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As a twenty-something, Tina Malia was looking for a spiritually satisfying life. Instead, she felt lost and lonely. Having struggled with depression on and off since she was a teen, Malia felt ensnared by unrelenting negative thoughts and saw no end in sight to her suffering. “It was like I was falling down this pit,” says Malia, now in her 40s. Nothing she grasped for to ease her pain—food, sex, movies, alcohol, spiritual books—gave her anything more than a quick and fleeting fix.
A friend who saw her struggling offered her a tool he thought would help—a practice called japa, in which a practitioner moves a string of beads, such as a mala, through their fingers while repeating a mantra, or sound, silently or out loud. Reciting a mantra is an ancient practice believed to have the potential to change the state of a person’s mental and emotional state and elevate their consciousness.
The mantra her friend suggested Malia practice was ram, which can be interpreted as “the inner fire that burns away impurities and bad karma.” At the time, explains Malia, she did not fully understand its meaning. She just wanted relief from her despair, and she was willing to try anything.
After nearly two weeks of silently reciting ram for several minutes—and, sometimes, hours— each day, Malia started experiencing a shift in how she was feeling.
“What appeared like a small speck of light—a little spot of relief—grew and grew with every recitation of that mantra,” she says. As she began to detach her true self from her thoughts, she slowly stopped acting on negative ones. “All these feelings of being unworthy, lonely, and lacking a purpose on earth were just thoughts,” she says. “When I gave my mind something to focus on, something besides my thoughts, it gave me relief.”
After six months of daily japa practice, Malia says she was able to access true joy deep inside her.
Malia had tapped into what yoga practitionersis have known for several thousand years: mantras, whether chanted, whispered, or silently recited, are powerful meditation and therapy tools. Western science is only now starting to catch up.
What Is a Mantra? Meaning, History, & Significance.
So what does mantra mean? The word is derived from two Sanskrit words—manas (mind) and tra (tool). Mantra literally means “a tool for the mind,” and was designed to help practitioners access a higher power and their true natures.
“Mantra is a sound vibration through which we mindfully focus our thoughts, our feelings, and our highest intention,” the late music artist Girish, author of Music and Mantras: The Yoga of Mindful Singing for Health, Happiness, Peace & Prosperity, once explained.
Over time, it’s believed the vibration sinks deeper and deeper into your consciousness, helping you to eventually feel its presence as shakti—a powerful, if subtle, force working inside each of us that carries us into deeper states of awareness, Sally Kempton, the late meditation teacher and author of Meditation for the Love of It: Enjoying Your Own Deepest Experience , shared years ago
One of the most universally recited mantras is the sacred Hindu syllable aum—considered by some traditions to be the sound of the creation of the universe. Aum (also spelled om) is believed to contain every vibration that has ever existed or will exist in the future. It is also the energetic root of other, longer mantras.
These Hindu mantras are in Sanskrit, but mantras have roots in many major spiritual traditions and can be found in many languages, including Hindi, Hebrew, Latin, and English. For example, some Catholics commonly repeat the Hail Mary prayer or Ave Maria. Many Jewish people recite Barukh atah Adonai (“Blessed art thou, oh Lord”), while some Muslims repeat the name Allah as a mantra.
Neurological Effects of Mantras on Your Brain
Neuroscientists, equipped with advanced brain-imaging tools, are beginning to quantify and confirm some of the health benefits of this ancient practice, such as its ability to help free your mind of background chatter and calm your nervous system. In a study published in the Journal of Cognitive Enhancement, researchers from Linköping University in Sweden measured activity in a region of the brain called the default mode network—the area that’s active during self-reflection and mind wandering—to determine how practicing mantra meditation affects the brain. From a mental health perspective, an overactive default mode network can mean that the brain is distracted and not calmed or centered.
Researchers behind the study asked a group of subjects to take part in a two-week kundalini yoga course that included six 90-minute sessions. Each session started with yoga exercises (asana or poses and breathing) and finished with 11 minutes of mantra-based meditation. The subjects recited the Sat nam mantra (roughly translated as “true identity”) while placing their hands over their hearts.
The same group also performed a finger-tapping control condition—in which they were instructed to perform slow-paced button pressing on a four-button keypad.
The subjects’ default mode networks were more suppressed during the mantra meditation than during the finger-tapping exercise—and suppression grew as mantra training increased. “The study suggests that mantra training can more effectively reduce [default mode network]-related distractions than something like tapping along to the beat,” says Rozalyn Simon, PhD, who authored the study.
Research findings such as these do not prove that mantra is a life-changing technique. But as Malia knows well, when we are beholden to our discursive mind, we can easily be led down the path to negative headspace—further away from our true, centered nature. In fact, research suggests that it doesn’t matter whether you recite an ancient Sanskrit mantra such as Sat nam, the Our Father, or any sound, word, or phrase—as long as you repeat something with focused attention, you’ll likely notice a shift in your mental state.
The late Herbert Benson, MD, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and founder of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, spent decades researching the integration of mind and body, including how meditation and prayer can alter mental and physical states. He was particularly interested in what brings on a meditative state, which he calls “the relaxation response.” Benson experimented with subjects repeating Sanskrit mantras as well as nonreligious words, such as “one.” He found that regardless of what the practitioner repeats, the word or phrase has nearly the same effect: relaxation and the ability to better cope with life’s unexpected stressors.
More recently, scientists at several universities and institutes have replicated these tests with contemporary brain-imaging tools and reached similar conclusions. A 2015 study from researchers in Israel found that people who silently repeated the word echad (Hebrew for “one”) experienced a quieting of the mind, particularly a deactivation of the typically active brain network. “When people said ‘one, one, one,’ everything that had been active during the resting state in the default mode network was shut down,” says Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, a neuroscientist in the Department of Education at the University of Haifa. “Subjects reported that it was relaxing and that they had fewer thoughts.”
How to Find Your Mantra
If you’re interested in trying mantra, start by exploring traditional phrases, each of which has a specific meaning. There may be one that resonates for you or you can seek one based on the emotion or mental state you seek to experience. For instance, the Sanskrit mantra Sat nam is thought to help strengthen intuition; the Shanti mantra is connected to inner peace.
Otherwise, attending a kundalini yoga class, mantra meditation session, or other types of workshops (either in person or online) can help you get a better sense of which mantras you’d like to explore further.
How to Practice a Mantra
Consistency is key. “You enliven a mantra through regular practice over a period of time—months or even years,” explained Kempton.. “It’s a bit like rubbing a flint against a stone to strike fire. The friction of the syllables inside your consciousness, the focus of bringing yourself back to the mantra again and again, and especially the attention you give to the felt sense of the mantra’s resonance inside your awareness will eventually open the energy in the mantra, and it will stop being just words and become a living energy that you’ll feel shifting your inner state.”
Mantra and meditation teachers recommend the following steps:
- Lie down or sit in a comfortable position.
- Silently repeat the mantra, once on the inhalation, once on the exhalation. Don’t fixate on it (you’ll know you are if your brow starts furrowing).
- When thoughts or feelings enter your mind, try to simply notice them, and then return to silently reciting the mantra.
Start small. Maybe you sit with your mantra for a minute or two. Eventually, you might work up to 10 minutes a day. Several traditions suggest staying with one mantra for several months before switching to another, in order to cultivate a sense of ease, presence, and peace.
“You have to practice, often for quite a while, before a mantra really opens for you,” said Kempton
Years into her spiritual chanting practice, Malia, who credits the Sanskrit mantra ram with saving her life, has experienced a deeper connection with the mantra. “It’s almost as if these mantras start to feel like your friends—even lovers,” she says. “Sometimes I wish I could stand on the top of a building and shout it out to the world: Mantra is free! It has no side effects! It’s simple and so easy!”
This article has been updated. Originally published March 20, 2018.