Mantras, quotes and koans have the power to connect you more deeply with your experience, either in meditation or in your wider life.

In my experience there are lots of different types of mantras. Just a few of them are:

• Ones that help you concentrate or get into a certain state of being
• Ones that evoke certain feelings in you
• Ones that reveal something new to you
• Ones that show you what is most meaningful or true
• Ones that support you through difficult times
• Ones that inspire you
• Ones that you spend your life living
• Ones that feel like they represent something intrinsic to the deepest part of your being

In my early days of practice, at any given time I would have a mantra that I was orienting my practice and life around – it would serve as a compass and a reminder to stay aligned with what was most important to me. A couple of examples were:

‘God, show me things as they are.’

‘Always go too far, because that is where you will find the truth,’ Albert Camus

Once I felt that I had integrated what I needed from a mantra, I would connect to a new one.

A lot of the power of mantras comes from the instilled sense of importance in them. Being able to feel the meaningfulness and resonance in your direct experience will increase the power that mantras, koans or quotes can have to really transform you. If you have come across something that resonates, take time to look thoroughly at it, to let it sink in and to appreciate the effect it has on you.

It is this willingness to let a mantra into your experience and to reflect on how it makes you feel that will allow it to change you.

This series of three guided meditations from Joost Vervoort are a good intro for working with koans in your meditation practice.

Lots of spiritual quotes are incredibly saccharine – be careful of anything that is pure light and love as this is often just feeding the soul’s sugar addiction, rather than nourishing the depths of your being.

True wisdom always has at least a drop of darkness and a drop of light in it.

Here are a couple of guiding mantras that I use that have been helpful for other people.

“What Feels Important?”

Focusing on what matters allows you to be less involved in your inner script and opens you up to see the bigger picture.

Asking yourself what feels important can cut through fear, judgement, intellectualisation and the need to be right and can allow you to focus on the things that matter most.

The more open your heart is the more naturally this will come. It is easy to get in contact with what feels important in situations where you already feel aligned with life. In more difficult situations, the more you ask this, the more you will be able to open your heart and move from that place.

It’s important that the answer is coming from a place of sincerity and from validating what you want and need – rather than what you believe others think you should do, or from some desire to be a perfect being.

This mantra can open up a way of connecting with the world where you are more able to act in service to others because this is a lot of what matters in life. But it can also open up a deep sense of care and respect for yourself. A busy, modern life can often require you to put your own needs aside and the answer to what’s important can often be things like rest, self-care or giving yourself space to recognise your most difficult emotions.

For it to be most impactful, you need to able to include your darkness and challenges in the answers, as well as the more beautiful aspects of life. You have to feel free to be honest, and sometimes what feels most important is to recognise how hard life is or how sad you are, for example.

Getting good at answering the question ‘what feels important?’ in an honest way can give you the courage to do the things you need to do and go after the things you really want.

Here are a few ways you can use this mantra:

• As an explorative question – to help you identify some of your values in life, which can then become like guiding forces
• As a self-inquiry – repeatedly asking it of yourself in meditation, allowing it to resonate through your being and seeing what effect it has on your experience
• As a reminder in daily life – throughout the day, taking time to pause and come back to the question ‘what feels important in this moment?’. Both out of curiosity and as a way to reorient yourself towards it

Ultimately, the more you can make space to recognise what feels most important to you and use this to focus on what matters, the more clarity you will have and the more meaningful that life will become.

“Here We Are”

This is my version of ‘this is it’, or ‘be here now’.

One of the reasons I prefer it, is because it is inherently non-hierarchical. Using it with yourself, it avoids creating a split inside of you where one part is directing another part (be here now) or where one part is claiming spiritual authority and telling another part (this is it).  It’s more like an open invitation to arrive in experience.

It’s the same if I am using it with other people. It acknowledges that we’re all in this together, rather than one person assuming an authoritative role on experience.

It also allows for people to have multiple parts of themselves. Humans are complex and have multiple conflicting desires, emotions and thoughts, as well as past and future versions of themselves present at any time. Using ‘we’ to refer to yourself in this context can create space for every part of you to be welcome.

Adopting this attitude cuts through right and wrong and opens up a sense of compassionate presence. You can arrive with what is happening, even if it is weird, ugly, painful or stressful in some ways. It doesn’t ask for experience to be any different to what it is for you right now.

‘Here we are’ also cuts through the model of awakening where things are supposed to get better all the time. A lot of the time they get harder before they get better because you stop running away from the things that are hard in life and choose to meet them with courage.

The mantra can bring you into a deep state of presence while simultaneously making space for imperfections in yourself, others and the world. Kind of like ‘despite all the fuck ups and complications and difficulty, we’ve made it this far… Here we are, despite it all’. And I love that.

I talk more about this mantra with River Kenna on this short podcast.