The Power of Mantras

The Union Path Podcast - The Power of Mantras
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The power of mantras is really interesting. It's really interesting that words can hold so much power, so much sway over not only what we think, but more importantly how we feel, what our experience of life is like.

This power of words can be really easy to underestimate. Of course, all of us have either had our feelings hurt, or been overjoyed by the words other people have used towards us to describe us, to relate to us. But we do it to ourselves too. Negative internal self-talk feels bad. Positive internal self-talk feels good.

The power of words is really intriguing. Because on one level, from a really simplistic level, words are ideas formed into communicable sounds.

That's really interesting that we take ideas and to fully understand them, we convert them into words, and words are seemingly sounds that we make with our mouths, but it must be more than that, right? It's an interesting thought experiment to sit down and wonder, what were thoughts like before language? Were they merely pictures? But what about all the commentary?

What about all the things we think about, what we think about? I don't know, it's really interesting, but probably a tangent for what we're talking about now. This idea of mantras, this idea that using the power of words, especially the power of words repeated, to make some sort of internal change, is a fascinating one.

Obviously this has been talked about for thousands of years, so this isn't new or novel territory, but it's interesting to think about nonetheless.

How we can repeat words over and over again and make slow, subtle, but persistent shifts within ourselves,thatso we can actually change, at the very least, our internal weather,

but more than that our internal sense of being through the repetition of words. And again, we can do this both in positive ways and negative ways. We can do this both consciously and unconsciously.

A lot of us suffer from negative self-talk from this ruthless, judgmental critic in our head that is constantly looking down at us, arms crossed, disapprovingly judging and criticizing a lot of what we do. But we can also witness the opposite, right? We can also witness people seemingly who their only internal dialogue seems to be how incredible they are at everything.

But when we think about something like a mantra and the ability of repeated words, repeated ideas to shift our consciousness one way or the other,

a lot of what we're talking about is bringing more intention to the mantras we're already repeating. Because whether we're aware of it or not, we are repeating mantras constantly.

It's a feature of the human animal. There's always some kind of chatter going on about something. There's always some kind of critical assessment going on. There's always seems to be some conversation going on, in the back of our minds, about what's happening to us, what has happened to us, what might happen to us, what's happening to them over there.

It's one of the many things I think a lot of people realize once they start any kind of mindfulness or meditation practice, is just how much of a chatter box their mind is. In a lot of ways it's incessant and really fatiguing. Just have this constant commentary, this constant commentary track running beneath life.

And when we start to pay attention to this commentary, and really start to hold it up to a level of criticism and scrutiny and really start to ask ourselves, who is this? Why is this so incessant? Is any of this true? Is any of this based on reality? How much of this commentary is aggregate of my fears and insecurities?

And so when we start to pay attention to this, these mantras, that are always happening, I think we learn a lot of very interesting things.

The main thing we learn is, or the main thing we can observe is, if I have this critic in my head constantly berating and criticizing a lot, if not nearly all of what I do, how is that affecting me?

Because even though these thoughts and ideas are coming from within me, they still have an effect. There's still an emotion, a feeling that gets triggered and activated, based on these mantras.

And whether we sit down and have a mantra of peace and love and joy, or whether we're walking in the world with mantras like, you're not good enough. Everything you do is wrong. This is gonna fail, just like everything you do fails, matras have a lot of power, matras hold a lot of power.

And again, it's not something we do however much we choose to meditate or what have you. For a lot of us, maybe for most of us, these things are continuous.

Kinda like the same way a visualization practice isn't something we do once a day, it's something we're doing all the time.

It's where things like manifesting can get really complicated. Because if we're trying to make something happen, and we're really visualizing it, and we're really repeating affirmative mantras around it for some amount of time,

but then going out in the world and basically visualizing and repeating something very different, if not something completely opposite, then that's counterproductive. Oftentimes that's defeating. So thinking about things like mantras or visualization, the most important thing to remember is that this is like breathing. We're always doing it. Yet a lot of the time we spend doing it, we're not actually conscious of doing it.

Sure, when we think about it, we can stop breathing or start breathing whatever we want. Maybe you just did it right there. But then we think to ourselves, now, wait a minute, how much time to actually spend noticing my breathing? Probably very little. Yet, the in and out happens anyway.

So to bring a little bit of consciousness to things like mantras is the most valuable thing about any kind of mantra practice. It's way more important to bring awareness to the mantras we're repeating all day, everyday, than it is to intentionally repeat some word or phrase or sentence for 20 minutes a day.

It's much more important to get a sense of overall being or the overall way we conduct ourselves, than it is to just intentionally do something for a short amount of time.

But when we do mantras for a short amount of time, there's one in particular that I've found incredibly powerful, and it's a simple one, it's one that's accessible to everyone. We don't need to take a class. We don't need to be initiated into some group. We don't need to read any particular book. It's very simple and it's very easy.

It's only two words. Thank you. That's it.

And this practice of saying thank you, of feeling and internally expressing gratitude, is one of the most powerful things personally I've ever come across. Interestingly enough, it's actually been pretty conclusively proven to be a very effective mood booster.

That if a person could just sit down in a chair and honestly and earnestly say thank you for just 20 minutes, they're in a better mood. It's a free, always accessible anti-depressant with no side effects.

But of course, for anything to be effective, it has to be the truth. Doesn't do a lot of good to just sit down and say, oh, well, I guess thank you for, I don't know, shoes. Shoes are good, right? Thank you for, I don't know, the fact that today will probably be less horrible than yesterday was? No, if we're in a bad mood, if we're just, if we just can't access gratitude, doesn't do a lot of sense to try to bludgeon ourselves over the head with faked and false appreciation.

But when we can sit down and really be thankful, really be grateful for what we have, what we've experienced, what life holds for us, the shift is profound. Because like a lot of things, I believe, we naturally feel better when we become a little less self-centered.

A little less focused on the transactions of life, of what we're currently getting or not getting, what we believe we deserve, and in what areas we hold umbrage to things we feel slighted by.

To gently shift that focus away from our own personal gain, towards appreciating the gain we're already experiencing. When we're caught up in our complaints, when we're caught up in our quarrels, when we're caught up in our dissatisfactions, that's quite the opposite.

That's usually rooted in the things we're not getting, in what's not happening, usually juxtaposed with some sort of expectation of the way things should be. Versus when we focus in on feeling real gratitude, we focus in on what is happening. We focus in on what is. We're not focusing on a lack, we're focusing on a presence. A lot of times we're focusing on abundance.

Because I think it's a fairly easy thing, to start being thankful for the obvious. Whether that's our health, whether that's our mobility, whether that's our relationships, our possessions, our experiences, our senses, whatever it is. They're things that are pretty accessible to most of us that's pretty easy to be grateful for.

But then once we do that, once we start saying thank you for things we're actually thankful for, then all sorts of other things we're thankful for start to flood in. Oftentimes a lot of things we forgot.

That when we're living a life focused on lack, focused on what isn't happening, focused on what we're not getting. That naturally shifts us into a mindset where we undervalue and under-count the things we are getting, things that are happening, what life is really like.

Because when we're focused in what's not happening and what we're not getting, again, these are mostly based on expectations. And most expectations are frankly just made up. It's just an idea that we got stuck in our head that leads us to quarrel with what's actually happening, that leads us to an adversarial stance towards truth.

Versus when we endeavor to appreciate what is happening, that not only reorients us back towards the truth, but it reorients us back towards the abundance of the good that's already happening.

Because we tend to find whatever we're looking for. We tend to experience whatever we believe we will. And when we're overly caught up in the negative, in the "not", in the lack, and that's what we tend to see.

Most of the time, what we see is what we expect and when we get in the habit of counting our losses of counting all the ways that life has led us down or has been unfair to us, then that's what we tend to see.

And I'm sure we've all had the experience of, we think about something, we think about a new car, we think about a vacation, we think about a new job, we think about anything, and then we seem to spot it everywhere. We think about going on a summer trip to Florida and now it seems like every 10th car we see in traffic has Florida license plates.

Isn't that weird? Maybe. Or maybe those license plates were just there all along and we could never see it because we were too focused on how we're not in Florida. We're too focused on what's not happening, what we're not getting.

We weren't really looking around, we weren't trying to see the abundance all around us, because we were too focused on the lack right in front of us.

And so when we sit down, or when we walk around, it doesn't have to be a sitting thing, and we just bring more of an awareness of gratitude into our lives, amazing shifts happen.

We feel better, but more importantly, we expand our minds. We expand our consciousness. We can see so much more because we're not just focusing on a sliver of our lives. We're looking much more at the whole than of the part that isn't currently satisfying us.

But I believe it's more than that. I believe building in a shift more towards gratitude, honestly, just makes us better people. At the very least, makes us better people to be around. There's a certain fatiguing quality to complaining, and of course, complaining, venting, and all those things is tremendously useful. It beats repression and suppression any day.

But at some point, it can get sticky. We can get stuck in it. We can get kind of stuck on repeat, have the same complaints, the same laments, the same problems over and over, and over and over again, and we get tunnel vision.

When we get so focused on a problem, it's hard to see many other things that have nothing to do with this problem. But when we shift instead towards appreciation, when we shift to gratitude, then this focus and awareness also shifts.

I believe we're much more likely to see that, of course, things happen to us that we don't like. Of course, things happen to us that affect us negatively. Of course, we have negative feelings, but that's not all we have. We don't have to get stuck in them. We can think other thoughts. We can observe other things.

We can spend more of our time and attention and focus on the good that's happening to us, rather than hyper focused on the bad. And there's just an inherent, uplifting quality of making this shift. It really is amazing to walk around in a sense of appreciation.

Because at least it's been my experience. It starts with the big, obvious things, but it can get to such interesting little things.

Like I've been on a walk appreciating everything around me, and I've gotten lost in awe and wonder, looking at a leaf on a tree. Looking at all the intricate details of this one leaf. The symmetry of it, the design of it, the function of it, the color of it, everything about it is incredible. Then I look at this tree and it's like there's gotta be a hundred thousand of these things. And then I look around and say, there's gotta be a hundred thousand of these trees. And these leaves fall off and come back every single year.

That's incredible, and yeah, maybe that sounds a little bit like the ramblings of a crazy person, but I think these sorts of things are a really nice reprieve,

a really nice way to kind of escape the gravity of the negativity that so often gets transmitted and communicated through our culture.

As a culture, we are obsessed with the negative. We are obsessed with what's going wrong, what's bad, who's getting away with something they shouldn't, what danger is lurking around the next corner?

And even if all of these things are true, there's so much more to life. There's so much more to life than fear. There's so much more to life than constant vigilance for the next negative thing. There's so much more to life than criticism.

But we're the ones that get to choose our focus. We're the ones who choose what we include and what we exclude. We're the ones who choose our ground states, who choose our core beliefs. Our core beliefs about ourselves, about the world, about right and wrong. It's all up to us, it's all personal.

We can choose to adopt these beliefs of whatever groups we include ourselves in, they be organizational or familial, or even our employment. But ultimately, we're the ones that choose. We're the ones that let these ideas in and include them at a base level.

So it's interesting to see what happens. When we include something at a base level, like thank you, like real gratitude, it's interesting the shift consciously and intentionally doing something like this makes in us and around us.

Because even in our relations with other people, our interactions are radically changed when we're appreciating someone, versus when we're criticizing someone. At the very least internally, it feels radically different.

And of course, I'm not talking about faking it. I'm not talking about some sort of false positivity. I think that's counterproductive because it's unconscious. It's an illusion. It's not the truth. What I'm talking about is focusing in on the real truth, the things we're really grateful for, the things we really appreciate, and then letting that expand.

Letting ourselves notice all of the things to be appreciated, all the things to be grateful for. To notice how, perhaps overwhelmingly, we'd miscounted the good parts and the bad parts of our own lives. How we've skewed our own interpretation of what our life is really like because we haven't been aware of everything that is happening.

And when we live in an overly negative culture or environment, just by applying the counterweight of positivity can really be helpful in bringing us back into balance. Can really be helpful in bringing us back to a sense of wholeness, feeling more complete.

Because the truth is, even though awful things may be happen to us, may have happened to us, probably will happen to us, there's still something to be grateful for.

There's still ways that we can choose to orient ourselves more positively. There's a way we can choose to live in a more balanced way, where we're not some Pollyanna that thinks everything that happens is incredible,

but at the same time, we're not so mired and stuck in negativity that we've lost access to appreciation and awe and wonder.

I don't think it's oversimplifying to say there's something to appreciate in everything. Even the most negative circumstance, I think we'd be pretty hard pressed to not find at least some little nugget of something positive that came out of it.

At the very least, it's worthwhile effort to try. It's a worthwhile effort to look and see. That's the thing about so many of us, we've been so trained to look for the negative, look for the fault, look for the problem.

What if we applied some focus of looking for the opposite. Again, it doesn't mean we ignore legitimate faults and problems, and we don't pretend everything is perfect. We don't pretend that everything is wholly wonderful and amazing, but we do shift some of that focus, some of that fault-finding, into favor-finding.

Like, okay, well I'm pretty good at identifying one side of this, what's on the other side? Pretty clear about what's potentially bad, what could be good?

Because a really interesting thing this can do to our consciousness is help us realize that we often do not have all the answers. We often do not know as much as we think we do. That when we label things in our life is good or bad, ah, it's not really so simple. We're not really as good as we think we are at knowing what's good or bad.

Another way of looking at it, everything in life is raw material to create something else. And again, we're the ones who choose. We're the ones who choose what we create. And one of the things we can choose is to create more appreciation, more gratitude. We can choose to intentionally reorient ourselves to a much more positive and uplifted way of being.

And we do it not because we're pretending, we do it because that's actually the truth. We actually bear witness to things that are actually good and we're actually grateful for. And we do this practice over and over again. We integrate it into our daily lives as much as we can.

And just that shift, that intentional movement, from finding fault to finding appreciation, can really change everything. Because it makes us more aware. it makes us more grounded in reality. It makes us more connected with the truth.

And the more connected with the truth we are, the more real our experience is. And the more real our experiences, the more we're experiencing it through our true selves.