The Vishnu Invocation
7/7/2026
My main spiritual practice these days is Naad Yoga, the yoga of sound. I was blessed to meet a great teacher about a year ago and studying with him has most definitely changed my life for the better. My teacher is Gurnimit Singh, he is a third generation kirtani and a master Naad Yogi. It’s impossible to describe what it’s like to experience his teaching. He doesn’t lecture. Rather he shares the techniques he’s been practicing since the age of 8. His singing is truly divine. Plus he is one of the kindest, gentlest souls I’ve ever met.
In a nutshell, Naad Yoga consists of various vocal and throat exercises designed to activate one’s throat chakra, develop one’s singing voice, and serve as a meditation practice that can directly and intentionally adjust the energies of our body to facilitate peace, healing and insight.
Amongst the many beautiful practices Gurnimitji shared with me and my fellow students is a gem that transformed my understanding of life's purpose and challenges. This gem is an invocation to Vishnu. To be clear, the following interpretation of this invocation is my own. As I said, Gurnimitji doesn’t lecture. He lets his divine voice and the practice of Naad Yoga transform the lives of his students.
To explain what the Vishnu Invocation means to me, I must first point out a few things about Naad Yoga:
This tradition aligns the 7 major chakras of the human body with the 7 notes of the major scale. In Indian music these notes are named Sa-Re-Ga-Ma-Pa-Dha-Ni-Sa* (instead of Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Si-Do, or C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C). In other words, these notes - these sounds - not only represent but resonate with the energy centres in our bodies, ie. from the base of the spine, to the lower abdomen, the solar plexus, the heart, throat, forehead, and all the way to the very top of the head.
In Naad Yoga, by chanting certain musical sequences we can actually activate and regulate the energies in our bodies. You can try it for yourself quite easily. Next time you feel upset, try singing the major scale up and down for a few minutes and you may feel yourself calming down. It certainly works for me. This is for many reasons, including the fact that singing stimulates your vagus nerve and moves you out of fight-flight mode back onto your parasympathetic nervous system. It does this by vibrating your vocal chords which stimulates the vagus nerve and also by making your exhalations longer than your inhalations, which also tells your nervous system it can relax. But I also believe that the major scale has a soothing effect because it is made up of seven bright and happy notes and they are all harmoniously spaced from one another. By travelling up and down this scale, it’s almost as if we’re telling our nervous system that everything is as it should be.
By contrast, there are many other exercises in Naad Yoga wherein we practice singing a mix of intentionally discordant major and minor notes - to train ourselves to overcome adversity as it were - and the psychological and somatic effects are quite different.
Having said all this, I’d like to invite you to listen to the Vishnu Invocation by playing the recording below. (This recording was made by Gurnimitji himself whilst teaching a group of us students in India last march).
A note regarding Vishnu:
He is one of the three principal deities of Hinduism and is regarded as the preserver and protector of the universe. Rama and Krishna are his two most famous incarnations or avatars. They are more commonly worshipped as they are the human forms that Vishnu took to restore cosmic balance when threatened.
As you may have noticed, this invocation to Vishnu is composed of the major scale but its signature identity is the two pauses on the way up and the two pauses on the way down. The insight that came to me one day as I was practicing this invocation was that the placement of those pauses in relation to their corresponding chakras could be interpreted as pointers to the basic challenges of progressing from the human to the divine and back.
In the next post I'll explain why those four pauses can represent what I now think of as the challenges of Compassion, Surrender, Expression, and Fertility, and why they transformed my understanding of the purpose of spiritual life.