excerpted from the print magazine…
“All music, in one way or another, is therapeutic because it can heal.
Behind this healing… [is] the notion that sound is God – that sound
is holy, and therefore capable of restoring wholeness.”
– Russill Paul, from The Yoga of Sound
I unlock the door to my apartment and drop my keys and backpack. My long day
at the hospital is over and I’m completely wiped out. The work is intense
and demanding: a student placement leading an expressive arts therapy group
in the inpatient eating disorders program.
Eating disorders are some of the most complicated and multilayered illnesses
I’ve ever witnessed – the body is in danger because of the psyche’s
own attack on it. Proper treatment involves rehabilitation of both the physical
self and the psychological/emotional self. In our studies, we place equal emphasis
on the visual arts, movement, drama, writing, and music as vehicles for therapy.
I’ve arrived home with just enough time for a quick dinner before heading
out again to a kirtan evening. I collapse on the couch and my eyes drop closed.
Why would I go out again?
It’s kirtan. You don’t just skip kirtan.
Okay, okay. With a considerable push, I fuel up and am back out the door.
Half an hour later I’m in an enormous ballet studio, seated near the front,
propped up on a cushion and watching a team of twelve musicians organize themselves
for what looks like a rock concert, not a kirtan. I see the typical
instruments – harmonium, tabla, hand drum – standing alongside an
electric guitar, an electric keyboard and an electric bass. That’s a lot
of electricity. I begin to wonder if I should have stayed on my couch. I’m
a bit of a purist about kirtan – the electric thing seems all
wrong. Plus, the musicians seem glamorized. Before I know it, I’m off
on an inner, fuming rant about the looming danger of kirtan losing
its integrity to fads, money and show. But the first chords of the harmonium
hush my mind.
A bindi-wearing blonde woman leans forward to speak into a microphone.
“This chant is to Sita and her love Ram.” The room fills with warm
sound: her voice, singing the Names of God – Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Ram,
Hanuman. The response rushes past me like a flock of birds, a full rich
bloom of voices: Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Ram, Hanuman. I look backward
and realize the room has filled with other chanters. I am stirred, humbled.
I sing.
“It’s the Name, the repetition of the Name; that’s what
does it,” Raghu, a long-time friend of and occasional drummer for Krishna
Das, once told me after a kirtan. “People love to sing, so they’ll
sing along, not knowing what to expect, and then the Name suddenly takes them
over. It’s our own Name we’re repeating, the Name of our true nature.
It resonates deeply, and something happens.”
Something, indeed, is happening, right here in the ballet studio. My skepticism
about this particular kirtan loses ground with every repetition of
the Name. What matters, I realize, is the Name itself, and the opportunity to
chant it in community. I am chanting and so is everyone around me; I am buoyed
by the vibrations and I add my own. Already, I can sense that being here is
rapidly promoting a turnaround in my general well-being. This is why I got off
the couch, because I know that creating sound also creates healing.
As the melody builds and peaks, I have the image of finding a cave and crawling
inside, into a place of deeper and deeper devotion – both utterly still
and in-whirling-motion, both like dusk and like noon sunshine, both joyful and
teary. I also have the sense that I could resist the pull of the Name, keep
my eyes open, stay out of the cave, and become annoyed by the electric keyboard.
But by saying yes instead of no, I begin to shed a thick layer
of darkness and exhaustion.
