Post five of seven, in section About Practice
Mantras, quotes, and koans have the power to connect you more deeply with your experience. There are lots of different ways to work with mantras and quotes.
For example:
- To help you concentrate or get into a certain state of being
- To evoke certain qualities or feelings
- To remember what is most meaningful
- To inspire and motivate yourself
- To spend your life living
Simple Practice
The simplest way to practice with a mantra is to choose something that feels like a distillation of where you want your practice to go and use it to orient your attention around it whenever you are practicing or throughout daily life.
In my early days of practice, at any given time I would have a mantra that I was orienting my practice and life around. The mantra would serve as a compass and a reminder to stay aligned with what was most important to me. Some examples were:
- ‘God, show me things as they are.’
- ‘Always go too far, because that is where you will find the truth,’ Albert Camus
- ‘You have been assigned this mountain to show others how it can be moved,’ Mel Robbins
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 a sense of 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 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.
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 Is 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.
Using this question as a mantra can open up a way of connecting with the world where you are more in touch with what matters in life.
Getting good at answering the question, ‘what is 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 We Are”
I use this instead of ‘this is it’, or ‘be here now’.
One of the reasons I prefer it, is because it is inherently non-hierarchical. Saying it to yourself 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 from 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.
Explore More
This series of three guided meditations from Joost Vervoort is a good intro on how to work with koans in your meditation practice.
Quotes I Love
See some more quotes that I love on Pinterest >