It is very simply, a meditation using simple melodic Sanskrit mantras to still and quiet the mind and bring us into the present.

Kirtan utilizes voice as the primary instrument, but in the West also features guitars, drums, flutes and other instruments.

Although the kirtan involves music, the underlying art of kirtan chanting is not actually about musical ability or training–it is about the heart. Everyone can participate, regardless of age or cultural background. The purpose of this music is to get us out of our heads and into our hearts. Typically, the songs can last for 20-30 minutes each with a few moments of silence in between each song so you can soak it all up. The longer songs allow for deeper experience of the effects, and with the simple, repetitive lyrics (it’s a chant, after all!) we really don’t have to think much about the words.

In fact, because the ancient Sanskrit lyrics are not familiar to many of us Westerners, these words take us away from the mind’s constant chatter a little easier. The powerful healing and transformational energies of these ancient chants can help to reconnect us to God, ourselves, and the world we live in. All the mantras, melodies, and instruments of kirtan are designed to lead us toward this meditative state.