Orva Schrock was hooked from the start.
Schrock is one of the organizers of “Let Your Heart Sing,” a Sanskrit devotional chanting group that meets in downtown Goshen. He discovered chanting through a newspaper article in the 1970s.
A group was meeting in South Bend. The public was invited. Schrock went.
“I was instantly smitten,” he recalled. “I sat on the floor with, I don’t know, 20 or 30 other people. Some were playing instruments, some were playing drums. They were all getting into it, and it carried me along. I walked out of there walking on air. I was hooked.”
Fast-forward a few decades and Schrock made contact with Kara Schmidt, instructor at Goshen’s Spacious Heart Yoga. Schmidt had experience with kirtans (chanting groups) in other places in conjunction with yoga workshops. Schrock and Schmidt began chanting together.
Schmidt recalled that the two had perhaps chanted twice as a duo, “and he was like, ‘All right! You ready to invite people?’” Thus Let Your Heart Sing was born. It’s been around about six months now.
The group has averaged 10 to 15 people at its sessions. Let Your Heart Sing meets at Schmidt’s yoga studio at 203 S. Main St.
“From the beginning, it’s been just wonderful, and much more than I ever thought it would be,” Schmidt said.
“We’re just having a really good time with it,” Schrock said.
Part of the culture
Chanting is a universal cultural phenomenon, according to Schrock.
“Mostly, its been an expression of man’s highest longing for transcendence, for going beyond what seems like our limitations,” he said. “It’s really been a search for God. The Christians have done it that way, the Buddhists, the Hindus. It still goes on around the world.”
“Sound is vibration,” Schrock said, and chanting is conducive to “a soothing and relaxing and meditative attitude.”
“In a group, the vibrations are stronger,” he said, later adding, “It lifts up everybody. People almost always leave here afterwards smiling. That’s something I just love.”
“It’s the best antidepressant I know of, but it’s certainly more than that, too,” Schrock said.
“I never go along with the idea that there’s a certain set of beliefs or a guru or a religion that you have to practice in order to be involved with this,” he said. “It’s an individual experience. I think that each person finds their own meaning and reality in it.”
“It has helped me find a more stable inner peace than anything else I know of,” he said.
No musical training or skill is necessary to chant. “If you needed a good voice, the Chant Police would have taken me away a long time ago,” Schrock said.
“People always tell me, ‘I don’t have a good singing voice,’” he said. “Well, you’ve got the voice God gave you. What we’re doing here is singing from our hearts.”
Newcomers tend to be sort of quiet. “You’ve got to start somewhere,” Schrock noted.
“I personally kind of let ’er wail, because it’s good for me,” he said of his own chanting style. “It’s what works. Sound is a marvelous healing thing when you accept it and practice it that way.”
There are benefits to solitary chanting, according to Schmidt, but the group experience is more powerful. “To me, it’s meant to be practiced as a community,” she said.
Schmidt said there are physiological benefits to chanting. For her, the practice provides a “connection to my heart, God. It’s meant as a way to celebrate that bigger energy, however you want to see it — whether it’s God or your heart or spirit.”
“Most of us have had that experience of being in church and having everyone singing together and how powerful that can be,” she said. “It’s kind of the same.”
Schmidt said that some chanters are hesitant at the beginning, “but most of them seem to warm up to it. They get enough out of it the first or second time that they realize there is benefit for themselves. So then they keep coming back and trying it.”
In practice
A recent Let Your Heart Sing gathering found people sitting on the floor in more or less a circle. For nearly an hour, they repeated this chant:
“Nityanandam Brahmanandam
Brahmaswarupam Neelavarnam
Triloka Natham Shree Gurudevam
Om Namo Nitanandam
Om Namo Nitanandam.”
The chant was backed by both recorded music and Darren Shetler’s violin. Some in the circle played percussion instruments.
Through repetition, the chant grew in intensity, though not really tempo or volume. Then it was over and the group spent minutes in silence
Schrock sounded a small chime, ending the collective stillness.
“Welcome back,” he told the group. “Take your time.”
“I’ve always enjoyed the chanting,” Shetler said after the gathering. “The sitting in silence afterward — I find it very refreshing and relaxing.”
That Let Your Heart Sing event was the first for Phil Stoesz. He noted that he’d gone to the session “nervously, shyly” with his girlfriend.
“I’d read up about a lot of this stuff, but taking part in it is really, really cool,” Stoesz said.
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