Notes

    1. Bayo Akomolafe (www.bayoakomolafe.net) and Sahana Chattopadhyay (www.pluriversalplanet.in), for example, are naming the threads of this intersection and challenge that push out outside of our current comprehension and capacity—and what it calls us to do.
    2. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2014), 92-101, 135-142, 148-155.
    3. Ibid.
    4. My notes from oral teachings. Sw. Shakti Durgaya and Sw. Jaya Devi, Kali Natha Yoga; Shivani Hawkins. “Mātra to Mantra: The Sounds of Sanskrit,” Living Sanskrit, August 2018, www.livingsanskrit.com
    5. Sally Kempton describes it beautifully in her book, Awakening Shakti: “[I]in the process of becoming all [all that is], Shakti has completely disguised herself by disappearing into the tapestry. To add to the impenetrability of her disguise, she shrinks the great awareness—Shiva—so that instead of encompassing everything, consciousness experiences itself as a single, separated ego. She veils her blissful Eros so that each individual consciousness believes that joy and satisfaction have to be brought from outside itself, by joining with or acquiring another atom of consciousness.” Sally Kempton, Awakening Shakti: The Transformative Power of the Goddesses of Yoga (Chicago: Sounds True, 2013), 37.
    6. Remember Śiva, the sacred container of pure consciousness, who expresses as: Stanu, a column of pure white light; the suṣumnā, the central and largest nāḍī in your energy body; and your spine. And, more literally, the sounds of the letters in Sanskrit express the energy of every force and form in the Universe—and of your cakras from your root to your third eye. (I explain this in more detail in Chapter 5 on mantra.)
    7. I was awed to read this: “Those who have the Mantra Shakti fully developed within themselves become true mantra gurus. They know intuitively the different powers of sounds and intentions and can recommend what an individual may need at any stage of life.” Dr. David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri), Mantra Yoga and Primal Sound (Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Press, 2010), 41.
    8. I first heard it phrased this way by Shivani Hawkins, Founder of Living Sanskrit (www.livingsanskit.com).
    9. Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, The 11 Karmic Spaces: Choosing Freedom from the Patterns that Bind You (Kashi Publishing, 2012), 6; Jay Lahkani, “True Understanding of Law of Karma,” HinduAcademy, educational video, November 11, 2015, 02:47, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjR1Y57jMJM.
    10. “[E]very organ, every bone, and every cell in the body has its own resonant frequency [as a result of its metabolic functioning]. Together they make up a composite frequency for the body.” Kulreet Chaudhary, MD, Sound Medicine: How to Use the Ancient Science of Sound to Heal the Body and Mind (New York: Harper Collins, 2020), 36. Kindle.; see also Jonathan Goldman, Healing Sounds: The Power of Harmonics, 30th ann. ed. (Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 2022), 42. Kindle; Dr. David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri), Mantra Yoga and Primal Sound (Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Press, 2010), 23.
    11. “Subtle bodies and vital energy are part of what we now call biofields in Western science.” Shamini Jain, PhD., Healing Ourselves: Biofield Science and the Future of Health, (Boulder: Sounds True 2021), 45. Kindle; “Magnetic fields emanating from the body . . . are readily detected by superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID)–based magnetometers.” Hammerschlag R., et al., “Biofield Physiology: A Framework for an Emerging Discipline,” Glob. Adv. Health Med. 4, no. 6 Suppl. (November 4, 2015): 35-41. doi: 10.7453/gahmj.2015.015.suppl. Japanese psychologist and philosopher, Hiroshi Motomaya, measured the body’s bioenergetic currents specifically to understand the energy body. Georg Feuerstein, Tantra: The Path of Ecstacy (Boston: Shambala 1998), 149.
    12. Chaudhary, Sound Medicine, 78; Hammerschlag, “Biofield Physiology” 35-41; Jain, Healing Ourselves, 166-170.
    13. Jain, Healing Ourselves, 166, 170.
    14. Cakra is often translated as wheel, to indicate the movement of the intersecting nāḍī, but vortex is more accurate.
    15. The number of your primary cakras vary by tradition, but is most commonly understood to be seven. Anand Viswanathan, et al. “Tantra and Modern Neurosciences: Is There Any Correlation?” Neurology India 67 no. 5 (2019): 1188.
    16. Your breath is the physical body expression of your life-force. Your prāṇa is the energy body expression of your life-force. Your breath creates a bridge between your body and your mind—through your energy body—by moving prāṇa.
    17. Loizzo, Joseph, “The Subtle Body: An Interoceptive Map of Central Nervous System Function and Meditative Mind-Brain-Body Integration,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1373 (October 10, 2016).
    18. Jain, Healing Ourselves, 54.
    19. Loizzo, “The subtle body.”
    20. Chaudhary, Sound Medicine, 90 (The kośas “collect and transmit information that the chakras translate into physical phenomena in the body.”); Jain, Healing Ourselves, 113 (“[T]he five sheaths make up the biofield, or subtle energy body; the chakras are the energy centers that transmit the information from the biofield to the body.”); Maharaj K. Raina, Ph.D., “The Levels of Human Consciousness and Creative Functioning: Insights from the Theory of Pancha Kosha,” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 48, no. 2 (2016): 173 (The prāṇamayakośa “is the medium of exchange in the whole psychophysiological system.”).
    21. Your biofields, particularly those of your brain and your heart, exchange and retain information energetically—without a material biological mechanism. Chaudhary, Sound Medicine, 78; Hammerschlag, et al., “Biofield Physiology,” 35-41.; Jain, Healing Ourselves. “[b]iofield effects are non-local and non-linear,” resulting in the exchange of information between bodies across space, “both in the lab and in nature.” Jain, Healing Ourselves, 166, 170.
    22. Jain, Healing Ourselves, 129-30, 157.
    23. “Our brains fail to perceive anything that doesn’t fit with [our previously identified] idea.” Lisa Miller, Ph.D., The Awakened Brain: The Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for An Inspired Life (New York: Random House, 2021), 95 (citing studies on attention conducted by Dr. Marc Berman at the University of Chicago).
    24. Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. (योगश्चित्तवृत्तिनिरोधः yogaḥ citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ) Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras 1:2, transl. Eknath Easwaran (New York: Vintage, 2000); “[Y]oga is perfect evenness of mind.” Bhagavad Gita 2:48, transl. Eknath Easwaran (New York: Vintage, 2000).
    25. Shivani Hawkins. “Mātra to Mantra: The Sounds of Sanskrit,” Living Sanskrit, August 2018, www.livingsanskrit.com; see also Bhagavati, The 11 Karmic Spaces, 7; Feuerstein, Tantra, 142; Sadhguru, Karma: A Yogi’s Guide to Crafting Your Destiny (New York: Harmony, 2021) Kindle.
    26. My guru, Ma, described karma as a stick in the wheels of your cakras. Bhagavati, The 11 Karmic Spaces, 22.
    27. Your karma is an energy pattern within you—that you are resolving within you. It is not you energetically attracting things into your life. It is how you respond to the things that show up in your life. (There’s a difference.)The claim that you manifest everything through your energy (like attracts like) is blame misunderstood as an energetic and spiritual principle.The sacred creative force (Śaktī) of magnetism doesn’t work that way—opposites attract (like the poles of a magnet), and it is a force of cohesion and stability.Things happen—the world happens.The forces intersecting to create any sequence of events is more numerous, more complex, and over a longer span of time, than a simple cause-effect of your individual karma (or vibration). You are not responsible for all of that.
    28. “You have been everyone, and you will be everyone.” Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati. Be aware not to abuse this. For example, because you may have been a person of color in a previous life doesn’t give you a pass for doing the work of anti-racism as a white person in this life. Quite the opposite. Your karma asks you to show up to what is present for you, as you, right now.
    29. Epigenetics is the study of inherited changes in gene expression where there is no alteration of the gene’s underlying DNA. Chaudhary, Sound Medicine, 106; Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017), 39. Trauma, for example, “can change the expression of the DNA in our cells [without changing the DNA itself], and these changes can be passed from parent to child.” Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands, 39. Similarly, spirituality can be inherited genetically and that inheritance can reduce the chances that you will experience depression by 5 times. Miller, The Awakened Brain, 51-2, 57-8. Most significantly for our purposes, sound can change how your genes express. Chaudhary, Sound Medicine, 42 (“Sound actually alters proteins and changes cellular function.”), 105-6, 107.
    30. Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary, a Western-trained neurologist and traditionally-trained practitioner of the Ayurvedic and Siddha medical traditions, equates epigenetics with ancestral karma. Chaudhary, Sound Medicine, 110 (“What modern science now calls an ‘epigenetic imprint’ was known as ‘ancestral karma’ in Vedic medicine.”). I distinguish between epigenetics and ancestral karma, because epigenetics explains a biological phenomenon in your physical body and ancestral karma explains the energetic phenomenon carried in your energy body.
    31. When asked what someone had done to deserve to be born into such pain, abuse or addiction, my guru, Ma Jaya, used to say, “Sometimes, you take the first train out.” Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, oral teachings.
    32. Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, oral teachings.
    33. Capitalism—and our particular form of capitalism—was not the only way that the socio-economic system could have evolved in Europe (and therefore, the West). As the feudal system declined, and protest and revolt over it rose, there were experiments with other ways of organizing social and economic interaction. It took an alarming amount of force to create and maintain it—and while that force is now largely psychological and financial, it still does. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2014).This is not to glorify some utopian feudal past that never existed—or any other system of social and economic organization. But it is to recognize that capitalism evolved according to a particular set of values and interests over an extended period of time—and that the choice and enforcement of those values and interests required sustained and coordinated violence by the state, the church (both Catholic and Protestant Reformation), and the aristocratic and mercantile classes. Ibid.
    34. Ibid.,  92-101, 135-142, 148-155.
    35. This was most famously and influentially framed by the philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650). But it was reflected, embraced and exploited by leaders of the Protestant Reformation and the growing mercantile class—in the form of work ethic and artificially-constructed work hours disconnected from any natural cycles of the sun, the seasons and the body. And it was enforced by hanging people for idleness and vagrancy. Ibid., 135-142, 148-155.
    36. Ibid., 135.
    37. This is Descartes most enduring and powerful influence: the internalized split that perpetuates the needs and values of capitalism as the hidden and valorized premise of Western culture. (If you cease to rely upon these structures for your security, your identity, and your decision-making, they will dissolve.)
    38. Its economic value to those who benefitted from the work was, of course, high—and foundational to great wealth in Europe and the Americas, and to capitalism itself. It was stolen from the enslaved and the women who did the work, and that theft was justified and naturalized by the asserted biological inferiority of non-male and non-white bodies.
    39. The construction of a social and legal hierarchy based upon race began in the 1640’s. Interracial marriage was outlawed and slavery was made hereditary (through children’s mother) in the early 1660’s. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 107-8; Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands, 62-63.
    40. Women were pushed out of the craft-guilds and the markets (both of which they had occupied in nearly equal numbers with men in the years immediately following the end of feudalism) and out of waged work. They were relegated to domestic work, and that domestic work became unpaid work—even when done for others. Their rights—to own property, to earn wages, to regulate their own reproductive capacity, and to engage in public life—were eroded and then eliminated. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 92-100.
    41. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 141-2.
    42. Ibid., 17, 100-3.
    43. Women’s roles and vocations as healers and midwives were outlawed by law—and replaced by the newly emerging “science” of male doctors. Ibid., 89.
    44. In the 1620’s, Europe hit the peak of its 200 years of burning women as witches; sent thousands of colonists to North America, who both intentionally and inadvertently killed 95% of indigenous peoples of the Americas; and established the trans-Atlantic trade of enslaving African peoples. It also was in the midst of a previously unprecedented population and economic crisis. Ibid., 85-6, 164-65; U.S. Library of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-history-primary-source-timeline/colonial-settlement-1600-1763/overview/)
    45. The day that I edited this section to add this sentence, an article about AI for mindfulness arrived by email.
    46. Silvia Frederici concludes that “[t]he product of this alienation from the body . . . was the development of individual identity, conceived precisely as “otherness” from the body, and in perennial antagonism with it.” Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 151.
    47. The women who were burned for witchcraft in Europe were overwhelmingly outside of the emerging economic order: either actively resistant to it; keepers of knowledge and practices contrary to its values and operation; or a drag on it by needing community assistance to survive. Over 2.5 million people died while being forcibly shipped from Africa to the Americas. Enslaved peoples of African descent were killed for attempting to escape their enslavement in the colonized Americas—and it was legal for those who enslaved them to kill them. 95% of the indigenous people of the Americas were killed during European invasion—and the United States’ western expansion. Ibid., 164-179.
    48. Bhagavati, The 11 Karmic Spaces, 6; Jay Lahkani, “True Understanding of Law of Karma,” HinduAcademy, educational video, November 11, 2015, 02:47, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjR1Y57jMJM; Sadhguru, Karma. Kindle.
    49. Bhagavati, The 11 Karmic Spaces, 7.
    50. On one side, my grandmother is a direct descendant of Jacob Hochstetler, who established the Amish Mennonites—and the Hostetler a few generations later who left and was shunned. (I imagine it’s no ordinary shunning when you’re of the family of origin.) On the other, she’s a direct descendant of John Henry Smith, who was exiled from the colony of Massachusetts for arguing for the separation of church and state, and then helped establish the colony of Rhode Island on the basis of the freedom of religion, but was exiled from Rhode Island for the same reason. These were my first relatives in the now United States. Ancestry.com.
    51. Where you left off is where you’re picking up again. Bhagavati, The 11 Karmic Spaces; Sadhguru, Karma.
    52. “[E]very creature is driven to action by his own nature.” The Bhagavad Gita 3:5, transl. Easwaran.
    53. This is an example of the fractal expression of energy-matter—and their processes. The relationship of your karma and dharma reflects the flow of your prana through your energy body and the biological structure of your physical body.
    54. The process of untangling your karma at the root resulting in exactly what you seek reflects the process of untangling karma through the practice of mantra (which I cover in Chapter 5). You first bring the energy of the mantra down through your energy body to your root cakra to clear your karma’s pattern of interference using the vibration of sacred speech. Then kundalini energy (the sacred force of creation within you) rises up unfettered through your cakras to merge with the universal source. Frawley, Mantra Yoga, 51.
    55. Buddhist traditions and Sanatam Dharma (Hindu) traditions, including tantra, posit different underlying metaphysics and spiritual aims and, therefore, teach different spiritual practices and processes. Anand Viswanathan, et al., “Tantra and Modern Neurosciences: Is There Any Correlation?” Neurology India 67.5 (2019): 1188.
    56. While traditions vary, the 8 limbs of yoga in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras are generally representative of the type and progression of tantric and yogic practices: yamas (external or interpersonal practices), niyamas (internal or personal practices), āsana (physical postures), prāṇāyama (breathwork), pratyāhāra (withdrawal of senses), dhāraṇā (concentration), dhyāna (meditation), and samādhi (absorption). Each has a set of practices that, through their specific function, cultivate the promise of that limb and draw you successively deeper into fully knowing and identifying with your eternal Self.
    57. The challenge with studying traditional spiritual practices through the lens of Western science is that the procedures for clean, repeatable scientific study compartmentalize and reduce spiritual practices rather than study them holistically. Also a minimum of deep, experiential understanding of the practices can lead to inadequately designed studies and/or interpreted data. For example, chanting “Om” and chanting “Ssss” would be expected to have a different effect. See Jain, Healing Ourselves, 42, 89.
    58. Zoran Josipovic, “Neural correlates of nondual awareness in meditation,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1307 (January 2013): 9-18, doi: 10.1111/nyas.12261.
    59. Barbara Tomasino, et al., “Disentangling the neural mechanisms involved in Hinduism- and Buddhism-related meditations,” Brain and Cognition, 90 (October 2014): 32-40, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2014.03.013.
    60. J. Gao, et al., “The neurophysiological correlates of religious chanting,” Sci Rep 9, 4262 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-40200-w.
    61. “The gap, the moment, is outside of time.” Ma, The 11 Karmic Spaces, p. 20.
    62. My teacher, Swami Jaya Devi, teaches that the Upanishads describe your mind (your manomayakośa) as “the great barrier sheath” because the constancy, intensity and rigidity of your thoughts and feelings—and how easy it is to identify with them—keeps you from accessing your wisdom, and knowing peace, let alone bliss. Swami Jaya Devi (oral teachings).
    63. “You cannot change your mind with your mind.” Swami Jaya Devi (oral teachings).
    64. J. Gao, et al., “Repetitive Religious Chanting Invokes Positive Emotional Schema to Counterbalance Fear: A Multi-Modal Functional and Structural MRI Study,” Front. Behav. Neurosci. 14 (Nov 23, 2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2020.548856; Peter M. Kraemer, et al., “Cognitive and Neural Principles of Memory Bias on Preferential Choices,” Current Research in Neurobiology, 3 (February 15, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crneur.2022.100029.
    65. The Rāmāyaṇa is an epic, originally oral poem, and there are many versions and interpretations of it that vary by region, lineage and language of translation. The emphasis of this telling was shared with me by my teacher, Swami Shakti Durgaya.
    66. Dr. Lisa Miller, a research psychologist at Columbia University Teachers College and the founder of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute, describes the field of psychology as “bound by three limiting assumptions: (1) that the brain creates thoughts; (2) that all meaning is interpretation; and (3) that we can feel better by rearranging our thoughts . . .” Miller, The Awakened Brain, 102.
    67. The social sciences that emerged in 17th century Europe were rooted in the split between the mind and the body—and the capacity of the mind to control the body. They analyzed human behavior from the perspective of its “potential for work and contribution to discipline,” and they created a “prototypical individual to whom all would be expected to conform.” Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 138, 145-6.
    68. H.G. Koenig, “Religion, Spirituality, and Health: The Research and Clinical Implications,” ISRN Psychiatry, (Dec 16, 2012) doi: 10.5402/2012/278730; Miller, The Awakened Brain, 5, 57.
    69. Research on the impact of spirituality, religion and spiritual practice on mental and physical health gained traction in the mid-1990s. Koenig, “Religion, Spirituality, and Health.” Even then, Dr. Lisa Miller met skepticism about her research and the continued slow advancement of any integration of spirituality into psychology as a field. Miller, The Awakened Brain, 53.
    70. Your mind can eventually direct your prāṇa. Tantric and yogic adepts can direct their prāṇa (and the autonomic processes of their physical body) with their thoughts, but it’s not where they start, and for the majority of our years of practice, until we become an adept, it’s not as direct.
    71. Frawley, Mantra Yoga, 33.
    72. The number of letters in the Sanskrit alphabet varies between traditions from 48 to 52. I was taught, and use, the Mātṛkā (Mother, Matrix, source of all mantra), which has 50 characters. Hawkins, From Mātra to Mantra.
    73. Understanding of the resonant energy (i.e., meaning) of the letters of Sanskrit varies between traditions and regions.When I was learning Sanskrit pronunciation, I asked my teacher, Shivani Hawkins, how the sound of the letter can be the vibrational essence of the thing and yet understanding of what that essence is for each letter can vary. How can both of those things be true at the same time? She explained that the difference is a difference of experience. If you were to chant a sound near the sea, you would likely have a different felt-sense experience (and therefore, understanding of the sound) than if you were to chant it in the mountains.Sanskrit is an experiential language. Its meaning is in the experience of the sound.That said, it doesn’t have any meaning you want. The resonance of the sounds—and the experience of them—builds up within a lineage over time. You experience that lineage of resonance in your practice. Ibid.
    74. Hebrew and Aramaic are vibrational languages like Sanskrit. It does not appear that Latin and Arabic are vibrational languages. Interestingly, however, chanting Ave Maria in Latin establishes the same breathing rate and heart rate variability as chanting a Sanskrit mantra. (Chanting it in English does not.) Luciano Bernardi, et al., “Effect of Rosary Prayer and Yoga Mantras on Autonomic Cardiovascular Rhythms: Comparative Study,” British Medical Journal, 323 (December 22, 2001): 1446-9, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC61046/
    75. Sanskrit is used only for spiritual practice, and it has been in continual use for over 5000 years. It is the nature of Śaktī, spiritual power, to accumulate, amplify. You receive the benefit of that potency.
    76. Frawley, Mantra Yoga, 142 (Your “individual constitution or ‘personal prakriti’ [your innate constitution in Ayurveda] has its own vibratory sound pattern.”).
    77. Thomas Ashley-Farrand, Healing Mantras: Using Sound Affirmations for Personal Power, Creativity, and Healing, (New York: Ballantine Wellspring, 1999), 40 & 44; Frawley, Mantra Yoga, 33 (“Through the right use of mantra, we can restructure our samskaras or ‘karmic patterns’”); Russil Paul, The Yoga of Sound: Tapping the Hidden Power of Music and Chant (Novato: New World Library, 2004), 5-9.
    78. Maria Engström, et al., “Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Hippocampal Activation During Silent Mantra Meditation,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 16, no. 12 (2010) 1253-1258, doi: 10.1089/acm.2009.0706 (finding that chanting mantra activates different parts of brain than chanting everyday words). Giridhar P. Kalamangalam & Timothy M. Ellmore, “Focal cortical thickness correlates of exceptional memory training in Vedic priests,” Front. Hum. Neurosci., 8 (October 19, 2014), https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00833 (finding increased cortical thickness in the areas of Vedic monks’ brains associated with pattern recollection, speech prosody, voice recognition and retrieval of pitches, tones and progressions).
    79. Chaudhary, Sound Medicine, 34 (“Primary cilia [the antenna-like protein structures on our cell membranes] quiver like a tuning fork and, if a vibration in the environment resonates with the receptor’s antennae, it alters the protein’s charges, causing the cell to change shape.”) & 39 (“The amygdala’s activity could even be modulated by a single cord change.”). J. Gao, et al., “Repetitive Religious Chanting Invokes Positive Emotional Schema to Counterbalance Fear: A Multi-Modal Functional and Structural MRI Study,” Front. Behav. Neurosci. (Nov 24, 2020), doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2020.548856 (finding that chanting mantra “can influence the function of emotion-related brain regions [the amygdala, thalamus and parahippocampus] in a direct manner”). J. Gao, et al. “The Neurophysiological Correlates of Religious Chanting” (noting that the practice of chanting mantra “appears to provide a streamlined procedure for the modulation of biological processes”).
    80. Chaudhary, Sound Medicine, 28.
    81. Bernardi, “Effect of Rosary Prayer and Yoga Mantras on Autonomic Cardiovascular Rhythms”; Chaudhary, Sound Medicine 37 & 39; Gao, “The Neurophysiological Correlates of Religious Chanting.”
    82. You experience delta wave activity when you are in deep sleep, in a coma, or have been injured. It is a state of healing, regeneration and repair—thought to be an evolutionary mechanism for healing. The practice of mantra appears to be unique among meditative and spiritual practices in its increase of your brain’s delta-wave activity. Mindfulness meditation has been found to increase alpha and theta brain wave activity—associated with reduced anxiety and increased relaxation, creativity and intuition. And prayer has been found to increase alpha and gamma brain wave activity—associated with reduced anxiety, increased activity, and active engaged decision-making. Gao, “The Neurophysiological Correlates of Religious Chanting.”
    83. Ibid. (citing X. Li, et al., “Delta Coherence in Resting-State EEG Predicts the Reduction in Cigarette Craving after Hypnotic Aversion Suggestions. Sci Rep 7 (2017): 2430).
    84. Gao, “The Neurophysiological Correlates of Religious Chanting.”
    85. A mantra is a “mind instrument” or a “technology for the mind,” from the Sanskrit root “man” for manas—that part of your mind that is the accumulated, conditioned expression of your thoughts and feelings, perceived and processed through your 5 senses—whether consciously, subconsciously or superconsciously—and the suffix “-tra,” that denotes instrumentality or the capacity to deliver.
    86. Gao, “The Neurophysiological Correlates of Religious Chanting.”
    87. Ibid. (noting that the brain activity of study participants who chanted a mantra indicated that they were paying more attention to fear-inducing stimuli rather than shifting their attention away from it).
    88. Ibid.
    89. Ibid.; see also Kalamangalam, “Focal Cortical Thickness Correlates of Exceptional Memory Training in Vedic Priests”; Miller, The Awakened Brain, 7 (“[T]he high-spiritual brain was thicker and stronger in exactly the same regions that weaken and within in depressed brains.”).
    90. Bernardi, “Effect of Rosary Prayer and Yoga Mantras on Autonomic Cardiovascular Rhythms.”
    91. Ashley-Farrand, Healing Mantras, 47-51.
    92. Yogacharya Dr. Ananda Balayogi Bhavani, Nama-Roopa: Invoking that which You Wish to Manifest, July 17, 2021, educational video, https://youtu.be/2tuJO8LTDaA?si=cvj54BJye8W0Rba7.
    93. Chaudhary, Sound Medicine, 36-37 (“The aggregate frequency of our brain cells can synchronize with that of an external source, such as the regularly repeating pattern of sounds or a sustained acoustical frequency—which we perceive as rhythm or pitch.”); Goldman, Healing Sounds, 42, 44, 46, 56-62.
    94. Your speech (vibration) is the sacred force of creation, Śaktī. It is the universal creative power, manifest—and it holds within it the universal laws of existence and directs the cosmic order. Mantra holds all of dharma—its activation, its process and the wisdom of its unfolding—because, as the creative force of the universe, it dictates the energetic laws of the universe. Frawley, Tantra, 49.
    95. Your practice of mantra will train you to control and direct how you use your energy, your speech and your actions—to interrupt your karma and live your dharma.
    96. When you learn to intentionally use your speech—first through mantra, then through action—you will interrupt your karma. Frawley, Tantra, 48
    97. Practitioner, musician and teacher, Russil Paul, groups the practice of mantra into śabda, śakti and bhakti traditions to describe the particular frame and emphasis of each—and how that translates into the choice of which mantras practiced, but how they are practiced. Paul, The Yoga of Sound, 63-115.
    98. Frawley, Mantra Yoga, 26, 39, 141.
    99. Hawkins, From Mātra to Mantra (my notes from an oral teaching).
    100. Swami Jaya Devi (oral teaching).
    101. Sally Kempton, Awakening Shakti, 8.
    102. “[M]yths [speak] to an enduring truth that lay beyond the ken of the senses . . . eternal . . . [and as old] as the universe itself.” They “are the unseen matrices that” express our universal, core essence and “guide how human beings express their destinies.” Simon Chokoisky, The 5 Dharma Types: Vedic Wisdom for Discovering Your Purpose and Destiny (Rochester: Destiny Books, 2014), 2-3.
    103. “Without correct pronunciation, the practitioner is denied access to the intended powers of the mantra.” Paul, The Yoga of Sound, 49.
    104. Chanting the sacred energy of a mantra is like singing to a dearly beloved.
    105. There is a cadence and rhythm to practicing a mantra. It varies among traditions, based upon their emphasis, and it varies by use and purpose. See Frawley, Mantra Yoga, 142; Paul, The Yoga of Sound, 239-264. If you receive a personal mantra from me, I will chant that mantra in a specific manner and at a particular pace, but follow your intuition about how you want to chant it. You might need to chant it slowly some days and more quickly others. You might need to have more or less variation in pitch. There is an inherent wisdom in how you want to chant. Follow that.
    106. Frawley, Mantra Yoga, 35; Hawkins, Mātra to Mantra (notes on oral teaching).
    107. Your direction of attention and energy is highly effective at releasing tension in your physical body—particularly those areas where you chronically hold tension—and metabolizing challenging emotions to discern what is true (and useful) and what is not (and you can let drop away).This is a form of a practice, called mantra dṛṣṭi, of focusing on places in your body, and a form of a breath practice given to me by my teacher Swami Jaya Devi in 2008.
    108. Some of my clients receive direct answers to direct questions. (Me, I get crickets.) Others see and experience an entire scene, much like a lucid dream. Still others experience tightness, opening or stirring in their body.I hear words or phrases. I also sense energy and hear vibration. Rarely do I see anything—and when I do, it’s most often still more of a felt-sense—a veiled energy, barely in form.
    109. “Unwrap your gentleness. The spiritual warrior wins over anything through gentleness. You can conquer anything.” Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati (my notes on an oral teaching as shared by Swami Shakti Durgaya).
    110. Clients feel a profound transformation just being with me on the phone for a few minutes—that’s the power of presence, transmissional energy, and sacred space. But they, and you, are not coming for my wisdom and direction (although you will receive the precision of my reflection, my practice and my presence). You are not coming for the wisdom and direction of my teachers and guides (although you will receive the energy of my entire lineage of practice—and the intimacy of my relationship with particular expressions of the Divine—through me). You are coming for a container where you can see and hear the truth of yourself. If we were to work together, I would midwife your return to this sacred knowing. Because it requires deep listening and keen discernment—and the challenge is that you cannot see yourself clearly while you’re in it. None of us can.
    111. “‘I don’t know’ are the 3 most powerful words on your spiritual path (and “I know” are the 2 most dangerous).” Swami Jaya Devi (oral teaching).
    112. This telling and interpretation is from Acharya Shunya. Acharya Shunya, Roar Like A Goddess: Every Woman’s Guide to Becoming Unapologetically Powerful, Prosperous & Peaceful (Boulder: Sounds True, 2022). Audiobook, Track 6.
    113. Bhagavati, The 11 Karmic Spaces, 15.
    114. My colleague, Dr. Mia Hetenyi, a psychologist and mystic who specializes in grief, says that your grief is your healing. There is no reason to push it aside or try to fix it or get rid of it. It is doing its job. It is the mechanism of transformation. You can find Dr. Mia Hetenyi and her work at https://www.sacredalchemyhealing.com/.
    115. Your intuition moves from your third eye down to your solar plexus. Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavti (oral teaching as shared by Swami Shakti Durgaya).
    116. The popular evangelism of “manifesting”—and its insistence that it operates according to the laws of the universe—have done a disservice to you in this process. It commonly teaches that once you’ve “changed your vibration” and “aligned with your soul” (which you are doing at a fundamental level by untangling the root of what distracts and derails you through the practice of mantra), that external circumstances will change—like immediately. You won’t “attract” those pesky clients anymore, or the unexpected illness or the storm damage or the death of a loved one. (You already don’t attract any of that. That’s life. You react to it.) Among its other, many problematic and dangerous reductions and inaccuracies of both spiritual practice and the nature of the animate universe, the cult of manifesting skips this part of your transformation.
    117. My notes on The Fire of the Lotus āsana, Kali Natha Yoga. Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati (oral teaching as shared by Swami Shakti Durgaya); Frawley, Mantra Yoga, 50; Laird Scranton, Amma and the Spark of the Universe (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2021), 133, 138 (citing physicist, David W. Thompson III’s theory that time, at the quantum level, is an oscillation).
    118. Tantra understands both this potentiality and this memory to be held in the Ākāśa (space or ether), “a field that records all that has happened in the universe.” Quantum physics understands this potentiality and this memory to be held in the zero point field, “a vast, inexhaustible energy source” of vibration in the background of what we experience as empty space that emits subatomic waves. Those waves “encode information in the form of energy” and “are constantly creating a record of this activity.” Chaudhary, Sound Medicine, 59-62.
    119. We know, from Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, that time is relative: the larger the mass of an object, the more slowly time operates. Laird Scranton, Amma and the Spark of the Universe, 132.“I came into our work together desperately wanting to weave together the different parts of myself, specifically spirituality and business, but what came out of our work together was infinitely deeper. I have shed a million layers; I am quite changed; and I feel more myself than I ever have.” Lara“I thought it would help me get to where I want to be. What I am finding is, it is helping me to root into who I am, and I know from there will emerge who I am to be in the world.” Alison (and she has)“I’ve wanted to integrate [that I see God in Everything]  into the work that I’m doing, but now I see the work has to integrate into my being.” April

 

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