Om or Aum? How to Chant Primordial Sound for 14 Mantra Yoga Therapy Benefits!
Chanting OM in a yoga class or kīrtan is practically ubiquitous. Everyone chants OM all the time, it seems! It's certainly the most well-known mantra.
But are you one of those (many!) folks who shyly mumbles along,
not really sure what you're supposed to do or how you should be feeling?
Or are you one of those chant lovers who thrills at the chance to tune into this potent, primal sound and lets it ring through their bodies with full resonance before you dissolve back into spacious silence and peace, becoming fully attuned and aligned with your whole self in JUST. ONE. NOTE.
From what I've seen teaching Sanskrit mantra workshops and sound healing yoga training courses around the world full time since 2009, statistically speaking you're probably NOT tuning into Auṁ as an instant reset. MOST people -- even chant leaders, professional kīrtan musicians, mantra teachers, and yoga teacher trainers -- are going through the motions, unsure of how to chant Auṁ for the maximum therapeutic effect.
Om vs. Aum - What is the right way to chant?
There are LOTS of books about Oṁ. Tons of blog posts about the "correct" way to chant Oṁ. Lots of old dead white guys who wrote about their far-out cosmic experiences with OM the first time they went to India. Lots of privileged Brahmin men in India who also want to tell you what their father's father told them. I'm infinitely thankful for the continuity of tradition - without it people wouldn't know about mantra meditation and Sanskrit mantra at all!
However, I bring a more "feminine" approach to sound and mantra training.*
It's not about the RIGHT way to chant Aum.
The question is, what benefit do YOU want to feel from chanting OM?
I would rather help YOU have a direct experience in your own body, than tell you from some lofty philosophical disembodied place what the "right" way is to chant Oṁ. From my view, debating over the correct pronunciation of Om or Aum - which is the audible echo of an inaudible sound - is quite hilarious and pointless. (The intellectual pissing match of crusty privileged scholar dudes? No thanks!)
Instead, let's discover together how different ways of making the sound affect our embodied experience. Then, we can adjust the way we chant it to put the accent on which element of the sound yoga therapy we most wish to benefit from:
14 Different OM Chanting Mantra Therapy Benefits:
- OM chanting for remembering who you truly are, your whole self, your inherent interconnection with the cosmos
- Aum chanting for aligning heart, mind, word & deed
- OM chanting for opening your throat chakra (cakra is often misspelled as chakra! it's cakra in IAST Sanskrit transliteration if you want to be precise!)
- Aum chanting for vocal empowerment, freeing your voice, feeling your full vocal resonance
- OM chanting for meditation on sacred sound
- Aum chanting for meditation on the silence beyond the sound
- OM chanting for opening anāhata cakra (or anahata chakra if you're not using proper IAST spelling)
- Auṁ chanting for manifestation (it IS the cosmic "yes" vibration after all!)
- OM chanting for prayer
- Auṁ chanting for connecting groups, community singing circles, non-denominational spiritual group
- OM chanting for invoking blessings, starting a yoga class, beginning a sacred sound session, starting a sound healing, etc.
- Aum chanting for self-healing
- OM chanting in a kīrtan melody, in rhythm
- How to use Aum correctly in songwriting, if you're recording a mantra music album or sound healing album
Surely there are many more than 14 mantra yoga therapy benefits to OM chanting, but this list gives us a starting point from which to explore the differences in AUM chanting technique, and how changes in our chanting produces different therapeutic benefits.
Since there are so many different situations that you'd hear or chant Aum in mantra meditations, kirtans, sound baths, and yoga classes, it's important to look at all of them differently.
Aum vs. Om - Which is correct?
The clever among you readers will notice that I'm alternating between Aum, Om, Auṁ and Oṁ. I'm doing that because you'll see it written all different types of ways using Roman letters to communicate what in Sanskrit is often written as 🕉.
Especially with a mantra like OM, it’s important to understand different perspectives and open ourselves up to the direct magical experience of the sound, rather than get limited by dogmatic ideas. I've written a whole separate article that shares 4 different (nerdy Sanskrit & Tantrik philosophy!) answers to the question, “Is it OM or AUM? Which is correct?"
Free Auṁ chanting Yoga of Sound Experience + mini-masterclass!
While writing this blog post I realized that I can't write all of the answers to the 14 different ways to chant Om. It makes much more sense to just make my next FREE Yoga of Sound experience be a mini masterclass on Auṁ! Sign up for it here:
Is it Om or Aum?
Let’s explore 🕉️ chanting from all 14 therapeutic angles!
The LIVE class will be FREE. If the recording is good, we'll post the replay and it'll be available by donation, though we'll offer an excerpt here and on our youtube channel. So if you want the FREE experience, and the chance to hang out afterwards and chat with our Heart of Sound community, be sure to attend LIVE!
Feminine Sound & Mantra Approach
After almost assimilating to be a “good Indian girl” I woke up just in time to realize that there are 5,000+ years of baked in patriarchal systems of oppression in nearly every aspect of yoga culture. (Not to mention my own American culture!) 6 ways you can fight the patriarchy one note at a time:
1 ☺️ Explore pleasure in your own voice vibration! It’s a radical act of self-connection and self-love.
2 👂🏽Listen to what is actually alive in you. Make space in your day to hear your heart 💓
3 😴 Rest from performative, competitive, stressful motivations (faster faster! louder louder! In order to feel excitement, aliveness, manufactured “ecstasy” in your kīrtans and chant experiences)
4 🗣️ Speak your full resonant voice, your values, your desires, your joy & laughter, your truth.
5 👸🏽 Celebrate women in leadership and power! Appreciate, support, and lift up folks of all gender identities who express traits of nurturing, compassion, equality, and care (let’s stop calling those “feminine” traits and call them human, ok?)
6 😶 If anyone ever told you to be quiet, your voice doesn’t matter, your opinions don’t count, remember this very powerful mudrā: 🖕🏾🖕🏽🖕🏻🖕🏿
My “aha” moment was at a Nāvarātri pūja in S India in 2018, (Lalitā, to be precise) when I realized that the priests tossing flowers at a statue of the Goddess while racing through mumbling the mantras at astonishing speed were the same men I’d seen earlier that day verbally disrespecting the women serving them special food and cleaning up after them. From one minute to the next, these men are oppressing real life women, then worshipping the Goddess? I wondered: is a statue a convenient representation for the privileged male priesthood because it doesn’t demand listening, presence, connection… and it can’t talk back? For me, the Goddess (Śakti in Sanskrit)
*I've been blessed by my gurus and mentors (traditional scholars and pandits in India) to teach mantra & nāda yoga worldwide -- they INSISTED that I do!
But my uniquely "feminine" approach I did not (could not!) learn from them. That has been hard earned by my own disentangling from the unnecessary patriarchal overlays on Sanskrit mantra & nāda yoga in order to actually use the sound to *heal* from trauma & PTSD, instead of the all-too-common *re-traumating* that happens when you study the yogic sciences from perpetrators of the patriarchy (the more recent colonial European patriarchy and/or the much older Brahmin Hindu patriarchy).
Surely no yoga teacher or kīrtan artist intends to traumatize you with mantra, or their approach to chanting and nāda yoga, but unless we've addressed the elements within the way we were taught the techniques, we can't decouple the violent bits from the sound healing bits and utilize the sound & mantra yoga tools to feel full power of sacred sound!
At this point in my sound yoga therapy teaching profession, I can't NOT mention that even posing the question, "What is the right way to chant OM?" is coming from a smaller worldview than I prefer to embrace. I'd always prefer to ask, "How does the way I'm chanting Aum affect the sensation I'm feeling, the connection I'm experiencing, and the therapeutic benefit I want to receive."
Smash the patriarchy rant over.
A Quick guide to how to chant AUM:
- Start with AA sound in the belly (relaxed, like you're saying "aaah" as you slip into a warm bath at the end of a long day)
- Slowly transition to an U sound using the lips, timing your breath capacity so you're fully making an (OOO like Oooh la la!) when you've used up about 3/4 of your breath.
- For the last 1/4 of your breath, make an M humming sound by closing your lips and allowing your tongue to rest gently on your upper palate.
- As your breath runs out (don't strain), slowly internalize the sound back into silence
- Listen in to the silence and feel the sensation of the vibration.
We chant OM as a mantra meditation practice not to “make the perfect OM sound,” but to focus our minds, experience the power of sound vibrations internally, and tune ourselves into the listening for the inaudible sound.
Anandra teaches Sanskrit mantra and the yoga of sound to empower students to affect lasting transformation and find consistently deep inner peace. She has been practicing yoga and meditation for more than 25 years, and has been teaching and helping clients internationally since 1999. She is known for a teaching style that integrates esoteric philosophy with practical, daily life applications in a fresh, modern way.
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