ENCHANTING TRADITIONAL MUSIC: I am in the Aditya Ayurveda Ashram in Kerala, South India. I am learning amazing things about this ancient traditional system of healing from the brilliant doctors here who come from a long, powerful and wise lineage. Also the brilliant and dedicated staff are giving me brilliant daily treatments. This is all so much deepening my understanding of yoga (the sister science of Ayurveda). I do my daily pranayama and yoga asana but we also have a Kalari Payatu (South Indian martial arts) class which is like doing a dynamic yoga battle with long sticks in the great Mahabharata war (where the word yoga was mentioned for first time in writing in the Bhagavad Gita). This morning after a special 4 am to sunrise puja (fire ceremony and blessing) by the oldest local high priests and their sons for Ganesh and Vishnu and lots of snake incarnations these two highly respected elder women came to sing in a dialect of Malayalam (the language of Kerala) to honour and give blessing to the local snake goddess for which there are at least 4 ancient temples I have seen just surrounding the ashram - we are in a sacred jungle that can never be cut down because these temples to the snake goddess are so old that they even predate the hindu culture that is here now. This is a small sample of the music they sung and played on a one-stringed guitar. This is my 16th trip to India and it never ceases to amaze me.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 06:53:25 +0000