Live music and chanting can take yoga beyond the physical practice to a more profound spiritual experience. I decided to check out a new Friday-night chanting class at Yoga Shunya on Grove Street and the live music class on Wednesday nights at Jivamukti Yoga Center on Newark Avenue.
Tuning in Through Mantra
I settle in deeply to child’s pose as I listen to Brad Roberts chanting in the background during a Friday-night yoga class at Yoga Shunya. That’s Brad Roberts of Crash Test Dummies fame, whose ’90s hit song, “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm,” is part of the soundtrack of my high-school years.
“What I did for so long being a musician didn’t seem that far away from what yoga teachers do,” Roberts says. “They go up in front of a group of people just like I did when I performed, and they guide people through an experience.”
A yoga practitioner for 10 years in the Anusara tradition, he became certified to teach in 2014. Originally from Canada, Roberts lives in Manhattan and started traveling to Jersey City in October to teach yoga. He leads a gentle, relaxing class.
Roberts’s baritone voice is set against the drone of a tanpura, a traditional Indian string instrument, which plays throughout the class. He leads students in a Bija mantra chanting, “Ah Hum,” which he tells the class is one of the most basic mantras we can link to the breath.
“When people are all in the same room and there is reverberation going on, the sound of the mantra is very captivating,” Roberts says. “It is like being in a sonic bath.”
A Healing Practice
“Brad’s an artist. He’s into yoga in its many forms, and he’s experimenting with reviving some of the forgotten traditions that bring deep healing to everyone,” says Elaine Hansen, director and founder of Yoga Shunya, where I occasionally teach. She’s incorporated chanting in her yoga classes for the past 18 years and had been looking for a way to bring more chanting to the studio.
She met Roberts in September during a workshop at Twisted Trunk Yoga, a new studio in Manhattan. She felt his background as a professional musician and his study and practice of mantra and tantric philosophy offered the right combination.
Roberts learned the practice of Rajanaka mantras from Douglass Brooks, a professor of religion, arts, sciences, and engineering at the University of Rochester in New York. Roberts has released an album, “Rajanaka Mantra,” and says that another one should be ready in a couple of months.
“I feel the mantra deeply, it has a really soothing effect on my consciousness, and I hope to be able to make people feel that in the class,” Roberts says. “And when I looked around today, everyone felt pretty blissed out.”
Yoga to Live Music
Jivamukti Yoga was cofounded by Sharon Gannon and David Life in New York City in 1984. On Newark Avenue in Jersey City, the Jivamukti Yoga Center offers a vigorous, energizing Vinyasa-based flow set to live music on Wednesday nights. Each week a new musician comes and sets the mood for the class. One week Matt Wiviott played a Guzheng, an ancient Chinese musical instrument with strings, which made for a sweet ambiance, while the next week vocalist and guitarist Stephanie Carlin sang in an ethereal voice.
“Live music in yoga classes has become popular recently,” says Austin Sanderson, studio co-owner and director. “The first time I went to a live-music class, I remember thinking, ‘This is taking it back to its purest form.’”
Sanderson, who is an advanced certified Jivamukti yoga instructor, opened the studio February 2014 with his life partner Robert Hranichny. Sanderson has lived in Jersey City for nearly 20 years and has spent decades working as a designer in American theater. He compared the live yoga-music experience to having a live orchestra play during a theatrical performance.
“Having that live music there brings such a ‘bhava,’ or divine mood, that it is so much more powerful than playing from your music playlist,” Sanderson says.
Sound Body and Mind
Sanderson says the live-music experience is very much linked to Nada Yoga, one of Jivamukti’s five tenets.
“Nada yoga is the yoga of listening for the un-struck sound—meaning the sound in its purest form—the sound of om,” Sanderson says. “The sound of om is the sound of God.”
He opens the live-music class with chanting from the Upanishads, ancient Vedic texts. Students follow along with a chant book in a call-and-response format.
The music begins, and Sanderson gets his cues on what type of class to lead from the tone and tempo the musician sets and vice versa.
“It is really a practice of presence. … It is all improvisation. It is all feeding off of the energy at the moment,” Wiviott says. “Which for me is the same kind of discipline that the physical practice of yoga nurtures.”
Originally from Montreal, Wiviott has accompanied yoga classes for six years. He played beautiful harp-like cascading sounds, as we rose up from a forward fold. Later I noticed the sound of a heartbeat pulsing, which had a calming effect.
“Music can send a very specific message to a class. It can uplift a class or it can bring them down,” Sanderson says.
Sanderson lowers the lights as the class progresses, and the mood shifts along with the sounds. When Carlin sang, she left spaces of silence between her songs and mantras, which created a feeling of openness.
“They know something very special is happening even if they can’t put their finger on it,” Sanderson says. “I think that they all of sudden surrender a little bit to it. … It opens their heart.”—JCM
Resources
Yoga Shunya, at 275 Grove St., offers chanting for all levels Fridays at 6:30 p.m.
Jivamukti Yoga Center, at 171 Newark Ave., offers a live-music yoga class Wednesdays at 8 p.m.