A month has passed since a group of us completed our Gayatri Mantra chanting from winter solstice to summer solstice, welcoming the light, wisdom, and healing that this mantra bestows. Beth, Sandra, Atmadarshan, and I each created a personal practice, the common thread being the mantra and time frame. We are sharing our reflections on this experience and how it has impacted our lives.
Cathy shared:
My sadhana was a purash charana of 125,000 Gayatri recitations (learn more in the December 10th Solstice to Solstice blog). This amounted to 7 malas (756 recitations) on most days, usually divided into two 1-hour+ sessions. I was very excited about starting this practice and had planned to do the morning session enhanced with Reiki and the later session as a walking meditation. Morning mantra with Reiki became an effortless routine, but I started the New Year with my lower back going out (again!?!) and my afternoon meditations turned into healing sessions on the mat with Yin Yoga and a Melt foam roller. It took six weeks to resolve my back problem and what happened after that was nothing I could have predicted.
Feeding my back pain was a pool of repressed anger that was finally set free and allowed to flow. This had also been feeding my inner critic and I became keenly aware of the negative, self-loathing chatter that had been playing in the background for so many years. Result? I got really angry with myself for not realizing what had been going on and for being so hurtful to myself. As you might imagine, the negative self-talk got super loud :)
That was it, and on February 7, I embarked on a healing journey and have not looked back. The past six months have essentially been an ongoing Yoga Therapy session through the five koshas – the physical, energy, mental, wisdom, and bliss bodies (for more on the koshas, please read my last blog What is Yoga Therapy?). I signed up with Noom to have a framework for healing my physical body through diet and exercise. My posture yoga practice was grounded in EMYoga® and Yin Yoga, using the meridians (energy lines) to structure the sequences. I received monthly Biofield Tuning sessions and complemented them with self-tuning practices for harmonizing my energy body, and to support mental health, I started asking myself, “what if I truly loved myself?” The daily Noom psychology lessons were confirming what I already knew, which was empowering, and helped me put one foot in front of the other when challenges came up.
As for the wisdom body, the Gayatri Mantra was the shining light for this part of my being. Even when the not-so-pretty stuff was coming up, I was in awe of the process and humbled by this deeper layer of anger that had been hiding within. One of the purposes for chanting this mantra is to realize one’s inner light, one’s inner sun. We chant to the external sun in the sky to (re)discover our inner wisdom, our inner guru. There is no place for negative self-talk at this level. It must be transformed to be able to fully tap into the inherent joy of the bliss body, the subtlest of the five koshas. And this is exactly what has happened through “truly loving myself:” I feel joy pulsing throughout and a lightness of being.
Toward the end of May, I started feeling every cell of my body lighting up – all the mitochondria shining like miniature suns. My physical body is down 27 pounds, my high blood pressure has resolved to 120/70, the mental stagnation is gone, and I’m feeling like I did 25 years ago – energized, joyful, and full of possibilities. I can’t think of a better way to welcome 65!
While chanting the Gayatri Mantra is an homage to the sun and all that it provides, it is also a chant to the goddess Gayatri. She is known as the Mother of the Vedas (of wisdom, knowledge, enlightenment). She is also called the Mother of the Universe. Through this chant, we may realize the universal intelligence from which all arises. It is said that chanting the Gayatri ten times daily removes the sins of this lifetime; one hundred times daily removes the sins of your previous life; and one thousand times, from three yugas (many lifetimes). I have continued to chant the Gayatri Mantra daily; she is living in every cell of my body and my whole being longs for the practice. It’s now natural and comfortable to chant 3 malas (324 recitations). If you have been chanting the morning mantras from the Bihar School, you’ve been reciting the Gayatri 11 times – an auspicious endeavor and healing for this lifetime.
Beth shared:
Hearing you recite the Gayatri Mantra during the Summer Solstice Class and participating fully from beginning to end, I felt such a closure to our solstice-to-solstice sadhana practice together. It was a beautiful chance to actually say it along with you and together we echoed it to the world one more time. I chanted it every morning with Deva Premal (about 10 minutes) and found it to be a great discipline and a way to send out prayers and be in silence and meditation or journal after. It was a meaningful and centering way to start every day, usually with candles lit.
I’ve never understood until those moments in the Summer Solstice Class an actual visceral understanding of the light within me as the divine light that I bow to in gratitude and for guidance, it’s all one light. My individual sparks of light form my own constellation of light shining my light into the world. This is I believe now what happened every day when I prayed the Gayatri. And had I not done that and made it a part of me, I may not have had this amazing inner knowing and illumination come to me. What a deepening of my own spiritual knowing has come to me by this sadhana, and then the yoga practice today where a true integration seemed to become known to me. I feel as if I’ve spiritually come to another level of knowing. Honestly it makes me cry to type this.
Thank you for your teaching, your practice, and inspiration.
The other thing I would share is how having the Gayatri sadhana every morning gave me a way to feel less hopeless and like I was doing something of service for this world when the war in the Ukraine started and I combined it with my world peace prayers that all hearts be illuminated to love one another. Truly, it’s what the world needs and by this practice I feel as if I contributed to a more enlightened and peaceful world (I pray for this to be so).
Sandra shared:
I want to thank you very much for this experience! It really was life changing and I learned a lot about myself.
The Gayatri was a very interesting experience for me. Initially I was able to stay on top of it with a daily practice. And I think it really helped with selling the house, heading to a change in my work location. There were days that it felt like too much; too much energy especially once the house sold and I was busy packing.
I would go for days not doing it and then there would be moments on other days that I would just start chanting it without even thinking about it. That experience was an ah-ha moment for me and so I just went with it whenever it came up.
I found it very spiritual, comforting, and uncomfortable at times. There were days it felt like I was a runaway train and those are the days I did not do it. Once I caught up with all the changes, the automatic chanting came back. And then I just naturally stopped before the solstice arrived.
Atmadarshan shared:
I was eager to begin the Solstice-to-Solstice Gayatri Mantra sadhana (dedicated practice) that Cathy thoughtfully designed. Almost from day 1 of my yoga studies, I heard mantra was a powerful tool that produced amazing effects on all levels of being. I even read a book by a Westerner who had tried different mantras and achieved profound, practical effects (like a bothersome next-door neighbor moving away). I dove into the sadhana. Sometimes it felt very easy and spontaneous, while other times it was difficult to stay motivated. But I stuck with it to the end.
Then Cathy asked the participants to share the results of the Solstice-to-Solstice program. I had no intention of responding because, to my dismay, there didn’t seem to be any effects. Or were there? I realized I was expecting amazing, over the top effects, and perhaps overlooking other significant changes that happened through the 6 months:
my dietary preferences switched, and I found myself craving more fruit and green vegetables and losing desires for higher-calorie, less nutritious foods…
leading to a spontaneous reshaping of my body – I was able to do certain yoga practices and wear clothes that hadn’t worked for me in years, plus…
a book that I had been working on for most of a decade finally got finished and is now published (!).
Upon further reflection, I also realize the mantra practice showed me how much time my mind spends making noise, and what kind of noise it likes to make. Replacing the mind noise with mantra made me more present and connected to what was happening – more yogic.
So, did I get anything out of the Solstice-to-Solstice practice? What do you think?
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Four journeys, each unique, and all transformative. If you are curious about the power of mantra and wish to start or deepen a practice, please be in touch. We are here to support you!