In the daily churn of thought, emotion, and mental noise, most of us live as permanent passengers in an overcrowded theater of the mind. Dhyanse, a meditation teacher working in the contemporary lineage of Osho, Krishnamurti, and other modern contemplative voices, approaches this ancient problem with a tool stripped to its essence: the mantra OM Shanti Shanti Shanti—a practice so deceptively simple it feels almost scandalous in a culture that equates depth with complexity.
The teaching rests on a single, piercing observation: all the uncontrolled patterns in your mind—the plans, the regrets, the endless interior monologue—ultimately reduce to sound. "If you break down this inner articulation that is all going on uncontrolled in our head, this is nothing but words in any language," Dhyanse explains in his meditation session. And if words are sound, then the right sound can absorb and neutralize them.
The opening of the mantra—OM—is not mystical decoration. In any language, Dhyanse notes, there are only three primary fundamental sounds. OM contains all three. When you chant OM, you create a resonance that absorbs the energy driving your thoughts, impressions, and patterns. "All the energy behind all these thoughts, this uncontrolled impressions, these uncontrolled patterns that go on in your mind, they come to rest and the energy is absorbed by these three sounds and for a moment a silence is created for you," he describes. For that brief window, you step out of the madness of continuous thinking and emoting.
But absorption alone is not the full work. The mantra extends beyond OM to repeat the Sanskrit word Shanti—peace, silence—three times. Each repetition serves a specific function. The first Shanti directs that absorbed silence into your body; the second into your mind; the third into your spirit or core. The mantra is not declarative; it is directional. It tells your awareness where to land and settle.
Dhyanse structures the meditation itself in three ascending stages, a progression that honors both the chaos of the starting point and the depth available through sustained attention.
Stage One: Observation (3–5 minutes). Before chanting begins, the work is witness. Sit silently and observe your own mind without judgment, participation, or frustration. "Don't get frustrated just sit silently and witness and observe whatever is going on in your mind for three to five minutes to confront this madness that we all carry in us," Dhyanse instructs. This first phase is honest reconnaissance—a confrontation with the actual texture of your thought-stream. You do not attempt to stop it; you see it.
Stage Two: Chanting (10 minutes). With the mind now witnessed and its patterns acknowledged, the mantra enters. For ten minutes, repeat OM Shanti Shanti Shanti with conscious breath. With each utterance of the three Shantis, sequentially anchor your awareness: body (first Shanti), mind (second Shanti), spirit (third Shanti). "Let that settle, let that become silent," Dhyanse says. The chanting is not muscular or performative; it is a vehicle for placing your attention into progressively deeper layers of being. The mantra does the heavy lifting; your job is simply to ride it.
Stage Three: Silence (open duration). Once the chanting completes, do nothing. Stop all acts. "Simply sit in silence with awareness without a word, without an act, without a thought," Dhyanse says. Close your eyes and let go as deeply as you can. This is the harvest—the actual work is over; now you receive what has been prepared. Duration is open; there is no clock.
The tripling of Shanti is not arbitrary. Western meditation often treats the body, mind, and spirit as abstractions, or collapses them into a single undifferentiated experience. Dhyanse's approach is specific: silence is not one state but three states, and each requires direct attention. You cannot bypass the body to get to spirit. Each layer must settle in its own way.
This specificity mirrors the structure of classical meditation philosophy—particularly the Tantric and Yogic traditions—where the body is not an obstacle to transcendence but a primary instrument of it. By directing the silence of OM first into the gross physical form, then the subtle mind, then the causal spirit, the practice acknowledges a real hierarchy of density and invites release at each level.
The practice arrives in a culture drowning in stimulation and choice paralysis. Most contemporary wellness approaches offer more noise in the guise of optimization. Dhyanse's teaching offers instead an almost defiant simplicity: one mantra, three stages, silence. No visualization, no ideology, no brand. The method is portable, secular in application (though rooted in Sanskrit tradition), and testable on the first sitting.
The genius of OM Shanti Shanti Shanti is that it gives the beginner a container and the experienced practitioner a depth charge. A person trying meditation for the first time has a clear protocol: witness, chant, rest. A person who has sat for years finds in the tripled repetition a refinement tool—an opportunity to differentiate what they thought was unified silence into three distinct clarities.
Dhyanse's lineage—he traces his teaching to Osho, Krishnamurti, Gurdjieff, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and Maharishi Ramana—was always skeptical of unnecessary complexity. These teachers worked in English and the modern idiom precisely to strip meditation of exoticism and return it to lived function. A mantra that works is not a relic; it is a technology. OM Shanti Shanti Shanti is that technology in miniature.
If you are new to mantra, begin with the three-stage structure as offered: five minutes of observation, ten minutes of chanting, then open silence. Consistency matters more than duration—a brief daily practice will deepen faster than occasional long sessions. If you work with the mantra over weeks or months, notice which of the three Shantis—body, mind, spirit—creates the most release for you. That is information; follow it.
For those interested in the broader context, Dhyanse's teaching draws from contemporary interpretations of yoga and tantra, and his digital offerings (guided meditations, a book titled 10 Bulls of Meditation, and a meditation app) extend the practice into different formats. The lineage he honors—Osho, Krishnamurti, Gurdjieff—is available in their published works if you want to understand the philosophical soil from which his teaching grows.
