Top 3 Things I Learned Going to Yoga Festivals (funny, but true)

For over a decade I taught mantra workshops and led chant experiences, sound baths, and led kīrtan at some of the largest yoga festivals in the world. Yoga Fest Yokohama Japan, International Yoga Fest in Rishikesh India, Bhaktifest in California, etc.

Like most of us though, I stayed put during the pandemic, and have just started leaving my house again. LOL! Within the last year I attended a few festivals different countries, and my oh my... have things changed, or have I changed?

I learned A LOT about the zeitgeist in the wellness scene. Mostly, it was awesome to connect with sincere, lovely people who are trying to help people and live a better life. It was amazing to chant in person with hundreds, even thousands of voices again.

And there were some things that felt "off" to me and that worry me.

I write this with a little sassy humor and a little deep truth-talking!
If you know me, you know that's my style. ;)

Top 3 Things I Learned Going to Yoga Festivals

1 
“Breathwork” is code for a space in which you’re invited (expected? encouraged?) to scream out your repressed feelings. If you don’t, the facilitator feels uneasy and isn’t sure if you’ve had a good experience, so even if you’re really not feeling anything come up, you play along with a bit of performative primal sounds and movement.

Breathwork as such is particularly popular in Germany, where several fans of transformational breathwork told me that they enjoy the temporary release of expression that such screaming offers, and it's a kind of "high" that they crave, but admitted that they're right back to the same pattern afterwards.

Perhaps combining such breathwork with a steady mantra practice would provide the lasting transformation they're after? Or are festival-goers really just looking for whatever temporary high after temporary high they can get, and not really interested in the steady grit of an empowering daily practice? What do you think?

2
Kirtan and mantra chanting music is most popular when it’s loud, fast, and gets people dancing. Festival organizers expect this and so mantra chant music artists develop their set lists to be more performative and dancey, focused on the charisma of the musicians vs. an internal experience of the power of sound. 

The empowering self-therapeutic value of mantra yoga, with participants directly embodying the nuanced vibrational healing frequencies, is not as popular as the flashy entertainment kīrtans or ecstatic dances where musicians basically use Sanskrit mantra as exotic lyrics. 

(here's me at Yoga Festa in Japan a few years ago teaching a Sanskrit mantra workshop. I always loved my sincere Japanese students!)

At the wellness festivals, I rarely heard basic accurate Sanskrit pronunciation. All this tells me there is SO. MUCH. MORE. that chant lovers don’t know they don’t know about the power of sound.

Has performative emphasis changed kīrtan & nāda yoga away from their sound healing roots?

🤔 side note (pardon the pun)
I suspect that the festival culture has HEAVILY influenced the development of mantra music in the West (outside of India).

Inside India while I was studying Indian classical music, I learned something interesting from my music guru and scholars of classical music: The style of Indian classical music that's popular today was heavily influenced by nāda yogis performing at royal court and for wealthy patrons who wanted to be entertained by fancy vocal and instrumental acrobatics. 

Nāda Yoga as Indian classical music also has lost its meditative focus for most practitioners! There's pressure to perform on stage and compete with other classical musicians to do the showiest, fastest, most complicated patterns. To become a graded artists with the All India Radio, one must show off these skills (which have absolutely nothing to do with the meditative, transformative, self-therapeutic aspect of nāda yoga that we enjoy in the heart of sound trainings.)

When I gave myself permission to use the same nāda yoga techniques to sing for my own pleasure (and not give into the pressure to perform on stage) the full healing power of sound started to reveal itself to me.

One thing I know for sure: the mystic musicians who wrote inspired poetry we now revere as nāda yoga scripture were NOT singing for any kings (or partying dance audiences for that matter!)

Interesting phenomenon! I wanted what those mystic musical saints had... so I to find the pathway within myself through the heart of the sound.

3
Cacao ceremonies, shamanic healing, MDMA, and plant medicine (psychedelics mushrooms, amanita muscaria, blue lotus, microdosing LSD, etc.) are rising in popularity in the yoga, sound healing & wellness spaces. Maybe more people are interested in plant medicine nowadays than yoga and mantra chanting? 

🤔 I wonder if the appeal is that it is easy and readily available to ingest a substance to quickly trigger expanded consciousness or personal insight? Perhaps more importantly, the cool kids are doing it, so there’s a fair amount of social pressure to at least try something like ayahuasca.

Compared to the more gradual self-fueled steady effort of the yogic path, psychedelic therapy for mental health certainly seems more sexy.

I worry about cultural appropriation of indigenous medicines and practices, just like in yoga and mantra chanting (if basic Sanskrit sounds are SO lacking from the popular scene, even after decades, how much will be lost in the transfer of plant medicine knowledge to a Western audience?)

A fundamental belief system shift is at the heart of these therapeutic practices; they can’t be engaged casually, for entertainment, or for exotic recreation without losing their potencies, and very few folks really take the decades it takes to unravel and reweave one’s Self into the fabric of embodied wholeness and embrace of Life.

🤷‍♀️ My opinion take it or leave it:
Personally, I’m not against psychedelics, but I have seen that even the most well-intentioned ceremonies can leave people in a more traumatized and hopeless loop than when they started.

So while I’m excited about people who really could benefit from microdosing, I would love to see more care and focus on empowerment, and I worry about the deepest levels of healing being outsourced to someone else or a drug, rather than one’s own self-inquiry and attunement practice (in a mantra meditation practice for example).

I’d love to see people going for a permanent state change, rather than a temporary high.

And of course the permanent state change that I know about is available through an empowering mantra & nāda yoga personal practice!

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