Mantras in the Mainstream

Several years ago I was in Rishikesh, India attending the International Yoga Festival. I had a life-changing opportunity to spend a week receiving a rapid induction into gurmukhi mantras via taking a Kundalini Yoga class every day, two times a day.

Little did I know where they would take me, and many others in my community, once I brought them home.

Let's get some technical stuff out of the way.

"Gur" means Guru and "mukhi" means from the mouth. From the mouth of the Guru these mantras come.

A mantra  is a vibrational sound containing wisdom and knowledge from a sacred sound current.  The sound current is called the Naad.

"Naad Yoga is based on the experience of how sound vibrations affect the body, mind and spirit throughout the movement of the tongue, the mouth, and changes in the chemicals in the brain." ~Aquarian Teachers Manual

"Man" means mind; "tra" means projection.  With mantra and naad, we can change the projection of the mind to a more positive thought stream.  It's a powerful technology for today, especially considering some mantras are up to 2,000 years old!

I quickly found the mantras finding me. I'd hear one playing, and it would "seductively" pull me in. I find that when I'm supposed to be with a certain mantra, it literally calls out to me and I can't stop playing it 24/7.  And then it "goes away" when the clearing, healing or shift has taken place.  I naturally feel like not listening to it anymore and another one catches my attention. Often really loudly in my soul! As if it's yelling, "Listen to me now!"

Ok, so I'm playing them in the classes I teach and listening to them at home all the time as my poor 18-year-old son cries out: "Mom, enough already!" Listening to them in my car, in the airport with headphones as I travel and sleeping with them every night, all night long.

Whew! I have to. They are telling me to play them and share them with my students because they need them. I'm just listening and following divine orders.

Fast forward…they have infiltrated into the yoga room space. The walls, floor, windows and students…everything has become saturated with their vibration.

One translation of a beautiful shabd, (a shabd is a way to "plug" in to God), says:  "I am dyed a deep crimson" or  dyed with the love. The studio is literally saturated with love now.

Students want to know what that one was or this one and "where can I get it, fast?"  My desk staff can't stop listening to them, bathing the entry to my studio in mantra. Sometimes, they tell me they have to switch mantras because one might be making them too woozy or blissed out, and they can't focus on the task at hand!

I'm in airport security lines, having a casual dinner with a friend or in a 2-hour car ride with a new acquaintance and it leads to: "I'll send you a mantra for that if you like!" Sometimes I feel like the "mantra doctor."

They deeply penetrate into the subconscious psyche and clean out old negative "programs," replacing them with a new Love-Based Only operating system!

Everyone always reports back to me that this or that happened so quickly for them. Yup, the energy shifts fast.

Speaking of fast, it's only been three short years now and they have already made their way into the local metro Detroit mainstream.  It's beyond exciting!

One of my students is a cardiologist and he's playing them in his office, while he travels and even during cath lab procedures to relax his patients. Another student and popular local restauranteur plays them in the dining room during the lunch seating; another student played one at her son's Bar Mitzvah and just the other week, I attended a student's family member's memorial and was blown away to see the closing hymn was replaced with a mantra she chose from yoga class.

The blending of two worlds?

Our human world merging with a higher world?

Maybe, maybe not.

Yoga means to yoke, join or union.  Seems to me that's exactly what's happening.

xoKatherine