When words travel from culture to culture, they take on different meanings.

So it is with the word “mantra”. In our culture, a mantra is any word or phrase that is repeated over and over. It’s the repetition that converts a casual word into a mantra.

Do you remember Jeff Goldblum’s cameo in Annie Hall? He played a deeply tanned and neurotic Southern Californian making a panicked phone call because he had forgotten his mantra:

Woody Allen, a fellow New Yorker, was making fun of the superficial California embrace of Eastern Spirituality. There was a period in the early seventies when everyone had to have a mantra. In fact, we all have mantras.

What is a mantra?

It is a phrase or word that is used to shape thought. A mantra is literally a tool for shaping the mind. In the yoga tradition mantras are used to re-shape the mind from it’s conventional state of anxiety and disarray into a more balanced, coherent, and creative form.

The yogis observed – and you can too – that left unattended, the mind was an unstable, scattered, and easily distracted. By repeating a mantra, the mind can be brought into a state of focus and harmony. Rather than simply let the mind flit from one stimuli to another, the yogi intentionally shaped the mind using the mantra.

You learned your first mantras from your parents.

And it probably wasn’t “Om”. More likely it was a mantra such as, “Eat everything on your plate’ or “If you don’t have anything nice to say . . . (you can finish this one).”

Your early conditioning came through repetition. In other words, through mantra – simple phrases that were repeated by powerful people. And your evolving brain took those mantras in.

These parental mantras are lodged firmly in the deeper layers of your mind.

You may not be repeating these mantras out loud, unless you have your own children and then you may dismayed to find these old mantras popping out of your mouth. But, understand that these early-life mantras are being repeated unconsciously in the deeper levels of your mind.

You also pick up mantras (thought forming phrases) from your colleagues.

If you’re surrounded by people who chant victim mantras such as:

• “Why are they doing this to me?”
• “There’s no point in saying anything, they won’t listen to us”
• “It’s not my fault”

The tendency is for your mind to absorb and adopt the shape of the mantras that it is surrounded by.

Your thought, experience, perceptions, and actions are being shaped by the mantras of the past.

And will continue to be so, unless you start “chanting” a new mantra. Unless you intentionally re-pattern the shape of your thought, perception, and experience into a form that is more reflective of your current wisdom.

My friend Jennifer Louden has recently adopted the mantra “Find the Good.” This simple phrase re-orients the mind towards discovering in every situation the blessing, the wisdom, the goodness that is there.

• What are the mantras from your past that no longer serve you – in work and life?
• What are the nourishing mantras that people around you are “chanting”?
• What are the constrictive mantras that people around you are “chanting”?
• What is a mantra that would serve you best, at this time in your life?
• What is a simple phrase, word, or statement that would re-pattern your perception, thought, and experience into a form that is supportive, creative, and meaningful?

Let me know the mantra you’ve chosen.

Related posts:

1. How can stillness accelerate change?
2. Are you working with flies or butterflies?
3. How to Discern Your Core Values
4. How to Live Your Core Values
5. Why some problems aren’t meant to be solved