Day 10: Chanting Is All The (Uncontrollable) Rage

could you shut it? i'm working out here

In the course of this little experiment, I've started to read some yoga life articles, just to see what other people are talking about and to give me some new things to think about (and write about!) besides, "down dog again...also very sweaty today." And apparently there's a horde of people out there on the Internet who are all, "argh enough with the all the damn chanting already aaarrrrggghhhh!!!!!"

Really, this is a thing?

For starters, these posts usually overstate the amount of chanting in your general yoga class.  Even when I used to go to the super-spiritual studio with Ganeshas and Shivas and incense and everything, the MOST we did was an OHM at the beginning and one at the end and the mantra (Loka Samasta Sukino Bhavantu. Shan'ti Shan'ti Shan'ti). Maybe ONCE in my year or so there my teacher asked us if we wanted to try some kundalini stuff, and since we were all like, sure, then we did the chakra chanting. But in my gym yoga classes, I encounter an OHM or two only most of the time, and that mantra is rare. That's it.  How this turns into "enough with all the chanting just shut up and let me work out!" like it's Mister Rogers' Neighborhood or something, escapes me. (You know what though? I would do yoga to an episode of Mister Rogers--"it's such a good feeling to know you're alive"? I would chant the ever-living shit out of that.)

There's even a so-called new approach to yoga with no chanting or OHMing at all, called the No OM Zone. The reviewers' comments boil down to "omg finally I can do yoga without all that hippie granola crap!" (To any of those people: why would you ever listen to a woman with a Kate Gosselin hairdo, for anything, ever?)

Some people try to compromise, and offer a "well, I'll give you a half-hearted OHM under my breath, but I Will Not Chant! So there." But you're in a form of exercise who's very point is to challenge your conceived notions of your body and what it can do, or will do. The whole crux of this thing is to reach beyond what your mind has decided you can and can't, and will and won't do, because only then do you discover where your strength, flexibility, etc lie. I can tell you, if your mind is putting up walls between what it will and will not do, you're not getting anything out of it.

You don't actually want to do yoga! And that's fine! Go do pilates instead.

I kind of get the "oh but my religion!" argument. But don't let any Ganeshas and Shivas and incense fool you: if you walked up to a real live Hindu person and said that you practice their religion, they will probably laugh right in your face. Western yoga has pretty much stripped the practice of any connection to outright religiosity, and there's an entire argument for not even doing it at all unless it is indeed a part of your religious practice. This fear of the spirituality reminds me of the hysterical leaflets the nuns would send home in grade school, warning our parents of ten ways their second-grader could accidentally drop acid. Relax, you're not going to unintentionally do wicca or worship satan.

I get that people may be bothered by chanting in a language that they don't understand. But OHM doesn't actually mean anything. It's just a sound. And the mantra, paraphrased, is, "wouldn't it be cool for everyone if no one was a jerk? Let's try that." And shan'ti means peace.  You can't say peace? Again, you're not accidentally unsaving your soul.

Sure you could actually say, "peace," but there's an advantage to chanting words you don't know.  I studied opera in college and had to sing in Italian, and I encountered this--it's easier to sing in Italian than in English! You know the meaning of the phrase, but not the specific words, so your mind focuses on the physicality of making the sounds rather than saying the words. It makes you aware of what your body is doing.

And resonance! Oh, man, yeah, resonance. Sound is energy traveling through air, so when a room full of people are putting out the same kind of energy everything builds on itself--this is how you get that I Am The Whole World feeling. When everyone's chanting a good, long OHM and none of them are tone deaf so you're all on the same pitch and everything in the entire room is humming the same frequency MAN ALIVE.

Have you ever felt like your entire body was ringing like a bell?

Try it and then try to tell me you hate to chant.




Would you like a very intimidating article about how resonant frequencies work in yoga that is pretty interesting if you have the time to really digest it? Here you go.

Further misadventures at the 30-Day Yoga Challenge Page


Image: Sura Nualpradid / FreeDigitalPhotos.net