Mantras sometimes have an air of mystery — strange sounding words and sometimes including some ritual. This tends to make the straightforward meaning of mantras confusing, misunderstood or over complicated for beginners.
Mantras are spiritual tools. They aim to provide protection, keep and strengthen your inner peace and balance and increase personal power in daily life.
At its core, mantras are a composition of positive words that are specially formulated to bring in or activate higher energies. This is done to empower you against non-serving aspects both within and around you or even directed at you.
Benefits Of Mantras
Mantras use the power of the spoken word to generate energy. These energies typically aim to raise your consciousness and vibration and align you with the universe. When your four lower bodies, (the physical, etheric, astral and mental) vibrate in harmony with each other, you may begin to experience greater well-being at all levels of your being.
At the emotional level, you may find you are more balanced and no longer resort to anger, fear, and frustration. You may feel a deep peace in the core of your heart. Also, regular chanting of mantras may bring in higher wisdom and increase overall happiness. This may allow you to make better choices in life that empower and fulfil you.
How To Use Mantras
When chanting mantras, you must do this with a pure heart and clear intention. It is essential to be specific about your intention, and the outcome you seek must not control anyone.
To supercharge your mantras and fully experience their full dynamic effects, you must repeat them a number of times. The common practice is to repeat in multiples of three. With each repetition, you are aiming to reinforce the positive energy in your energy-fields, which accelerates your vibrational frequency.
Repetition of mantras is essential. With constant repetition, you may start forming new positive and life-enhancing thought patterns. As you create new thought patterns and programs, you start to erasing old, non-serving sub-conscious programs (How Meditation Rewires The Brain). In many ways, it is almost like reformatting the hard drive of your computer with new and improved software.
Popular Mantras To Get Started With
One of the most well known and powerful of all mantras is the mantra, ‘OM’. Although often associated with religious practice, ‘OM’ is not strictly religious. 'OM' is the sound of the Universe which reverberates in the cosmos. If you spend a little time thinking about this, you can see how powerful this sound is. It’s empowering effect often becomes palpable if you chant this for 108 repetitions or more with focused concentration. Another mantra, which is just as powerful is, 'I AM, That I AM'.
A fun exercise when starting with mantras is to compare the ‘feeling’ of the energies of different mantras. If you chant one mantra after the other, over a number of times, you will notice the subtle differences in vibration.
Daily Use Of Mantras
It is good practice to devote a particular time each day for chanting mantras, undisturbed with complete focus for a few minutes. Also, you can also chant the mantras throughout the day while doing routine tasks that do not require mental alertness (please don't chant mantras while driving or operating heavy machinery).
With consistent practice, the rise, fall and pitch of your voice as you speak the mantras will become automatic. They will continue to replay in your mind in a perpetual loop by default, without your conscious effort to do so.
The chanting of mantras should not be seen as a wasteful, passive exercise. In reality, it is a dynamic activity, the effects of which you need to experience at the personal level to believe and understand its power. Mantras may offer the key to a joy-filled, peaceful and wholesome existence in this chaotic world. What have you got to lose?
