Mantra meditation is a powerful tool for bettering your spiritual and mental health. Chanting these mantras multiply the benefits. Here we offer suggestions on how you can experience this for yourself.
Chanting mantras is a deeply transformative process that intensely activates, strengthens, and cultivates the mind. Through this guide, we wish to make it easier for you to gain all the true benefits of the chanting experience.
We encourage you to try chanting for meditation to engage in the meditative state with your body, mind, soul, and energy. That's because meditation no longer has to be only about sitting silently to calm your mind.
Chanting is an experience that engages you, the chanter, completely, one where you utter a combination of sounds known as mantras. These mantras are usually in an ancient language like Sanskrit or Pali, and uttering them with the right pronunciation benefits you on a physical, mental, and spiritual level.
Chanting for meditation is a great anchor for your attention – it goes a big step further in cutting away distractions and keeping you focused on your intention.
Now we know, that since many of these ancient languages might not be familiar to you, you might think that chanting is too complex a task.
Even today, mantras can influence our minds and our lives gently but deeply, and it remains available to us as a lifetime source of healing, joy, and well-being.
So let's step outside the scope of religion or rituals, and take a closer look at how mantra chanting can help us lead happier, more prosperous lives.
Before we try to determine whether learning to chant is worthwhile or not, let's understand exactly how chanting works on our body and mind.
What Happens When You Chant a Mantra?
A mantra is a purposeful composition of sounds, that can produce a certain effect on the body and the mind.
A big and popular example of this is the chakra healing mantras, which use a single sound to activate different energy centers in your body.
Every sound in the universe is accompanied by its related vibration. Often, these are vibrations that we can sense in our surroundings as well as in our bodies.
For instance, chanting the sound ‘mmmm' creates a strong vibration that we can feel within a specific area of our body. Try chanting the mantra for a few seconds, and you will notice that you feel these vibrations in your head, more specifically within the skull.
In the process of creating this vibration and resonance within any specific region of our body, the corresponding cells and systems are activated.
That's how sound is connected to activation. That is the foundational principle on which mantra chanting works.
Chanting a Mantra: The 3 Powerful Responses
When you chant a mantra, it sets off 3 powerful responses from you.
Physical response
Emotional response
Spiritual response
It is true that the experience of chanting a mantra is extremely personal, but irrespective of who the chanter is, these are three responses that are generated in the chanter every single time.
Why Should You Learn Chanting?
Chanting is a form of intense and focused affirmation – that works on a subconscious, emotional and spiritual level at the same time
Chanting along with yoga or meditation will help you gain more mental strength and peace of mind through these practices
Chanting is a brilliant way to regulate and improve breath control and re-energize the body and mind
Learning to chant mantras can seem like quite a task, but the satisfaction you derive from it makes it worth all the effort.
Benefits of Mantra Chanting
Some of the major benefits are:
Helps heal the mind as well as the body.
You become an active observer of your pain and suffering, rather than a passive observer.
It brings purpose and intention into your day-to-day life.
It brings clarity to your thinking and boosts your creativity.
You get over self-limiting beliefs, releasing your true potential.
It lets you set an intention and manifest positive changes in your life.
One of the best examples of such manifestation is the Karagre Vasate Lakshmi mantra.
This is a chant that is recited first thing in the morning by looking into the palms and focusing on the intention of health, wealth, and prosperity.
To better understand the importance of chanting a mantra, check out our post delving deeper into the topic.
Will Mantra Chanting Work For Me?
Here are a few signs that mantra meditation will work for you:
You have been feeling drawn towards meditation, and wish to feel more guided and at ease during meditation practice
You have trouble staying focused on your goals, intentions, or your positive thoughts
You feel emotionally vulnerable to the energy that others bring into your life, and intend to build your mental resilience
You wish to try a new, less overwhelming way to manifest your desires.
You wish to walk into every new with preparedness and an eagerness to expect and appreciate things
You wish to heal from your emotional and physical discomfort and are soothed by pleasant sounds
How to practice chanting meditation
The steps to chanting meditation, in brief, are:
1. Be mindful of the setting
2. Be mindful of the posture
3. Relax your body
4. Begin with three deep breaths
5. Chant Om 3 times
6. Set an intention
7. Begin the chanting, take adequate breaks
8. Gently come back to awareness
To read more about the benefits and importance of mantra chanting, check out our dedicated post on the topic.
What are some easy mantras I can learn to chant?
To help you experience the joy of chanting, here are 3 simple mantras to get you started:
1. Om
This is an ancient mantra that anyone can chant during meditation. Traditionally, every form of meditation starts with the reciting of ‘Om' – anywhere between 3 to 21 times.
The sound, although written as ‘Om' is ‘A-U-M' – and each of these syllables creates responses in different parts of our body and mind.
The sound A vibrates and energizes the area around our gut, the sound U resounds in our chest, and the M sound vibrates inside our head. To start, we recommend chanting Om three times before and after a typical 5-minute meditation.
2. Om Namah Shivaay
Om Namah Shivaay is a brilliant tool for chanting in meditation. This Sanskrit mantra is an invocation of Lord Shiva, the God who encompasses all that we know and aspire to about meditation.
Chanting Om Namah Shivaay is a wonderful breathing exercise in itself, as it must be chanted slowly and extended as much as possible.
The mantra is chanted anywhere between 3 to 108 times in meditation. The greatest gift of chanting Om Namah Shivaay is the way it empowers the faculties of our mind: our memory, our focus, and our sense of clarity.
3. Om Shaanti
Om Shaanti is a call for peace, and that's the reason it adds depth to meditation. As we chant Om Shaanti Shaanti Shaantihi, we are constantly re-affirming our inner summoning of peace.
The longer we chant this mantra while meditating, the deeper we dive into the feeling of peace and positivity.
The mantra can be chanted at any time of day, and even at night before going to bed. This chant is also a great soother of pent-up emotions like anger, grief, frustration, etc.
For a bigger list, check out our comprehensive list of mantras that you can try chanting.
Final Word
Chanting a mantra is a tool for achieving emotional self-healing, purely through the power of sound, focus, and intention.
And whether you chant or meditate for 10 minutes or an hour, you begin to notice visible, positive changes in the way you feel and react to situations throughout the rest of the day.