Japa Meditations

Japa meditation is the practice of repeatedly reciting a mantra—a sacred sound, word, or phrase—to calm the mind, enhance focus, and promote spiritual growth. Originating from ancient Indian traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism, the practice uses the sound vibrations of the mantra to quiet mental "chatter" and access deeper states of consciousness. A regular practice of Japa can do things like clear negative thought patterns, improve concentration, soothe the nervous system and promote relaxation. For these reasons, Japa meditations are reputed to improve concentration, provide stress relief, leading to emotional stability as a method to promote spiritual growth. In yoga, it is a tool for purifying the mind, develop inner strength and connect both with a deeper sense of self and a higher power. In this video, I explain Japa from the practice we had just done, as a deep listening while a mantra, whose words those in the room do not know the meaning of and it was recited to a unique tune; so I explain how the mantra works even in that situation, video and captions provided below.

Japa explained at Morning Sadhana

Captions here: "When we sit in silence normally, you come to a different inaudible, you just sit there in the silence. When you are doing Japas … , so what Japa does, it takes the Wisdom of the Spiritual Master, .

Now we’re doing it the traditional style, so you’re hearing words you don’t understand. Traditional style is you hear the words … these speech sound enters your mind, it changes how you think towards more positive thoughts, that’s what Japa does. A form of Japa is a single mantra. Mantra can be one word or series of words that you use to repeat in a day, right? So you can do the mantra, like Satnam, SoHum, WaheGuru, RamRam, one just repeats the mantra, not gain anything outside of swapping the energy of the mind to be more positive. Different Mantras can provide different energies. In a Japa like this, where its full and none of the sentences are repeated, the meaning, the full version, I’m going to send inside the group chat. What ends up happening is, it’s like an overflow. It’s like spiritual wisdom is coming to you while you’re sitting still, kind of like the Yoga Nidra. Yoga Nidra’s purpose is to clear your subconscious. Likewise, when you’re sitting actively in meditation and somebody is doing the Japa, it is like an active Nidra that is reprogramming your subconscious without your knowledge. (Knowledge in the form of conscious awareness). 

In the same essence, when you’re sitting in the Japa meditation, you’re letting this mantra flow through. It’s just flowing from the sky, its flowing from these four speakers. You just there and you just sit in the silence and let the work happen. Only job we do, we sit here, we focus on the breathing, we don’t let the body drop. That’s it."