Snatam Kaur performs "I Am," a kirtan composed by Sukhmani Rayat, that uses call-and-response chanting and affirmation-based lyrics to guide participants through states of consciousness. The song cycles through affirmations—grace, freedom, strength, grounding, love, and peace—each anchored in specific embodied experiences and repeated until they become felt rather than merely thought. Performed live in Bucharest with band members Grecco Buratto, Sukhmani Rayat, and Ram Dass, the performance demonstrates how kirtan functions as a participatory spiritual practice that dissolves the boundary between singer and audience.
What Is Kirtan and How Does "I Am" Function as Spiritual Practice?
Kirtan is a form of call-and-response chanting rooted in Indian spiritual traditions, particularly Sikhism and Hindu bhakti practices. Unlike a concert where an audience passively listens, kirtan explicitly invites collective participation. In this performance, Snatam Kaur and her band—Grecco Buratto on acoustic guitar and vocals, Sukhmani Rayat on percussion and vocals (and composer of the song), and Ram Dass on keyboard and vocals—establish clear vocal sections, sometimes splitting the audience into groups. Kaur says at the beginning: "you you all sing this with me" and even directs different sections of the room to sing different parts, creating a woven texture of voices rather than a unified chorus.
The structure of "I Am" exemplifies how kirtan uses simplicity and repetition as portals rather than tedium. Each verse states an affirmation—"I am grace," "I am free," "I am strength"—followed by a sensory or emotional anchor. The formula is not arbitrary. Each affirmation is paired with a direct experience: "I am grace / I'm lifted by your air with every breath," "I am free / I feel the blessings bless me with your love," "I am strength / I am the fire that rises when I sing." This structure prevents affirmations from becoming hollow self-talk; instead, they are grounded in the body and the present moment.
How Do Affirmations Deepen Through Repetition and Chanting?
One of the most striking features of this performance is the deliberate use of repetition. After introducing each affirmation once or twice, Kaur and Rayat repeat the phrase "I am sad now" (or variations of this anchor phrase) many times in succession—sometimes seven, ten, or more repetitions in a row. This is not a mistake in transcription; it is a foundational kirtan technique. When a phrase is repeated, consciousness shifts. The rational mind—which interprets and judges—becomes less active. The body begins to resonate with the sound. The breath synchronizes. After repeating "I am grace" ten times with 200 people singing in unison, the affirmation stops being a concept and becomes a resonance in the chest, a felt state.
The song structure cycles through six primary affirmations, each given its own verse and repetition cycle: grace, freedom, strength, grounding, love, and peace. Notably, the final affirmation—"I am peace / when I'm in stillness I become my truth"—marks a transition inward. The earlier affirmations are active and embodied (grace lifts, freedom blesses, strength fires, grounding anchors). Peace arrives not as achievement but as a result of moving into stillness, where "I become my truth." This suggests a progression from doing to being, a journey many spiritual practices outline but few distill into six minutes of singing.
What Role Does the Body Play in Kirtan?
Throughout the performance, Sukhmani Rayat's percussion—layered beneath the vocals—creates a heartbeat-like foundation. This is not decorative. In kirtan, the pulse is the body's gateway into the practice. When a room of people synchronizes their breath, voice, and heartbeat to a single rhythm, the nervous system begins to regulate. The individual ego—which experiences itself as separate, defended, and bound—momentarily dissolves into a collective resonance. The audience is not merely hearing the song; they are embodying it through the voice, the breath, and the alignment with a communal rhythm.
Grecco Buratto's acoustic guitar work serves a similar function. Rather than complex chord changes, the guitar provides warmth and anchor, allowing the voice to soar without the audience becoming distracted by harmonic complexity. The arrangement is deliberately spare. This sparseness is radical. It means there is nothing to hide behind. When a singer is held by only voice, guitar, and percussion, authenticity becomes unavoidable. The audience feels not whether the affirmations are "true" in an abstract sense, but whether they are being sung with presence and sincerity. In this performance, they clearly are.
How Does Audience Participation Transform the Experience?
Early in the performance, Kaur invites the audience to practice before the full rendition. She teaches them the melody and the lyrics, then asks: "do you want to practice?" The response is affirmative, and she leads them through one complete cycle. This is pedagogical and also deeply communal. By the time the full performance begins, the audience is no longer external. They are co-creators. The song that emerges is not Snatam Kaur's "I Am" but the Bucharest audience's "I Am"—sung in their voices, rooted in their bodies, and arising from their collective intention.
This participatory structure also normalizes the affirmations for participants. In a typical concert, a singer proclaims something and the audience receives it passively. In kirtan, when you sing "I am grace" yourself, you are not adopting someone else's belief. You are exploring a quality of consciousness through direct experience. The distinction is crucial. A person sitting in the audience might intellectually resist the idea that they are grace. But once they have sung it forty times with their own voice, in alignment with hundreds of others, something shifts. The affirmation has been embodied. It moves from the realm of belief into the realm of felt truth, at least temporarily.
What Does "I Am Grounded / I Am One with the Earth" Reveal About the Song's Philosophical Grounding?
Midway through the performance, after moving through grace, freedom, and strength, the song introduces: "I am grounded / I am one with the Earth we are all." This affirmation points to an underlying philosophy. The "I am" statements are not isolated declarations of individual self-improvement. They are statements of interconnection. By affirming that "I am one with the Earth," the singer is not claiming dominion or separation from nature. They are asserting unity with the earth itself. The phrase "we are all" expands this further—the "I" is always already embedded in a "we." This is an antidote to Western individualism that treats affirmations as tools for personal gain. Here, to be grounded is to recognize one's place in an ecology, not to reinforce ego.
How Does the Song Navigate the Spectrum From Activity to Stillness?
The arc of "I Am" moves progressively toward silence and inwardness. The early affirmations are accompanied by energy and sound: grace, freedom, strength. The middle section introduces grounding, which is already more internal. Then comes love—"I am love / I'm in the moment when I smile." Love, in this context, is presence itself. The final affirmation is peace: "I am peace / when I'm in stillness I become my truth." The song does not end with a triumphant crescendo. Instead, it returns to a gentle, almost meditative space. The audience is guided, through song, from externally directed energy toward internal stillness. This structure mirrors the arc of many meditation or yoga sessions: activation, integration, release, return to ground.
Where to Go From Here
For those encountering kirtan for the first time through this performance, the next step is often to attend a live kirtan session in your own community or online. The experience of singing these affirmations in a room with other people is qualitatively different from listening to a recording. If no local kirtan is available, Snatam Kaur offers courses and teachings through her online school at kirtanandkundalini.com. Her album "Heartflow" contains additional kirtan recordings that can deepen familiarity with this practice. For deeper study, explore the lineage traditions from which kirtan emerges—Sikhism and bhakti Hinduism—to understand the philosophical roots of affirmation-based chanting. Finally, consider experimenting with the technique yourself: choose one affirmation that resonates, and repeat it aloud for five to ten minutes. Notice what shifts in your body, breath, and consciousness. The efficacy of kirtan is not a matter of belief but of direct experience.
