Refine your chanting, refine your mind

Chanting the Yoga Sūtra-s is Citta Vrtti Nirodha

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Life blips are inevitable, and chanting is there to help us hold ourselves through them. The best way to keep the practice alive is to keep learning and reviewing with a teacher. Revisit, review and refine your chanting, and consequently, your mind this Tuesday.

The relationship between chanting and mental refinement is direct. On the path to nirodha, a streamlined mental state characterized by a strong connection to a singular object, internal and external distractions are warded off, technically. Practically, it’s not always the case. Settling down to do this work is a great challenge in our hyper-mobile lives, internal narratives surrounding us are strong and our attention spans are suffering.

Chanting class, either individual or group, has an inborn mechanism to powerfully counter the patterns of unrest and distraction: ādhyāyanam. 100% listening is both required and cultivated, and the sense of empowerment, well-being and lightness that results is not random, but a result of the citta vṛtti nirodha process. CHANTING IS A TOOL OF YOGA. One that is accessible and yields immediate, and long term, results.

While we are practicing citta vṛtti nirodha, that is chanting in this case, we are carving new mental niches, forging new neural pathways that overwrite the conscious ones. Sticky narratives, confusing situations and chronic ruminations deplete our stores and cause behavioral breakdowns; however, our bandwidth for all of that drastically reduces while we are in the process of actively chanting with a teacher.

Then there are the unconscious programmings that run our lives. This is where the vibrational aspect of Sanskrit sounds enter the internal milieu, and where the chant being learned or practiced matters even more so. We all have deep needs for this, trauma from our past that pervades our current approaches. Both universal and personal application of chanting pervades the deep space within us, the space where challenging and taxing experiences live clandestine. It vibrates at frequencies that can deactivate and dissipate old and stubborn memories, particularly with prolonged repetition. This way, our new and positive utterances overwrite our old negative ones, and the work of transformation is well underway.