What are the biggest benefits of practicing mantra meditation?

What will be the biggest benefits of mantra meditation for you?

The true answer is that you cannot know or define the biggest benefit prior to receiving it. 

Let’s see why.

We all come to spiritual disciplines such as mantra meditation with hopes.

• We have ideas and expectations about what healing and awakening will mean for us. 
• We have projections about what it will feel like when the practice reaches fruition and how it will change our life. 

All of these ideas have a purpose.

They provide the motivation for beginning to practice. But, in terms of what we receive from our mantra practice, the biggest benefit is always going to be beyond our images and assumptions.

The biggest benefit is always going to be beyond our expectations.

Because the practice takes us out of our conditioned identity and the repetitive patterns of thought and emotion that constitute our current experience of life. Included in those patterns are the ideas of enlightenment and awakening that have brought us to the practice. Paradoxically, the practice will free us of those very concepts and initiate us into a deeper revelation.

Through the practice, we will receive an unexpected benefit.

This benefit will be an experience that we can't define in advance. It will be an insight that we can't predict. But, we can receive these benefits through practicing.

How to practice?

Allow your current motivation to bring you to the cushion. Feel the energy of that motivation as you settle into the practice period. And then, let it go.

Your motivation and all the associated ideas of benefit are like a raft that has carried you to the shore of whole-hearted practice.

Having reached the shore of practice, let go of the raft.

Turn to the mantra. Become absorbed in the mantra. As absorption deepens, the mantra itself will guide you.

With each resonance of the mantra, your conditioned concepts of awakening are dissolved. In that dissolution, the blessings that you cannot plan for are revealed.