Meet Your Instructor:

Mike Cohen, MA is founder of Kirtan Leader Institute. Since 2010 he has trained and apprenticed thousands of aspiring and emerging Kirtan Leaders across the globe, from total beginners to dozens he has guided to create/release Kirtan albums, play at festivals, and tour nationally. 

A life-long musician with two decades experience developing and coaching leaders, Mike has created a curriculum that supports total newbies in quickly and easily learning to play chants from their favorite Kirtan artists without needing to understand or learn Western or Indian music (Sargam). Training for advanced students expands beyond Musicianship into important domains such as Psycho-Spiritual Leadership, Community Building, Entrepreneurship, and Minimizing Spiritual Bypassing. His training is rooted in the principals of Waking Up (Spiritual Practice), Growing Up (Psychological Practice), Cleaning Up (Shadow work) and Opening Up (Multiple Intelligences) so we can Show Up fully; and includes teachings and practices from discourses such as Somatics, the Enneagram of Personality, Integral Theory, Ontology, Integral Unfolding, the Dattatreya lineage of Sri Kaleshwar, and more.

Mike has released four critically-acclaimed full length Kirtan albums, the most recent two with Grammy Award nominated produced Ben Leinbach (Jai Uttal, Krishna Das, Deva Primal). He has articulated an Integral Approach to Kirtan and is in the processing of writing and sharing this rich body of material.

For well over a decade, Mike has toured North America, offering accessible and potent Kirtan events in yoga studios, healing centers and at yoga/chant festivals. In 2014 he had the honor of opening up for Krishna Das at Bhakti Fest Midwest. Mike lives in Boulder, CO with his parter Martha, where he leads Kirtan and trains Kirtan Leaders to share the exquisite practice of sacred chant.