Mantra for Peace: Om Shanti

Namaste, I am very happy to be back with you again to share the joy of mantras. Today we are going to look at a mantra which I am sure many of you are very familiar with. It's the peace mantra which is om shanti, shanti, shanti. The word shanti which is a Sanskrit word comes from the root sham. Sham in terms of its experiential effect means to unite, to concentrate, to focus.

It is a sound that helps build stability, endurance and the sense of balance, harmony within us. It is a sound that helps our being to slow down and experience a sense of contentment. This aspect of bringing everything to a close also implies that it is a distraction of everything that is not necessary. So when we do the sound shanti, it is the creation of this space that is quite full in itself which has a sense of being complete, being full, being content. So shanti and we do it three times because of the three levels of our existence.

There is the physical level, the physical level corresponding to the world that we can grasp through our senses, the subtle level which is the world that we can't grasp through our senses but is very real through our thoughts, our feelings etc. And there is the spiritual level which is the level where things exist in their ideal state. So when we say shanti, shanti, shantihe, it is like we can actually create this kind of peace at all the three levels of our being so that with the third shantihe we can feel that we are like an incarnation of peace. Going back to the words itself, the word is shantihe, I'll draw your attention to the tea which is the soft tea, so it's shantihe and not shantihe with the English tea. Try and become aware of that softness which is associated with this experience of peace.

And also if you'd like to experiment a little more with spaces in your mouth, you can pronounce the ah like shaa, like try and open your jaws as widely as you can, shantihe. What I have also noticed sometimes is when we do these sounds in a slow manner, the end tends to become long and heavy so it becomes shantihe, but the way I like to normally suggest that we do it is to remember that the last e is a short sound and there is an aspiration in it, so it's a shantihe, shantihe, shantihe. So while it is a very full sound of peace, it also has with it a certain lightness, a certain upwardness in it, so it's shantihe, shantihe, shantihe, yes, can we do that together with the ohm in the beginning, let's try it, ohm, shantihe, shantihe, shantihe. This particular mantra usually comes at the end of other more elaborate mantras and it sort of marks the end of a mantra and people tend to do it fast, but I always recommend that you sit with it, allow this mantra to fill you, very consciously create that space of peace and fulfillment and then chant it. On a lighter note, what I have found is that this particular mantra can be very helpful to quieten down crying children.

The only problem is that the moment you stop with the shantihe, they might start again. So you really need to internalize the sound and feel it concretely, to create it concretely outside of yourselves. So let us together end with this mantra by chanting it three times for all the three levels. Let's do it. Ohm, shanti, shanti, shantihe.

Ohm, shanti.