Gemma and Mark podcast interview - The Gentle Revolution
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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to now episode eight of the Gentle Revolution Podcast, where we seek to tap into the best of humanity. Ultimately, that's what we're after here, finding the goodness, bringing the goodness to light through my particular interest in meditation, breath work, yoga, yogic philosophy.
Exploring the tools that humans have evolved over such a long period of time. Ultimately to bring us into the best versions of ourselves so that we might feed into this collective we call humanity, and ultimately raise humanity to be a sustainable being upon this planet Earth in this episode. I'm really fortunate to be joined by Dr.
Gemma Perry or Dr. Gemma Perry. Om, as, uh, [00:01:00] she's sometime described whose interest, whose particular interest as a, an individual and as a researcher is in fact in mantra, the science of mantra, exploring how mantra meditation mantra practice ultimately. It is a profound toolkit through which we can refine our personality, reduce stress disorders, connect us to divinity.
There's so much to explore there in this podcast. We. Go fairly deep into some of the nuance of what mantra is and the different lineages, the way different people engage with mantra. In fact, the different mantras and their meanings. There's a a lot there. If you're interested in mantra, please do take a listen.
Or if you've got no interest in Mantra and it's all new to you, this is a great opportunity to learn more. As usual, this podcast is supported and sponsored through the Yogic Meditation Institute, [00:02:00] which is a teaching academy. Pioneered by myself and supported by others as well, where we run meditation, breath work, yoga, teacher training programs, retreats, and other little treats along the way.
Supporting Ultimately, hopefully, what I think of is the good work of sharing these practices with the wider community. If you're interested to know more about that, check out yogic meditation.net or bamboo yoga byron.com, where you'll see links to courses and current offerings. We are actually just kicking off a weekly Friday drop in class, so it's Friday.
Australian time, new South Wales, Australian time, 7:00 AM till 8:00 AM You can just turn up, drop in, sharer breath work and meditation practice. That class is in fact by donation. So if you go to yogic meditation.net or just check the link in the bio of the [00:03:00] various, uh, social media networks, uh, you'll sure to find us or just reach out and I can share with you the link.
You do need to register to join.
So very warm. Welcome here to Dr. Gemma Perry.
Okay, so we are here, we have arrived. Thank you, first up, for taking the time, and I'm going to invite you to join me with just a simple practice of connection to breath, a little inhale and an exhale.
Taking a little moment here just to arrive. And centre ourselves inhaling and exhaling. [00:04:00] I don't usually do this at the beginning of every podcast, but I think it's appropriate for this one. And that we'll start with a chant of the mantra om. I invite you to join me, and perhaps we can chant the om mantra three times. That sacred sound, the resonance that underlies all, and we'll start with an exhale, releasing our breath, exhale completely, deep, full inhalation,
chant two more times [00:05:00] let's chant Om Shanti, our invocation, our prayer for peace. Inhale.
Om Shanti, Hare Om Tat Sat. And welcome Gemma.
nice to be here.
So nice to see you. So nice to hear you. I'm going to give you a little introduction and I'm going to open the door, perhaps you can introduce yourself a little more. For the next hour of our lives, I'd like to think that you can introduce yourself to the people listening to this podcast.
[00:06:00] Yeah.
I'll tell you what I know about you and why I was really interested to have you joining in this conversation. You came onto my radar really via social media. I think that you studied yoga, correct me if I'm wrong, in some way, shape or form through the Satyananda Yoga Academy through Mangrove. Is that correct?
Okay.
quite a lot of teachers from there and visited there a lot. So I'm heavily influenced. By those practices and I used to go to, Saturday night fire poojas in Manly. And yes, yeah, but I did my teacher training at the Yoga Institute in Camaray.
Ah, cool. Fantastic. Okay. I met those guys. That was a great school. Yeah. That was more informed through the lineage of Desikachar, is that correct?
Yes, it was very much focused on the sutras, [00:07:00] whereas Sat, it's a little bit more of a tantric tradition.
Yeah. Such an underbrought all together quite beautifully, but definitely there's that heavy Tantra influenced and look, the Mangrove Ashram, and certainly the Manly Yoga Center. did an amazing amount to propagate a love for mantra within the Sydney community for a long period of time. If you look around who was sharing mantra in the Sydney community and that filtered out all through Australia, really, where I live up in the Northern Rivers, a lot of the stalwarts, they've all been exposed to that lineage.
They were all there at Mangrove at some way in some time. So I know when you came onto my radar, I think it was via social media and I just noticed that your last name, I don't know if it's still your last name, but your last name on social media at least was Gemma Perry Om. And I liked that. I liked that.
Not that I like this person. [00:08:00] And I observed for, again, from a distance via social media over, I guess it's a number of years now, you were studying at Macquarie University, is that correct? Doing a PhD, which involved studying mantra and the effects of mantra practice. So would you maybe just give us a bit of a view of what that looked like?
Yeah, sure. I studied at Macquarie, did my undergrad there. I did my honors in om, my masters in Om and my PhD in a more broader range of sounds that people were chanting. So it's been, I think. 10 years of research now. The PhD was it was incredibly challenging and we were very influenced in what we could do during the pandemic we had a lot of,
[00:09:00] Everyone had their mouths covered. It was a challenging time for mantra, yeah.
Chanting actually became one of the illegal things. So it was literally an illegal practice to come together in a group and
makes it more attractive. Wow.
designed this experiment and it was really, we were going to be putting motion sensors on people and we were going to see just how close people got to each other because we wanted to see how socially connected they were getting after the chanting.
So that experiment just got completely shut down because we all went in a lockdown and everything went online. So we looked at things like Zoom chanting. And so how people were getting benefits from chanting across Zoom. And also. through, so a lot of people are chanting using apps now. So we were looking at how people just listening to a recording and chanting along with that recording, how that was [00:10:00] impacting people.
And we also did a global survey, just asking. Anyone from any different tradition, because it's not just in yoga that we have these chanting practices. It's in all different traditions around the world. And so we were asking people what sort of experiences they were having from chanting. And we had nine different traditions, I think that Buddhism, Hinduism.
We had tantric yoga, we had transcendental meditation, Takatina, and we found that 60 percent of people. Regardless of the tradition they were practicing were reporting these mystical experiences, whereas like they were like having this profound unity with other people or their environment and feeling deep sense of peace.
So we found that the tradition didn't matter.
The people that were reporting to be more spiritual and higher on absorption so being moved by art or [00:11:00] music or also being aware of internal processes going on, those people were reporting more mystical states than others.
Very cool. I just point back to COVID, those bizarre times. It was interesting that mantra was illegal in that time. I was highly recommending it for people at that time. And certainly for me, my mantra practice amplified, although admittedly it was my personal mantra practice, which I was so grateful to have.
I remember Robert's Svoboda, it was at the beginning of COVID in the early days. And it was great to see a couple of, or quite rather a few, important teachers stepping up and sharing guidance. And I remember Robert Svoboda talking about the importance of mantra at that time and taking, and one of the definitions that he provided of the word [00:12:00] mantra is, was, is a refuge for the mind.
And it was such a manic time. And look, we still live in manic times. People are anxious for valid reasons. The world is a. Bizarre and strange and somewhat crazy place, but thinking about it all the time doesn't seem to be the answer. And COVID, I don't know about you, but I. I think a lot of us, certainly I did, went down a bit of a wormhole of overthinking about things and I found such reprieve, giving my mind a refuge to go to away from social media.
So let's talk about defining mantra. Could you give a definition for mantra, maybe in a specific Sanskrit based definition or perhaps a more general explanation of what it is.
Yeah, so mantra is a Sanskrit word and Sanskrit can be translated into many things in English, so I'm going to give you something and you may have [00:13:00] heard a thousand different other interpretations but coming from manas, mind. which can be liberation or tool for the mind. Yantra, tantra.
But mantra I would say is, ,
from ourselves in a way liberate the mind and Connect with something bigger than ourselves and we can use different sounds, different mantras to connect with different types of energy because one of my questions to people all the time and to myself is like, why not just
We. don't in a way, but there are these different kind of stepping stones and archetypal forces that we can [00:14:00] connect with through the other sounds. And then in the scientific framework. We're obviously still, researching and doing lots of different studies, but I have a theory that something like, so we have a sound gum, which is associated with Ganesha as a seed mantra Om Gum Ganapataye Namaha.
But the important thing is the gum. And I wonder if that gum, so we believe that Ganesha is associated with overcoming obstacles. And I wonder if gum is accessing a part of our brain for creativity. So for example, that's a way that we can see, okay, this is the sound that's believed to overcome obstacles, but what's happening scientifically is that sounds different from any other sound.
But we have to get so [00:15:00] detailed in what we're measuring, like it could be in one part of the brain and you have to, so it's years and years of research to get to that point.
Yeah, it's a fascinating conversation. This is where I really wanted to get to with you, because I don't think that there's that many people around who are thinking about it. at that level. So there's the tantric methodology, which ultimately invites us to bring mantras into chakras, specific bija mantras into chakras for intentional purposes.
I am a practitioner of tantric yoga and do And many of those practices, the whole practice of yoga nidra is based upon the technique of nyasa, which nyasa means to place, and literally placing mantras into chakras to activate those chakras, so a specific sound, which brings a quality into a specific part of the body for the purpose of meditation.
[00:16:00] illumination in a very particular defined way. We're getting quite nuanced here, but then on the other contrasting side of it. What we're experiencing and learning more about through an understanding of polyvagal theory, I think is just singing, just using your voice and activating your throat is a really beautiful experience for your nervous system and has a really positive effect.
Even if we never truly understand the full potential of mantra, I think some people do, but. And you can rest assured that it's doing something positive. So it's interesting with your research, from what I've seen, it is probably a little bit more general and just looking at the overall effect of a mantra practice, particularly the, it seems the group practice.
Can we talk a little bit about that, perhaps the difference between practicing a mantra on our own as opposed to a mantra as a group, and then we [00:17:00] can circle back to maybe the more detailed exploration of mantra.
Yeah, and the reason that our research, is general it's not that general at the moment, but it's just not published yet, but it's, there's not a lot on chanting. So it's quite surprising that nobody's researched this before, but there's very little research, so we can basically choose.
where we want to go. In terms of group practice versus individual practice. So first I would say it depends on what you're measuring. Because we have measured social connection quite a lot in our studies and looking at if it enhances social connection or or altruism. So being kinder to people.
And we find that if people are chanting in a group, they Report being more altruistic. Would you give up your seat on a bus? Yes, I'd be more likely to do [00:18:00] that. After chanting with these people for 10 minutes. Help a friend move house. All that kind of thing. In Zoom, we had a Zoom study that actually directly compared an individual and a group setting.
They were either on zoom with just the researcher doing a practice or on zoom with a group doing the practice and we found that the people in the group practice do have a higher sense of social connection than the people doing it individually.
Okay.
But we could also argue we haven't. We haven't tested this yet, but with an experienced practitioner having an individual practice, they could still feel a form of social connection especially if they're having like intentions with the practice or often, I find when I chant, especially certain mantras I feel I'm connecting with that community that is also chanting that sound.
Yeah. Yeah. So we haven't tested that yet. And I think that it would [00:19:00] take an experienced person or at least some sort of intention outwardly towards other people, but but that could also, yeah, impact social connection.
So good. I love that idea of chanting with the world. I often reflect on that when I practice Gayatri Mantra, for example. And, but many of the universal mantras would be the same, but Gayatri Mantra, we're not chanting it right now, but if we were, we'd be chanting, no doubt, there is somebody out there right now chanting Gayatri.
No doubt. If you go to India or anywhere Hindu in the world, there's the Gayatri Mantra and it's just played on the streets and there's people singing. I guarantee you someone's singing the Gayatri. Many people would be sharing Gayatri right now. Not only they're doing it right now, but that.
That mantra is 5, 000 years old, at least, that we've, it's been, since it's been recorded, probably much longer. So you're, that resonance has been carried through time over such a [00:20:00] long period of time. And you're singing along with humanity, you're singing along with history. So it might just be you.
I'm often in my car actually singing these mantras. I have a mala on my steering, my indicators. And I often sing mantras in the car and I'm just singing along with the world. That's how I've experienced it. And that's how I like to share it with people. And it's a beautiful thing. But then sharing a mantra with a group of people, particularly people who are really passionate about it, who are really mantras, no doubt.
My most transcendental experiences have, in life, have been those times. There is something just exquisite,
Yeah, definitely. And I became so even though my practice started in this. yogic tradition, I became curious about other groups of people chanting. And so I would go to a Sikh temple, which is one of my favorite [00:21:00] places to chant. They chant Wahe Guru.
And I had to investigate. I was like, Oh, is there any chanting here?
Oh yeah. In this little room after five o'clock, and so I was with the hardcore of the hardcore, like they were there every day and it. was just so beautiful. And I've also been to Buddhist temples and small community centers with, Chinese Buddhism within Sydney. And everyone welcomed me, given me, like the sheet of paper with the sounds.
And I'm finding all of these similarities sitting with people often devoted to a higher force. And there's lots of different sounds going on, but the intention is often Similar.
Connection to divinity. I grew up Roman Catholic and I came from a lineage of Catholics. [00:22:00] My mother was fairly devout. My grandmother, seriously devout, you would go to church every day. And She would chant, do the rosary, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, or a different prayer, and they would do repetitions with the rosary.
It's essentially a mala, and it's the same. It's the same. And in fact, one of the things I fell out a little bit with the Catholic Church, when I got a little bit older, I had a, let's say, a philosophical difference with some of the things that went on there. And, A bit of an ethical conflict and it left a hole in my life.
It really did. And it was quite a few years before I found myself in yoga. In fact, one of my first yoga teachers said, I often find that those ex Catholics make really good yoga students because We were looking for God, we were looking for divinity, and I miss the singing, I miss the singing. It wasn't [00:23:00] actually really until I went to Mangrove, the first time I landed there, I stayed for three months, and I remember writing to a friend going, Oh, I really don't like chanting mantras to other gods.
I feel like there's a There's this Catholic in me that's saying, no, there is only one God and you're not allowed to sing the names of any other ones. After a while, it just soaked over me and I just fell in love. And it was the first time in a long time that I'd really connected with just being able to sing the names of the divine again.
It was just it, my intellectual mind was. And I was able to switch off and I was really able to just dive into that experience and marinate in that experience. They had some wild kirtans there. I don't know if you ever did any of the Akhand kirtans where we teamed up with one time with the Krishnas from Sydney and we did, is it 48 hours of the Maha Mantra.
That's just next level stuff. Amazing. 48 [00:24:00] hours of Hare Krishna. It was cool. Very cool. Silence.
cultural appropriation? I don't like, how would I feel comfortable? I'm like, I think I'm the wrong person to ask because I've Never in my life felt more comfortable than I do bowing down to Shiva, wearing a sari, Kumkum on my head, Om Namah Shivaya, I can't explain that,
[00:25:00] But I haven't met an Indian person that has said, don't do that.
That's my culture. They're like, Oh wow. I'm so glad to see your passion towards, this as well. And what you're saying. It's like you have
This is my tradition.
Yeah. Om Namah Shivaya. Yeah. Put that there. And then they see someone from a different place come and just do it with such reverence and such devotion that they then are learning something from the way that we are doing it. Or, they could head over to a different, Catholicism and find themselves there and that's also fine.
But it's also a conversation that I think is important to have is who is complaining about the, it being inappropriate for different people to practice another, something that we maybe weren't born into, but we feel more comfortable with than our own culture. Is [00:26:00] that not okay?
Yeah, I've checked in on a num, on that on a number of occasions with Indian Hindu friends and they laugh they're just like we love it. Like we love it. My, my teacher is Indian, who really pushed me forward to go and teach and take it out into my world and share the practices.
I do it in a way that respects the lineage. So that's a big part of what I teach. connected to a lineage, which has its basis in Hinduism. And I don't, I haven't packaged it up and commercialized it. I guess maybe there's reflections there. If you turn it into something else and say, Hey, this is mine.
And you don't connect to the lineage, then maybe. Look, every single person I've ever checked in with has just [00:27:00] wow, cool. And you go to those. Many of the Kirtans, most of them, you've got a really healthy representation of cultures from everywhere. There's a lot of Israelis, an amazing amount of Israelis, always.
Like the core of many Kirtan communities are Israeli and they just love it. They just love God. I often compare myself, I don't know if you've ever read the book, Life of Pi. Did you ever see read there's a movie as well. Brilliant book, and it's a story about this young Indian boy, Pi, who, he ends up on a boat with a tiger.
That's the story of his And it's the story of him living on a boat with a tiger. His family actually own a zoo. That's what happens. And then the zoo is moving and they have all the animals from the zoo on this boat and the boat sinks. And he ends up on the life raft with a tiger and the book is set around him getting along with this tiger and trying to, learning how to live together.
And so they're trying to support each other and [00:28:00] trying to keep the tiger alive, la di da. But this guy Pi, he's just obsessed with God. He's, he is, what God is he into? All of them. All of them. I love Jesus. I'm interested in Muhammad. I've been a bit like that. I was really interested in Islam, particularly Sufism.
And I love Hinduism. I love the stories. I love the metaphor. I love the wisdom, but I also, I've actually, it's interesting. My study of Hinduism has brought me back around to Christianity and I don't, definitely don't really identify as being a Catholic. I now have found great peace with my heritage and my mother and that lineage that I came from.
And I've managed to forgive the Catholic church for what's gone on there and, see the good that they bring into the world as well. And that came through Hinduism. The Hindus just love God.
Yeah, and the Hindus I feel also I acknowledge all other traditions as well. It's oh yes come, it's all welcome. It's all welcome.
[00:29:00] So let's look at mantra, its place in the world today. The world's a complicated place, okay, so hopefully we can agree on that. At certain levels it's a complicated place. Mantra is very simple. If you look at the OM mantra in particular, it's a single syllable, or three syllables woven together into a single sound. What's the importance in your mind of mantra in the world today?
The question makes me emotional, actually. Because I think it is really important and when we so when we say mantra, we've been talking about all different traditions. So we're talking about repetitive sound prayer, because yeah, so some people might call it different things.
One thing I think is the connection and the connection to self and also an enhanced or an increased self awareness. Cause I [00:30:00] think. That's the main aim in yoga, is self awareness. The other thing is connection to something higher than the self. We might say in some philosophies they're the same thing.
Okay.
But connection to the divine, others around us and the environment. So in, in these experiences that we study, both we study ego disillusion and mystical experiences. People tend to feel more connected to others and their environment and lose the sense of separateness between self and other. And so then we get back to the social connection or even the altruism.
So realizing the other as the self. And, yeah, I think, for me, that's what's [00:31:00] important that's what's important about being here. There's a lot of distractions, and my work is also a distraction I, I research the, the science of these practices, but, ouch, it's hard work, being a female out in the academic world, also experiencing quite a lot of discrimination with our topic, being criticized from the spiritual communities, being criticized from the scientific communities, Everything is, is taking us maybe not away, maybe it's just challenges to go through, but I definitely need chanting in my life to, yeah, to get
There's a, There's an interesting juxtaposition between what mantra is, which is a relief in many ways from the mind, and academia. which is the pursuit of the mind, trying to understand things and explain things intellectually. [00:32:00] And you are seeking to explore intellectually, in a way, the undefinable.
But I'd also see the beauty there because you're it in a way that is going to give it relevance to more people. I have a great interest in yoga nidra, the practice of yoga nidra. I teach it and practice it a lot. It's been a very important part of my own personal journey. And there is some amazing research being done around yoga nidra over a period of time now, but more and more, it would seem there's really interesting science.
Andrew Huberman is big on yoga nidra. Lot of the biohackers are really big on the potential of yoga nidra. But what yoga nidra is, it's an experience of the no mind state. It's Turiya, it's the dot on the om there's mindlessness. There's timelessness. You're literally pausing the clock and you're able to experience. reality, which is Turiya, that experience [00:33:00] of nothingness, but trying to sell that to people scientifically. That's the outcome. Ultimately, that's the destination of Yoga Nindra. What you get along the way to that experience is a profound settling of the nervous system, really. Deep ventral vagal experience.
You're able to unseed latent trauma and recalibrate your mind. There's some, and they can measure that stuff. They can measure that stuff. We can explore and expand and extrapolate and prove that hey, there's something happening here. They can hook us up to various pieces of equipment and go, wow, yeah, there's something really happening here.
But the real outcome of yoga nidra, as far as I'm concerned, it's knowing Shiva. Shiva Consciousness. You really can't put that into a paper and sell it to whoever you have to sell it to get your funding approved.
We
Okay.
[00:34:00] But we use the language Shiva or we use Shiva to explain a concept that we can't actually talk about in this realm. I, so obviously, yeah, we can't. But yeah, those altered states are a way of trying to get at that. That unseen world in the scientific framework.
Yeah.
It's a dance, but it's an important dance. And it's interesting because I've seen you, somebody who is deeply connected to the devotional elements. Mantra, as far as I'm concerned, is really practical. It's a very practical thing to do. Any smart person should be. Hopefully, engaging with the practice to relieve themselves from their mind.
And my attraction to mantra, and I often share this when I run trainings in yoga, run yoga teacher trainings with new teachers, and my observation of many yogis over a long period of time, [00:35:00] many senior yogis, people who've been at it for a long period of time, they all seem to gravitate to mantra.
eventually, if not initially, maybe we come to yoga for back bends and handstands, but I won't say all, but many, if not most of the senior teachers, certainly that I've looked towards and respected, they're utilizing mantra as a core part of their practice. And there's a reason for that.
That's not just a Strange, quirky coincidence. These are very pragmatic people, most of them, who are wholly dedicated to the evolution of spirit, wholly connect to the pursuit, the desire for yogic liberation. And so why do they keep coming to mantra? Why is it? There's a reason for that. What's the reason, Gemma?
Yeah I think it's easy. I think it's an easy and very efficient practice. There are [00:36:00] different, I think, different ways of chanting for different types of personalities. So you have a very devotional style of chanting for that devoted person. And then you have these very intricate articulation for the people that want to really focus on, the betas and pronouncing things correctly.
So they get there in a more kind of mechanical way, rather than just bowing down, there's these different sort of pathways through it's. I think a lot of us are starving for community. And, we spoke a little bit about that group practice before, but there's a whole range of things going on when we do group practices.
So even if we clap together we move together, we sing together and, we have all these kinds of entrainment going on and that, that connection that can happen potentially. Not even in the room with others. So that, with the Zoom chanting or [00:37:00] individual and also what we spoke about before is it's in every, almost, I don't know, I don't know what tradition it's not in, but, I'd say almost every tradition throughout history, throughout the world, there is this practice, practices that don't work, don't survive.
So I think as well, there are a lot of we spoke a little bit about the Patanjalis Yoga Sutras before. There's philosophies to follow within yoga and that kind of thing, but they are pretty hard work.
Can be sure.
That's not, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras is not for the faint hearted, like it's quite a prescriptive and it says things that I think, like we spoke about that we may not even be able to speak about, we've got like these beautiful poetic verses, but [00:38:00] I think a lot of people can't access that path.
It's not actually for everyone in this day and age. With the tantric yoga, we're more looking at something like integrating it into a busy lifestyle or, like putting, using life for spiritual growth. Rather than rejecting a lot of things in life. Going into that cave and finding consciousness, think the chanting is something that can be really integrated into life, individual group.
It can be done with musical instruments, it can be done without anything. It can be a very simple musical style, like I play with the harmonium and just do chords and, all my beautiful musician friends, they play on top violin and make it sound much better, but it doesn't need to be it doesn't need to be fancy.
So yeah, I think that there's a lot of benefits to the practice. Yeah.
So good. So good. Mantra for me is often, as I [00:39:00] said before, it's me and my car, singing along, particularly when I'm on a long trip, just, which I have actually live in Lennox Head and I'm often driving into Byron Bay, which is about 20 minutes, or if I'm fairly quick, I can do, a full round of, I'd do sort of seven Gayatri, seven Mahamritanjaya and about three of the Durga path, the 32 names of Durga.
It works on a straight road, does not work in traffic because you need to have a. different level of awareness. And another question that I was wishing to explore with you is using mantra as a meditation technique. And I know there's meditative elements to it, but we're talking more perhaps Vedic meditation or Transcendental meditation or You're probably familiar with the practice of a Ajapa Japa using the Soham mantra, really coming into that quieter mind with silent repetitious mantra.[00:40:00]
What's your experience there and do you have you looked, because I know there's been a lot of studies done around the effects of this type of meditation.
Repetition. There are different ways to do it. So that will lead to, I think, different effects. With transcendental meditation, there's a kind of instruction of not focusing. And so you're letting things whirl around. With the mantra, and your thoughts, and you don't really focus, you just let it, and it's a good relaxation technique.
Whereas some other practices will be like focus on that mantra, focus on the breath, bring in, a symbol, bring in the Lotus or an m or a Yantra as well, because we want. All of your focus into this, and that's [00:41:00] going to get you a different effect than whirling around, potentially, I, we haven't tested the difference between these and these are the details, that we come to, we're still in a kind of broader way of researching things and finding out, hey, who's chanting, what are the benefits, and then we can start to get into the nitty gritty. But I think what we do find in the research is belief is important.
Right
so whether you believe that what you're doing is effective or whether you have a belief, if we're talking about Shiva or divinity or more self awareness and you believe that you're doing that practice, your focus may even be enhanced because you have stronger belief systems around it, you may be more likely to practice.
The other thing is you're more likely to be able to interpret your experiences. because some experiences [00:42:00] can be, quite profound and sometimes confronting. With the psychedelics, there's a lot of psychedelics a lot of research on psychedelics at the moment. And the people that go in atheist, they don't come out the other end atheist from having these profound experiences.
And we use measures similar to the ones they use in psychedelics. So they're having profound experiences in chanting as well. Yeah.
Beautiful. Yeah. And I, would suggest perhaps that chanting is a more accessible, low risk and sustainable practice and that you can chant mantra every day. You might look, you certainly can have those revelatory massive experiences, but my journey has been. It's just steady as she goes, just a slow unveiling that whistling away of truth.
And if you work with a particular mantra over a particular time, there's a level of effort and commitment there, but [00:43:00] look it's a friendship. Talk about my relationship to certain mantras as a friendship and that I've gotten to know them over time. And I know that I can call on them. They're always there.
All I need to do is open my voice and bring that mantra, bring that resonance into being, and it's there in my life. And the more I chant it, the more powerful it is. And for example, I've been working with the Gayatri Mantra for a long period of time and I never had anyone really explain it to me.
In fact, most of my teachers were like, don't worry about what the mantras mean. Just focus on the mantra. I just chant on the mantra. And of course I wanted to know what the mantra meant. My experience with Gayatri is that it is. The quality of light that, and that just is just my observation of I'm chanting with mantra, actually chanting the Gayatri mantra, I feel like I'm literally chanting along with the resonance of light.
That is my [00:44:00] meditation. That's a profound experience sitting there in the sunlight and just chanting along with the resonance of light. I don't know if that's correct or what, but that's how I feel. And that's that. That's the intent and that's the energy that I bring into my practice with Gayathri Mantra and that positivity around it.
It's, I'm not getting that in other aspects of my life. That's quite unique.
Yeah, it's really interesting to see how the different sounds have different impacts and whether we could say that, eventually we could potentially test but people are sensitive in different ways. So we don't know if that impact that you're having from the Gaia tree is going to be somebody else's experience of it.
And also for someone that might have this experience within 10 minutes, somebody else might [00:45:00] get that experience within 20 years. And it's so hard to put these aspects into science and kind of lump everything together and go, okay, like this does that. But I certainly understand what you're saying.
And I have different. I have felt very different impacts from different sounds.
It does seem to be commonality. It's tricky. It's you trying to put things into a scientific understanding and the yogis would to some degree laugh at you. But then yoga is very scientific. It's, you want to work on Manipura Chakra, yeah, great, we've got a mantra for that. We can help you with that.
Let's work on it in a very specific way and it is one of the tools that we use in Kriya Yoga, Kundalini Yoga, we're working with mantra, Bandhas, Mudras. certain breath techniques, Kumbhaka, et cetera, and working specifically into areas. But mantra is fundamental to that. It is, it's almost like the pointy [00:46:00] end of the spear or the other elements.
And when you bring a really sophisticated practice of yoga, a mantra is at the heart of it. Mantra is absolutely at the heart of it. Tantra is a practice of name and form. So you have a mantra. And then you have an expression of that mantra, whether that's a physical posture or an idea or a sound or a picture, a yantra.
So what about your personal practice with mantra? Do you have a personal mantra that's been given to you by a teacher, by a guru, or are you working with a range of different mantras? .
and as to what I need, and sometimes I've been informed by my experience and had to take that back to a teacher and [00:47:00] say, this is what's happening. And then that teacher has worked with me with the experience because the.
The mantras, they sometimes choose us rather than the other way around. And yeah also depends the practice. How busy I am and how much energy I have. I've just come out of like a six day fever
And I can't say that I was sitting down to to my altar every day.
I, wasn't practicing in that way, but I would maybe just be lying down and doing a, doing some Soham or visualizing or also doing certain practices for healing that I've been taught in India. It always changes but I'm, yeah, always working with teachers and my own experiences as well.
My teacher in India is like everyone, everyone Takes up like a plate and offers things to like the [00:48:00] teacher flowers and honey and like ghee and all this kind of thing and I'm like, here's my thesis,
Ah,
here's my thesis,
that's glorious. Yeah.
because that's also something, my work is something that I offer up to, like it's a devotional practice in a way as
Yeah, it absolutely is. We're yogis in the modern world. This podcast is a devotional practice. I'm doing this because. I was instructed to by my guru in some way, shape or form, I need you out there doing this stuff, not, I don't want you in an ashram in India, I want you, not specifically, but I want you out there in the world, educating people about yoga.
And this is the way we do it. This is what it looks like in 2025. It could look very different in another however many years. Let's jump a little bit, if you don't mind, and Perhaps for some [00:49:00] people listening to this haven't got a huge exposure to what the mantras are and the different mantras and we've mentioned a few but I thought it might be a little bit of fun just to explore quickly a few of the major ones, the more universal mantras and understand a little bit about what they are, where they've come from, and maybe perhaps the use of those mantras.
I'm happy just this to be a conversation and get your input. Let's start with the obvious. Start where it all began. Start with mantra om. your take on om? Where's where is the om useful? What's the importance of om? Okay.
What you're looking for, because, and this is where some of that criticism I was speaking about comes into play, we did a few studies on [00:50:00] chanting Aum and we found that it decreases cortisol, reduces stress, it activates the parasympathetic nervous system and some spiritual some spiritual people Would say how dare you talk about reducing stress.
yeah.
What a trivial thing to do. And I'm not saying that OM only reduces stress, but it can also reduce stress, I mean we talk about OM being in The fundamental sound of everything, that om is in all sounds. In my neighbor's air conditioner that they have going 24 7, om is in there.
That's beautiful. In the cacophony of the world, there's an um, there's an um. I love the all important dot on the um symbol I mentioned before, turiya, the [00:51:00] silence beyond the um, the primordial silence. There's so much that, again, like you can use the um like a tool as an exploration of the chakras, the personal practice, which is often taught in tantric practice.
It's, we're. It's, we're. Bring it, letting the um begin in Mooladhara chakra and rise up with the increased resonance. So it begins with his deep base in Mooladhara and rises up in an um meditation that rises up through Agnya and through Sahasra and that um becomes at that level quite tantric. And it's, as we've spoken about, it's a tool.
It's like, how many ways can you use a hammer? Lots of different ways, lots of different ways, there's so many different things. But again, it's a, this is more of a conversation just to explore from our understanding. One of the other things I love about OM as a teacher, it's just so accessible.
I can introduce the OM mantra to a group and everyone. already knows it usually, [00:52:00] but if they don't, it's, they've learnt in four seconds, and we can break it down. We can explore the syllables. It's so accessible. It's a, an entry into it's the final destination, but it's also the entry point as well. What about what about the Maha Mantra?
Maha
Yes. What is the Maha Mantra, for those who don't know? Hare
Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.
Rama Rama Hare Hare
there is one Maha Mantra, because Maha Mantra is just great
Yeah, sure.
It depends who you talk to about what is the Maha Mantra, but that is the one that we usually talk about. And Yeah, you were talking about doing 48 hours of that. I went recently to, or not recently, this was during my PhD. I went to Murwillumbah, the farm, and they have five days of [00:53:00] the Maha Mantra over Easter and,
hours?
No, not 24 hours.
So it's just every day, I think it's eight hours a day kind of thing. And I went there during the PhD to understand a little bit more about the practices and, I remember writing, I was in my van and writing to my supervisors and I'm still on a farm with the Hare Krishnas and I can't come back yet and this is, and just crying and just absolutely having my own experience of it, but also speaking with a lot of people about their how they interpret it and, It was like, at some points, like a rock concert, people were swinging off lights on the ceiling, and, things got pretty,
They get wild, huh? Yeah.
pretty wild. But my personal experience of it is, and Vishnu in general, because this is really Vishnu, isn't it? [00:54:00] Is love. Is is love, is the heart.
I, that's where I feel Krishna and Vishnu and yeah.
The ecstasy of Krishna, which is interesting because that's what really circles me back to Christianity and gave me love back to Christianity. It's pretty easy to cross reference Krishna Consciousness with Christ Consciousness and that deep connection of just love of charity.
And there's a beautiful word, you mentioned it before, and I picked it up when I was reading through some of the extracts of your papers, but I can't remember the exact word you used it just before, but being able to, or altruism. The Maha Mantra makes us altruistic. There's so much love if you go to, and perhaps the reason that the the Krishna Mantra is [00:55:00] the Maha Mantra is because it's got a really passionate group of ambassadors.
It's got a lot of people who are really passionate about bringing that mantra and all that mantra represents forward into the world. So anyone who hasn't. connected with the Krishna movement in the world, I highly recommend it in most parts of the world. We're fortunate in Australia to have some really loud and proud Krishna devotees.
I was a kid actually, a teenager, I lived in Sydney and I was in I had a friend actually who, his parents had a funeral business in North Sydney. Mora family funerals, and we used to go to his place and hang out, and we'd smoke weed. They had a What do you call where you keep the dead bodies? In, the funeral home has a place where they keep the morgue.
They have it, they had a morgue, and we used to go into his morgue and smoke weed, and we were like 15 year old boys, 16 year old boys, and then we'd go down. He was a few hundred meters from the Krishna temple. Then we go down to the Krishna temple and dance and eat food and [00:56:00] just be there. And it was just this, as a teenage boy, it was just like, whoa, I'm just stoned and just opened up.
I couldn't talk when I smoked weed, but I could just dance and I could sing and I was just, and I could eat. I could eat. It was such an amazing experience. And then when I came to Byron, there used to be And that was 25 years ago, there used to be every week at the Scout Hall, there would be a a Krishna feast.
And as I mentioned at Mangrove and at various other parts. Various other parts around the world have been able to connect with that mantra and the fellowship of love that surrounds that mantra. But let's, maybe let's jump mantras. And I mentioned before the Gayathri mantra as a celebration of light, a devotion to light. Have you got any takes on the Gayathri? It seems to be one of the most universally loved and utilized mantras on the market.
yeah, I think it's a beautiful one because I really love the ones that are dedicated to really [00:57:00] nature,
The sun, the, that is the ultimate deity, the sun.
Unbelievable, but the person to speak to about the Gayatri is Dominic Haas in Austria, I think he is, did his entire PhD on the Gayatri.
Wow.
Yeah. And he's more of a historian than a psychologist, but he's absolutely, yeah very passionate and just knows it inside out. So it's like in a scholarly way, but also in a practical way. Yeah.
Look, there's a heritage of guide three, which it's. It's a vibration. It's not a series of words. There are many ga threes that versions of the dietary using the same meter that the, that it's the resonance, not the words. And yeah. GA three guy, I've described it as the guy I would actually a part of B would, I'd mentioned this to a friend a little while ago, would love to talk to [00:58:00] people all around the world about their experience with Guide three.
And just, there's so many different, it seems to be. And the title of the film that I would call it would be Guy at Three, A Love Affair. Because it is. People talk about their love affair with that mantra. It's my experience. They talk about it in a way that, as though they would describe their dearest intimate friend.
Yeah. Yeah. So psychiatry for me is I've done it a lot on cliffs, at sunrise and sunset and. That's where I see it happening. The
those little moments, those poignant moments. What about something perhaps a little bit quieter, like a Shiva mantra? The Shiva mantra is the other maha mantras the Mahamrityunjaya mantra, for example, or Om Namah Shivaya. What's your journey with the Shiva mantras?
Mahamrityunjaya mantra was the first mantra that I ever learned.
okay.
[00:59:00] so I have special relationship with it. I use it often and yeah like he's explaining friend, like that, that one to me would be definitely a friend and so powerful, like really powerful, shiva as well is like a comforting place for me. A lot of people do not find Shiva comforting because, he's a bit dusty and can be a little bit terrifying for people. But I
yeah, Shiva is I also find Shiva, I use Shiva more to balance and In terms of like the elements, the elemental forces and balancing out the elemental forces within the body and I also would just say about Shiva, Arunachala, when I go to Arunachala, which is the mountain in India, which is said to be Shiva.
[01:00:00] And every time that I've been there I've wondered whether I'm going to come down off that mountain.
Wow.
Yeah, it's probably my favorite place in the world.
Okay. There's a practice I love to do in my meditation where I sit and I listen. And I Imagine that I am Lord Shiva, or I'm sitting on Kailash, or a mountain, it doesn't matter. That Shiva consciousness of just listening to the world. Just listen to the world. That's it. No need to interfere. No need to judge.
Just listen. Listen to the world. That's one of my favorite go to meditation practices, is just listening to the world. And the Mahamrityunjaya mantra if anyone who's been to such an under ashram would no doubt have experience the Agnihotra practice, the havan that happens pretty much every Saturday in most Satyananda ashrams, where they do 108 rounds of the [01:01:00] Mahamrita Jaya Mantra as a prayer for peace.
One of the things I realized when it was first introduced that you, there's a list they pass around. You probably would have been to one at Mangrove or somewhere, at Manly, and they they've a list for the people. Who are unwell. And being a Christian, I was thinking, okay, you pray for the people that are unwell and God will come down and make them okay.
And I realized over time is that's not what it's about. It's actually about you being okay with those people not being okay. Shiva's not coming down and casting magic spells on making people well. It's actually about you accepting that sickness and death and pain is just a part of reality and that we have to be okay with that.
And that is the magic of Shiva is that Shiva's not in there intruding and changing things. Shiva's, that connection to Shiva consciousness is about. It's just unbinding us from the suffering. At least being able to have some distance and space from the complications as they exist. And there's [01:02:00] a place in Rishikesh, the Shivananda ashram in Rishikesh, where apparently they've been chanting the Mahamrityunjaya mantra 24 hours since World War One.
So since the beginning of World War One, Swami Shivananda Got people chanting the Mahamrityunjaya Mantra, there's a little room there and apparently it's still going. That, 24 hours, someone's in there with a harmonium or whatever else and chanting the Mahamrityunjaya Mantra. Be cool to go and check that one out someday.
Yeah. Look, I think that we should leave it with Shiva. All has been said. We could go further, no doubt, exploring the magic of bija mantra, etc. But I really appreciated and enjoyed this conversation, Gemma. It's been amazing. So thank you.
Yeah. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed having a chat as well. And I know [01:03:00] we went to some tangents, so I hope that's okay. But,
Oh, we love a tangent. I'm a huge fan of tangent. Look, mantra is the thread. Mantra was always going to be the thread. There's so many tangents you can go. I think that's part of the point, is that there's lots of different ways to explore mantra as a tool for psychology, as a tool for transcendence, as a tool for experiencing divinity. Start somewhere. How do people contact you, Gemma? Where do we find you?
There's everything on my website. So drjemmaperry. com. au and that can lead to, every other social media form, Instagram, Facebook, Researchgate, LinkedIn,
all the things, and you are teaching mantra, you're running courses,
Yeah, so at the moment I do four terms of online chanting, which I see is like a like a yoga asana class where people come for a term and drop [01:04:00] in or, that kind of thing. But then I also will be having some More courses coming up going to be doing some courses for psychologists and health practitioners, yoga therapists, things like mantra for PTSD, mantra for depression, anxiety.
We've got, I can't think of them all right now, but yeah, so a lot of things are coming up. Neuroscience of mantra, we do a workshop where we actually run an experiment and get some EEG data in real time and yeah,
cool. Very cool. Look, thank you so much. I can't wait to see what you come up with next. And yeah. Thank you for what you, thank you for bringing, sharing your time with us here, but also for what you're doing to support the work The evolution of mantra in, in the world, the propagation of mantra.
So keep going. I'm a fan. I'm a fan.
you. Thanks.
Hari [01:05:00] Om Tat Sat. Should we close with an om? I think we could close with, maybe you could take us out with three oms. Is that okay?
Yeah, sure. Yep. There's. Ah
container. Om.
seated posture, maybe closing the eyes as long as you're not driving or something. Inhale. Om. Om. Narayom [01:06:00] tat sat.
Thank you, au revoir, and we'll meet again soon I'm sure.
Yeah, thanks so much, Mark.
Have a beautiful day Gemma,
