This afternoon I went for a walk at Sachuest Wildlife Preserve in Middletown, RI- one of my favorite places to walk. At a certain point I stopped and made a conscious effort to feel the vibratory frequencies of all the different elements around me- the dirt and gravel path on which I was walking, the air, the blue sky, the clouds, the different varieties of plants, trees and shrubs, the pounding surf, the birds, the rustling of unseen animals in the bushes near the path. I stopped, breathed, tuned in all of my senses, and took it all in- and in that moment realized that the synergistic effect of all these frequencies was
Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati (Ramamurti S. Mishra, MD) my teacher's guru
My beloved teacher, Swami Sivananda Sarasvati
Reasons for learning Sanskrit through chanting, according to Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati:
You learn Sanskrit naturally and
effortlessly.
You enter your being through
discipline of meditation, relaxation and concentration.
You experience natural unity and
integrity with the world.
You receive natural and holistic
healing, unifying body, mind and spirit.
By the radiation of natural health
on all levels you help others in the same direction.
You experience the integrity of
all world languages through the vibration of Sanskrit language with
chanting.
You enter into meditation in a
natural way.
You experience natural and
spontaneous revelation of freedom and enlightenment, the light of
natural awareness.
The Sanskrit language, known as “The
mother of all tongues” is one of the oldest known languages, if not the oldest, on our planet.
The written alphabet is called “devanāgari”.
It is said that the language derived from the cities of the devas,
“the shining ones” (“nagar” is the word for city). Each
letter was derived from an icon of one of the many diverse Goddesses.
The great Devi created 50 subforms of herself, the mātrikas
or “little mothers” whose names are still recited daily by devout
shakti worshippers. Each letter has its own meditative quality and
vṛtti (perturbation of the
natural mind) associated with it.
Because
each phenome in the Sanskrit language has its own vibrational
quality, with the proper pronunciation one can attain states of
mastery- theoretically even
if you did not know the actual meaning of the words!
This idea has another level of importance, because if the language is
mispronounced one can inadvertently be bringing in unwanted vibratory
energies. For example, “the pigeon”... rājakapotāsana...
the
word “rāja” means king or sovereign. Leave off the long “a”
and the word becomes “raja”- which translates as either pollen of
flowers or menstrual excrement! Properly pronounced it really
translates as “the royal pigeon pose”. When one is teaching [yoga] one
can be adding to this energy of excellence through the correct
pronunciation of Sanskrit.
In 1786 Sir William Jones, one of the first people to seriously study the language outside of India had this to say about it:
The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin,
and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a
stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of
grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong,
indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.
My personal experience of studying and chanting Sanskrit is that it charges the brain, balances the nervous system, creates new neural pathways and improves memory.
This short video is from an introductory Sanskrit class for yoga teachers that I taught at Living Room Yoga in St. Petersburg, FL several years ago. The actual devanagari letters are below so you can chant along.
