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A student of mine was telling me about an experience she had, recently. She was feeling down about something relating to her Dad. Often times when we regret something it’s because a realization about that situation has come too late, and hence, we regret what we did not do; what we missed out on, or what mistakes we made at the time. In this case, this woman remembered an angry moment with her dad and she regretted not telling him off and it began a whole series of emotions for her.

Thousands of thoughts fly through the mind with each blink of the eye, but they only take hold if we grab on to them and back them with emotion. Soon she found herself following a train of thought back into her past, having a non-existent argument with her dad. Suddenly she realized that this was all happening inside her mind. What was happening around her in the present moment was completely different from where her mind was– off in some non-existent landscape of the mind re-creating a scenario from the past. All of us do this. We grab onto a thought or even an assumption that may have never even happened and we go off in our minds, creating situations that don’t even exist, sparked by something that happened in the past.

Mantra is the creative projection of the mind. Man= Mind. Trang=wave, or projection. Sound is a vibration and vibration affects energy. You are a composite of energy– your body, mind and soul are all pure energy. This isn’t spiritual mumbo jumbo. It’s pure science, quantum mechanics. All sub-atomic energy when broken down to it’s smallest parts is pure energy and it’s all the same stuff. So when you use a sacred mantra whose sound vibration evokes an eternal aspect of your higher self, you are actually using a very powerful tool. When you make a sacred sound either mentally or aloud, you are vibrating the electromagnetic waves of your mind to that sound. A simple mantra such as “Wahe Guru,” or “Sat Nam,” because of their sacred meaning, have a powerful vibration when pronounced and projected correctly. This creates an energy that can actually have an energetic effect on your mind-waves and thus change your mind.

Yogi Bhajan explains it like this: If you have a minus sign and you cut it in half, what do you get? A positive.

Mantra does this and sacred mantra does it more powerfully. Using a mantra when faced with negative thoughts can actually flip the mind from negative to positive. The high energy of the sound current actually cuts the negative thoughts in half, creating a positive state.

So this student of mine, remembering that mantra can be a powerful tool for focusing and straightening out the mind, began chanting “Wahe Guru” right at the place in her mind where a moment before she’d been visualizing this imaginary argument with her dad, that never even occurred. She told me that as she chanted the mantra, she went into the gap for a moment, like when you fall half asleep but you’re still conscious, in meditation. As soon as she’d gone out, she said, she came right back, but instantly she noticed that her mind had flipped upside down, almost as if on an axis of sorts. While the notion of those angry thoughts were still there, the positive mind was now dominant and she simply felt better. The scenario she was ruminating in her mind no longer sucked her in. It was there, but she was using her positive mind and it no longer had an affect on her. She fell fast asleep and woke the next morning feeling refreshed.

If you don’t yet know any sacred mantras, you can just create a positive affirmation and repeat it for a period of time. Let’s say in the above example this woman didn’t know the wahe guru mantra (pronounced: wah-hay goo-roo.) She could have just picked a positive statement such as, ‘I have a good life in this moment and I feel good.’ That would also do the trick because the sound vibration of what those words mean would penetrate the psyche and bring the mind to a positive state.

What’s your mantra?