Here’s a glimpse inside how I hear your personal mantra.

Puja is a moving prayer. My moving prayer is a practice of yoga that invokes devotion and detachment. That is how I want to enter into meditation: clear, empty and with great love. In this darkest part of the year, I bow to Shiva, the eternal essence, and to Kali, the releaser. I practice a dance of yoga, specific to honoring them, handing down by my Guru. I hold them in mind with each breath.

After which, I set out my Guru’s mala, pink quartz, amethyst and a tibetan bell in the space in which I will place cards with the names of the 11 energies for this years malas, and wrap my malas around my wrists. I ring the bell, listen to its perfect pitch and feel it clear and attune me. Then, I enter meditation with an invocation of Ganesha, the remover of obstacles, and my Guru and her Guru.

This prayer on my breath, I practice what is called the death breath. It is then that I invite each of you in.

In the depth of meditation, I hear the vibration of your energy, your essence, and I hear the discords or disruptions in that vibration.

It’s subtle. It’s not like auditory voice or thoughts or even the voice of intuition. It’s more like a disruption in the silence. That first layer of sound before it becomes sound. Like Om itself.

With all of my attention on this experience of your vibration, I ask what will harmonize you, or sometimes, what you need this year and then I pull a mantra card. The mantra often surprises me (it is never what my mind would have offered you after reading your intentions), but when I listen for you again alongside the mantra, the frequency of the mantra always heals the discord.

My guru taught that 11 repetitions completes a mala. In other words, the number 11 creates a complete practice–a whole. These 11 mantras are, in essence, a distillation of the whole universe in sanskrit sound and make a complete offering.

The mantras this year will be the same 11 as in 2017. These are foundational mantras. There’s a specific structure to them that hits the core resonance (seed sound) and makes them potent, and practically speaking, they are the simplest to learn and practice.

I work with mantra as energy. (That is what it is: energy in the form of sound vibration.)

It is my experience that, far from conflict with or attempt to convert clients from their own religion or spiritual path, the practice of mantra leads them deeper into it. It shows them their lineages. It introduces them to their teachers, and it deepens their own practice.

Mantra is a practice of yoga, which is its own spiritual path, or I should say a set of spiritual paths as there are many lineages of yoga, rooted in the sacred Vedic texts and oral teachings of the dharma traditions of South East Asia. These dharma traditions were grouped under the umbrella term Hindu post-colonization.

These divine energies have no attachment, however, to you loving their form. They will come to you, as you are, not as they are.

Clients with a mystic bent, who seek a direct experience of the divine, regardless of tradition, find mantra an easy addition to their own practices.

I will be listening for personal mantras 3x a week during the months of December and January.

Immediately after you request your mantra, you will receive an email asking you about your intentions and anticipated challenges for the year. You will receive your mantra within a week of my receipt of your response. If there is a backlog due to high demand, I will email you to let you know when to anticipate receipt of your mantra.

I don’t know. The question I ask is what you need this year to move from the discord I hear into the harmonized resonance of your soul’s particular vibration. (That’s if I were to explain it in words. It’s a wordless experience and intention.)

So, yes, you could receive the same mantra this year as last year. It only means that it has more to teach and offer you.

The question I would ask you is: How would it be to invest in a 2018 mantra for curiosity’s sake? Would it be worth it if you do receive the same mantra again?

Whether you receive the same mantra or a different mantra for 2018, you cannot lose.

We just don’t know what a mantra has to teach us, or why, or for how long, until we’re with it.

Yes, absolutely.

All these energies in the mantras are beautiful and powerful. I am in love with them all and often work with more than one at a time. If you were to ask me what my aspiration is for my clients, it would be to love and work with all energies; befriend them, master their teachings, call upon them as needed, surrender to them when they beckon.

It’s an intimate relastionship that we develop with the energy of our mantra practice. You might feel sadness or resistance about “moving on” or “giving up” your 2017 mantra. Bring awareness to that. Non-attachment and embodiment (of that energy) might be the leading edge of your path right now. Feel into it. Get curious about the mantra that came through for you this year, and move into relationship with both from there.

I know (and practice) two ways of working with more than one mantra: stacking and discernment.

Stacking is practicing one mantra immediately after the other. (There’s an art of feeling into the energy of each to decide which to practice first. I offer more on that in the notes on chanting you’ll receive with your mantra.) Stacking mantras activates and moves a lot of Shakti (spiritual energy). For that reason, I do not recommend stacking mantras if you are not practiced at mantra or other meditative practices that have cultivated your ability to hold Shakti.

Discernment is asking yourself which mantra you want to practice. You can ask each day, or each time you sit to practice, whether multiple times a day, or periodically. (I will often practice a different mantra at two or three different points during the day, intentionally or because one calls to me. Yes, I am revealing myself as a crazy person. You do not need to do this.) I recommend making a practice of feeling into what mantra you want or need to practice. It sharpens your ability to hear the subtleties of your own wisdom.