Dave Stringer's Profile

I AM: “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.” Dave Stringer quotes those words from author Arundhati Roy to sum up the moment his life changed in an Indian ashram in 1990. Pre-India, Dave was a film editor living in Los Angeles. Post-India, he is a passionate kirtan wallah and world-traveling troubadour, singing Sanskrit love songs of and to the Divine. He arrived in India not as a seeker, but as a hired hand. He went to the Siddha Yoga ashram in Ganeshpuri not for devotion, but to work on an editing project. In the process, he encountered kirtan for the first time. In kirtan “you’re not just listening to the music, you are the music,” he told me. The experience was so powerful he left his former life behind. “While I was at the ashram, my priorities began to change. I lost my reasons to do what I was doing in L.A.” “I was hired to go to India as a film editor. This was a job. I went there and encountered kirtan, and had a number of experiences that were sufficiently ecstatic and transformational that all those things I had going on in my life ceased to be important any more. This was the most riveting thing that I’d ever encountered. The fact that I encountered it without seeking it and without believing in it and it still affected me and changed my life is significant. “In a scientific culture, we examine things; we don’t take things on faith. My approach to yoga has not been to take it on faith. But every time I chant I always feel better. And my experience keeps validating this.” After several months in India, Dave returned to L.A., but not to business as usual. Instead, he embarked on the spiritual path of kirtan, which became his career. His goal is nothing short of bringing this ecstatic, soulful experience to everyone on the globe. To this end, Dave tours the world incessantly, singing kirtan in small towns and large cities, in yoga centers, art galleries and museums and occasionally, smoky rural bars. It’s all part of his philosophy that the sacred is in everyone, in every place. Therefore, he believes his role is to make kirtan as accessible as possible, both literally—by traveling a full third of the year to as many locations as humanly feasible, and artistically—by expanding the presentation of the practice beyond the form as we know it in the West. In that sense, he is a kirtan maverick, constantly pushing the envelope with the goal of inviting an ever-widening audience to experience the divine vibration. This audience includes even prison inmates, whom he has taught meditation and chanting. Time, Billboard, In Style, and Yoga Journal have all recognized Dave Stringer as a top player in American kirtan. He has collaborated with numerous other artists including Rasa, Donna DeLory, Toni Childs and Girish, and has performed with Krishna Das and Jai Uttal. You can also hear his voice on the soundtracks of the blockbuster movie Matrix Revolutions and the video game Myst.

My Style: Bhakti Yoga

Interested In meeting People for: Yoga Community

My Astrological Sign: Leo

I Have Been Doing Yoga: Long enough to know time does not matter