Sacred Chants Kirtan
Chanting sacred songs has been part of my spiritual practice for many years now and some people say that only the purist versions give the best energy, but I find personally that some of the rock and roll versions of sacred chants like those coming from Krishna Das or Tina Turner or Deva Premal help me to remember the sanskrit words more easily and helps me to sing/chant them with greater pleasure, so I do it more often.
And isn't that one the goals of chanting is the repetition of these sacred sounds to allow even ancient sanskrit words to penetrate through this veil of ego and allow us all to connect to the Divine around us and the Divine within us?
I've added above Krishna Das' version of Hare Krishna as a kirtan I like to practice.
What's your favourite chant?
Here's a transcript about Love and why he chants from a workshop Krishna Das did in Merrickville Australia April 2012 that I think is very interesting...
Click here if you'd prefer to download the transcript
Krishna Das
"Marrickville, Australia, Saturday, April 28 2012. For more information please visit, Krishna das.com Good morning. It always morning for me. So we call this a workshop, because we don't know what else to call it.
It's basically just hanging out for the afternoon. In, hopefully a loving space. And whether we sing, or whether we're talking. We hope to aim at that space, and try to stay in that nice place together.
But that doesn't mean you can't say anything you want to say it gets to be fun sometimes. So let's start off with sing a little bit first. Beautiful day. Sydney is really like LA vibrationally Melbourne is like New York, both good. But, and then the way you were also fashionably late today and it's just like LA.
So, sit down. So what's the sitana. We just sang it for half an hour. What is it, I don't know. Maybe you knew one thing, whatever it is. When we're singing and chanting these names. It's hard to think about robbing banks. Right. It's hard to think about hurting other people, or hurting ourselves, or creating suffering for ourselves or others. So first of all right off the bat, when we're chanting were for the most part not creating new negative karma. Right. Because karma is are created every second that we're alive, every thought is a karma, every reaction, every emotion. Everything we do creates karma. So, and karma. You can think it up seeds you plant. If you plant the seeds of jealousy and fear. What do you think's gonna grow. If you plant the seeds of compassion and kindness. What do you think's gonna grow. It's that simple. It's really that simple. What's not easy though, is planting those seeds that we want of the things we want to be in our li