“You have to experience it to know what it’s like,” Deva Premal says about chanting mantras. “It’s beyond words. Breathing together. Laughing…crying together.”
Deva experienced the joy of chanting, before birth. Her father chanted the sacred Gayatri mantra to her mother’s belly, and with the first breath, Deva took, her father responded singing the mantra. As a child, Deva sang that same mantra every night before she went to bed. Many years later, as her father was in his final moments, Deva sang him the Gayatri mantra.
Chanting mantras was a personal ritual for Deva until she met Miten in India, and they became soul mates and musical partners. He was a musician that discovered there was something far greater than following the musical notes and rhythms.
The Magical Journey of Mantras
“My music didn’t have substance,” he says about his Beatles and Elvis-inspired preferences before he discovered devotional music or Kirtan. “How many love songs do you want to hear? Or why somebody left them? Mantra is a magical journey. And I jumped on the train.”
Meditative chanting has been gaining popularity in the Western world, and the lyrical voices and instrumentation of Deva Premal and Miten’s arrangements have spread the passion for mantras even further. “Mantras are scientifically designed energetic sound formulas created 5,000 years ago in India,” explains Miten. “The ‘technology’ was the body and nature. They refined sounds to a point that if you repeat them, something happens. It was scientific exploration. Deva and I have seen so many people benefit from singing the mantras. We really have a mission to share what we feel to be amazingly precious healing vibrations. Sound has power.”
“Repetition is important,” adds Deva. Explaining how mantra meditation is about somatics, she says that you can create beautiful shapes by applying frequency to water or sand. “Our bodies are 75 percent water. I find it’s like tuning forks. That’s why we feel a peace (when we chant) and we don’t even need to know the meaning (of the words we are chanting). It’s our cellular language.”
Mantra chanting, typically, includes 108 repetitions of a short mantra. According to Ayurveda, the 5,000-year-old Indian life science, our bodies have 72,000 nadis and 108 are main energy lines. When we chant a mantra 108 times, that sound vibration can fill the primary energy lines in the body and balance them. “We are messengers,” says Miten about Mantras. “We feel we have a jewel to offer.”
One year, 95,000 people from 200 countries participated in Deva and Miten’s online 21-Day Mantra Meditation Journey, creating an incredible circle of love, compassion, and awareness around the planet.