Groovy chanting

In my online Veda class recently we fell into a group discussion about the challenges of sending our chant recordings to the teacher, the vulnerability of being obviously sh*t at something and doing it anyway, the importance of feedback for correction as well as encouragement, the joy of being seen (or heard) especially in these moments of challenge and what feels somehow like personal risk. It was so beautiful hearing everyone’s similar stories and the readiness of the group to share, especially in service of the students who didn’t yet feel able to participate in this aspect of the learning process. And I was immensely grateful that I have worked through some of this difficulty already, at least to the point where I can regularly send the teacher my recording and not re-try endlessly to get it better. I just pick a day, record my practice, and send it off. She hears how it is in ‘real life’, not a confected performance.

It’s listening to the feedback that is the harder part for me. Sometimes it takes me days to find the courage to open the audio file I get back, where the teacher plays my recording back and pauses it any time she wants to add a comment on something.

Yet the teacher is so consistently firm and steady that this too becomes a little easier over time. I tell myself it’s not simply that I dislike criticism. I mean I’m expecting and indeed wanting her to correct my technical mistakes. A wrong svara (note or tone), a missed mahaprana (aspiration), sometimes even a muddled pronunciation. On this level it’s easy. My reluctance sits deeper than this. I somehow fear she’ll give me some much more fundamental feedback, that I’m just somehow not meant to study the Veda, that I’m not worthy or able or….. well, I can’t even find the words because I know how ridiculous this is, I can’t bring myself to write it out.

And yet it’s also not at all ridiculous, as the teacher would doubtless tell me straight up! These fears come from past experiences and they take their time to be replaced by new samskaras. She is helping, largely unknowingly, to smooth out the grooves of past time and enable me to have a new experience of mutual respect and trust between student and teacher. It would be really lovely, this building of relationship — and some days it is so — if it didn’t often feel so frustratingly tainted and gritty. Samskaras really get under your skin! I guess the point comes where they are so uncomfortably irritating that you take new action to resolve the discomfort?

As I observe my fellow students each week struggling and progressing, doubting and still doing, ironing out their own grooves, I am filled with admiration and delight. And I am learning to extend that response to my own journey too. I didn’t need to listen to the most recent feedback from the teacher to know that it was a big shift from where I was previously, I knew it for myself. Not just improved accuracy in the technicalities but also a greater underlying steadiness, finding my voice, finding my feet. My asana teacher used to urge me to ‘stand in my power’ and I think I just begin to understand what he meant and how that might feel. It’s not literally about ‘standing’ of course, it’s about stance, attitude, alignment with self.

If you get that kind of self-power through chanting the Veda, I’d say that’s pretty groovy! 🙂