I recently finished a three-month mantra practice aimed at purifying past karma and detoxifying the body. It is the third mantra practice that I undertake and, as with the first two, the results are transformational.
Now I am ready for my fourth practice, which will be aimed at cleansing emotional memories. It is a well-documented fact that emotions become thought, thought becomes action, action becomes habit and habit defines life. What you think will become what you are.
Another well-documented fact affirms that traumatic events leave imprints in our body and our mind. Healing these traumas is not easy. In the first place, it is difficult to identify what traumas we have. For some it might be an event as clear as their parents’ divorce, for others it might be the birth of a sibling, for others something as apparently insignificant as a playground fight can have life-long consequences.
Freud’s life work was devoted to unearthing what makes people tick. He would listen to his patients talk and, through their use of language, attempt to decode the repressed emotions and memories that were afflicting them. This sort of deconstructive therapy can take years.
But, I recently read The Healing Codes by psychologist Alex Lloyd on the possibility of healing trauma without going through exhaustive treatment. Although he preaches a method that is different from a mantra practice, his main point is that trauma can be healed without going through the trouble of identifying it.
For example, we might be able to recognize that we suffer from unsolicited, quick-fire anger, or that we are afraid to take risks, or are particularly sensitive to bouts of jealousy. These behaviors indicate that there is an underlying event, a source, a trauma, that triggers an exaggerated reaction.
A mantra practice like the one I am undertaking can help eradicate negative emotional baggage at a very deep level. Indeed, it can heal trauma, without bothering with the source.
Here is my mantra:
Shante prashante sarva krodha upasha mani swaha.
According to my guiding book, Healing Mantras by Thomas Ashley-Farrand, this mantra means the following:
Invoking supreme peace I offer (surrender) the quality of anger to its source in the higher and formless Universal mind. Salutations
I chose anger because I am too quick to get angry. Not good. It is the imprint inside me of past moments of anger that I want to transform. But, I don’t want to resolve each event that sparked a bad temper. Instead, I want to erase the memory of the emotion itself as it survives in my body.
To do this, Healing Mantras recommends chanting the mantra at least 100 times per day for forty days. I usually do a mantra practice until I sense that I am done, which has been as long as six months.
If anyone reading has a different negative emotion that they would like to work on, I am happy to share the Sanskrit mantra for that particular emotion. My book has about fifteen different ones!
In closing, I wanted to mention that I am still digesting Dr. Alex Lloyd’s The Healing Codes. However, I hope to be able to share more on them very soon.