Om Chanting

Om chanting as a practice is nine repetitions, about three minutes, each one a four count inhale followed by a twelve count chant, building to twenty one repetitions and about seven minutes over six weeks, followed by two minutes of silence. Early morning before food, or the evening. That is the dose.

The syllable has three sounds, A, U and M, made as one continuous exhale that changes shape rather than three separate syllables. It is chanted in classes and temples across India and appears at the start and end of a great deal of yoga practice, and it is also studied in the research literature under Omkara and Om chanting, which is why there is anything to cite at all.

The pronunciation section below is the part of this page I would read first, because the commonest fault by far is chanting OH instead of AH and losing more than half the sound. And the evidence, which is one twelve person imaging pilot and a meta analysis of mantra practices in general, is smaller than the confidence with which it is usually quoted.

Om is written with two letters in English and has three sounds in it, which is the whole source of the confusion. Written properly it is AUM.

The three are one movement. The jaw stays where it is and the lips do the work: open for AH, rounding for OO, closed for MM, with the sound never stopping. Half the chant is the A, which is the part almost everybody shortens.

A useful test: chant one repetition with a hand flat on the belly and then a hand flat on the top of the head. If you cannot feel the AH low down and the MM high up, you are chanting OH from the middle of your mouth and the practice has become a word. Slow it down, start with the mouth genuinely open, and let the rounding happen late.

The hum at the end is the same vibration used in Bhramari, and if you already practise that, it is the sensation you are looking for.

Nine repetitions to begin. A four count inhale plus a twelve count chant is around sixteen seconds a repetition once you allow for the breath arriving on its own, so nine is a little under three minutes.

• Week 1 to 2: 9 repetitions with an eight count chant. Two and a half minutes, plus one minute of silence.
• Week 3 to 6: 9 to 12 repetitions with a twelve count chant. Three to four minutes, plus two minutes of silence.
• Week 7 onwards: 21 repetitions with a twelve count chant. About seven minutes, plus two minutes of silence.
• Frequency: once a day, morning or evening. An hour after a light meal.
• Silence: two minutes at the end, always. It is not optional and it is the first thing people drop.

Twenty one is where I stop. Longer chanting sessions exist and belong to a devotional context rather than to a practice page, and the students who have tried to go much beyond it mostly report a tired voice.

Nobody publishes a ladder for chanting, which is odd, because the thing that grows is the length of the sound and it grows exactly the way a long exhale does.

The ratio matters more than the count. A twelve count chant against a four count inhale is a 1:3 breath, which is a longer exhale than any of the counted breathing practices on this site ask for, and it arrives without anybody having to be told to lengthen it. That is the reason I use chanting to teach a long exhale to students who cannot count one.

This practice is quoted with far more confidence than the literature supports, so here it is at its actual size.

The imaging study. Twelve right handed healthy volunteers, nine men, scanned during audible Om chanting, during a sssss sound and at rest. Om produced significant bilateral deactivation in the orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, parahippocampal gyri, thalami and hippocampi, with the right amygdala deactivating too. The sssss control produced neither activation nor deactivation there, which is the useful part: it suggests the effect is not simply making a noise. The authors observed the pattern resembles vagus nerve stimulation, which is used in depression and epilepsy. It is a pilot, it says so in its own title, and twelve people is twelve people.

The mantra literature. A 2022 meta analysis of 51 randomised trials of mantra based meditation found anxiety at g equals minus 0.46, depression at minus 0.33, stress at minus 0.45 and post traumatic symptoms at minus 0.59. Not one study was at low risk of bias, only four assessed safety, and effects were bigger against passive controls than active ones. Most of those trials are transcendental meditation and similar, not Om chanting specifically.

What follows. Chanting Om appears to do something specific in the brain that making an unrelated sound does not, on the evidence of a twelve person pilot. Mantra practices in general help anxiety, stress and mood by a small to moderate amount on evidence that is weakened by bias. Nothing here supports treating any illness, and the review that gathers the sleep mechanisms says so itself, describing the pathways as proposed rather than proven. If you want the practice from this family with the best trial evidence behind it, that is yoga nidra.

It goes at the beginning, at the end, or both, and it works as a practice entirely on its own.

1. Three Oms to open. Not the practice, just a marker, and it settles a room faster than any instruction.
2. Asana, or breathing practice, or both.
3. Om chanting proper: 9 to 21 repetitions at 4:12. Three to seven minutes.
4. Two minutes of silence, sitting.
5. Savasana, if there is time.

On its own, in the early morning before anybody else is awake, it is the practice several of my long standing students have kept when they let everything else go. Sit for it in Padmasana or Vajrasana if you can, or on a chair, and give the chest room.

If you already do Bhramari, the closing hum is the same vibration and the two go together naturally: nine Oms and then five rounds of Bhramari makes a complete ten minutes for the evening. And if a long exhale is what you are working on, this practice will teach it more quickly than counting will, which is the argument the three part breath page makes from the other direction. In the online classes I ask everybody to unmute for the chanting, which is the one time I do.

It appears in the quiet parts of this site and in the philosophy.

• Yoga for anxiety includes it, with the honest caveat that the evidence is a twelve person pilot and a meta analysis of mantra practices in general.
• The eight limbs of yoga is where the syllable's place in the wider scheme belongs, and it is worth reading before deciding what chanting is for.
• The glossary has Omkara, pranava and japa, which are the terms you will meet if you read further.
• Sivananda and kundalini both use chanting far more centrally than a general class does, and those pages say how.
• So Hum is the practice I offer to students who would rather not chant a syllable with a religious history, and it does a similar job.

If you want to hear a chant done at the right speed rather than read about it, that is what an introductory class is for, and chanting is the one part of a practice that genuinely transmits better in a room than in writing.