People ask me this often, and usually what they mean is: is it a chant, a prayer, a spell, a slogan? The honest answer is that mantra is older and stranger than any of those, and that some version of it shows up almost everywhere human beings have tried to reach what is beyond them. So before I tell you why we chant in my Rooted & Reclaimed Class, let me try to say plainly what a mantra actually is.

Sound turned inward

The word itself is usually unpacked as manas, mind, joined to a root meaning to cross over or to protect — that which carries the mind across, that which keeps the mind safe. (Those of you who practice with us at Manas Yoga already carry that first word with you.)

That gloss tells you something important: a mantra is not a message sent outward to a deity who might grant a wish. It is an instrument turned inward. The mind is forever wandering — planning, remembering, narrating, comparing. A mantra gives it a single steady place to rest. You repeat the sound, and the repetition quiets the noise, and in the quiet something becomes perceptible that the noise was hiding all along.

So a mantra is not really about the words. It is about what the words do to the one repeating them. The sound is a tool. You are what it works on.

The mystics kept finding it

Here is what convinced me, long ago, that this was something real and not merely cultural: contemplatives who never met, separated by oceans and centuries and entirely different gods, kept arriving at the same technique. Repeat a sacred sound. Let it still the chattering mind. Approach the divine not through argument but directly, through attention.

The Christian mystics knew this intimately. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition there is the Jesus Prayer — a short line repeated with the breath, over and over, until it prays itself. A medieval English contemplative, writing anonymously, advised fastening the mind on a single small word and returning to it again and again whenever thought pulled away. Centuries later, Christian monastics rebuilt almost exactly this practice and called it centering prayer: one sacred word, held in silence.

You find the same impulse in the Sufi dhikr, the remembrance of God through the repetition of divine names. You find it in the Buddhist syllables passed from teacher to student. Different cosmologies, different languages, the same discovery: that repeated sacred sound can carry a person past the noise of their own mind toward what they are seeking.

I find this genuinely moving. It suggests that mantra is not a quirk of one religion but something closer to a human technology — a thing we keep rediscovering because it is true to how the mind works.

But it has a home

And yet — and this matters enormously — naming that universality is not the same as flattening it.

The word mantra is Sanskrit. The most developed, most precise, most rigorously mapped form of this practice grew in the soil of the Indian subcontinent, in the Vedic and Upanishadic traditions, refined across thousands of years. The sounds we use carry specific meaning. Om, the syllable said to hold within it waking, dream, deep sleep, and the silent fourth beyond them. So’ham — so on the inhale, ham on the exhale, “I am That” — a mantra you do not even have to manufacture, because the tradition teaches that it is already the sound of your own breathing.

These were not improvised. They were heard — śruti, “that which is heard” — and carried mouth to ear across an unbroken oral lineage long before they were ever written down. To practice them is to step into that lineage. That is a privilege and a responsibility, not a default setting on a wellness app.

So when I honor the mystics of every tradition, I am not saying it’s all the same, take whatever you like. I am saying the opposite. The practice is shared; this form of it came from a specific people, and it deserves to be named.

Why we chant in Rooted & Reclaimed

Which brings me to our class.

Mantra is one of the most appropriated and one of the most erased elements of yoga, often by the same culture in the same breath. On one side, Sanskrit syllables get printed on leggings and sold as ambiance, severed from the rishis entirely. On the other, mainstream studios quietly drop the chanting, because it sounds “too religious,” because it might unsettle certain students, because yoga is easier to sell once the culture has been scrubbed off it. Both moves do the same thing. They cut the sound from its source.

To be rooted is to refuse that cut. In this class we name where these practices come from. We do not pretend Om is a generic relaxation tool. We sit with the discomfort that honesty sometimes brings, because comfortable amnesia is precisely how appropriation works.

To be reclaimed is more tender. For so many of the people this class is built for — BIPOC practitioners, queer and trans practitioners, anyone made to feel like an afterthought in rooms that center whiteness and the mirror — there is a real question underneath: do I get to make this sound? Does this belong to me, or has it been sold back to me, sanitized, by people who would not have let me in?

Chanting answers that question with the body. When we open our mouths together, something shifts that no posture can touch. You cannot fall behind in a chant. You cannot do it wrong the way you can fail to touch your toes. There is no front row. The sound moves through the whole room and no one is ahead of anyone else. The hierarchy of the mirror dissolves, because there is nothing to look at — only something to listen for. That is what I mean when I say we reclaim voice as belonging.

So that is what a mantra is, and why it lives at the heart of this practice. Not decoration. Not performance. A lamp made of sound — one we light together, in a lineage we name out loud, to see what was always already there.

Come as you are, at the rate that honestly reflects your life. The chant will be waiting.

— Erika