Mantra as a drawing tool

Mantra practice, japa, is usually done seated, with a string of 108 beads moving through the fingers. One bead per repetition, one round, then another. I started saying a mantra while drawing for a much more practical reason: I kept losing my place.

The rhythm becomes a ruler

A long yantra drawing involves hundreds of nearly identical gestures. Petal after petal, line after line. Somewhere around the fortieth petal the mind wanders, and the fortieth petal comes out a little different from the thirty-ninth.

With the mantra running quietly, each petal takes the same number of repetitions. The sound becomes a kind of metronome. When a petal takes two more repetitions than its neighbours, I look again, and usually find that something drifted.

What changed

Consistency. The repeated forms in my drawings are noticeably more even.
Pace. I stopped rushing the boring parts. The mantra doesn’t care whether the section is interesting.
Honesty. I can feel the moment my attention leaves the line, because the mantra stumbles at the same instant.
Fatigue. Strangely, long sessions are less tiring. The mind has one job instead of a dozen.

A caution

In the tradition, a mantra is received from a teacher and treated with care. I don’t think it is a productivity trick, and I would not recommend borrowing someone else’s sacred syllables to finish a commission faster. What I am describing is the other direction: practice leaking into the studio, rather than the studio using practice.

The line and the syllable both come from the breath. Neither should be hurried.