What Is Kirtan?
by Kitzie Stern*
The spiritual practice of singing kirtan originated in India, and it pre-dates Christianity — if you practice yoga, you've probably heard it played in class. Kirtan comes from a branch of Yoga called Bhakti Yoga, the Yoga of Devotion — the Yoga of Love. While many people think of yoga primarily as physical postures, Bhakti Yoga reaches toward the Divine through the heart rather than the body, using sound, surrender, and devotion as its tools. Kirtan is basically an easy and powerful way to meditate. The chants do the work for you, and singing or listening to kirtan is an easier and faster way to get to the place we try to reach in meditation. Where seated silent meditation can sometime feel like an effort, kirtan gives you something to hold onto. The melody carries you. The repetition steadies you. Before you know it, you've slipped into a quieter, more spacious state of mind without having to force it. Kirtan is a non-denominational practice. It's about opening your heart and feeling your connection to a deeper place of belonging and Love. When we sing kirtan we lose some of the separation between us, and that feels really good. You don't need to belong to any particular faith, or any faith at all, to feel the effects — the practice speaks to something universal in the human experience: our longing to feel connected, held, and less alone.
Kirtan uses mantras — a mantra is a sound or prayer that frees the mind from the miseries of the material world. As kirtan has its roots in India, many of the chants are in Sanskrit, but it is also sung in other sacred languages. Each mantra used in kirtan condenses a spiritual truth and carries meaning in every single syllable. Millions of human beings have sung these mantras over the course of more than five thousand years, and they carry a lot of spiritual weight. Kirtan is a community practice — it's a participatory, call-and-response form of singing. With the call and response, the singers create the experience together with the musicians. Here's the way kirtan works: you sing the chant, either out loud or in your head. When your mind wanders (and it will) you bring it back to the chant — again and again and again. And when the singing stops, your mind is quiet and has more peace. There's no performance to get right and no wrong way to participate.
The most important element in kirtan is the voice, and kirtan might be the first time you use your voice as a way to deepen a spiritual experience. You don't have to worry about knowing the words, or really about singing at all if you don't want to. It's perfectly okay to just sit back and be bathed in sacred sound. Everyone can experience kirtan, and it's the only concert where there's silence at the end of every song — we stay in silence so we can be fully present to where the chant has taken us. You can also express yourself through movement if you wish. In the last twenty years, kirtan has become something of a phenomenon in the West, which has led to a vibrant independent music scene filled with musicians who play the ancient Sanskrit chants in different Western musical styles, from rock to hip-hop. Well-known kirtan bands play in yoga studios and festivals around the world. Friday night is kirtan night at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, with either Community Kirtan or live music. Our spiritual community is sweet, and growing fast. It's a beautiful way to end the week, and we hope you'll join us!
*Kitzie Stern has called Corvallis home for over 40 years and is a member of the Corvallis Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. A professional voice-over actress and musician, she's voiced over a thousand commercials, narrations, and audiobooks, and hosts the New World Kirtan Podcast, reaching the global kirtan community since 2008.
