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Certain words or phrases can bring out joy, calm and happiness in our minds. Here’s how to make your own mantra.

Can you make your own mantra or can you only adopt an already established and practiced one? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could create your own mantra for your life, and keep customising it to cater to your mood and your day? Some people write their own marriage vows; so what’s stopping us from writing our own mantra?

And what is a mantra, anyway?

The Cambridge Dictionary, with reference to specific religions, defines mantra as a word or sound that is believed to have a special spiritual power.

Our favourite Wikipedia defines Mantra as a sacred utterance, a numinous sound, a syllable, word or phonemes, or group of words in Sanskrit believed by practitioners to have psychological and/or spiritual powers.

I was never convinced when so many people on various occasions suggested quite passionately to me that I should start chanting a certain well-known mantra that they swear by. I have always been of the belief that you will benefit from chanting a mantra that you truly understand and feel a deep connection with your heart.

One day, a mentor asked me to think of words from every letter from A-Z, which bring out a certain sense of positivity, calm, joy and an immediate feeling of upliftment in me. So, I started writing many such words down in a diary. As I was writing them, I could sense a strong connection and felt an increase in my energy and vibration with some of the words!

I realised that my mentor was actually making me write my own mantras! And it seemed that I could not only create my own mantras but also customise them to my day and the emotion or the situation I am in, at that moment! It felt amazing!

I gradually managed to carve out a few sets of four-five-word clusters which serve as my mantra for that particular day and keep repeating my mantras silently in my mind through the day. I have seen for sure that the days I do this, are definitely better than the days that I don’t.

To de-mystify the mantra creation process for you, I suggest some simple ways to go about it:

• If you’re feeling good, then you can maintain the good vibration by mentally repeating a few positive words like ‘joy, harmony, positivity’ as your day’s mantra so that your already-positive vibration attracts more positivity and joy.
• If you’re feeling low, you can make words like ‘gratitude, appreciation, faith, worthy’ your mantras for the day so that you start vibrating at the same energy as those words.
• Some more examples of words that you may want to include in your mantra based on your desired vibration could be abundance, admiration, beauty, balance, celebration, confidence, dignity, easy, energy, fun, fearless, hope, love, peace, passion, safe, success, wisdom and well-being.

My yoga teacher always starts the class asking us to set an intention for ourselves for the class as to how we want to feel at the end of the class.

And there, I instantly do a quick mental search and pick a few words which become my mantra for the session! And it works beautifully for me every time!

Now, it’s time to make your own mantra!