INTENSE HUMMING🔗

(Duration : 7 mins)

In the second step, you should sit in vajrasana, form a chin mudra and place your hands on your knees. In this posture, with your mouth closed and lips together, produce a humming sound as intensely as possible, as loudly as possible and as lengthy as possible.

Put your complete awareness on the humming. Become the 'humming'. Humming reduces your inner chatter. Continuously there is talking going on within your mind. You may not be talking to anybody outside, but internally there is always some activity that is going on. Humming is an excellent technique to reduce this inner chatter.

Normally people find it very difficult to sit without thoughts. When you venture into meditation in your middle age, the first thing you would see is resistance from the mind. The mind will revolt; it does not want to sit silently. When it has been habituated to run for so many years and then suddenly it is made to sit silent, obviously it will revolt. In fact people often complain that in an attempt to be thoughtless, they encounter more thoughts! The mind is not accustomed to be silent for so many years. And any initial attempt to make it silent is like swimming against the flow of current. And obviously the river is going to protest. This is the time when many people drop meditation. They get discouraged and they think that meditation is not possible at all for them. But let me tell you that this is the experience of all the seekers initially. You have to make the effort. And this very effort is what I call as tapas (austerity). If you feel discouraged by the initial resistance, then you can never succeed.

There is a mythological story where all the gods and demons are together, trying to churn the ocean to extract divine nectar. But to their surprise the first thing that comes out after the churning, is deadly poison. Later many other things appeared as a result of the churning and finally the last thing to surface was the divine nectar. This is a metaphorical story which has a deep significance in the process of meditation. When the mind is churned in the process of meditation to extract the experience of enlightenment, the first thing to come out is always the negativity that was suppressed in the past. Do not feel discouraged; this is an indication of progress that the negativity is being thrown out. Keep up the effort at meditation till you experience the supreme state.

In this initial stage when the inner chatter is continuously bothering you, intense humming can be an extremely useful tool. It helps you to silence the mind. Our inner chatter is created between the Manipuraka and the Swadhistana chakras. This area is also called ‘Hara’. When we hum intensely such that we feel the vibration of the humming right below our navel, we stop this process of continuous inner chatter. It's like shaking the hara. So the humming should happen from below the navel.

The inner chatter is the sole reason for the mind to survive. Mind is nothing but the inner chatter. Through humming when the inner chatter reduces, automatically you start progressing towards no-mind. You start experiencing a different dimension of your being.

A good driver always knows intricate details about his car, like the noise the car makes at different speeds etc. If the engine noise changes, a good driver immediately senses that there is a malfunction in the engine and takes corrective action. The passengers won't realize anything, but a good driver certainly does. Similarly once you start doing this meditation regularly, based on the intensity and the quality of your humming, you would start understanding your body functions well. If you have over eaten or certain kinds of foods do not suit you that well, you will see a difference in the quality of the humming. Automatically you will adjust your body's needs to make sure that the humming is smooth. Humming gives you an insight into the subtle vibrations of the body and helps you to take corrective action if necessary. It's happens automatically and need not be enforced.

Our body and mind are always out of sync. I always tell people that if your body is here then its almost certain that your mind is not here! Your mind is always hovering elsewhere. Our body has its own innate intelligence which is functioning all the time. It's just that the mind refuses to corroborate with that intelligence. It forces the body into certain actions which later manifests as disease. Disease means absence of ease. If the body is made to run forcibly, then it is going to revolt some time or the other.

So many times you overeat. The body is giving you signals that it is full. But the mind is not satisfied. It wants more. It goes on filling the body, creating more and more damage. You feel the repercussions later. So creating a harmony between the body and the mind is important for going beyond both, else we would be caught in this psycho-physical entity, and transcendence would be difficult. Humming is one of the best techniques to make a bridge between the body and the mind.

Humming lets you feel your body as energy. The moment you start humming, you start feeling light, as if you are floating. You don't feel the heaviness in the body, because humming matches the vibrations of the mind with the vibrations of the body. Body and mind become harmonious. You start experiencing yourself as energy.

So in this step, keep your lips together and produce the sound 'Mmmm...' from inside. If you were to put your face inside an empty aluminum vessel and make a humming sound, the sound generated will be similar to this. Note that this is not 'Humm...' or 'Omm...', it is simply keeping your lips together and producing 'Mmmm...' sound. The humming should be as lengthy as possible between breaths; it should be as deep as possible (from the navel center) and as loud as possible. There is no need to make an effort to take in deep breaths, the body itself will take breaths when needed. Don't become tense, just do it in a relaxed manner. Immerse your whole being and energy into creating this vibration. Try to minimize the gap between the humming sounds. After some time, you will feel that the humming continues without your effort and that you have become simply a listener. The body and the mind start resonating with the humming vibrations.

Continue to do this in the vajrasana posture with a chin mudra and hands on your knees. Chin mudra as shown here is a hand gesture where the index finger is kept at the tip of the thumb and the other three fingers are unfolded. The chin mudra helps to maintain a balance in the energy flow in the body and keeps the energy within the body by creating a circuit. It prevents the energy from being dissipated out of the body.

After going through the first two steps of chaotic breathing and intense humming, we move on to the next step where we start entering the subtler zones of our being.

If you would like to know more techniques related to humming, you could practice the Mahamantra Meditation technique that is taught in the Life Bliss Program (LBP) or the Ananda Spurana Program (ASP).