Mantras are anchors.

They are both a grounding and an elevating force in spiritual practices. The repetition of a mantra during meditation or prayer helps us tap into deeper states of connection with ourselves and the divine.

Secular modernity may have its own label and flavor of a mantra—the affirmation. I am beautiful, I am loved, I am safe. Everything will be okay, everything happens for a reason. These too are anchors, stabilizers during dysregulation.

Will everything be okay? Does everything happen for a reason? Perhaps not, but the belief in such a wide-sweeping phrase is useful, it's comforting, it's soothing. I am not here to say that if something is not true in one sense, it should not be employed. It may not be true that a child's cancer will heal; as adults, however, we can offer that child some comfort and hope. Perhaps the hope is the extra fuel needed to keep someone going another day, another week, another year until they cross a threshold of recovery. These phrases can keep us going, and when the only way out is through, we cannot sit still.

When we bring these modern mantras to mind, when we tell ourselves everything will be okay, we are soothing our inner child, our emotional self. That inner being is not a machine, not an intellect, but a vulnerable emotional body. Contemporary psychological methods like IFS, the Hoffman Process, or other Parts Work systems offer frameworks to converse with the inner, emotional parts of ourselves. It is effective in healing ourselves to identify these parts, to converse with them, to ask them about their fears, and to offer them comfort.

The inner parts of us must feel the words, not intellectualize them, in order to feel relief from anxiety or fear. Mantras as intellectual platitudes are ineffective. They are just words when they do not reach the heart.

Similar but distinct from my exploration of concept distillation or AQ, mantras are containers for comfort, anchors to stabilize us in emotional contexts. Naming things allows the spiritual self and the intellectual mind to identify problems, craft solutions, navigate the chaos of the world, and even find ways to diagnose issues and comfort the emotional self. The language of the emotional self, however, is not intellectual, not in naming. It is, well, emotional. It needs to know it is safe, heard, loved. It is a social animal with mammalian needs. Modern mantras and affirmations are comforts that we can reference in times of difficulty.

What mantras do you say to yourself? What new mantras will you create?