Concerning meditative prayer, a young friend recently asked the question, what kind of mantra do you use when you’re spinning out into obsessive thinking?
Hmmm. Maybe we should start by defining mantra.
According to Merriam/Webster, a mantra is “a mystical formula of invocation or incantation,” while the Oxford dictionary adds that it could simply be “ a statement or slogan repeated frequently.”
For my purposes today, let’s sidestep the eerie notion of incantation (like, a spell), and slide a bit more comfortably into this idea of mantra as prayer, or as a deliberate statement, an element embedded into the discipline of a contemplative practice.
So…back to the original question: what kind of mantra do you use when you’re spinning out into obsessive thinking? Sitting on a firm pillow after this particular session of contemplative prayer practice, without thinking about it, I said, “For me, it’s smiling… I smile.”
And it’s true.
As “statements” go, statements that in this context are “repeated frequently,” smiling is the statement that is starting to emerge when my silly mind interrupts the stillness of prayer.
But I didn’t come up with the concept. Not at all.
