Kirtan chanting inner peace

By Sean Reagan
---- @Text body copy:It’s Sunday evening and rays from the setting sun stream through the west-facing windows at Yoga Sanctuary in downtown Northampton. Seven musicians, their backs to the light, settle in with their instruments — acoustic guitar, bass guitar, drums, tambourines, chimes. In the center, flanked on each side by three band members, David Russell sits behind a harmonium — think of it as a hand-pumped organ no bigger than a suitcase — and picks out a melody.
---- Russell, 57, is a kirtan leader — or kirtan wallah — and the musicians watch him carefully to get a sense of how he will approach the evening. Kirtan is an ancient practice rooted in India in which a leader chants in Sanskrit and a chorus — the audience — responds.
---- As the band warms up, about 25 people form a semicircle before them. Some sit on yoga mats, others on meditation cushions. A few simply plop down on the floor or lean against the wall. Others pull out folding chairs. There are men and women, at least one toddler, and even babies fast asleep in parents’ arms. A small placard at the door requests a $10 donation.
---- Dressed unassumingly in a plaid shirt and wire-rim glasses, his graying hair carelessly ruffled, Russell asks if anybody is new to kirtan. When several people raise their hands, he welcomes them and offers a brief explanation: He’s going to chant a little in Sanskrit and everyone in the room will echo the phrase.
---- “Chanting just brings you into this alignment where you’re in touch with your heart,” Russell says. He moves his hands as if encompassing a globe. “You start thinking with your heart and it’s a whole different paradigm.”
---- He takes a deep breath and plays a melody on the harmonium. The sound is rich and exotic, far exceeding both the size of the instrument and its plain, boxy appearance. The notes fill the room, hanging in the air.
---- “The point is to have fun with this,” says Russell. “It’s not an austere event. So let’s make the best of it — if you can’t sing, you can always hum.”
---- And with that, he leads the band into “Ganesha Sharanam” — which translates loosely to “surrender to Lord Ganesha,” who in the Hindu religion is the god of wisdom.
---- The band members — which include Russell’s wife, Holly Hartmann, on vocals and his 16-year-old son, Julian Hartmann-Russell, on bass guitar — slip into a trance-like rhythm, eyes closed, rocking gently back and forth. Russell’s voice is low and strong, blending in with the harmonium and percussion.
---- “Ganesha Sharanam, Sharanam Ganesha,” chants Russell. The chorus sings it back.
---- The pace quickens after a few rounds, rising in a crescendo, then falling back. Russell chants mostly with his eyes closed, one hand squeezing the harmonium while the other picks out the melody.
---- Ten minutes later when the chant ends, he pulls out a green handkerchief and wipes his brow. The room is silent save for the baby, awake now, playing quietly with car keys.
---- “Wow,” says Russell. “You are a really powerful group.”
---- @G In text head:Kirtan revival
---- @Text body copy:Kirtan — from the Sanskrit for “to repeat” — is devotional chanting rooted in both Hinduism and Sikhism and usually includes the names of the gods. While often done in Sanskrit, it doesn’t have to be. There is a long tradition of Jewish chanting in Hebrew. There are chants in English.
---- According to its practitioners, chanting kirtan creates vibrations that resonate in the body’s seven psychic energy centers (the chakras), causing them to open, and thus raising kundalini energy — positive energy in all human beings that allows them to awaken to their true selves.
---- It has been around for centuries, but in the United States kirtan has undergone a revival over the past two decades. There are rap kirtans and flamenco kirtans. Nationally known kirtan artists — like Jai Uttal and Krishna Das — tour the country, performing with audiences who number in the thousands.
---- Russell discovered kirtan in 1969 at Woodstock. Sixteen years old, excited by the chance to see Jimi Hendrix onstage, he was instead transfixed by Swami Satchindananda, who opened the festival with a Hari Om chant.
---- “It just astounded me,” said Russell in an interview at his Northampton home. “To hear so many people chanting Om and the stillness that surrounded half a million people . . . It was just amazing.”
---- Soon after, he began to study transcendental meditation. A year later, he went to Swami Satchindananda’s New York City ashram and yoga institute to deepen his practice. He soon took up permanent residence there, immersing himself in yoga, meditation and kirtans.
---- About the time he began to lead kirtans, Russell met Ram Dass, a former Harvard professor who had traveled to India and returned to write and teach about Eastern spirituality. In 1974, Russell spent the summer at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., studying meditation and doing kirtan with Krishna Das.
---- But his full-tilt approach to spirituality and kirtan drained him, he says, and in his mid-20s, he turned away from it.
---- He says living a Hindu lifestyle in the United States felt increasingly suffocating to him. Giving authority to a spiritual leader ran contrary to the free-thinking way he was raised, he says, and he eventually rejected it.
---- Marriage followed, as did an undergraduate degree in English and a master’s degree in urban planning. His two sons were born. He started a business running commercial real estate magazines out of his Northampton home.
---- And he got rid of his harmonium. Kirtan, believed Russell, was a thing of the past.
---- When kirtan began to grow again in popularity in the 1990s, two of the major practitioners — Jai Uttal and Krishna Das — were already well-known to Russell. In the 1960s he and Jai Uttal had gone to a New Hampshire summer camp for children of leftist families — “Karl Marx in the morning and pingpong in the afternoon,” quips Russell. And in the 1970s he had attended numerous kirtans and meditation retreats conducted by Krishna Das.
---- So Russell went to their new kirtans, taking a place in the choruses, chanting with them. “I didn’t feel like I could be a leader,” he says. “I had too much unfinished inner business.”
---- He devoted much of his time to the practice of Buddhist Vipassana meditation. He saw a psychotherapist. Both helped address what he calls “lifetime habits of feeling unworthy, not good enough.”
---- “Those are things that don’t go away whether you have a guru or not,” he says.
---- In 2002, his wife, Holly — “who is always a step ahead of me” — bought him a harmonium for Christmas/Hanukkah. Russell laughs, remembering the unexpected gift and the implication that he might start leading others in kirtan. Yet, he says, he still felt “like a passenger, not a pilot.”
---- @G In text head:The harmonium beckons
---- @Text body copy:He returned the harmonium, only to buy another one later. As soon as he began to play, says Russell, “I just fell in love with the whole form again.”
---- These days, Russell leads several kirtans a week, often traveling to New York and Boston. He continues his real estate work by day.
---- Russell likes to talk to the chorus between chants. “Let all of your troubles come to the surface,” he says. “Don’t try to change them — just watch them.”
---- Members of the audience appear to respond to kirtan individually. There are people who sit stock-still in the lotus position, eyes closed. Others sway and chant. Still others get up and dance.
---- “I’m really attracted to the way that Dave leads kirtan,” says Lesley Slay, a Northampton resident who adds that she has sampled many kirtans over the years.
---- “I feel a lot of the joy and the momentum of the chants. ..
---- I just really feel it so easily without any effort. Dave has such a pure, beautiful heart and it really comes through.”
---- Slay describes kirtan as producing a literal physical change — in fact, she is emphatic that any discussion on the subject happen before kirtan and not after. When it is over, she says, she is in “another place.”
---- Pressed to explain that place, she smiles. It is not, she says, an easy question. Kirtan, by virtue of its simple repetition, aims to loosen the hold language has on the brain. The experience is not supposed to be easy to talk about.
---- “It’s a place that is joyful,” she says at last.
---- Melanie Jolicoeur of Plainfield agrees. She started coming to Russell’s kirtans when her mother died earlier in the year. Kirtan, she says, was helpful to her grieving process.
---- “Dave is really down-to-earth and very open,” she says. “I feel very peaceful and hopeful after kirtan.”
---- A block down Main Street from Yoga Sanctuary, above Fitzwilly’s restaurant, Karuna Center for Yoga and Healing Arts houses another of the Valley’s kirtans, this one led by Shubalananda Saraswati, 67, a blues guitarist formerly known as Larry Kopp.
---- Saraswati — Shubal to friends — is a Sadhu. That is, he travels throughout the Northeastern United States, leading kirtan six — sometimes seven — nights a week, and living solely off the donations of the kirtan community. His guru was Ma Chetan Jyotie of northern India, who, even though deceased, continues to be a vital presence in his meditation and kirtan practice.
---- Twenty years ago, Saraswati was living in Cambridge, a businessman by day who played blues guitar by night. He describes those days as a split existence — he kept the one side of his life hidden from the other. It was, he says, “a life of intense middle-class desperation.”
---- Then, at the suggestion of his boss, he agreed to consider meditation. He says it had an immediate and profound impact. He eventually moved to India, where his musical inclination lent itself to kirtan.
---- “It just flowed from what I knew, that’s all,” he says.
---- While kirtan can appear to have the elements of a concert or performance, says Saraswati, it is in fact a spiritual practice like yoga or meditation. Where a blues guitarist doesn’t mind the spotlight, a kirtan wallah wants only to encourage a spiritual experience with the people he leads. He wants, in other words, to get out of the way.
---- “Some people approach this practice from a complicated place,” he says. “But kirtan is something very simple — it has to be in order to induce a meditative state. You can’t think while you sing.”
---- Dressed in white and wearing sandals and beads, Saraswati discusses kirtan in the hall outside Karuna Center’s spacious studio. The night is hot — pushing 90 degrees — and people arrive flushed from climbing the stairs. Saraswati greets everyone individually with hugs and handshakes.
---- @G In text head:Giving to others
---- @Text body copy:He has been leading kirtans here for 15 years. When he started, he says, it was a small miracle if a couple of people showed up. Today, the Karuna kirtan community numbers in the hundreds. Even on a sweltering night like this, close to 40 eventually show up.
---- Saraswati laughs when asked about the rigorous schedule he maintains. It is tiring, he concedes. At his age, being on the road and lugging guitars and amplifiers up flights of stairs day after day takes a toll. But he cannot envision his life without it. It is, he says, “a Johnny Appleseed kind of thing.”
---- “The grace of learning to love myself has allowed me to stop thinking about myself so much,” he says. “I am able to focus more on what I can give to others.”
---- At its core, says Saraswati, kirtan is about love. All people want to awaken to who they truly are. Kirtan, he says, enables them to do that.
---- “All the names of God — Allah, Jehovah, Yeshua — have these familiar sounds and there is a reason for that,” he says. “Inside these syllables’ vibrations is the awareness of kundalini energy.”
---- He leans in to press his point, perhaps the only moment when his face loses the otherwise warm smile. “Ultimately there is only religion and that is the religion of love,” he says.
---- Inside, Saraswati and his band sit on the floor to play, essentially forming a circle with the chorus. When he chants, Saraswati throws his head back while his right hand flicks the strings of his acoustic guitar. His voice is strong and resonant, and the chorus — which includes senior citizens, teenagers and babies crawling on the floor — returns it with gusto.
---- Earlier, asked to describe his kirtans, Saraswati had said they were a blend of campfire music, old tent revivals and soul music.
---- His description is apt. People spread their arms wide, lift their open hands. They turn their faces toward the high ceiling where their voices and the sounds of the guitar and harmonium echo and re-echo.
---- Saraswati says that if he begins a kirtan and 30 seconds into it is still aware of himself — the sound of his voice, the notes he is playing — then he stops and begins another chant.
---- That approach appeals to his chorus. Leah Moses of Northampton, who has been attending kirtans with Saraswati for almost five years, says he is powerfully effective. He takes her to a place that is “just complete release,” she says.
---- “For me,” she says, “kirtan is a chance to get out of my body. I can just be in the moment — right there in the music.”
---- Dave Russell likes to point out that while kirtan is a spiritual practice, there are numerous physical benefits. Studies over the years suggest that it can lower blood pressure, reenergize brain cells, and relieve both physical and emotional tension.
---- At Yoga Sanctuary, as his evening of kirtan winds down, Russell praises his chorus. “Thank you for your energy,” he says. “Thank you for being in community.”
---- After, between hugs and handshakes, Russell offers a few parting thoughts. He wants people to have fun, to find a haven in otherwise busy and often stress-filled lives. He wants to connect them to “divine joy,” but he recognizes that language can be a little stiff and confusing.
---- “The chanting is .. an affirmation of the self that you are enough just as you in this moment. There is no one emotion that shouldn’t be brought into kirtan because kirtan can change everything,” he says. The rhythms and the repetition and the presence of others chanting along helps to quiet the mind and raise our vibrations, he says.
---- “We are joyful at our core and kirtan reminds us of that,” he says as the last members of the chorus file back toward the street. “That’s our essence — joy. All the other stuff is just that — stuff.”
---- Sean Reagan is a freelance writer who lives in Worthington.