Mantra meditation is considered to be among the easiest meditation forms practiced. Besides evoking the stillness in you, meditation mantras have a myriad of benefits on one’s body, mind, and spirit. Though it involves focusing one’s attention on a mantra, other activities are required, such as face relaxation, mental concentration, facial or bodily gestures, visualizing, and walking meditation.
Benefits of Practicing Mantra Meditation
- Relieves Anxiety and Stress
Anxiety, depression and stress are quite common mental health problems in our day to day lives. Like all meditation types, practicing mantra meditation helps greatly in relieving stress and anxiety. This follows mantra meditation’s ability to increase activities in the brain parts dedicated to one’s calmness.
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- Improves Memory and Focus
One of the purposes some great achievers recommend meditation practices is their impact on focus and memory. Mantra meditation has been proven to increase mindfulness amongst those who practice it through which focus and memory are achieved. Concentration during the meditation sessions helps one enhance their focus levels.
- Activates the Relaxation Response Leading to Great Health
Practicing mantra meditation helps one maintain great cardiovascular health. Through relaxation of one’s body, mind, and soul, mantra meditation helps lower the heart rate and the blood pressure consequently. A lower heart rate and blood pressure are key to avoiding hypertension.
- Balances Our Emotions
Choosing a mantra is based on our intention. When we have a mixture of emotions that we can hardly tame, one way of seeking calmness and balance of the emotions is mantra meditation. What we affirm during our mantra meditation has a significant impact on our emotions, in this case yielding to calmness and their balance.
Methods of Mantra Meditation
There are many ways to engage in mantra meditation to receive its healing and calming benefits. The methods of mantra meditation are divided into the spiritual and secular approach. Below are some of the common methods of mantra meditation.
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- Mantra Meditation in Yoga Practices
Incorporating mantra meditations during your yoga practices is one of the common ways to start your mantra meditation journey. Notably, this is to be done during the open and close sessions of your yoga practice. During yoga practices, meditation mantras offer effort and dedication to your practice, hence greater meaning to your yoga practices.
- Chanting
There lies great power in chanting a mantra repeatedly in your meditation sessions. Notably, chanting a mantra connects us to our deeper self. Through this, we drift away from the outside world, leaving us to interact with our inner self, leading to calm.
- Use of Mala Beads
Using mala beads in your mantra meditation is widely known for its aids in counting the number of repetitions you make while reciting your mantra. While using mala beads, mantra meditation feels more of a spiritual practice where you connect to your inner soul to affirm what you intend to perceive.
- Focus of Mind
The focus of your awareness is on a mantra, but it is not totally focused on the word or syllable. A mantra may have very special meaning, or a word that has never come up in a mantra may arise. Some mantras do not have any particular meaning to begin with. You are simply the very subject that makes the mantra. As the word, or syllable, is focused, a feeling arises within the mind, and this feeling, called the factor of mindfulness, is what the meditator experiences. The mind is in this special place called the state of mindfulness. This special place, called the state of mindfulness, is so deep and calm that a person may fall into the experience of slumber at any time.
Conclusion
There lies a transformative power in the deep state of concentration during mantra meditation sessions. Practicing mantra meditation is a pathway to achieving enlightenment on one’s true nature and inner processes. The benefits of mantra meditation go beyond our physical and mental health to calming our souls. Let your intentions and intuition guide you through your choice of mantra. There can be many obstacles to a meditation practice. You will need to overcome these if you wish to be successful at meditation and to be able to reap all of its positive benefits.