I remember the first time I was invited to recite a mantra. It was at a yoga class in Hong Kong, I was in my early twenties and thought the yoga teacher was out of her mind, as if she had asked us to say “abracadabra” and expect to see bunny rabbits pop out of a hat.

So it is rather ironical that thirty years later I find myself chanting a healing mantra for 11 minutes every evening, and invite a few others to join me every month. 

I got to mantra very gradually. After my first daughter arrived I was on the look out for anything that could give me more energy. I learned Reiki, level 1 (sending healing energy to oneself or to someone who is present in the room) and level 2 (sending healing energy at a distance). We learned symbols and mantras associated with every symbol. My rational mind had failed to give me the back-up I needed and I was willing to venture into more unconventional practices. It worked. In particular, I remember performing reiki on myself after we arrived in Canada from Malaysia, a 16 hour time difference, and feeling hardly any jetlag. I don’t have a formal reiki practice now, but I regularly practice it on myself when I lie down and I used to practice on my daughters when they were small enough to cuddle in bed with me.

I must have felt the need for a practice that could help me find peace of mind, I soon after learned Transcendental Meditation (TM). I was given a mantra that was mine only, that I chanted in my head for 20 minutes and that I wasn’t allowed to repeat to anyone. It seemed quite reasonable to me to focus on a word, in a way it could be any word, but I had no objection to be given a secret word. Some meditations focus on a candle, others on the breath, why not on a word. I never tried with another word, a bit in the same way I don’t deviate too much when given a recipe. Other steps might work too, but if something has been tried and tested I am happy following other people’s foot steps to get the desired results – in the case of meditation a calm mind-. It worked too. I practised TM once or twice a day and encouraged some of my friends to try it too.

Life got faster paced, I lost my centre and finally had a break down in my early 40ies. My life made no sense, I had been living for others and had completely lost touch with who I was. I looked for a modality that could help me. When I tried a kundalini yoga class I felt such love I wanted more of it and decided to explore it further. I have been practising if every day since, we’re in 2023 so it’s been twelve years now, training to be a teacher in the process. It is a lifeline, part of my daily routine in the same way as brushing my teeth, a way to keep a secure connection to myself and the universe.

The practice of kundalini yoga includes LOTS of mantras. Some like Wahee Guru about expressing awe and wonder at the beauty and mystery of the universe. Others like Humee Hum Brum Hum about feeling at one with everything, even though we are in separate bodies. Yet others like Gobinday, Mukanday, Udare, Apare, Harian, Karian, Nirnamee, Akame about bowing to the cycle of Life and Death and surrendering to it in trust without any expectation. It is about devotion to something so much bigger than us we will never comprehend it in our minds, we can just have an intuition of it in moments of grace. I love it. Mantras have supported me for the past few years through moments of deep grief, anger and insecurities. I chanted the Sodarshan Chakra Kriya mantra “Wahe Guru” for 11 minutes twice for a period of 1,000 days, it was said it would “increase my vitality and intuition, and purify my subconscious mind from negative patterns”. My fourth daughter was small when I first started chanting it every morning, she would lie down against me when I sung it, she liked to ask me to put on the music whenever we were in the car with her friends.

It could have been time wasted, but that was a calculated risk on my part. Transcendental Meditation had already shown me that repeating a word over and over again helps still the mind. Associating a word, or a series of words, with an intention, a mudra and a particular breath pattern was just adding a few things to something that I knew by experience helped still the mind. I was curious to see what the effect would be. 

I might be open to trying weird things, I also keep a dose of healthy skepticism: I am prepared to try things out – if they work, I explore further, if they don’t, I explore in other directions. My father was an engineer and modelled great integrity in his thinking. Everything had to be tested and make sense to him, regardless of what anyone else thought, before he accepted it as a working hypothesis. 

The shifts in my life in the past ten years have been dramatic. I feel empowered and aligned with who I am in a way I wouldn’t have dreamed was possible. It doesn’t mean my life is easy, it just means that what I say and do is more and more aligned with what I feel is right. My intuition is much stronger and I feel I can rely on it a lot more. I know to always strive to be calm and serene inside, as that is indispensable for me to feel into what is needed for me and others at any given time. I often have little understanding of what is what and why, but I trust that by being as still as possible, a little voice will talk to me and tell me what is needed at any given time. The more I get out of the way, the clearer that voice is.

So I feel that the Mantra Experiment has been encouraging, certainly positive enough to justify further experimenting. I started the evening Healing meditation in February this year after a kundalini yoga workshop, I was inspired by one of the participants who said she was doing it every day for her father who was unwell. One of my family members has been unwell for a while, it is a cause of worry and sometimes stops me from sleeping.  I decided to do the healing meditation every evening for that person, but also for other people who suffer from the same thing, and sometimes for other people, it depends on the day. The meditation includes a specific mudra, and chanting the mantra RaMaDaSa SaSeiHoHung, which in very broad terms calls on the purifying energy of the sun, the deep inward processing energy of the moon, the grounding of Earth and the surrender to Life’s energy of creation and destruction, with an intention of Healing. The immediate effect is that I get to visualise that person in her shining light, her essence and beauty, and that is a delicious experience. Everyone has a specific and beautiful essence, and it is a heart-warming experience to concentrate on it, feel it and feel it expand in the heart centre. The second effect is that I sleep better. Somehow by repeating a mantra for 11 minutes the brain goes into a different brainwave and the circular thoughts and worries that appear at night and that serve no purpose just get stopped in their track. 

Whether the person gets better or not is yet to be seen, but one thing is certain: every person at any one time has a potential of becoming many different things. If I hold an intention of vibrant health, see the person healthy and joyful, I am feeding into the potential of that happening, actually in a way it has already happened, or the train of events leading to it has already started unfolding. It might be very small changes to start with, shifts so small no one notices, but just like a seed grows without anyone seeing it grow minute by minute, the potential for vibrant health is at work. 

If we’re not careful it is easy to let our worries permeate all our thoughts and focus on the worse possible outcomes. A pinch of that is useful as it mobilises all our resources to stop it from happening, but the mind thrives on drama and it’s important not to let it get away with more than is useful. Anyone who has put a question “out there” has probably experienced that eventually there is an answer. The field/ source/ God has ways of communicating with us through synchronicities, serendipity, signs that could be dismissed as random and not consequential, or embraced as answers. Certainly any sign that comes in response to a question should at least be tested as a possible answer, felt into, played with, until we know if it is a valid answer or not. Similarly, a healing meditation is a communication with the field/ Source/ God, a petition. There may be a reason we don’t yet know about the current challenge, but considering there may be a reason makes it easier to accept and to surrender to the process, trusting it will all come well in the end, if we can just hold present the beauty and essence of everyone involved.

There is clearly an element of trust into what is unfolding. The intention is for vibrant health, but also for everyone to be at peace with whatever unfolds. When someone is unwell, it necessarily creates shifts for the person and everyone around them, it’s a rite of passage for everyone involved. Old perceptions have to be let go of, just like a storm breaks old wood, new elements appear that weren’t there before, just like fresh buds appear at sometimes unexpected places. 

Note: How and why we can set intentions and manifest certain outcomes is a topic in itself, alternative scientists , thinkers and healers such as Bruce Lipton, Rupert Sheldrake, Lynne McTaggart, Caroline Myss have spoken and written about it extensively, I may be brave and synthetise my understanding of them one day. What is certain is that yoga and Taoism have used mantra and mudra for millenia, so something about them must work, even though science is still struggling to make sense of it.

If you wish to join the monthly Healing Meditation (it lasts 20-30 mns in total), please e-mail me here. You can send healing to a particular person, or a group of people, or a place of your choice.