I didn’t expect to make it to Snatam Kaur’s concert in London last Sunday, and I was incredibly grateful to be there. Snatam Kaur has been pretty influential in my kundalini yoga journey, although I perhaps haven’t given her enough credit for it. But when she opened at London’s Troxy with Ong Namo Guru Dev Namo, I was reminded, and I was flooded with gratitude. That was when the tears started streaming… and they basically didn’t stop until well after the closing Sat Nams!
I first came across Snatam Kaur’s music before I discovered kundalini yoga. I was volunteering at a healing stand at the Mind Body Spirit festival. We were right next to a stall selling CDs, and it was blaring out a continuous playlist of sacred chants. The music was hiked up really loud and interfered a little with our healing work—we had to raise our voices a few octaves!—but hey, this was MBS where peace and quiet is generally not an option.
I was working with someone in one of our ‘quiet’ booths, when I heard a song that still gets me: Guru Ram Das Rakho Saranai. It went straight to my heart. I was filled with the grace of that song, and I had to know what it was, whose voice was behind it. So after the healing, I went to the stall, and the woman handed me Anand. I played it on repeat for months afterwards – it brought me such peace!
I found kundalini yoga a little while after that, not by looking for it, but by happy synchronicity. And when I heard the music in the class, it clicked in my heart – of course, Snatam Kaur! Life, you beauty. When I took up kundalini yoga teacher training, Snatam Kaur accompanied me through my first 40-day 31-minute meditation, and her Kirtan Sohila is one of my favourites of all time.
Fast forward 15 years or so, and here I am, at Snatam Kaur’s concert in London. And I’m feeling so utterly grateful. Kundalini yoga has given me so much, it is such a balm for my soul, it is such a precious technology. And here is a woman who’s holding such a luminescent flame for it, a flame that certainly guided me in! So many students come to kundalini yoga through the music, including me. What a gift.
So, thank you, thank you, thank you Snatam Kaur, for your recent world tour! And for sharing your grace, for living through your heart and for being a lighthouse for so many.
Here’s a beautiful kundalini yoga kriya for the throat:
Sat nam x