Ten years ago, in February 2015, a Rishikesh-based teacher posted a three-and-a-half-minute introduction to the mantra, nāda, kīrtan and bhakti yoga work she was then teaching in the foothills of the Himalayas. The clip is small, and it was never meant as a manifesto. Yet it captures a specific moment in the life of a sound practitioner, a moment when the chanting, the classical singing and the ashram rhythm were all new enough to feel total. Revisited now, with the description she wrote underneath it, the video becomes something more useful than a throwback: a record of how a devotional sound practice gets absorbed, and of what a student can learn when she later looks back and asks what she took in along with the music.
The video, titled "My first video Intro (10 Years Ago) to our Mantra, Nāda, Kīrtan, Bhakti Yoga RYT200 Rishikesh, India," was uploaded by the Heart of Sound channel under the name of its speaker, Anandra George. It is an introduction to a teacher training program, the kind of short film a school produces to explain what students will learn. Its subject is the combination that gives the program its identity: mantra, the repetition of sacred sounds; nāda yoga, the yoga of sound; kīrtan, communal call-and-response singing of the sacred; and bhakti, the path of devotion that animates all three.
What makes the clip worth a second look is the context she added in the description. She writes that the video was made when she was "nearly fully assimilated into being a 'good Indian girl' and pretty smacked out on the Himālayan āśram life," chanting mantra and practicing Indian classical rāga "6-7 hours per day." That is a striking number, and it tells you the video was filmed inside a total immersion. It was also recorded before the Sacred Sound Stage at the International Yoga Festival, which she dates to 2017.
Nāda is the Sanskrit word for sound, and in the yoga traditions it carries a particular weight: the idea that sound is not only something we hear but a force that moves through the body and the mind. Nāda yoga is the discipline of working with sound as a path, whether through chanting, singing, listening or attention to subtle resonance. Its place in a teacher training is significant because it asks the student to treat the voice as the instrument, not as a tool for performance. The teacher's job, in that frame, is to hold the sound steady and let it do its work.
Mantra sits close to this idea. A mantra is a sacred syllable, word or phrase repeated, often silently or aloud, to focus attention. In the sound-based trainings that have grown up around modern yoga, mantra is usually taught as a discipline of repetition and precision: learning the exact pronunciation, understanding the Sanskrit, and then sustaining the practice over time. The emphasis is on the ear and the breath, not on a result.
Kīrtan is the communal singing of sacred names and verses, usually in call-and-response, where a leader sings a line and the room answers. It is the most visible part of the tradition for people who come to yoga from outside India, and it is also the part most easily reduced to a pleasant group activity. Bhakti is what gives kīrtan its depth. It is the path of loving devotion, the idea that the singer is oriented toward the divine rather than toward self-expression.
The tension in that pairing is one the teacher herself seems to have lived with. Devotion, when it is practiced inside a long-term ashram setting, can come with structures of authority, hierarchy and gendered expectation that are not always visible from the inside. Her later comments name this directly, and they are the most important part of the video's afterlife.
In the description, Anandra George writes that she has "graduated from a lot of the hierarchical, patriarchal religious overlay that I had unconsciously assimilated into during my long years in India." That sentence is the spine of the whole piece. It does not disown the practice of mantra or kīrtan. It separates the sound itself from the social and religious framing that arrived with it, and it says plainly that some of that framing was absorbed without conscious choice.
"I've graduated from a lot of the hierarchical, patriarchal religious overlay that I had unconsciously assimilated into during my long years in India." — Anandra George, video description, Heart of Sound
She also notes a practical change: "I'm no longer teaching in Rishikesh (since 2020), for one thing." The sentence is brief, but it marks a decade in which the teacher moved on from the place where the video was made, and the practice itself has been reshaped by that move. The description is candid that the clip is a snapshot, and she chose to keep it online "just for posterity."
There is a lesson in that choice for anyone who teaches or studies sound. Practices like mantra and kīrtan are often transmitted inside communities that carry strong assumptions about who leads, who listens and what counts as devotion. A student who arrives young and immersed may take those assumptions along with the chant. Years later, the same student may find that the sound is still useful while the surrounding hierarchy no longer fits.
The description also advertises the program the video introduces. It calls the course "the world's first entirely sound-based Yoga Alliance approved teacher training RYT course," and it lists sanskrit, mantra, kīrtan, bhakti and nāda yoga as its subjects, taught in Rishikesh with what it describes as "esteemed Indian and international guest lecturers, scholars & performers." It also points to an online sound healing teacher training. These are claims made by the teacher and her channel, and they belong to her. A prospective student should verify current details, curriculum and accreditation directly with the program rather than relying on a clip from a decade ago.
That caution is not a criticism. It is simply how to read an old video well. The most valuable thing the 2015 intro offers is not the pitch but the honesty of the later note: a teacher who spent years inside a tradition, who sang for hours a day, and who now can say which parts of that inheritance she still values and which she has put down.
If the video has sparked a question about sound practice, start with the terms it uses and learn them in context. Read about nāda as the yoga of sound, about mantra as a repeated sacred sound used to focus the mind, about kīrtan as communal devotional singing and about bhakti as the devotional path that holds them together. Then ask the question the teacher's own reflection invites: when you practice a tradition, which parts are the sound and which parts are the social structure around it? Listen to a range of teachers, compare how they frame devotion and authority, and make those choices consciously. The clip is three and a half minutes long. The question it leaves behind takes a lot longer to answer.
