Reflections
What Chanting Om Namah Shivaya Daily Has Taught Me
For a long stretch of years now, the same five words have opened and closed my day. Om Namah Shivaya, repeated well past a hundred and eight times in the dark hours before the world wakes up. I didn't expect a repeated phrase to teach me much of anything, at first. I was wrong about that.
It taught me that repetition isn't the enemy of meaning
There's a modern instinct to treat repetition as dulling, something that empties words of significance the more you say them. My experience has been the opposite. The mantra means more to me now than it did when I first learned it, not less. Each repetition doesn't wear the words down, it wears down my resistance to actually sitting with them. Somewhere past the first fifty repetitions each morning, the mental noise quiets, and what's left is just the practice itself.
It taught me the difference between chanting and performing devotion
Early on, I'll admit, some of my practice was about doing it 'correctly,' worrying whether my pronunciation was right, whether I was seated properly, whether I was doing enough. Years in, that self-consciousness has mostly dissolved. What's replaced it is something closer to presence than performance. The mantra isn't a task to complete well. It's a space to occupy honestly.
It taught me to notice my own resistance
Some mornings, even now, some part of me doesn't want to get up at 3:30. That resistance used to feel like a problem to solve. Now I recognize it as just part of the practice, the friction that shows up before something meaningful, not a sign I'm doing something wrong. Chanting on the mornings I don't feel like it has taught me more about discipline than the mornings that come easily ever could.
It taught me that devotion and daily life aren't separate tracks
I used to think of my spiritual practice as one part of my life and my professional, ordinary responsibilities as another, running in parallel but rarely touching. That's shifted. The stillness I find in the mantra in the early morning has started showing up in smaller ways throughout the day, in how I handle frustration, in how quickly I can return to calm after something goes wrong.
None of this happened quickly. It's the slow, compounding effect of showing up for the same five words, day after day, long enough that they stopped being separate from me at all.
Curious how this shapes my mornings more broadly? Read next: How I Start My Day With a Shiva Mantra.