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Do you have a mantra?

For several nights now I've been taking part in the New Reality Transmission worldwide event in which thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe millions of people are meditating on a world built on love for eleven minutes, at 11:11 (EST), for eleven days, beginning, of course, on 11/11.

Each evening I settle into a quiet place where I can sit comfortably with my back straight - or, as Baba would say, my antenna aligned. As I get settled I wiggle a little to loosen up, and exhale rapidly a number of times to clear my lungs, sometimes using my arms like chicken wings to help pump out the air. Then, relaxing more and more deeply, I take about ten of the longest, slowest breaths I am capable of taking, the out-breath roughly twice as long as the in-breath.

I use mantras with my breath practice. Ever since I learned it from Baba, a simple OM on the in-breath, OM on the out-breath, has been the core of my practice. Sometimes I sing the word to myself as I breath, going up and down the scale, or to some melody, but more often I just listen to my inner sound.

The syllable OM represents the primal vibration, the sound of the Big Bang behind space and time. Our ears cannot possibly hear it - but our bodies do sing, some more loudly, some very softly. The body's song is not respected in today's world; we call it "tinnitus." I call it my personal OM and I find listening to it immensely peaceful.
I revert to OMing in one form or another between periods of trying other mantras that have come to me from here and there over the years.

Currently, I am using abundance on the in-breath, surrender on the out-breath. I don't use the word, I feel the idea; it's vibrational.

When I am begin the slow, rhythmic breathing that I try to maintain through rest of the meditation, I think about a new world built on love, a world where the currency is love instead of money.

Each evening the thoughts that come to me when I set that stage are becoming clearer. I've been taking a few notes after each meditation. Over the next few days, I'll try to find the time to put some of those understandings here too.

Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for more than three decades. In the article below, inspired by the memory of Fran Lewine, Ritchie looks at how women fought to write the news.

So much attention has gone to the news of a woman frontrunner for her party’s presidential nomination that it has obscured the parallel story about how much of that news is being reported by women. Not long ago, women were struggling to gain their place in both politics and journalism. One the pioneers in that effort, Fran Lewine, covered six administrations at the White House as an Associated Press correspondent, and spent the rest of her career as an editor and producer at CNN, where she was still working at the time of her death, on January 19, at age 86. (more…)

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