Welcome

Hello, I am Ben. Welcome to my website. If you are interested in learning a little bit about me, you’ve come to the right place! (For example, if you want to know a fun fact about me, FYI I get up every day at 4:00am, and I could not imagine a life where I was not at the gym at 5:30am.)

I live in beautiful northeastern Ohio with my awesome (!) family, and I am a pianist-composer, teacher, open source software developer, yogi, writer, inventor, and athlete.

Professionally I work as an embedded firmware engineer, with a background in systems integration and real-time closed loop control systems. (My specialty is embedded Linux, and I have even written a small Linux kernel module.)

Significantly, I am a devotee of Krishna, with a special affinity for Lord Ganesha and Goddess Saraswati.

The most recent yoga class I taught was at the Student Recreation and Wellness Center at the University of Akron. I called my class “Yoga for Mind Body Connection”, and I described it like this:

Yoga for Mind Body Connection” is a gentle, holistic introduction to the traditional yoga practices of pranayama (breath control), asana (posture), and dharana (present-moment-based awareness.) Each beginner-friendly 45-minute session aims to unify the body, mind, & spirit, and to increase mental and emotional well-being by exploring the ancient science of yoga.

I play the piano at the Unitarian Universalist Church in my hometown of Kent, Ohio for the 9am service. So if you ever want to hear me play and/or join a beautiful community of people, stop by anytime. Remember: whoever you are, whoever you love, we welcome you.

In 2024, I ran the Akron Marathon to raise money for charity… and I am pleased to say I raised more than $1000.00 for Akron Children’s Hospital.

I am also a long time student and contributor to the Lightning Path System of Self Actualization, which is a modern framework for connecting to higher consciousness. Additionally, I am the creator of a novel system of Peak Performance called Kundalini-Ambdexterity.

Yogas

I am a practitioner of Bhakti Yoga and Karm Yoga, with a special affinity for:

  • authentic Kundalini Yoga, the yoga of union with the creativity of higher consciousness (i.e. the maha shakti)
  • authentic Nada Yoga, the yoga of union with the Music of the Divine
  • authentic Hatha Yoga, the yoga of union with the Sun and The Moon (i.e Divine Energy Balance)

My own spiritual sadhana primarily consists of Bhakti, which means moment-to-moment reliance on the all-pervasive benevolence of God to provide for the well-being and day-to-day needs of her devotees.

Additionally, my personal practice is one of San Kirtana, and consists of singing and chanting the Maha Mantra. (See below under “Music Compositions” to hear excerpts from my composition Grand Fantasia on the Maha Mantra for Piano, Percussion, and Mixed Voice that I wrote.)

I also practice Laughter Yoga, and invented (and pitched) a cool wearable device called The Kundalini Laugh-Bit for helping to bring about more of it. šŸ˜šŸ˜šŸ˜

Kundalini Awakening

The entire story of my spiritual journey is told in my upcoming memoir “Journey Into Krishna, a Magically-Realistic Memoir of my Kundalini Awakening.” But in the meantime… here are a couple of sentences:

“This is a story about love. I have been very blessed to have experienced significant international travel, most significantly to India on four occasions, which has changed my life. My own spiritual awakening began unexpectedly in city of Silchar, in the Indian State of Assam, i the early morning hours on a balcony overlooking the city in the Cachar Club…”

Anyway, my most recent trip to India — a month long residential stay in Swargashram in Rishikesh at the Nada School of Traditional Yoga — was just too good!

My exposure to, and embrace of, the traditional spirituality of India, and in particular, the Hindu concepts of Dharma, Ishvara, and Bhakti Yoga have made me the man who I am today.

It is not my intention to tell others what to believe, but if I had to give my advice — for sure I would say: please chant Hare Krishna and Be Happy.

Therefore, I would like to humbly dedicate my website to A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the man who brought knowledge to my country.


Kundalini Piano Platform

My free time is spend developing my Kundalini Piano Platform, which is the novel piano educational system that I’ve developed with funding from a National Science Foundation grant.

My system works with digital pianos, and has several novel pedagogical and music-making features.

The first is that it creates a mirror-image digital keyboard; this promotes true ambidexterity by allowing students to utilize what is known as symmetrical inversion to learn to play melodies with equal facility in either hand. (For more information on this, please see my explanation here.)

Next, the Kundalini Piano Platform makes a digital piano scriptable, so as to teach computer programming as part of musical education. (Please see here for a further explanation and an example.)

Lastly, for use with my system, I created my own transpiler that I call the Mozart Transposition Engine that can create mirror-image scores. (See the special edition of the Bach 13 2-part inventions that I created with my transpiler to see what mirror-image scores look like. A simpler example featuring an excerpt from Mozart’s Concert Rondo can be seen here.)

Much more information on this can be seen on my other website, KundaliniSoftware[dot]com

GitHub

You can find more information on the software I write on my other website, Kundalini Software, or by checking out my GitHub profile.

Additionally, the source to some of my cooler open source projects on GitHub can be browsed online using the awesome tool github1s.com

Writings

Spiritual Fiction

Love Poetry [written for my soul-mate, my wife]

Mystical Poetry

Misc Poetry

Misc Fiction

Academic

Misc

Comics

Books

The intertwined story of my own spiritual journey, and the journey of creating my startup company Kundalini.Software is written into the stars, and told in my upcoming memoir:

Journey Into Krishna, a Magically Realistic Memoir of my Kundalini Awakening, by Benjamin Pritchard. [coming soon]

My other books:

  • Bach-In-The-Mirror
  • 108 Rules of Thumb for Life
  • the Kundalini Piano Method Book, volume 1
  • Kundalini-Ambidexterity, a novel method of Self Actualization and Peak Intelligence
  • Benjamin Pritchard, the collected works

are all in process.

Musical Compositions

In 2024, I graduated from the University of Akron (as an adult with) an associate’s degree.

While at the University of Akron, I taught yoga, and studied music theory, composition, and piano with Dr. James Wilding. The following are some of my compositions:

  • Grand Fantasia on the Maha Mantra for Piano, Percussion, and Mixed Voice
  • Original Setting of Om Nama Shivia
  • Dash-Avatara
    • Movement 1: Matsya
    • Movement 2: Kurma
    • Movement 3: Varaha
    • Movement 4: Narasimha
    • Movement 5: Vamana
    • Movement 6: Parashurama
    • Movement 7: Rama
    • Movement 8: Krishna
    • Movement 9: Balarama
    • Movement 10: Kalki
  • Passacaglia for Solo Piano on “What Are You Longing for?“. (First performed at the Unitarian Church in Kent, Ohio on Easter Sunday, 2025.)
  • Invocation of Angels
    • Movement 1: Invocation of Mother Mary
    • Movement 2: Appearance of Goddess Saraswati
    • Movement 3: Showered with the blessings of the Nine Muses
    • Movement 4: Born away on the wings of Angels

Commentaries

I am begining to work on a 500hr certification Yoga certification, and on Sunday mornings I do my systematic study. A big part of this is called “Svādhyāya”, which means “study of scripture or sacred texts”, and is one of the niyamas (disciplines) of Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga. Along these lines, you can checkout some of my thoughts / reflections on verses from the Bhagavad GÄ«tā and ŚrÄ«mad Bhāgavatam which I am building up a little bit at a time.

Darma Talks

  • Excerpt 12-April-2025
    • “The Sanskrit word “hare” means something like: “addressing the energetic potency of God.” And I think the Eternal Dharma (“Sanātana Dharma“) means: Krishna’s assertion of the Reality of Hare: the existence of the all-pervasive benevolence of God to provide for the well being and day-to-day needs of her devotees.”

Just for Fun

Finally, if you would like to see a video that I made using my awesome visualization engine, check this out. The video expresses my sentiment when I first got back from India, and is described by the poem I wrote to go along with it:

RamaKrishna is supreme Freedom / an unfathomable ocean of eternal bliss / enticingly beckoning all people / to please find her / and make her your own.

Special Thanks

I would like to thank of the friends, teachers, students, and mentors I’ve had over the years.

And of course my family!

I love you guys.

Thanks for visiting; please have a nice day.