Bhakti Yoga as Living Breath: Lessons From a Kirtan Evening

Bhakti yoga, the path of devotion, trust, and love, is often described as the gentlest of the yogas, and it is also one of the most physical. A recorded satsang kirtan led by Shell and Anton, who teach under the names Premrupa and Nataraj, makes that case in under an hour: devotion is something you do with your breath, your voice, and your attention, not only something you feel. The evening, the second of a two-night program at Sivananda Ashram on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, moves from call-and-response mantras to storytelling about the lineage of yoga, and it closes with a room of people whispering the same four Sanskrit words. What follows is a close look at what they teach and why it works.

What does it look like when a room is split down the middle to chant?

Near the end of the session, Anton asks the room to find the middle, then divides it: one side follows Shell, the other follows Radha, who has been singing with them through the evening. The instruction is playful. "You can go team Radha or team Shell," he says, and when someone jokes that nobody is on his team, Shell answers that he is on hers. The call-and-response builds from a cautious "Oh, she" into a roar, then drops, then softens until the chant is, in Shell's phrase, "like a whisper now. She only in your mind."

That arc, from loud to near-silent, is the kirtan form in miniature. The group chant is not a performance for the leaders. It is a shared rhythm that the room has to hold together, and the teaching built into the game is that you can change sides, change volume, and change harmony "any way you want." Those small permissions matter. Bhakti practice has always been communal, and the satsang setting leans on that fact.

Why begin with a guru mantra and a question about teachers?

Every session in this series opens with the Guru Brahma mantra, and Shell explained early on why. "The guru mantra is just a way for us to get our thinking straight before we practice," she said. "It's a way for us to have some humility." (Shell, opening remarks, around 1:30.)

The more unusual move is the reframing. Shell asked the room to think of the guru "not only as a person, but as every moment that woke you up, including the painful ones, including the joyful ones," and then to ask which experience became a teacher. It is a question that turns a traditional invocation into a personal inventory. Bhakti is often pictured as devotion toward a figure outside oneself, but this framing asks the chanter to recognize that awakening has come through loss, joy, and ordinary moments alike.

How does chanting calm the nervous system?

Shell gave a concrete physiological reason for the breath-based approach. As you chant, she said, you are exhaling and slowing the exhale, which "speaks directly to your nervous system, calming it down." She asked the room to take a deep breath in and a long breath out before the first mantra, then to notice that the voice itself does the work.

This is a practical teaching, and it explains why kirtan feels settling even to people who are not singers. A sustained chant lengthens the out-breath by design. The practice does not require belief in any particular theology to notice the effect. Shell's emphasis on the voice as breath-training gives the practice a body, and it is the thread that connects the rest of the evening.

What is the teaching behind Govinda and Gopala?

Before one of the mantras, Shell explained that Govinda and Gopala are names of the young Krishna as protector and friend. She asked the room to "bring to mind some kind of situation in our life that we would like to sustain, preserve, protect," and to ask how it might be done in line with one's own dharma. (Shell, around 4:00.)

The instruction treats a mantra as a focus for intention. The name of a deity is not only praised; it is brought into a specific, personal situation. The protective, friendly quality Shell describes is the thing being asked for. Here Bhakti becomes a practical request, not an abstraction.

What does Om Shanti ask us to wish for?

The Om Shanti section starts with a few slow oms, and then the room picks up the repeated phrase until the words blur into rhythm. Afterward, Shell explained the phrase in terms that reach well past the room. "Vasudeva means the one who dwells in all things and shanti means peace," she said. "We wish peace on all things for all things." She named three objects of that peace: the people around us, ourselves, and "those forces of nature with which we have no control over."

That third category is the part many spiritual gatherings skip. Peace for others and for oneself is familiar. Peace toward weather, illness, and the things we cannot manage is harder to hold, and the teaching asks the chanter to include it on purpose.

Where does this practice come from?

Shell linked the evening to a lineage. She named Gorakshanatha as one of the first to share yoga from his teacher Matsyendranath, and said Matsyendranath is said to have learned yoga directly from Shiva, "the Adi yogi, the first yogi." The chants to Gorakshanatha, she said, are a way to call to mind one's own practices and where they came from.

Then came the line that reframes the whole Shiva chant. "We're not chanting to Shiva," she said. "We're chanting through Shiva back to ourselves." (Shell, around 23:40.) Shiva, in this telling, carries the quality of letting go. Shell described yogis as unafraid of destruction, because destruction is the step that clears room for a new cycle of creation and preservation, which then turns back to destruction. "These are the three principles in life that just happen over and over and over again," she said. The reading is practical: change is not a failure of devotion but part of its rhythm.

What is the heartbeat of the Gorakshataka?

The chant Anton calls the heartbeat of Gorakshanatha is built on a short phrase, "Goraksha, Goraksha, Goraksha Shiva," and the room is asked to listen for the pulse inside it. "Listen for the heartbeat, listen for the heart of yoga, listen to your own heartbeat," he said. The instruction is to listen rather than to perform, and the call-and-response is the mechanism for doing that. When the room drops to a whisper, the listening becomes most audible.

Why do they say they sing?

Partway through the evening, Shell offered a line that works as a thesis for kirtan as a whole: "We don't sing so that the divine can hear us. We sing so that we can finally hear ourselves." (Shell, around 11:15.) The sentence turns the usual idea of devotion inside out. The chant is not an offering that must reach a distant listener. It is a method for attention, and the chanter is the first to be changed by it.

That framing also explains the warmth of the rest of the program. Shell and Anton talk about hugs, invite questions, and describe the workshops and talks scheduled for the following two days, including a noon session with a chant of the Hanuman Chalisa on Monday. Their debut album, Breath of Bhakti, is due on December 4, and the evening was framed as a preview of the kind of practice that record documents.

How does the evening end?

The program closes with the Sanskrit phrase "Loka samastah sukhino bhavantu," which the speakers translate as "may all beings be free and happy." Shell and Anton close with "We love you," and the room answers with Om Shanti three times. The ending is a fitting return to the beginning: the guru as lived experience, the breath as the bridge, and peace extended outward to every being, including the forces no one controls.

Where to go from here

The most useful way to take in this material is to practice it. Start with the breath the teachers recommend: a deep inhale, a long exhale, and a mantra sung on that exhale. Choose one question from the evening, such as which experience has taught you, or which situation you want to protect, and let it sit beside the chant. If you want to hear the full session, the recording is available on the Sivananda Ashram Yoga Retreat Bahamas YouTube channel. For the course details and the program schedule, the Sivananda Bahamas course page for The Breath of Bhakti, November 2026, lists the sessions and the retreat itself. The point of the evening, as Shell put it, is not to be told who you are. It is to hear yourself.