Mantra yoga

What is a mantra? Mantra yoga

Mantra is a set of special words of power that saved their original meaning, the consciousness (meaning, sense) and the energy (action) are the same in them.

There are different types of mantras: spiritual, material, mixed, direct action mantras and “fool-proof” mantras. They are intended to achieve the relevant objectives: health, wealth, spiritual growth, success, etc.

Mantra yoga is the science of spiritual vibrations that allows to awaken the so-called kundalini energy, even in people who have only recently adopted the path of yoga, and thus greatly accelerate their spiritual growth. Mantra yoga gives us a powerful tool of self-exploration and changes our inner world and the whole universe that surrounds us to the better. Mantra yoga is one of the easiest and safest type of yoga in practice. However, an explanation of the principles and mechanisms of its action is one of the most challenging tasks. Because of this many yoga practitioners neglect mantra yoga, as insufficiently substantiated from the theoretical point of view.

The difference between mantra yoga and other branches of yoga

The practice of mantra yoga is very easy. It does not require any special skills or abilities. Each of us can distinctly pronounce sounds out loud or silently.

Mantra yoga does not involve any physical exercises for its practice, which makes it a very useful and irreplaceable in cases where conditions are not good for other types of yoga. You can practice it anywhere: in private and public transport, at work, during household duties, etc. This makes it very convenient as you will always find an opportunity to practice it. In addition, if you have some troubles with your body but you want to practice, mantra yoga can be a wonderful solution.

Mantra yoga uses our ability to speak. Pronouncing certain types of mantras, we generate a vibration. If we pronounce a mantra out loud, we generate the vibration of the voice, if we pronounce a mantra to ourselves – a vibration of thought. Each vibration has certain features and action, in accordance with our objectives. It means that by practicing mantras we can bring into our life one or another missing aspect: health, wealth, creativity, spirituality, etc.

Benefits of mantra yoga or what mantra yoga gives to practitioners

If you feel that your intellect needs a boost, consider practicing mantra yoga. The development of mind should start with the development of speech. As soon as the speech center (chakra) is opened, the mind center will open as well.

Pronouncing words out loud, we change our state of mind and the perception of ourselves and the world changes accordingly. The whole nature of how our mind sees everything changes.

When we speak, our energy flow changes, a lot of things in our mind begin to be realized more clearly and more precisely. Our mind is made in such a clever way, that if we face any difficult task, by mere uttering the task we can find a clue to its solution. We all know what cramming is. We can read a page from a book several times to ourselves and still not grasp the meaning, but when we read the same text out loud we begin to understand it. If we are confident with our speech, usually it means that our mind is more developed than the mind of someone who is not so confident in speaking. This is a very strong and strange relationship between the ability to speak clearly and the ability to think.

There is an anecdote - a teacher is complaining to another one:

"My students are so silly.

I explain the topic to them again and again but they do not understand. I finally understood it myself, but they still do not get it!"

Sometimes it is very difficult to focus, thoughts are continuously jumping. And we do not even know what we need to strain inside us to keep consciousness on something we want. With the practice of mantra yoga comes the ability to keep focus on an object longer and longer with less effort.

Usually, our life is full of worries. A thought can occupy us and our body reacts by releasing adrenaline into our blood, and we start to shake physically. Someone who repeats mantras, builds a membrane between the mind and the outside world, as if they cover the mind with a soft blanket to protect it from the brutality of the environment. It softens the penetration of disturbing impulses inside greatly. They become more calm and balanced.

What is voice? From yoga’s standpoint, it is an indicator of the body’s state. It is the system, which shows what is broken inside a person. And if a person has diseases, certain karmic flaws, it is immediately reflected in the tone of her voice. This is the most informative part, apart from the human eyes. We cannot see the karma, but it is possible to identify defects. If we practice mantra yoga for a long time, we eliminate the flaws through vibrations, and the voice becomes more harmonious. So, here we can see a very serious connection between a person’s voice and her state. Mantra yoga is, firstly, a diagnostic method, secondly it is the process of treatment.

By practicing mantra yoga, a person eventually destroys negative karma and acquires positive one. In general, we can do almost nothing with our karma. If we did something bad in our previous life, and provoked our negative karma, we must either bear the consequences, and thus atone it, or we must pay it off. But, fortunately, there is a saying in karma yoga:

"If, according to your negative karma, your hair must burn, it does not mean that it must burn on your head."

If you owe anything to anyone, you can pay your debt in many ways. The most valuable currency in the universe is prana (vital energy). If you spoiled someone’s life, you cannot always pay it for with money. You can help yourself to a certain extent, if you return your debt with prana, but it has to be a certain type of prana for each specific case. Nevertheless, people just do not know where to get prana. So, there are special mantras, and when you repeat them you gain this ability and get special vibrations of prana, that you owed someone.

For example, you owe someone 5 liters of blood. Paying it back, may be like this: a vampire will come and suck it all from you at once, and you will immediately die. But there is another option, you can slowly donate blood to a blood bank and get to the desired amount in a certain period, so you will pay off your negative karma with no terrible consequences for you. But anyway, you must give blood back if you took it as a vampire in a previous life. Of course, it is, as you understand, an abstract example. The sense is the same, with mantra yoga practice you can significantly improve your karmic situation.

By working with the voice and special mantras, you increase the degree of vitality, and your life immunity starts to grow, accumulating prana. If a person has prana, he or she is joyful, cheerful, happy, can resist diseases, can live in adverse conditions and does not feel any effect. And if there is no prana, even being in sterile conditions, a person will be prone to diseases, to problems, which can be observed both at the level of physical and mental body, the latter are expressed by irrational fear and negativity. On a subtle level, the one that is responsible for the spiritual vision, the fullness of prana is felt as an involvement in events of cosmic scales, and the lack of it causes a feeling of absence of spiritual laws.

A person who practices mantra yoga develops the abilities that later turn into superpowers. Working with our voice, we disclose other abilities of our body, which later reach such a degree of subtlety, that they do not fit the usual definition of abilities, they become superpowers.

A person who practices mantra yoga, and specifically certain mantras, eventually gains the ability to control the minds of others, the ability to adjust them to the desired wave. It is a very valuable feature, if you are the head of a large enterprise, and all your employees are ready to scatter in different directions and do anything but not their duties in your company. Only those companies survive where there the boss can control everything. And it is extremely difficult to control the employees. There is a myth that you can control with big money: the more you pay, the more the person will work. It is a misconception, due to which many enterprises failed. It should be something more than money. It is something elusive that helps bring people together in the name of a one goal.

Development of intuition

A person who practices mantra yoga eventually gains something that is called intuition. We have our usual mind, it analyzes the events and outputs the result, but we also have an opportunity to get a result without thinking or, in other words, the ability of intuition. There is this ability in each of us, and everyone can disclose it. Methods of mantra yoga help to do it very quickly.

And finally, the most mysterious one. A person who practices mantra yoga begins to get closer to the exploration of the Higher Self, and furthermore, through the practice of mantra yoga, she can reach samadhi (the final liberation from all limitations through self-exploration).

Thus, mantra yoga gives results that are clear to us, and easy to understand. It is a tool that takes us up the spiritual staircase, and which is able to lead us to the ultimate objective of yoga. Moreover, if a person is limited in physical abilities, she can practice only mantra yoga, and with this method only, without the involvement of hatha yoga, to achieve the final result - samadhi. There was a period in history if humanity when this method was so popular that all the others were forgotten.

The power of words and the role of speech development

Yoga says that the ability to articulate words is not accidental on the way of evolution, but is built into its structure. From this point of view, even if somewhere on another planet some intelligent creatures forgot to invent language, they would inevitably use some analogue of language based on some type of vibrations.

What is the speech? It is a vibration of air that transmits some information. But not only air can carry this transmission. For example, penguins exchange vibrations in water, and snakes are very sensitive to vibrations of terrain. In general, the channel of interaction with the external universe through vibrations exists independently of any life forms using it. This channel reaches highest manifestations in humans, because we can speak articulately. Yoga says that the ability to speak is not an accidental phenomenon, but the display of the deepest principle in our nature.

When you open your speech center, the intellect center follows shortly, like a layer of blocks in a pyramid, which is based on the layer below. Moreover, yoga gives detailed description of which centers of our bodies are responsible for what. According to the architecture of body in terms of yoga, the center that acts through the voice is at the base of the neck and is called Vishudha. This center is responsible for the articulated speech.

Next to it, the intellectual center located between the eyebrows, is called the Ajna center. The evolution of a human follows the development of the centers bottom up. And as soon as the voice center is evolved, it starts to indirectly develop the intellectual center.

How to develop our mind

The development of the mind must start with developing the speech. For example, if you want to learn some topic in Maths, but you just cannot understand it, there is a practical method to read the text aloud. Do it, and you will immediately feel the difference. This is known as the method of cramming. It seems a bit old-fashioned, but it is one of the most efficient methods. The center of speech and the center of intellect are tightly tied to each other. Therefore, before you try to take on some serious intellectual task, it is not bad to first develop the skill of speech.

Advantages of a talker

People that have the skill to speak are more successful in life than silent people. As a rule, people who speak more, have higher position in society, even if everyone knows that they are chatterboxes. This is just psychology: if you need to interact with someone it is important that you understand each other. It is frustrating to talk with a person who does not understand your language. You try to tell something to her but she looks at you, and you cannot get whether she is stupid, or just does not understand you. Therefore, intuitively people want to contact with persons who talk.

Nowadays it is a life necessity to learn foreign languages. Those people around the world who can speak English at least a little (even just speak, not read or write), they begin to dominate among people who can say nothing, especially if it is a matter of employment. There is a strong relation between the skill to talk and intellect. And, the other way around, if a person is silent, we percept her not adequately and prefer to not have any business with her.

What is the difference between usual words and mantras

In the mantras, the meaning of a word and its action match each other, but in ordinary words they do not. There is the myth that all people spoke one common language. One of the focus areas of linguists is finding the source of and interdependencies between different languages.

Among the tools, that linguists use, are deducted laws of transformation, which can help to reproduce words from languages, which by now are long dead. Linguists analyze ancient sources and re-build vocabularies and grammar rules that nobody uses today. All in all, this work helped to classify most of modern and many ancient languages into so called language families. Based on theories of some researchers, though not confirmed and accepted by the whole scientific community, we might even assume that all the language families can be traced up to one single source, one proto-language.

This point of view has much in common with yoga, where we trace all the known words to a single vibration. Throughout the time this vibration, or, more precisely, its energy and meaning, was divided and interpreted in numerous ways, creating the first sounds and words of human languages as well. Later, the meaning of words and their energy diverged with each other. Many words that we use now meant different things before, and the energy contained in them was lost. This is like giving your dog a command in foreign language: you put power in your words, but the meaning is not clear, so your effort gets scattered. The initial power remained only in words of two types: in mantras, and in swear words. People approximately understand what kind of energies have to match these words, and they have not changed a lot since ancient times.

The words of original languages (or language) were somehow linked with the kundalini energy. Every word we say is an emanation, thin shadow of the initial vibration of kundalini. And the words that fully convey these vibrations are called mantras.

Nowadays most of our words have lost their meaning. For example, vibration of the word “box” somewhere in the past might mean just “a wooden frame to put things in it”, but throughout the time it got meanings of “punching people for sporting glory” or “television set”. This mess caused the ordinary words to cease to be mantras. The words stopped acting, their meaning diverged with the original energy. But in mantras the meaning was kept.

The mantras are special words of power. Formally every word was a mantra, but most of them lost their energy.

Attitude towards words and speech

First thing to start your practice of mantra yoga is to develop a new attitude to the words and to the speech. Think about the words, watch your feelings, when you speak a lot or a little, calm or stressful. Observe how your mind works, how your body is affected.

For example, you quarrel with your wife or husband and you start to break dishes. You lost control and everything is going to hell. You start to shout. But then the emotional splash is gone, and you realize that your spouse is the most wonderful person in the world, and you calm down and kiss, and put up. What was it there throughout the fight? Try to mark the moment when suddenly you lost your will to continue quarreling. Maybe you would continue to shout, but the power left you. And all that was hurting and offending you was gone. You became tired and forgot everything.

So, you need to start observing the state of your body and mind when you speak something. Keep a diary, it helps to structure your memories and feelings. It is not much important whether you will read it or not, but writing down you will able to analyze your states and work with causal relationship. Observe your feelings from what and how you speak, because all components are important in speech: what you said (information) and how you said it (emotion, energy). The latter can affect our state even more than the former.

When you will get into the habit to analyze your speech, you will be able to practice it not only when doing mantra yoga, but almost in every conversation you have. Start paying attention to your speech, treat words consciously. Articulated speech is an unknown realm, although we believe that there is nothing new in it, and everything is clear. But many interesting discoveries await us there about things that indirectly affect our lives.