The mantram is a powerful spiritual tool, and children of all ages can benefit from the strength and comfort it brings. This page will give you ideas and inspiration for sharing the mantram with children in your life, helping them to build their own mantram practice.
For anyone who interacts with children, the power of the mantram will best be conveyed through your own practice – they may not know that you’re using a mantram, but they’ll experience the calm and peace it brings you.
Before considering sharing the mantram with children, it’s important that you’re repeating the mantram regularly yourself. If you aren’t already familiar with the mantram, we recommend learning more and establishing your own practice first.
We usually recommend that parents give the mantram to their own children, or that a close family member does this, if the parents agree. If you interact with children outside your family, giving a mantram may also be appropriate – just be sensitive to the family's own beliefs and choices, and check you have their permission and understanding first.
The mantram is one of the most valuable gifts you can give a child – at any age!
You give the mantram simply by guiding and supporting a child in choosing and using a mantram. If your child is small, you’ll choose the mantram for them, and with an older child you can help them choose one for themselves.
Before Birth: You can start saying the mantram for a child even before they’re born. Easwaran says that when a pregnant mother is repeating her mantram, she’s repeating it for two, and strengthening the mind of the baby – just as nourishing food strengthens the body. If someone’s expecting a baby in your family or circle of friends, you can repeat the mantram for that baby, too!
Young Children: You can sing your mantram to young children as a lullaby, and say it aloud to them day or night. You can use your own mantram, or if you’re not sure which mantram to use for your child, you could consider the simple mantram, Rama.
Older Children: If you’re giving the mantram to an older child, you might consider sharing the list of mantrams Easwaran recommended, and letting them choose their own. You can also describe what a mantram is, how you use it, and how it helps you.
With the mantram we regain our natural energy, confidence, and control, so that we can transform everything negative in us and make our greatest possible contribution to the welfare of those around us.
– Eknath Easwaran
You can introduce the concept of a mantram in whichever way feels most comfortable for you. Here are some of the ways that passage meditator families have described the mantram.
The mantram soon becomes a familiar friend of whom we never grow tired.
– Eknath Easwaran
Easwaran's core instruction for using a mantram is to repeat it silently in the mind, whenever possible, because this will help you drive it into consciousness. However, when we’re with children, we can help them learn to use the mantram through external practice.
Here are some of the ways passage meditator families have shared the mantram with their children.
When you use the mantram in this way, you are planting it deep in your child’s consciousness, which will be an invaluable service to him or her in later years.
– Eknath Easwaran
Other creative and effective ways to get the mantram deeper in consciousness are through writing, drawing, and singing the mantram. Anything you can do to keep it going is great! When you and your children have the mantram more deeply rooted in your consciousness, you’ll be more able to repeat the mantram silently on a regular basis, and it will come more quickly to you in a crisis.
Mantram writing is wonderful for children. They can be creative with color and art, and the practice can help them be more concentrated on repeating the mantram. You can write the mantram line after line, or you can be creative and make a piece of art. Very young children can do “mantram doodles” or “mantram circles” – everything goes!
You can make mantram art free hand, or use templates. If you’d like to write the mantram in a template, here are a few examples which friends of the BMCM have used to fill out. You could print one out, or look at them for inspiration and then create your own.
Whatever you do, make it your own!
Singing or chanting the mantram is another creative way to deepen your practice of mantram repetition, and these activities can also help children. Singing the mantram before bedtime can be especially helpful in sending them off to a restful sleep.
It can also be uplifting and special to sing mantrams other than your own. When we sing a variety of mantrams, it gives us the opportunity to lend our support to friends around the world who use different ones. This is a beautiful way to honor different faith traditions and experience the universality among them.
Here are some mantram songs that have been written and sung by friends of the BMCM, but they are just examples. There are plenty of other wonderful mantram songs, and again, you can make up your own!
When we repeat the mantram, we are not asking for anything in particular, like good health or solutions to our problems or richer personal relationships. We are simply asking to get closer to the source of all strength and all joy and all love.
– Eknath Easwaran