A new kind of love song

Tenderfoot Yogi Podcast and Audio Blog: Perspectives and Insights for Ease in Your Awakening

Boy I love a good love song. Who doesn’t? With the heartache, the longing, the passion and desire and joy – what’s not to love? Whether your idea of a love song comes from Mozart, Metallica, Elvis Presley, John Legend or Adele – the thing that all love songs have in common is that they engage our emotions. But what if there is a different kind of love song? There is. What if all the time that we spend singing along to our favorite love songs we are expressing our longing for love that reaches far beyond the lyrics? We are. There is a love that lives within all of us that seeks freedom from our emotions, and music can take us there – we just need some awareness of the path. Here is what I’m learning…

Listen to the Podcast version of this post below

Sappy Mush

For as long as I can remember, the songs to which I have sung out loud the loudest have been love songs. Here is a brave confession for you – I know all of the words to several songs by the soft rock duo Air Supply who peaked in the early 1980s. Bear in mind that I balance this out by knowing all the words to most songs by Pearl Jam and Guns and Roses as well. And let’s be honest, you can belt out a few versus of ‘Making love out of nothing at all’ also can’t you? No? OK never mind. The bottom line is that if you are a sappy mush like me when it comes to love music, there may be something more behind it.

Tears

Several years ago, while visiting my father in Florida I came across a performance by the pop music star Pink. She did a performance piece of her hit song ‘Glitter in the Air’ at the 2010 Grammy awards that engaged me to the point of tears. It was the music, the nature of the song, and the visual of her physical performance that combined to engage my heart. Then, last week during a long yoga practice at home, during which I was listening to Krishna Das chant the Hanuman Chalisa, I again found myself with tears. Were these the same kind of tears that came upon me in response to Pink’s pop song in the Grammy awards performance?

Yes and No

The first answer to this question is yes. It is yes because the pop love song pulls at our heart. It taps into the longing and the desire and the happiness and the sadness and all of the other emotions that flow through us as we experience being a human with a heart living amongst other humans with hearts here on Earth. Listening to Krishna Das chant also engages our heart, so in this it is the same. But it’s also different because chanting engages our heart through a completely different channel – a channel that intentionally circumvents our emotions and all of our emotional attachments and associations with the love of human connectedness and relationship.

Brain Science

One of the primary benefits of a sustained meditation practice is that it simultaneously strengthens the part of our brain that is responsible for joy, while it inhibits the part of our brain where our emotional reactivity resides. Our center for joy lives at the front of our brains, right behind the point between our eyebrows. Our emotions reside at a much more primitive part of our brain just above the spine and brainstem. This is part of why it is such a wonderful example of spiritual progress when you are able to respond to a challenging situation with calmness and perspective, instead of with emotional reactivity. You are acting from a completely different part of your brain.

Emotions of the heart

It is important not to confuse the words ’emotions’ and ‘feelings’. That we seek, through our spiritual practices, to be less tied in with our emotions does not mean that we seek to feel less. These are two very different things and we want to feel more, not less. I think that it’s helpful to think of emotions as reactive – we don’t want to be beholden to our emotions. As we strengthen the part of our brain that opens doors to higher states of being we actually feel more. We see more. We experience more. We become more. Whereas yesterday we were able to feel happiness only through external experiences that happened to tap a pleasure center, today we are able to experience happiness through the observation of something beautiful within us.

It’s all one thing

It is also important not to misread that experiencing heartfelt emotion through singing a love song is somehow inferior to experiencing the joy of chant music. It all touches our heart and our capacity for love and feeling love and it’s therefore all just one thing. Anything that opens our hearts and our capacity for love is what is needed most. There is no difference between the longing for romantic human love, and the longing for the divine love that lives within us. Because it is all leading us to the same place. Tears of joy or tears of sadness or tears of love or tears of loss are all tears worth shedding because it means we are alive and experiencing this human gift. But it’s also true that listening to spiritual chant music and chanting it ourselves offers us something that the pop love songs do not.

Why we chant

Years ago, even as I was opening to the idea of meditation and yoga, I remained skeptical about chanting. This is fascinating, because chanting may very well be what I now enjoy most about my spiritual practice. It was just so new and foreign, and to a certain extent I may have felt a bit fraudulent because I did not yet understand or feel in a genuine way the words that were being chanted. But this does not matter. First, we chant regardless of our feelings about it. The chanting will do the work for us and we come around. But I have found two things undeniably true about spiritual chanting. It is a wonderful tool for quieting our mind, and it is a wonderful tool for engaging our heart.

Quieting our mind

In the earliest days of my awakening I found chanting to be a solid tool for quieting the floodgate of thoughts to which I had recently been introduced. Chants are short and repetitive and the flow of melody is simple and engaging. The short verses allow them to be committed to memory quickly. I have used some chants that are no more than one word or even one sound. This means that even when a chant is new, you are soon free to let go and focus on the words as they come. Unlike when singing along to a love song on the radio where you may find yourself responding to all sorts of memories and emotions that come up, when chanting you are simply focused on the sounds that you hear and feel coming through. In time, the same words sung over and over blend with the melody and become one – they become like a vibration to which you are tuned. While pop love songs tend to last no more than 3 minutes, to coordinate with the average conscious attention span, chant music lasts much longer. You can simultaneously become lost and found in the chanting, and this leads you to your heart.

Your heart

In time, chanting becomes even more than a tool for quieting our mind, as we learn to release ourselves into it. The effect is different depending upon whether we are listening to chant music or chanting ourselves, but both are wonderful. As our focus tunes in with the chant verse, the melody of the chant, either accompanied by music or simply with the sound or our voice, makes its way into our heart. Because we are focused, our mind is quiet, and as we know when our mind is quiet we can begin to hear our heart. And if this were not enough, all of the wonderful Kirtan and chant leaders and composers speak of devotional chanting as a way to engage the divine within us to overcome all of life’s obstacles. It is an incredibly powerful tool to experience and incorporate into your practice.

Satsang

In a recent post titled ‘That person’s fear is not yours‘ we discussed the value of surrounding ourselves with others who similarly seek spiritual awakening. The Sanskrit word that embodies this value is Satsang. Group meditations, yoga classes, and workshops that focus on spiritual matters are great for Satsang. But in the absence of these opportunities I have found that this music that we are speaking of, music that is sung by a fellow truth seeker and that is of and about this greatest love of which we now seek, well, it can be our Satsang.

A simple chant

There are many sources of chant music and different ways that you can apply it. You can start by simply listening to this new kind of music, and see where it takes you. Start your search on YouTube or Pandora. You can also begin incorporating your own chanting. You can chant a prayer, a blessing, an affirmation, or in devotional chanting you can repeat a single word of divine origin. You can chant in English or expose yourself to any number of Kirtan styles that chant in ancient languages. Here is one in English that I adapted to combine a blessing with an affirmation. First, we state our innermost desire for Peace, then we affirm that which we desire is already within us. Apply any melody that rings true for you (or listen to the podcast version where I give you my melody).

“I want Divine Peace. Peace, only Peace. I am divine Peace. Peace, only Peace”

Ambassadors of Love

It’s funny how the greatest wisdom from the most powerful ambassadors of Love can evolve over time. Paramhansa Yogananda said that “the more you meditate, the more you’ll want to meditate. The less you meditate, the less you’ll want to meditate.” This is one of those pearls of wisdom that becomes more true over time. It seems that there is a certain hump that we all cross over in the early days of meditation as our mind is resisting the change with everything in its arsenal. In the early days we have to make ourselves sit down for meditation, and then at some point it becomes all we really want to do. Life becomes the things that we do in between meditations, instead of the other way around. And so it has become with music that is of a certain origin and focus. First you might dabble in it. You might give it a try in between the familiar love music that sparks memories and familiar emotions and feelings. And then, like meditation, it becomes much more of what you want to experience. And I think this is because it is touching a place in us that we most desire touched. We just went for so long unaware of this place, and so it took the music to remind us of it.

For what it’s worth, and for the knowing that all is well.

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