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Devi Prasad and My Introduction to Bhakti Yoga

Celia Chantal

Most of us can remember the first time we connected deeply with someone or a place or experience in such a profound manner that our world and life path forever altered.


I was subbing as a singer and flautist in a New Year’s Eve band at Breitenbush Hotsprings when the bass player told me I needed to look up a singing teacher, Devi Prasad. This was to begin a beautiful time of musical and spiritual growth for me. I set up lessons once a week and made the trek to Seattle, taking an entire day for the drive, the lesson, and the return. My lessons began with being greeted by the most loving, sweetest woman and engulfed in a warm hug, fed, and then a beautiful lesson. We started with a guided meditation, opening to intention and recognizing the sacred work we were doing for the lineage. I followed her scales and learned mantras and sacred verses. The practice felt like coming home to my Soul. Frequently, I would cry during our lessons, healing the pain and disconnection with my voice, myself. I had been a lifelong musician but always afraid to sing – my voice thin and tight from a lifetime of trauma, poverty, and disempowering experiences.


Through Devi, I learned the voice is the carrier of vibration and sacred energy– the Divine singing through us. Embodying humility and surrendering to the music as a vessel was incredibly healing. This practice helped me to relax my body, relax my self-consciousness, and allow the music to flow through me, becoming a channel for the sacred frequencies we were sounding forth into the world.


My meditation and sound practices became a daily rock in my world. My voice slowly became fuller, resonating, carrying a vibration that nurtured and filled me with love. This was the gift of Devi – giving me the gift of my voice. Singing for me feels deeply vulnerable, accessing deep-seated feelings of pain and disconnection. I began a sacred foundation in my life for consistent practice. My self-consciousness abated, and singing became a gift to connect with my Spirit and the world around me.


I would drive back home from my lessons to Olympia completely blissed out. I felt ecstatic with gratitude and relief for finally finding Devi, this thread of sacred music woven deep in my Soul. It felt like reclaiming and remembering a very deep and real part of my life on this planet, reuniting with a long-lost family.

Devi encouraged me to be as independent and resourceful as possible as she did all women. She encouraged me to pursue a professional career in nursing. She was a well-known professional musician in India and the US and a professor of music at UW, and her culture and marriage shaped her life. She wanted her female pupils to be self-empowered and to go on and sing and perform and carry her lineage. Many of us have, and many were already professional singers.

Nowadays, when I let the music practice go, she is in the background, “Be disciplined! Get focused! Let the music lead the way; let it heal you; let it be your friend, comfort, and connection with the Divine!” She remains a beacon of light in my life and frequently returns in my mediumship circles – encouraging, reminding, reprimanding – but always loving - a true teacher. I am alive in a body and here, and I won’t always be. I honor her teaching and memory by allowing the vibrations of mantra, of my voice, to heal my life and, in turn, share these healing frequencies with others.


Through singing/chanting, I felt and embodied the experience of the Divine infusing everything, and singing is a way to express and share this love in the world. The human voice carries frequency and intention, the emotional energy of the vessel through which it moves. Sound is a living, breathing being. Singing became a sacred act of singing existence back to itself; singing out was the world receiving itself. Singing was to know and hear my Soul.


Through the mantras and scales and intentional practice, I uncovered the cobwebs, the dust, and the erosion of negativity. I found instead a burnished, glowing perception of life – infused and lit up from within by the Divine, by creativity, by the Soul of Sound herself. Sound and vibration running through my body and voice became my healing journey back to wholeness. A sparkly, mystical light infuses my life when I prioritize sound. It is to be admitted to a beautiful, sacred world, touching and elevating everything I do, light and love.


Finding and healing my voice was an excavation. It is a gift to share my voice and sound healing, bringing to life the vibrations of love.


In a spirit of loving gratitude, I remember Devi Prasad, my first teacher of sacred mantra practices and Bhakti yoga.


 

Prabha Devi Prasad

Prabha Devi Prasad (1937-2018) was born in Suva, Fiji Islands. Prabha accelerated her passion for music and teaching, achieving many awards, recordings, radio broadcasts, and concerts with her sitar playing and singing. Music led her to be one of the top-known artists in India, Fiji, New Zealand, the USA, and Canada to this day. One of her notable musical accomplishments was the opportunity to play with the Beatles in Auckland, New Zealand, and for Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. She also taught in primary and secondary schools, colleges, and universities. She then migrated to Seattle sometime in August of 1968 to be a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Washington.

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