Mahamantra🔗

Meditation

(Total duration: 30 minutes)

◈ The Mahamantra meditation is an ancient Tibetan Buddhist technique to awaken the anahata chakra, located at the heart center. This meditation makes your mind firm and stable. Your mind is always oscillating with thoughts. This meditation makes your mind still by making it enter into the zone of no-mind. It is like a jumping board to enter into infinity.

This meditation will create a good energy flow in you. It is a technique that fills you to the brim with energy so that you may stop seeking attention from others and start giving energy and love to others as a result of overflowing energy in you. While doing this meditation, wear your mala around your neck. It will serve to store the energy that you create during the meditation.

Do this meditation on an empty stomach, either early morning or two hours after any meal. It can be done either alone or as a group. When done as a group, it effectively energizes the place where it is done.

◈ Step 1 - Intense Humming (Duration: 20 minutes)

Sit cross-legged in a comfortable position on the floor. Your head, neck and spine should be in a straight line. Those of you who are not able to sit on the floor may sit on a chair. Feel relaxed and close your eyes. Even after we close our eyes, we see forms and images from behind the eyelids. To handle this, imagine that your eyeballs have become stone-like. Just harden them with mental pressure; then the images will die. The movement of our eyes is very closely related to the movement of thoughts in our mind. That is why you are asked to arrest the movement of your eyeballs. Don't be too worried about keeping them arrested. Just proceed with the meditation. Now, produce a humming sound as intensely as possible, as loudly as possible and as lengthily as possible. Keep your lips together and produce the sound 'Mmmm...' from inside, from the navel center. If you were to put your face inside an empty aluminum vessel and make a humming sound, the sound generated will be like this. Note that this is not 'Hum...' or 'Om...', it is simply keeping your lips together and producing the sound 'Mmmm...'. Don't make an effort to take in a deep breath after every 'Mmmm'; the body itself will take breaths when needed.

Don't become tense. Put in your whole being and energy into creating this vibration. Become the humming. Let your whole body be filled with the vibration of the humming. After some time, you will feel that the humming continues without your effort and that you have simply become a listener to it!

❖ Step 2 - Watch Your Thoughts (Duration: 10 mins)

At the end of 20 minutes, stop the humming. If you are playing the cassette or CD, you will hear 'Stop!' Stop where you are, abruptly.

After stopping the humming, keep your eyes closed and remain silent and inactive for 10 minutes with a smiling face and blissful mood. If any thought comes to you, let it come. Simply watch your mind as if you are watching television, without resisting your thoughts or passing any judgment on them.

Remain silent and blissful. During this time, the energy created by the 20 minutes of humming will enter all the corners of your Being and cleanse it deeply.

At the end of 10 minutes, slowly, very slowly, open your eyes. Carry this silence with you.

The anahata chakra is located at the heart center. It is blocked by seeking attention (attention need) and is made to flower by expressing self-less love.

In the diagram overleaf, we see a woman facing the left side of the page, and a mirror image of the same woman, facing the right. The experience of the woman on the left is the 'normal' experience of people trying to fulfill their lives through their relationships, feeling depressed and lacking energy. The woman on the right has taken the steps necessary to become aware of how she creates her own unfulfilling experience through trying to extract energy from her environment. Her anahata chakra is now an outpouring of selfless love and she feels fulfilled and blissful.

Like the woman on the left of the picture, when our anahata chakra is not open, we feel lacking in love and look to find it in our interactions with other people. Their attention feeds us the energy we need and the feelings that we lack. When the anahata is open, on the other hand, we feel that we are flowing with boundless love which spills over and fills everything we come in contact with.

When we buy something for ourselves, we look more at what kind of reaction we will get from our friends than the utility value of the article. This is depicted in the diagram as the 'Drop Dead Coat'. The woman is looking to buy a coat which will make her friends 'drop dead' from envy.

In our interactions with our family, friends and partner, we are all the time seeking their approval. Only when they approve of us do we feel that we are worthy. We are not centered in ourselves, but we are centered on others' opinion of us. When even one person withdraws their approval, we find ourselves feeling depressed.

Our self-image is built upon the opinions of others. This is depicted by the house of cards built out of the 'certificates of approval' which we are always after. In our relationships, we constantly have expectations of others and how they should behave. This actually locks up energy which we could be using for our own growth.

Some couples constantly fight with each other because it gives them the attention they crave. It has been shown that humans cannot live without attention, and so, if we cannot get it in a constructive manner, we will look for it in other ways. Fighting creates energy.

We are so used to relating in ways subconsciously designed to get attention, that we are not aware that most of our relationships are actually transactions. 'If I do this for you, you should do that for me'. This is not love; it is a business deal.

When we are centered in ourselves, we are not caught in the grips of emotions like anger which attack us everyday and overpower us. When we experience our true nature of bliss, we can use the anger energy also correctly to the optimum level. Then the love exuding from us will be truly selfless love because it is spontaneous and there is no need to get anything in return for it.

As we become aware of our attention need through meditation and through a sincere desire to become centered in ourselves, we will begin to experience the flow of love emanating from our own being. We will have boundless energy and love.