Shivam Rath

Shivam Rath is an Australian musician and Nāda Yoga teacher based in Byron Bay, New South Wales, whose teaching grows out of nearly two decades of study in Hindustani classical music. He plays the 22-string Indian slide guitar, or chaturangi, and is known for sliding along its strings with a Himalayan crystal sphere, a habit that began in Dharamsala in 2013 after he lost his usual steel bar. He trained with the slide guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya, also plays tabla and shakuhachi, and composes and produces under his Crystal Slide name and with the world-music group Boom Shanko.

For Shivam, raga is a way of training attention as much as a set of scales: students learn to listen closely, sing and play with feeling, and settle into a meditative flow. He leads small-group Raga Retreats that weave together raga, mantra, voice, rhythm, yoga and time in nature, held in the Northern Rivers hinterland, in Dharamshala and Varanasi in India, and in the tea country of Yunnan and Fujian in China. He also gives private lessons and mentoring in raga, voice, rhythm and slide guitar, online or in person in northern New South Wales, and shares guided Nāda Nidra and yoga nidra sessions alongside his music.