Monday mornings 7 am CST July 10 - August 2023

Monday August 21. We will meet next Monday to practice this one more time. And then on to the next (Bhū Sūktam, hymn to Mother Earth) starting in September.

Monday August 14, Guest Ekta Hattangady.

For the next two weeks, we’ll review and practice the Śrī Sūktam. Then we’ll move on the the Bhu Sūktam/Hymn to the planet in September.

Monday August 7

Keep reviewing, working towards enough ‘familiarity’ that you can go all the way though with the text and audio. Use earlier recordings to help with tricky bits. Ekta will be joining us next Monday.

Monday July 31

Little bits by little bits…keep refining your ‘consistency’. 10-15 minutes a day, with the piece you are currently learning. You do not need to listen to all the recordings in one sitting; repeat the previous one and add one. Do that for several days. Then, move on. Once in a while, you do the whole. Eventually, you are moving toward repeating the whole in one go. But you do little pieces as many times as you need to get familiarity (not mastery or memorization).

Monday July 24

good cheer, my friends: so long as you remember that you are SUPPOSED to be in the wilds of learning something new, not the territory of mastery, all is well. Just look to consistently review the early mantras and slowly add. Don’t linger too long on one line: let yourself move forward. How often in life have you not let yourself move forward?

Monday July 17

aim to practice at least 4 times this week, looking to familiarize yourself with the new. Keep working on the first 4 mantras, but now at half lines or lines, then adding a little new mantra each practice session. For many people, listening and repeating along with the spoken vocabulary for 2-3 days before trying the chanted parts is helpful. Then a couple of repetitions/days of the small parts. Then the full lines. In other words, by next Monday you want to be practicing full lines, but NOT to the point of perfection. In other other words, practice each of these recordings 2 times over the next week (not all of them today).

Monday July 10

Homework: explore the question of/your relationship to delight. SEE the beauty. Take pleasure, give pleasure, realize this life is loving you hard. 10 minutes a day adyayanam (practicing, singing along).

sometimes/some people really do well speaking the words, each sound, each syllable, before trying to ‘sing’ them. You probably only need to do this once. But the other practices might be astoundingly easier if you look at and pronounce the words first.

Recordings will be available, but your live participation is appreciated. As we go along, resources will be placed here with the most recent on top. I expect you to be practicing for 10 minutes a day or so. You may send audio recordings for 1:1 feedback no more than every 2 weeks. Please just send the part you are currently working on.

Studying Vedic Chant makes the practice or action aspect of yoga philosophy obvious. It simply does not work to take in the information; if you want to understand, you yourself have to sing. Many people are uncomfortable with either singing or Sanskrit; this is okay as there are hundreds of other yoga paths and just listening to the mantras is said to be helpful. We should always look for the practice that works for us. Please understand that this gathering is about singing Vedic Mantras, not āsana.

This particular song is a cheeky direct address to the goddess of harmony and beauty, grace and soul in this world, the divine Lakshmi. The most common name for Lakshmi is goddess of wealth, fortune, or prosperity. However, if we read that through our contemporary global-social lens, the power of Laksmi is brutally tarnished. “Abundance mindset” and “manifesting” are a manipulation of a sacred truth. I’ve been told over and over again: the only real wealth is spiritual wealth. Praying for riches or manifestation isn’t the point. Invoking these practices for personal gain directly leads to harm.

This song turns out to be a profound contemplation of values, a challenge to exploitative capitalism and power. The song acknowledges that this life is both hard and beautiful. We are provoked to not waste, but absolutely to indulge. A love of material life is not ‘nice’ to have on this path; it is a requirement to spiritual fulfillment. Spiritual evolution invokes material wellness for all. We sing about beauty and harmony and as we learn, as we practice, we inevitably develop deep abiding appreciation within ourselves.