meditation in motion

I’ve been staffing a residential educational intensive for the last 5 weeks. This means in essence, a minimum 12 hour day, often longer; being on-call; and schedules that are subject to change any time. This doesn’t leave a lot of down time for long, luxurious practice. But what I CAN do is stay with my breath, stay with awareness, and stay with the mantra. 

So’Ham (सोऽहम्), pronounced So Hum, is the mantra of the breath. A condensed version of ‘Saha Aham’ its translation is ‘I am that.’ Moving through the day with awareness of the breath and its mantra means we can move through our day with meditative awareness.

So Ham isn’t something you say, or recite, it’s something already present that you simply attune to. On each inhale, you listen for your own internal sound ‘So’. On each exhale, you listen for your own internal sound ‘Ham’. As you attune to the mantra, each breath reminds you of your vast, expansive, eternal nature (‘That’).

One of the places I find myself practicing So’Ham is on my nightly commute into Dr. Lad’s clinic in Old Pune. This 30km drive can take up to 90 minutes in jarring start-stop traffic with blaring horns. After a long day, when I might otherwise be winding down, it’s an onslaught for the senses. So, I sit back, soften my gaze into the distance, and I listen into the breath for the reverberation of So’Ham. Doing this practice in the taxi has meant that on the other side of this drive I arrive centered, calm, and rejuvenated for the night the clinic has in store for me.

The next time you’ve got a seemingly endless day, or it feels like crunch time, or a story of overwhelm presides try - in the midst of it all - to listen in to So’Ham. Track the subtle vibration of the mantra on the breath and remember you are ‘That’. 

This mantra is always there to return to, it’s simply up to us to attune to it.