A Divine Mother Celebration!
Ananda Lila Kirtan
Saturday, May 20th - 7:30-9:30 pm
$25 in advance / $30 at Door **
Join Ananda Lila Kirtan & friends in a collective sharing of Love!!
To sing from the heart, ground, center, connect and share! Raising vibrations through participatory chanting of sacred songs and mantras from different traditions. Quieting the mind, allowing each of us to journey into the self. Together we will create a joyful space for opening voices and hearts in unity to share:
• Kirtan Chanting
• Vib rational Sound Healing
• Mantras for Peace and Unity
• Yantra Flower Mandala Creation
AND as a community ceremony and celebration, we will co-create a mandala, or Yantra, from flowers and objects from nature. Entering sacred space to activate Divine Mother Goddess LOVE! Cultivating a peaceful heart, offering mantras, to infuse our Yantra Mandala with intensions for beauty, peace and love. Join us to discover mantra and kirtan as a very simple and joyful way to meditate and celebrate!
For more info:
www.facebook.com/anandalilalove
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAwtDOjlkygdHdh0yDfva_Q
(**No-one will be turned away for lack of funds. Please inquire about volunteer options)
Your Musical Hosts:
Ananda Lila (pronounced Leela) is a is a Family of Musicians offering a healing music and meditation soundscape and atmosphere for community chanting and singing with songs and mantras. With a focus on Kirtan, or call and response chanting, Ananda Lila also offers japa mantra repetion and unison sining to open the hearts and create integration and peace and healing. Ananda Lila loves to weave ancient chants from different traditions with newly birthed sacred songs. And also integrate ritual, ceremony, and movement and meditation from many masters and teachings. Ananda Lila's sound is a fusion sound with Sufi Kirtan with Gypsy Grooves, World Music Rhythms, and Transcendent Voices; Blending East & Native Indian Sounds with Klezmer, Ambient and Folk Flavors. And features Shanti Wendy Warnimont: Vocals, Accordion; Paula Battaglio: Harp; Muriel Reymond: World Percussion. With other special guests on violin, flute, sound healing, and vocals.
Ananda Lila brings an infusion of kirtan and mantra experiences since 2010 at places such as: Kirtan Festival Milwaukee, Midwest Yoga and Kirtan Fest, The Blue Lotus Buddhist Temple, Yoga Now Chicago, Yogaview, Unity Church, Unitarian Church, Himalayan Yoga and Meditation Center, Vedanta Center, Bodhi Spiritual Center, The Theosophical Society.
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WHAT IS KIRTAN
Below is a variety of kirtan explanations. Short and long! If you want to share more about what kieran and mantra music is. Thank you!!! Wendy
From Jai Uttal:
Kirtan is part of an ancient form of yoga known as bhakti, or the yoga of devotion. In Bhakti we experience the power of Love, we feel the extraordinary and transformative power of expressing our feelings and emotions through songs and mantras, and we are graced with the healing power of sacred sound. This practice of calling to the divine creates a bridge between the individual and the eternal, opening the heart and welcoming the spirit. Mysteriously, as we chant, this sonic medicine intertwines with molecules both near and far, and purifies all that it touches. By singing we became a reservoir of sacred sound and project healing energy throughout the world.
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From Krishna Das:
At first we feel our practice is about me, and my happiness, my calming down. But everything that we do affects everybody all the time, even people we see on the street. This is the essence of dedicating your practice for the benefit of all beings.” Kirtan, he adds, is one way of “extending loving kindness to the whole world.”
Kirtan, he says, is a profound spiritual practice. As he once told the Washington Post: “When people come to sing for an evening of chanting, they’re not coming for entertainment. They’re coming to enter into this place in the heart…it’s participatory, and the motivation for doing it is to enter deeply into ourselves. So I’m entering into myself; they’re entering into their selves, but ultimately there’s only one of us.”
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From Ram Dass:
Kirtan, the singing of mantra, is an old and revered technique used in India and other parts of Asia. While kirtan uses music as a vehicle, aesthetics or musical ability are not the main concern. The ability to sing beautifully is enjoyable, but not necessary. What matters is singing from the heart. In India, it is often the old man who sings last, with no teeth, a raspy voice, and hacking cough, who blows everyone away, because he knows to whom he is singing, and the beauty of his contact with God is moving and powerful. To open fully to kirtan, to the singing of the divine Name, is to know this sweetest form of bliss.
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From the Sivananda Yoga:
Kirtan is derived from the Sanskrit root meaning to call, recite, praise, or glorify. Put simply, it is the act of praising and glorifying some form of divinity. Kirtan involves joyous chanting often performed in a community environment with the accompaniment of instruments such as the harmonium, tabla, and cymbals.
The practice of kirtan or chanting mantra regularly has been shown to bring our bodies back into balance, promoting holistic wellbeing: mental, intellectual, physical, emotional, and spiritual. Chanting helps us regulate our sleep, energy input and output, and, thanks to the stimulation of the vagus nerve, the "rest and digest" response of our bodies which is also responsible for regulating breathing, heart rate, muscles, digestion, circulation, and even the vocal cords. Simply put, chanting helps slow down the heart rate, lower blood pressure, relax different muscles and produce slow, regular, and deep respiration.
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From Jai Uttal article "what is kirtan":
“These ancient chants,” says Jai “contain a transformative power and healing energy. By singing these prayers we join a stream of consciousness and devotion that has been flowing for centuries.”
Kirtan is the calling, the crying, the reaching across infinite space — digging into the heart’s deepest well to touch and be touched by the Divine Presence.
Kirtan is singing over and over the many names of God and the Goddess, the multi-colored rainbow manifestations of the One. It is said that there is no difference between the name and that which is being named, and as the words roll off our lips in song, the Infinite is invoked, invited, made manifest in our hearts.
Kirtan is part of an ancient form of Yoga known as Bhakti, or the Yoga of Devotion. But in Bhakti we redefine “devotion”, we expand the meaning to include every shade of color in the palette of human emotion, turned towards God through song, dance, and worship. These chants have been sung for millennium by sages, sinners, devotees, and the great primordial yogi alchemists of old. And, as we sing, we touch the spirits of the millions of people across the centuries who have sung the same songs and cried the same tears. As we sing, we immerse ourselves in an endless river of prayer that has been flowing since the birth of the first human beings, longing to know their creator.
Kirtan is a vessel that can hold love, longing, union, separation, lust, despair, mourning, anger, hate, sadness, ecstasy, and oneness. Powered by the fire of these emotions, the chants of Bhakti become like a ship, singing us to the other shore. In lightness, in darkness, in despair, in joy we sing the names — The Name — and turn our human hearts toward the One, who is closer to us than our own breath. Kirtan is food for the spirit, a life raft of song.
Kirtan is for all people. There are no masters of kirtan, no experts, no teachers, no advanced students, no beginners. The practice itself is the teacher, guiding us to ourselves. Kirtan teaches itself by allowing us to enter into a mystery world — a world where all the logic of our minds, all the conditioning and learning are left outside — and we allow ourselves to expand into the mystery.
And in this mystery, we create a temple inside of our hearts, a place of refuge, a place of love, a place of being, a place of sanctity… whatever we need.
There is no right or wrong way to sing kirtan. Kirtan can be breathtakingly beautiful, the music can be stunning and masterful; and it can be cacophonous, dissonant, and almost painful to the ears. Aesthetics don’t matter. All that matters is the spirit, the feeling. Don’t worry about what you sound like, feel whatever you feel, have no expectations, no inhibitions. Kirtan is an oil well digging deeper and deeper into the heart. A power tool of love and longing. A train carrying us home. Make these kirtans your own prayers and use their power to set fire to your own soul. We sing together and each person has a totally unique, individual experience. Yet by singing together we give strength, safety and passion to each other, and give ourselves permission to sing and dance freely, releasing and expressing through our voices and bodies, the emotions tightly locked in our hearts. The pain of separation is one with the bliss of union.
And finally kirtan is an offering, a gift to the great One who has given us everything, and to whom we can give nothing in return but our loving remembrance." Jai Uttal
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From Psychology Today:
What are the benefits of Kirtan? While Kirtan has been around for thousands of years, modern researchers have only recently begun to study its health benefits. A team at the University of West Virginia interested in examining the effects of Kirtan on cognitive impairment found that doing a Kirtan mantra for 12 minutes a day for 12 weeks altered plasma blood levels involved in cellular aging which were associated with improvements in cognitive function, sleep, mood, and quality of life.1
Another team at the University of Pennsylvania, who studied the effects of Kirtan on patients with memory loss, found that after eight weeks of Kirtan the brain scans of participants in the study showed significantly increased cerebral blood flow in several areas. Most importantly, their performance on neuropsychological testing showed improved visuospatial memory, increased connectivity, and improved verbal memory.2 Others researchers have found that Kirtan can reduce symptoms of depression and improve chronic pain.3-4
From an emotional perspective, Kirtan is beneficial because you are engaged in an activity that distracts you from thinking. This is particularly beneficial if you are caught up in a spiral of negative thinking and would like to use meditation to alleviate the ruminative process. When you stop flooding your brain with fear and worry about the future or resentments from the past, this has a profoundly positive effect of resetting your emotional state to calm and peaceful. Some people who practice Kirtan also report a spiritual benefit, with some saying they feel a sense of bliss, more emotionally open and connected to others.
Register Here:
https://www.nshealing.com/appointments-2-3