What Is a Mantram?
What is a mantram? How can it help you? How does it work?
The term mantram (or mantra) stands for a word or short phrase that you can repeat silently to yourself to help you cope with stress. It has the power to calm and steady your mind whenever you need access to deeper reserves of strength or patience within you.
You may already be using stress reduction techniques such as counting to ten, taking a couple of deep breaths, or repeating a positive affirmation to yourself. All of these can help, but the mantram is just as quick, just as easy to use, and much more powerful. It combines immediate help with long-term benefits that, like a savings account, accumulate the more it’s used.
This simple skill is thousands of years old. Saint Francis of Assisi, for example, repeated “My God and my all.” Mahatma Gandhi used “Rama, Rama.”
But you don’t have to think of yourself as religious to use a mantram. It works for everyone, because it works directly on the mind. You’ll see from the stories in this book how the mantram continues to help ordinary people face crises today.
How does the mantram help?
* It calms you down, whether you’re facing a minor irritation or a major drama.
* It stops you from reacting too quickly and saying or doing something you may later regret.
* It halts rising anger, fear, panic.
* It gives you a breathing space. Once you’ve got your mantram going, you’ll find yourself in a much better state to choose your next move – and to choose it wisely.
The mantram works fast. If you start using it today, you’ll probably feel the benefit of it the very next time you face a problem. But the more often you repeat the mantram, the deeper its benefits go.
For more on choosing and using a mantram, see the Points to Practice right after this article. You’ll find a fuller list of mantrams to choose from on our Web site at easwaran.org.
If you’re like me, at this point you may doubt that such a simple skill could do what I claim.
I doubted it, too, when my grandmother tried to tell me what the mantram can do. Granny was the wisest person I have ever known, and I loved her passionately, so I always took her advice seriously. But, after all, grannies don’t know everything. “Granny,” I protested, “that’s just mindless repetition! What can repetition do?”
“Walking is just repetition too,” she said. “One step after another, each one the same.”
She had me there. But I still didn’t believe her.
But life went on presenting challenges, and in college I encountered a really intimidating one: public speaking. I found the activity fascinating and took every opportunity to learn, but no matter how many times I stood before an audience and lived to tell the tale, I was always afraid that on the next occasion I would trip on my way to the podium or open my mouth and find that no words would come out.
When I confessed this fear to my granny, she had a very simple piece of advice: not to sit there going over my notes or trying to size up my audience, but to repeat the mantram to myself quietly while awaiting my turn.
I decided she didn’t really understand. After all, she never had to give a speech! But because of my love for her, I promised to give it a try.
The next time I had to give a talk, I sat quietly repeating Rama, Rama, Rama over and over and over in my mind. Whenever my thoughts tried to blurt out “I’m afraid! I’m afraid!” instead, I would bring them back to “Rama, Rama” – adding to myself, every now and then, “I hope it works.”
And the talk went well. With my mind calmer, the words came up right on cue.
I kept on practicing this little trick, and after a while I began to say, “Rama, Rama, Rama . . . I think it works!”
Today, after years of practice, I can assure you with complete confidence that I know it works. This is really the only way that trust in the mantram can come – through your own personal experience.
Using a mantram is not just mechanical repetition. You learn to trust it by using it.
You can draw on the power of the mantram like this at any time, wherever you happen to be, whatever you happen to be doing. But if you want the mantram to come to your rescue when you need it, if you want it to steady your mind in times of turmoil, you need to practice, practice, practice in calm weather.
Whenever you get a moment free, unless you are doing something that requires attention, repeat your mantram to yourself silently, in the mind – while waiting, walking, washing dishes, and especially when falling asleep at night. Constant repetition drives the mantram deep into consciousness, where it can anchor your mind so surely that no amount of agitation can sweep you away.
I must have given this advice a million times, but it can never be repeated too often. Throughout my life, no matter how assiduously I practiced this skill, I have always been able to find more time, additional opportunities to put it to use. This is how we can gradually extend sovereignty over the mind.
This protective influence can even extend to the body, as I can illustrate with another story from that stormy ocean voyage.
From my first day on board that P&O liner, I acquired a reputation as a very odd bird. For one thing, I had to have my meditation every morning – and since my little cabin was cramped and airless, I chose to huddle in a blanket up on the sports deck, which was quite deserted at dawn. That alone secured the amused attention of some young Australians, whose boredom found relief in making cracks at my expense.
Then, after my meditation, I would take a long, fast walk repeating my mantram to myself – a habit I must have picked up from Mahatma Gandhi’s example many years earlier. Of course, a long, fast walk on a relatively small liner means going around and around and around . . . at the pace of an Olympic walker. More opportunities for amusement for my fellow passengers, who much preferred their deck chairs. After a few days of this, my reputation was assured.
Then the storm struck – and when the view started gyrating wildly between sky and sea, my stomach began to behave the same way. I made it through the first day, but the next morning I awoke with the sinking sensation that my time had come. My first impulse was to grab a brown bag and join the others draped miserably over the rails.
But my mantram had awakened too – “Rama, Rama, Rama” – without any conscious prompting. After all those years of practice, it knew when I needed help.
Clinging to the mantram as tightly as to the handrail, I managed to reach the sports deck without incident and sat down for meditation. For a while it was touch and go. But then my mind settled down, and I got absorbed in what mystics call the “sea of peace” within.
When I finished and opened my eyes, my stomach had stopped complaining. It had calmed down along with my mind. I felt on top of the world. With the ship still pitching wildly, I sauntered as best I could into the dining room and sat down to a first-rate breakfast – in solitary dignity, monarch of all I surveyed.
The purser looked on in awe. When I rose to go, he approached with new respect and asked in a conspirator’s whisper, “What tablets do you use?”
I wanted to tell him, “It’s not the stomach that needs to be settled. It’s the mind.”
STORY
Fear of Flying
Natalie, a software engineer, has been learning to calm her mind to deal with an anxiety that millions of us can relate to.
“At some point in the early nineties, as a result of seeing several scary airplane crash movies, I became very scared of flying. Not so scared that I couldn’t get on a plane to go somewhere, but scared enough to have sweaty palms, nausea,