Kirtan, Songs & Sutras with Dave Stringer & Sheila
**Events may have been canceled or postponed. Please contact the venue to confirm the event.
Date & Time
Sat, Feb 17 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Address (map)
28 Parker Way
Venue (website)
Yoga Soup
With Dave Stringer, Sheila Nicholls + Special Guest Joss Jaffe
Saturday, February 17th
7:30 PM
$40
Join us in Celebration!
For 18 years Dave Stringer has been a part of Yoga Soup Anniversary Gatherings.
We’ll gather in the studio to lift our voices and hearts and move our bodies as we’re guided into ecstatic Kirtan oblivion by Dave, Sheila, Joss and their exquisite band of musical prodigies. Soup and simple delights will follow.
About Kirtan: The call and response form of mantra chanting known as Kirtan is a consciousness-transforming practice, directing the singers to vanish into the song as drops merge into the ocean. The mantras quiet the mind, and the music frees the heart. Ecstasy is both the process and the product.
From the perspective of Eastern philosophy, the bliss we are seeking is already inside of us, and it’s interesting that from a scientific perspective this is also a true statement. Bliss is an electro- chemical state that the body itself creates and maintains, and it is a state that we are apparently hard-wired to seek. Chanting is one of the world’s oldest means of finding it.
Chanting affects the areas of the brain that produce our sense of where our body ends and the world begins. It also slows and steadies breathing, producing hormone and neurological changes in the body that feel simultaneously calming and thrilling. One’s sense of separation diminishes, and one’s feeling of connection increases.
Moving from the individual level to the collective level, the effect is magnified. A group of people singing together, breathing together, is a cloud of intelligence, turning like a flock of birds. As the song itself vanishes into the skies of silence, it’s a mighty thing to be a part of. You feel intimate with all the strangers surrounding you, concurrently expansive and still. Intensely, vividly, alive.
Inquiring into the origin and nature of the universe, both the Western discipline of science and the Eastern discipline of yoga arrive at the obstacle of the mind. But how can the mind come to see beyond itself? How can we transcend the limits of our consciousness? Singing, we move ourselves into a field out beyond questions and answers. Encountering bliss, the mind is still.