Mantras I live by

Hi sweethearts

In this post I'll share with you my secrets about Mantra's; what they are and which ones that work for me. So yes, another mental health-related quote!

A Mantra; what is this?

"(originally in Hinduism and Buddhism) a word or sound repeated to aid concentration in meditation." So a mantra is a small sentence that you repeat a lot, to help you to focus more. It can help you through meditation and through life. After a while, you'll learn to tell yourself this sentence, without even thinking about it.

Most mantra's are spoken in Hindi languages but I don't really understand them and I don't have the time to learn them. So I'm using Mantra's in my own language; Dutch.

If you're meditating, a mantra can also help you to start the meditation faster...but meditation is a whole other subject to talk about (which I already did in previous blogposts).

I learned about Mantra's when going to a psychologist when I was a teen. I went there because I couldn't cope with stress... and because of my low self esteem, which was also stress related.

I used to really hate myself when I was a teenager. You can tell that I've come a long way, when you've read more of my blogposts about my happiness-journey.

So when dealing with stress, my number one reason to cause stress was school. I used to freak out before any test. My psychologist told me that I needed to tell myself before any test that I could do it. AND repeat it a billion times, to calm myself down. I didn't really understand back then why I'd be telling myself a billion times that I could do it.. but I was like, yeah let's just try out anything that could help.

So since I was about 14 years old, before any tests in school, I told myself that I could do it....

Now, I still do this, but more consciously.

I learned that a Mantra is used to calm yourself down (to shift your mindset...). After using it for a veeery long time, you'll also start to believe more in what you're telling yourself. Now, I actually believe myself when I tell myself that I can do it.

All the stress built up in my head before tests, only made it worse for me. Is stressing out actually helping you? NOPE! SO tell yourself not to stress too much. A mantra can help you to focus on the phrase, and not on the negative thoughts.

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So this is about the use of mantra’s. Now let’s go onto why my Mantra is: “I can do this.”.

Yes, “I can do this, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this….”.

For me it’s about accepting my situation, to not focus on stress but focus on telling myself that I can actually do it. It distracts me and it helps me not to think about stressing out.

I always had problems with believing in myself. So I needed to learn to believe in myself. To actually believe that I studied well and that I was able to do the test well.

So this one is my personal one.

There’s a whole lot of other inspiring quotes that I like to tell myself as well. I’m just going to share them with you and why I like them, but they’re not the 1 mantra I use almost daily…

“Never make permanent decisions based on temporary emotions”. I believe in this quote, because it’s easy to make bad decisions when you’re angry. You always need to be able to control your thoughts and emotions.. and not make bad decisions that you’re going to regret afterwards.

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”- Friedrich Nietzsche

And even though I don’t believe in marriage... I think that it’s really important to focus on your friendship first, when being in a relationship. If you’re not best friends, it’s going to be super hard to be able to stay with the same person for a longer time. This one is a helpful tip for relationships.

"Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death." - Coco Chanel. So never feel guilty for too long in life. Work things out and fix the things you’re feeling guilty about… and if it’s not possible to fix it, then just leave it be.

These were the 3 most important Mantra's in my personal life. You can also write your own mantra if you like. Oh yeah it’s not a secret that I love both Nietsche and Chanel, so yes, I did steal their quotes 😊.

What mantra's help you to control yourself?

X Steph