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We focus on breath meditation here at Mindful15, but at times, it’s nice to experiment with something different. Today, we’re exploring mantra meditation.
Now, I don’t advocate shopping around for the kind of meditation you like best. It takes time and practice to reap the benefits of mediation and if you’re always trying something new, you never allow yourself enough practice for any one method to pay off. Furthermore, the whole point of mindfulness practice is to teach you to be mindful under any circumstances. If you struggle with, for example, breath meditation, giving up on it and moving to mantra meditation is the wrong thing to do. Instead, you need to sit with the breath over and over again until you teach yourself that it’s possible to sit in any circumstances.
So, why am I sharing mantra meditation today? Because once you have a regular meditation practice, you can broaden your skills by practicing in other circumstances, and changing the object of meditation is one possibility. And, because it’s fun to sometimes try new things. I have a solid daily breath meditation practice, but sometimes, I use mantra meditation, open awareness meditation, or other practices, just to broaden my experience.
A mantra is an utterance. It can be a sound, a word or a phrase. Mantra practice is some 3000 years old and the earliest mantras were Sanskrit. 
In fact, the word mantra comes from the Sanskrit manas meaning mind and tra meaning tool. A mantra is a mind tool used to focus the attention.
The practice has spiritual roots. In fact, mantra is said to be the basis of all spiritual practice including prayer and scripture. Traditionally, the mantra is chosen for its spiritual significance and in some traditions a teacher gifts a specific mantra to a student. Of course, at Mindful15 we practice secular meditation, so we’re going to focus on the meditative qualities of the mantra as opposed to its spiritual meaning. You can, however, select a mantra that has spiritual meaning to you.
Basically, this form of mindfulness meditation uses the sound vibration of a mantra in place of the breath as the object of meditation. And, I’ve said this before, in mindfulness meditation, it doesn’t matter what you choose as a meditation object. The practice remains the same. You sit in mindful, non-judgemental awareness of the meditation object, coming back to the object whenever your attention wanders. Coming back is the essence of meditation.
And, there are similarities between breath and mantra. Both are repetitive and both involve vibrational qualities. If you are very mindful, you’ll notice that, whether you use breath or mantra, there’s a little variation with each repetition.
We’ll say the mantra silently to ourselves, however, you can use the mantra as an audible chant if you like. You can also synchronize the repetition of the mantra with your breath, which is what I like to do. I think for breath meditators it’s just natural to synch with the breath.
Even today, the most commonly used mantras are Sanskrit. Many of us who don’t know Sanskrit enjoy using these, because they seem exotic to us. But, it’s not necessary for a mantra to be exotic. In fact, if you get too attached to that feeling of doing something alluring and unusual, it gets in the way of non-judgemental awareness. A mantra can be created in any language.
That said, today we’re going to meditate on So Hum, another commonly-used Sanskrit mantra. So means “that” and Hum means “I,” so So Hum translates to “I am that.” Scholars believe “that” refers to the universe, so So Hum means “I am the universe.” It’s an acknowledgement that you are but an element of the universe and it represents the concept of oneness.