Finding a Brother. Changing Your Vibration
Bethel Farm. I’m sitting on a giant boulder by a creek in the early morning light, feeling it all. Yesterday = phew. First time with the band since covid, sharing air, sharing breath. Last night’s kirtan was full body hugs, tears coming down, heart-cracking harmonies, the guitar and bass like lovers, weaving together, slow and rich… not one but TWO amazing drummers, and of course Adam bringing it with a room full of souls singing the isolation out, making one body.
We’ve been holding so much alone this year.... here we are each other’s medicine. I got this message loud and clear in the silence: Give it away if it isn’t yours to do, if it isn’t coming from right now, if it isn’t love. There is so much that I do that is old and needs to be dropped. Give it away if it isn’t yours to do.
(Continued from this Prior Post: Collective Effervescence)
Finding a Brother.
After the Taos experience, my interest in all things mantra deepened. I started to learn Sanskrit, and to read more of the ancient philosophy and spiritual texts. During this time, I also met a soul brother, the devotional musician Adam Bauer, with whom I would eventually sing in hundreds of places around the globe.
I met Adam when I was doing a yearlong refresher yoga teacher training, trying to fill in some knowledge gaps. He arrived as a guest of our shared instructors, Nicki Doane and Eddie Modestini, who were rare in that their training took both Iyengar and Ashtanga schools of yoga into consideration. We were in a small, traditional yoga studio in Sebastopol, California: the kind with ropes attached to the walls, where the teacher doesn’t stand in front and demonstrate and cheerlead, but rather walks up and down the center of two rows, so that they can have a full view of all the students and thus work with them individually.
Adam and I partnered up on some exercises and laughed the whole time. A lifelong friendship was born. He was and is many things: an Indiaphile and Deadhead, hyper-literate, the best communicator I’ve ever met, gentle-hearted and also crude and very very funny. I soon picked up that music was central to his life. His auditory perception was so acute that harsh sounds caused him literal physical pain. As we got to know each other, I learned that he was a kirtan musician, specifically a bass player, who had been playing with the great teacher Shyamdas for many years, in a North Indian Krishna lineage called Pushti Marg.
Also, side note: Krishna is a real personified deity for many, and for others he is an archetype. He and his consort-queen Radha represent one of the cosmic forces of creation, that of the playful dancing lovers that brings the world alive. I love this quote on the relationship between Radha and Krishna from the Chaitanya Charitamrita: "Radha is the storehouse of spiritual love and her countless expansions manifest unlimited aspects of that love. Resplendent and most beautiful, she is worship-able to everyone; she is the protector of all and the mother of the entire universe. She is the full power and Krishna is the possessor of that power. Radha and Krishna are inseparable, like musk and its scent, or fire and its heat. They exist in two distinct forms only to enjoy the exchanges of love." That is also the heart of Kirtan! We exist to enjoy the exchanges of love.
So, back to Adam. For many years Adam also played with Krishna Das. In fact, one of the first things we did together was go to hear Krishna Das in San Francisco, front row. At that point, Adam hadn’t yet begun to lead on his own. As I mentioned above, he also played with Shyamdas for many years, and immersed himself in his teaching.
I want to paint a picture of Shyamdas, because this is part of our lineage. When Shyamdas sang, he was utterly untamed, uncensored and expressive in his devotion. His chanting would go from a tender whisper to a red-faced openmouthed sputtering wail, head thrown back, crying out to the godhead, giving his all to the prayer. He was a practitioner-scholar of Indian devotional traditions for more than 40 years. Born in New York City, he was part of that first wave of what are colloquially called “Hinjews”, Jewish kids who traveled to India and found a resonance in the mystic traditions there. Shyamdas found his way to Radha and Krishna’s hometown, Vrindavan, in the 70s, where he studied with prominent saints and scholars, translating and interpreting classical texts, making many of them accessible to English-speaking audiences for the first time. So this is the framework that Adam and I are part of- the loving, divine play of Radha and Krishna coming from Shyamdas.
Eventually, Adam invited me to come out to the east coast, to visit his farm and attend a weekend chant festival in Rhinebeck, New York, a full five days of around-the-clock immersion in devotional music. I took the slow Amtrak trip from New York to Amherst, and waited at the little brick station. It was a kind of the threshold, and he carried me over. We drove up to the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, where Artists like Cece White and Vishal Vaid graced the stage, and of course, Shyamdas himself was there.
During those days, I sang with the full force of my heart’s longing, danced until my clothes were soaked, stayed up all night and sat on the wet grass at sunrise and listened to master flutist Steve Gorn playing a tender morning raga on a wooden bansuri.
At the end of the festival we went to Adam’s farm, a sprawling 130 acres with a rambling farmhouse and a giant barn dating from the 1800s.
Once inside, guess who was everywhere?
Plaid blanket man, Neem Karoli Baba, Maharaji. 36” posters and laminated portable postcards on walls and refrigerators. Everywhere I looked it was: love, serve, remember.
We didn’t know at the time that Shyamdas would leave his body in a matter of months, in a motorcycle accident in Goa. Or that his parting invitation to Adam was that he begin to lead the chant himself. That in the mourning days immediately following Shyam’s death, while still in India, a full album of new chant melodies would be “downloaded”, and would become Adam’s first devotional recording, Shyam Lila.
Listen to a track from Shyam Lila:
Changing Your Own Vibration
Rooted in the rich tapestry of Hindu and Bhakti traditions, kirtan has not only emerged as a powerful tool for the personal experience of everyday ecstasy, it is a practice that changes the way we see the world. It changes our vibration. It opens the heart to divine love and to connection with the sacred presence within and around us.
As we transcend ordinary consciousness and enter into higher states of awareness, we see the unified field from which all material reality arises.
Once you see that, you can’t go back. You begin to live from this awareness. The practice helps us surrender the less pleasant parts of the ego, the anxious and self-absorbed parts, to become increasingly selfless, and as our perceptual lens shifts, our happiness expands.
(Continued in the next post).