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This Week’s Mantram Practice
Thank you for sharing your mantram experiences this week. It’s great to hear how you are bringing your practice into everyday life.
This week, identify a specific time or times during the day when you are physically active and would like to practice the mantram. Maybe you walk to work, or have a scheduled exercise time, or other active time that you already do. While moving with focus and safety, try to consciously apply the mantram. If you already have a “mantram movement” time during the week, can you expand it a bit more?
Please share your observations, successes and challenges in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!
This is an excerpt from The Mantram Handbook by Easwaran.
The mantram is most effective when we say it silently, in the mind, with as much concentration as possible. Sometimes saying the mantram aloud a few times can help you get it started in the mind, and it is so rhythmical that it can be sung aloud, as it often is in many religious traditions. Some of my friends even confess to singing it in the shower.
But by and large I recommend repeating the mantram silently, and not dwelling on tune and rhythm and such matters. Anything which takes attention away from the mantram itself, such as counting or worrying about intonation or connecting the mantram with physiological processes, only weakens the mantram’s effect; it is like trying to dive to the bottom of a swimming pool when you have an inner tube around your waist. So it is best right from the outset not to get dependent on external aids, not even the rosary that is used in many religious traditions. After a short while, any such aid is of little use, and eventually it will even hold you back. Counting or thinking about what your hands are doing only helps keep you on the surface level of awareness; it may even encourage your repetition to become mechanical.
Similarly, let me urge you not to connect the repetition of the mantram with your breathing or your heartbeat. There is no harm if this happens of its own accord, but in making a conscious effort to link the mantram with these rhythms, you may interfere with vital processes which the body, with its native wisdom, is already regulating at optimum efficiency.
A mantram is more than just a word or phrase; it is a force, and in order for this force to heal the divisions in our consciousness and to give us access to our deeper resources, it must be working from deep inside. At first, of course, we will be repeating the mantram only at the surface level of the mind. But if we repeat it with regularity and sustained enthusiasm, it will take root deep in our consciousness until it becomes as natural to us as breathing.
There is nothing mysterious about this process. We all have the capacity to concentrate, especially on things we like, and concentration itself is a deeper level of awareness. When we get absorbed in an intricate problem, or in reading our favorite author, or in listening to music we love, or in doing anything else that commands our full attention, we are no longer aware of our surroundings or of extraneous sights and sounds; we may not even be aware of our body. In moments of intense concentration like these, we experience a deeper level of awareness. It is just the same with the mantram; it can come from a level beyond awareness of sights and sounds, beyond awareness of the body, even beyond the level of words and conceptual thought.
Sometimes, in the West as well as in the East, you hear that the mantram is only effective if repeated in a particular way – with exactly the right pronunciation and intonation, or a set number of times. Let me assure you that any way you say it, the mantram works. Whether you say it fast or slow, with an Oxford accent or a Tennessee drawl, for five minutes or for hours at a stretch, you are still repeating the name of the Self, who is waiting to be discovered in the depths of your consciousness.