I'm Sorry For Doing A Good Job
I've been doing kīrtan long enough that my hands know the harmonium without my eyes checking, long enough that the tabla player and I can find each other's tempo without a word exchanged beforehand. And still, every single time, in the seconds before I begin, some old part of me starts negotiating. I think, “How much of this can I let them hear before it becomes too much?”
Kīrtan is supposed to dissolve the self, not display it. You’re meant to sing so that the sound can carry something bigger than the singer, so that the room feels compelled to turn toward Guru Sahib, instead of toward the person behind the mic. I learned this early and fully believed it. I still do. With that lesson, I also absorbed a lesson that wasn’t explicitly taught: if the goal was to disappear behind the words, then any moment I was visible inside them (any moment someone noticed my voice specifically, my phrasing, my presence at the front of the room) became a version of failure. I somehow translated that into evidence that I hadn't gotten small enough yet.
So when someone tells me I sang well on stage, or they liked my kīrtan, I don't just deflect the compliment. I deflect it like I’m proving to myself that I’m still preserving some of the righteousness of the act. Being seen, even briefly, feels like I let my own ego slip through a practice designed to erase it. My go-to phrase to a compliment on my kīrtan is easily, “I messed up so bad,” which mentally registers as, “I know I’m not supposed to be the point, so please don't make me the point, even by accident, even with something as small as praise.”
I also know the warning I was raised on, and I don't think it was wrong. The moment I start doing kīrtan for the feeling of having done it well, or for the version of the sangat's face that looks impressed and they have a compliment waiting at the end, that’s when something in the practice curdles. Haumai isn't a myth that was invented to keep people small. It's a real door, and pride disguises itself with confidence to walk through it easily. I've felt it happen mid-shabad, and for half a second I'm singing to be told I sang well instead of singing to Guru Sahib.
How hypocritical of me to be singing a shabad on killing one's ego, while waiting for the shabad to end so I could go feed mine.
But receiving a compliment tied to devotion doesn't automatically put me on the wrong side of that door. Someone telling me the kīrtan moved them is describing their own experience of something passing through a sound I happened to make. And I can hear that as information about what happened in the room without turning it into fuel for my own ego. Whether it curdles depends on what I do with it after it’s in my consciousness, not on whether it arrived at all.
The same goes for the rest of my life, outside the darbar hall or wherever my kīrtan takes place. Whether I’m in a conversation, at work, in a room where I actually have something worth saying, it’s not a crime to know you belong in the position you’re standing. Guru Sahib wasn't asking me to make myself small everywhere, all the time, as a blanket rule. I used to shrink myself a lot in places I wasn’t even singing.
Someone asks a question I actually know the answer to, and I’d qualify it three times before I’d say it. "I could be wrong, but," "this might not be right, but" — building the apology in before they’ve heard the answer. It was the same foundation I used to build "I messed up so bad" into a compliment before I'd even said thank you. I've done it with friends too, tiptoeing around my own certainty like it's something fragile I might break if I put my full weight on it. I told myself it was politeness, but really it was just walking on eggshells — as if having a real opinion about my friend's situation might shatter the bond we had. As if being
sure of something, out loud, was a risk to the relationship instead of just gentle honesty.
My voice was never on loan to begin with. There's nothing to pay back for having used it. Knowing what I know, saying what I mean, standing in a room as I belong there — if it's done with the right intentions, none of that is haumai. The opposite of pride is NOT disappearance. I used to think shrinking was a form of devotion because it was the only word I had for giving something up. But the room doesn't get less sacred when I let myself be seen. If anything, I've learned how to be within the moment and also detached from it. Taking up space isn't always an egotistical move. We've started treating confidence and pride as the same thing because they look similar from the outside. Liking something you've done or you've made can easily get tangled up with needing everyone else to notice it. But if your intentions are in the right place, taking up space is never something you owe an apology for.
**kīrtan (ਕੀਰਤਨ): devotional practice of singing/chanting sacred and divine hymns, with efforts to become closer to the One
**Guru Sahib (ਗੁਰੂ ਸਾਹਿਬ): spiritual master or teacher; one who guides an individual from spiritual ignorance to the light of divine wisdom.
**haumai (ਹਉਮੈ): ego, self-centeredness, or egotism; fundamental illusion that an individual is completely separate from God and the rest of creation
**shabad (ਸ਼ਬਦ): sacred hymn, verse, or divine word from the Guru Granth Sahib
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