Official Shiva Prayer is a short music video from kirtan leader Mike Cohen, made with filmmaker Roger Ingraham and released in December 2021 on the Kirtan Leader Institute channel. Its framing, set out in the video's own published description, is about meeting hard times, which the description calls "gritty challenges (disasters)," with prayer and right action, which it names "dignities," as a way of being carried "to the other side." The track features vocalist Sandy Griffin and was produced by Ben Leinbach. This piece draws on the video's title and published description. The spoken content of the video was not available to us, so we have not quoted from it or described its specific moments.
The video is a devotional music piece presented as a prayer. According to its description, it "acknowledges our gritty challenges (disasters) and how prayer and right action (dignities) can guide us to the other side." That sentence carries the whole idea. The video does not pretend that difficulty is absent. It starts from the premise that hard things happen, and it offers a practice for passing through them rather than a promise that they will vanish.
The pairing is the most distinctive thing in the published framing. A disaster, in the sense the description uses, is a rough patch: the gritty, unglamorous stuff of living. A dignity is the counterweight the description names directly: prayer, and right action. Putting the two side by side changes the question. Instead of asking how to avoid trouble, the framing asks what posture a person takes inside it. The implied answer is that prayer and right action are not a shield from hardship but a way of crossing it.
This is a useful lens for anyone who has ever felt that spiritual practice should make life easier and then felt let down when it did not. The video's framing suggests a different expectation: practice is what you do while the disaster is still in progress.
The description lists four intentions for difficult times: to "keep our hearts open, our minds calm, our prayer deep, and our actions aligned with our deepest prayers." Each one is a practice in its own right. An open heart resists the contraction that fear produces. A calm mind creates room to think before reacting. Deep prayer means prayer that goes past words. The final phrase, actions aligned with our deepest prayers, is the hinge. It asks that what we do in the world match what we say we are reaching for in our hearts. Prayer that never reaches the hands is only half the practice, and the description puts the weight on that connection.
Kirtan is a devotional tradition of chanting, usually sung in call-and-response, in which a leader sings sacred texts and a group answers. Mike Cohen is known in the description as a kirtan leader, and the Kirtan Leader Institute channel that published this video is built around that practice. The video is credited as created by Cohen and Roger Ingraham, with vocals by Sandy Griffin and production by Ben Leinbach. The description does not detail the arrangement, the texts sung, or the recording process, so we are not going to speculate on those.
You do not need to have seen the video to use the idea it names. Try this: when a hard stretch arrives, name it plainly as a disaster, the way the description does, without dressing it up or pretending it is fine. Then ask two questions. What would it look like to keep my heart open here? And what is one action I can take today that matches the prayer I actually hold? Keep the action small. The description's own language points toward alignment, not heroics.
Watch the Official Shiva Prayer video itself, and listen to the track for the way voice, music, and intention work together. To explore more of Mike Cohen's work, the video's description points to KirtanLeader.com and MikeCohenKirtan.com. If you are new to kirtan, those are the natural next steps for learning how the practice is taught and shared.
