Somewhere in the middle of a 2002 recording session, the singer stopped. Ananda Vodvic had been carrying the melody, and then her voice simply ended, her eyes rolled up into her head, and she was gone into a trance. Her collaborator, Craig Pruess, did not reach for the controls. The two of them sat in the studio for fifteen or twenty minutes in what he later described as a powerful silence, until she came back and whispered, "It's OK, we can continue." What they had been recording became "Devi Prayer," the second track on the album 108 Sacred Names of Mother Divine, also released as Sacred Chants of Devi. It is a devotional Sanskrit chant, and the story of how it was made is as much a part of the record as the sound itself.
The track was created in 2002 during the first collaboration between Pruess and Vodvic. Pruess, a film composer by trade, describes the piece in his own video notes as "deeply meditative and devotional," a chant that "expounds the divine qualities of the Divine Mother." That phrasing matters. The chant is not a song about the goddess so much as a sustained act of praise directed at her, and the music is built to hold a listener in that posture for a long stretch of time.
The album from which it comes was the project's commercial centerpiece. Pruess's notes describe it as the best-selling record of the collaboration and say it has been championed over the years by leaders of the human development movement. The description does not name those leaders, and nothing further is claimed here about who they are or how they championed the record.
A note on the words: the Sanskrit text is sung in devotional form, and this article does not attempt to render or translate the lyrics, because the auto-generated transcript available for the video is too garbled to quote reliably. What can be said with confidence is the structure and the spirit of the thing, which the album's title makes plain.
"Devi" is the Sanskrit word for goddess, and in devotional Hindu traditions it names the Divine Mother as a living presence rather than an abstraction. The "108 names" in the album title points to one of the oldest practices in that tradition: reciting a litany of names of the divine, each one a different facet of the same reality. The number 108 has long been bound up with that practice, most visibly in the 108-bead mala, the string of beads a practitioner moves through while repeating a name or mantra. Devotees have counted names this way for centuries, one bead at a time, so that the recitation becomes a kind of walking through the divine's many qualities.
That is the logic underneath "Devi Prayer." A chant built around names asks the singer and the listener to dwell on one quality after another, and repetition does the work that narrative would do in a Western song. Pruess's description frames the track as expounding those qualities, which is exactly what a litany does. You are not following a plot. You are staying with the names until they change something in you.
The most revealing line in Pruess's account is not about the trance at all. He writes that "Both Ananda and I feel that we 'stepped aside' and simply let the divine energy express itself through us." That is an unusual claim for a studio musician to make, and it sits at the center of how devotional music is understood in many traditions. The performer is not presenting a self. The performer is a channel, and the job is to get out of the way.
For a listener, this matters because the recording carries that attitude in its texture. Chants made this way tend to avoid flash. They hold a note, they return to a phrase, they let silence sit between lines. If you come to the track expecting a performance to be judged, it can feel slow. If you come to it as a practice, the same slowness becomes the point.
Pruess tells the trance story plainly, as a thing both musicians experienced. He writes that "we both had the experience that Mother Divine came in the room when we were recording this." The energy was intense enough that Vodvic stopped singing and went into a trance, and the two sat in silence for the length of a short film reel before she spoke. Her whisper, "It's OK, we can continue," is the kind of small human detail that keeps a sacred story from floating away from the room where it happened.
Later, Pruess recounts, Vodvic told him that Mother Divine had blessed the recording and had "clearly indicated" to her that it would become known all around the world. Whether a reader takes that as revelation or as a musician's retrospective account, the sequence is the same: a session that paused, a return to work, and a claim about the record's future that the years have, in Pruess's telling, borne out through its sales and its reach.
Pruess reports that many people have written to him with personal accounts. Some say a son or daughter was born while this music was playing. Others say a loved one passed away while the track was on. He does not overstate these reports, and he does not turn them into a claim about the music's power. His response is modest: "I am just glad to have been of service to the world."
That restraint is worth noticing. Music that accompanies births and deaths is music that has become part of people's most important moments, and the way Pruess handles those letters, as thanks rather than proof, suits the material. The chant is offered as a companion for a threshold, not as a tool that guarantees an outcome.
Pruess's own description lists the track's uses: yoga, meditation, contemplation, healing sessions, and prayer. He ends his notes with a simple instruction: "Close your eyes and enjoy this sound!" That is the most useful advice here. The chant rewards undivided attention, so it works best when you are not reading, driving, or checking messages while it plays.
- Play it at the start of a meditation and let the first minutes set the pace of your breathing.
- Use it during a yoga practice's resting pose, where a long devotional line gives the mind somewhere to rest.
- Try a full listen with eyes closed, treating the track as a prayer rather than background.
- If the trance story moves you, notice when your own attention drifts and return to the sound, the way the two musicians returned to their work.
Start with the full track, then listen to the rest of 108 Sacred Names of Mother Divine in order, since the album was built as a sequence of names rather than a set of singles. The official album page, listed in Pruess's notes, is at http://www.heaven-on-earth-music.co.uk/album1.html. If the idea of the musician as channel interests you, return to the recording with that question in mind. Listen for the places where the voice seems to hold back rather than push forward, and ask what it would mean to make a record that way.
