Mantras

Yesterday I was driving home from the grocery store, and was just thinking about random things. Then I caught myself thinking, and started repeating one of my mantras. Then I realized that I haven't done that in a long time, because I haven't needed to do that in a long time.

I started "waking up" in 2000. At that time I, like most people, had many thoughts going through my head all the time, and had a hard time stilling my mind. Many of those thoughts were not so positive, or were very ego based, or were a lot about judgment (of myself and others). I remember reading about meditation, and the work needed to still your mind of these thoughts. I think it was something about your thoughts being like "a drunken monkey" going all over the place, I'm not sure if I'm remembering that right. In order to help calm the monkey, mantras were suggested.

So I made up my own mantras, and would recite them in my head whenever I found myself thinking thoughts that were not in my best interest. I had to make them up because simply repeating "Om... Om, om, om" was a sure-fire way of quickly getting bored and jumping back onto the drunken monkey track.

One of my mantras was "beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty around me, beauty within me." This was simple enough, yet just complicated enough that my mind would have to actively be involved in the mantra in order to keep repeating it correctly -- in other words there was no way I could say the mantra correctly, over and over, AND let the drunken monkey dance about.

Another mantra that I enjoyed that was especially helpful when I was feeling down is "breathe with me, live with me, birth with me, die with me" and sometimes I would add other variations to mix it all up like adding "love with me, laugh with me" etc. It would always help me feel better, and stop that damn monkey.

So back to driving yesterday -- I realized that I had not said any of these mantras for a long time, because the monkey rarely comes out to drink and dance anymore. And that is a very good thing.