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The Orchestra: Practice, Harmony and Symphony

1/30/2015

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The Orchestra: Practice, Harmony and Symphony

A youth orchestra is giving a performance. The members are ten years old and have been playing their instruments just a year. So who comes to the concert? For the most part it’s parents, grandparents, classmates and friends. And they enjoy the performance. The novice musicians are clearly enthusiastic and engaged. To be sure, their sound is not completely cohesive. Even the conductor cannot tell which of his violins are not quite in tune, which of the wind section need to work more on their breathing, because none of the players are quite in rhythm yet, none of the instruments are fully in tune. Nevertheless, they still do make a beautiful, heart-lifting sound that appeals to the audience and gives the young players enough satisfaction to keep at this business of playing.

Some five years go by. Years of steady, patient practice: every day learning more about the scope of what it really means to be in rhythm and to stay in tune. Now they are the regional youth orchestra giving a performance: talented young musicians who have been studying and practising together diligently for several years. Their parents, families and neighbours all come along again, but this time, the much larger venue is also much fuller, with members of the wider public, including representatives from Conservatories, from universities that give scholarships for student musicians, even from professional orchestras and record labels. What a thrilling sound they make in the ears of the parents and friends! Now, in the public arena, they, who have heard them practising over the years, can recognise just how much growth has occurred, how much more mastery has developed, and they are moved by the music. Of course, this stage of what might appear like advanced proficiency is really still a beginning. Orchestra members do still come out of tune and rhythm, but now the conductor can identify which of the oboes needs to work on her breathing, which of the cellists needs to relax his grip on the bow, which of the percussionists needs to learn to be less distracted by the girl on the harp who sits across from him, and support her more by keeping greater focus on his own timing.

Thirty years go by: of constant practice, constant study, constant exploration. They are now one of the most accomplished orchestras in the world. It is now hard for mum and dad to get tickets for their concert. Everyone who comes is captivated, transported, moved and refreshed by their glorious sound, their irresistible symphony. Now what happens if one instrument strays out of tune? It is actually hard for this to happen, because the force of the collective harmony pulls it back in, right away. The cohesion of the whole has developed a force of harmony.

And so it is with yoga practice, which could be described as cultivating harmony and integration, about finding unity here and now in this world of duality and diversity. Yoga is that sweet spot where all the potentially discordant pairs of opposites: steadiness and ease, engagement and relaxation, and all the rest; meet, marry and bring forth each other’s complimentary potential.

Just as it takes a lot of practice to secure a seat in a great orchestra, and persistent application to maintain it, so it takes practice to attain the seat of yoga: āsana. Sometimes people think of āsana as posture, pose or attitude; but these are all just parts of what āsana really means: the easily sustainable state of integrated, balanced awareness through all the layers of our being. Or, we might say that yogāsana is the seat of sustainable harmony in which all the members of the miraculously-powered orchestra of our bodies, senses, minds, intellects and emotions work together, in glorious symphony.

As we navigate the journey of a human life, these amazing powers and instruments are exposed to all sorts of influences and conditionings. And so yoga, as Patañjali defines it in the Yoga Sūtra, takes practice. It requires effort to secure steadiness and harmony: an effort that is sustained, for a long time, without interruption, attended to with wholehearted, assiduous presence and a spirit of devotion, then it becomes firmly established, and we become more established in the unfolding glory of being a little bit more fully our unique selves.

This practice of yoga could also be described as learning to sing our own song, our authentic song where, when we act: our heart, mind and gut all say YES! And peaceful knowing resounds within us. As we cultivate this, we may many times and often stray out of tune, but in so doing, we will steadily learn more about what it actually means to stay in tune, to inhabit a home of robust harmony and genuinely sing our true song. As we keep practising, our force of harmony does increase, and strengthens us to reach deeper into the previously unsounded realms of our being and invite richer, fuller harmony within, which can then support us to bring a more harmonising energy into all our interactions.

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Kirtan - Yoga of Song

1/30/2015

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Kīrtan

In a traditional kīrtan, a bard-like leader ‘tells’ of the kīrti - the glory – of the Lord; or, we might say, of the divine qualities that are our potential. This may include compelling renderings of stories from the Purāna-s, episodes the import of which will then be embedded in the audience more deeply through participative singing, communal and call and response, in which the names and phrases sung will be packed with an energetic quality which serves to encapsulate so many of the great qualities illustrated in the glorious story. And there are many names, and many phrases. Sometimes people ask: if in Indian Philosophy, God or the Supreme is One, why does He/She/It have so many names?

When asked this at a kīrtan, I often give the example of love. Imagine you are deeply, wildly in love… Now, describe the beloved. Will one word do? Will one thousand? Of course not, like all the greatest things we can experience as humans, love is beyond words. And that is the whole point about God, the Supreme, Pure Consciousness. It is beyond name and form, which always and only limit and contain. But this God, this Supreme, this Consciousness is limitless and uncontainable, so one word can’t really convey it. However, thinking back to the example of love. We do have so many beautiful poems and songs which do somehow manage to evoke something of the wonder and greatness of what it means to be in love, what this mysterious, formless force can do to a person, can bring to a human life. And so it is with the Supreme and the beautiful divine powers that it holds. When we sing certain words, and hear certain archetypal stories, it rouses within us a certain quality of feeling. The words, the richly evocative names of the Supreme that we sing in kīrtan songs and chants kindle our feeling (bhāva) and invite us to relish (rasa) a particular quality of experience.

However, kīrtan works on many levels all at once. In yoga practice, we are cultivating our capacity to be focused and present, open to the wonder all around us, yet centred and balanced. With yoga practices, we can train ourselves to do whatever we are doing with every part of ourselves.

In āsana, for example, we work from gross to subtle to invite all parts of our system into whatever we are doing, to participate in the maintenance of balance. We use our emotional intent, our mental focus, our sensory curiosity and receptivity, with the agency of the breath to foster a space of balance within and through the physical body.

In walking meditation, we may use the feedback of our feet against the ground, our skin against our clothes and the air, our breath and the rhythm of each step flowing into the other to deepen our awareness of our body-encased conscious system as a place of real and potential dynamic equilibrium.

In seated meditation, with the body held stable (āsana), the breath subtle and refining (prāṇāyama), the senses consciously connected to their animating source (pratyāhāra), we then concentrate (dhārana) and channel the powers of the subtler realms of our awareness to flow towards the object of meditation (dhyāna).

In each of these three example of yoga techniques or practices, we are using a support: balancing the body-held system in whatever orientation we find ourselves, observing the locomotive movement of our body, focusing on the object of our concentrated meditative awareness; to facilitate integrated or ‘yogic’ experience. As we do this, we expose all the parts of our system to the joy and fullness of cohesion. With regular practice, this space of centred, integrated awareness becomes more familiar, and so we notice more readily when we come away from it.

The practice of kīrtan is a beautifully efficient way to invite this yogic experience. When we sing, it’s a physical act, so the body is engaged. As soon as we sing, we work with the breath. Singing is in fact a very pleasing, accessible and joyful means to practice prāṇāyāma – the extension and refinement of the life force. The mind and intellect are also involved: paying attention to the sounds, the words, the melody. When we sing wholeheartedly, our emotions are also engaged. Very readily then, the practice of call and response chanting, frequently referred to as kīrtan, invites the glorious, integrated experience of yoga. When we do give ourselves wholeheartedly to the practice of kīrtan, we come to understand what it means and why it is referred to by this name. Kīrti means glory. When we sing, with all parts of ourselves, it can bring forth a feeling of glory. However, really, all yoga practices are forms of kīrtanam – telling the glory of our latent potential to the more superficial levels of our awareness, training us to make even the simplest of our day-to-day actions glorious expressions of integrity and efficiency, teaching us to live the path of authentic action, a path what will almost certainly be trying, and searching, but which holds our true unique glory.

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