Life can easily become stressful from time to time. From work deadlines to schoolwork, family troubles to personal obligations, feeling overwhelmed can happen and it can happen fast. Learning how to cope with high levels of stress and anxiety may do wonders for your spiritual well-being. One useful way to get your mind, body, and spirit back on the right track is by developing a mantra. Loosely translated to mean “instrument of the mind,” a mantra might be of use when you’re drowning in the chaos of everyday life.
Developing your own is simple when you know how to get the process started. Look over these tips and learn how to create a message that will help you through difficult times.
Identify Your Issue
A personal mantra is, essentially, a word or phrase that a person repeats during specific times, such as when meditating. The beauty is that you can change it, alter it, or scrap it altogether when you need to refocus your thoughts. To develop your first mantra, it is important to give yourself a little bit of time to identify what issues you feel are weighing on you the most. Though a lot of problems might be lingering in your mind and heart, it is best to focus your energy on one specific trouble.
For example, you may feel like you absolutely hate your job and it offers you nothing but stress whenever you set foot through the door. This is a great issue to focus your energy on, as it probably negatively impacts other aspects of your life as well. Think about this issue for a moment and try to put the problem into a simple sentence. If work is bothering you, then you can phrase the issue as “I am sick of what my job does to my spirits.” This is the first step of your journey!
Rephrase the Problem
After identifying your main issue, it is time to pick the problem into pieces and reshape it. When your problem is the stress caused by your job, you want to first think about what a perfect resolution might look like. If your job makes you feel stressed, you may think something like, “I wish for my career to bring me joy instead of heartache.” Essentially, you want to focus on how you would like the problem to resolve or, more specifically, the emotions you’d like to experience.
This is the beginning of your personal mantra, in a manner of speaking. Rephrase your wish a bit so that it goes from being a desire to being a statement. Using the above example centered on career, you would change your phrase to something along the lines of “I bring joy to myself.” The idea here is to change your language so that the problem is removed from the equation and you are only left with the part of the sentence that helps to capture how you want to feel about your life or a particular situation.
Create Your Personal Mantra
At this point, your personal mantra will be something similar to “I bring joy to myself.” When you are sitting alone with your thoughts, feeling particularly stressed, or attempting to meditate, start repeating the phrase to yourself. You can speak aloud or keep it internal, but slowly say the phrase again. The idea is to change your attitude and your mindset over time, allowing you to realize your strengths while removing external factors like your job from the equation. Just like that, you have a simple mantra.
A lot goes into creating a personal mantra, but you can easily develop your own with practice. Identify the problems you face, reconfigure how you view them, and begin to overcome all the obstacles in your way.