The first thing you hear is a voice, not a chord. Over a bed of soft, sustained sound, a spoken line sets the terms: "We have to get out of our minds. Our thinking minds." A short pause, a few seconds of music, and then the offer that frames everything after it: "I'll tell you how I do it. By using a mantra or phrase." That phrase is "I am loving awareness," and across roughly ten minutes of the official audio for "I Am Loving Awareness (feat. Krishna Das)," credited to East Forest and Ram Dass, it is repeated, sung, spoken, and returned to until it stops sounding like a sentence and starts working like a door. This piece looks closely at that one mantra: what it asks the listener to do, how its lines build from awareness to love to the heart, and what the track leaves for you to finish on your own.
Start with the diagnosis, because the track does. "We have to get out of our minds" is not a call to feel more or to fix anything in particular. It names a place the listener already lives: the thinking mind, the running commentary that narrates the day, rehearses conversations, and judges what it sees. The lyric's repetition of "our thinking minds" is a small act of emphasis. It makes the point that the problem is not thinking as such but the habit of being absorbed in it.
That framing matters for how the rest of the track should be heard. A mantra in this sense is not a slogan to believe in. It is a tool to give the restless mind something to hold, so that attention has a place to rest other than the next thought. The track is explicit that this is its method: "I'll tell you how I do it." The lyric is less a doctrine than a how-to, offered by someone describing their own practice.
The phrase is short on purpose. "I am loving awareness" has four words and no narrative, which gives the mind very little to elaborate on. When a phrase is repeated, the thinking mind tends to notice the repetition and, over time, loosen its grip on the content of its own chatter. The listener is invited to ride the phrase rather than analyze it, letting the words carry attention the way a current carries a boat.
The transcript of the track shows how the phrase is distributed. It comes back again and again, sometimes in full, sometimes split into fragments, sometimes sung in a stretched melody and sometimes spoken plainly over music. Those variations do real work. A phrase repeated identically can become mechanical; a phrase repeated in changing textures keeps re-entering the ear, which keeps the listener returning to the practice rather than drifting off inside it. If you try this yourself, you do not need to match the melody. Choose a phrase you can say without effort, say it slowly, and let each repetition be a fresh return to the words.
The most useful line in the track is the one that defines its key term. As the lyric has it: "Loving awareness is a name, for soul, which you really are. Leads you to love everything you are aware of." The sentence reverses an ordinary assumption. Most of us imagine that love is something we feel toward things, and that we must first find the right object for it. Here, the order is different. Awareness is the ground, and love is what that ground naturally turns toward when it is simply present.
The lyric then makes this concrete by naming what awareness is aware of: "The sky, the room, your body, other people." The list moves outward and then back inward, from the open sky to the ordinary room, through the body to the other people in a life. Nothing on the list is special. That is the point. The practice asks the listener to extend the same quality of attention to whatever is already in front of them, and to notice that the attention itself is already warm before it attaches to anything.
"Loving awareness is a name, for soul, which you really are. Leads you to love everything you are aware of."
(Lyric from the official audio of "I Am Loving Awareness (feat. Krishna Das)," East Forest and Ram Dass, released on YouTube in January 2019)
It is worth lingering on the phrase "which you really are." The track does not present loving awareness as a state to be achieved. It presents it as an identity to be recognized. That is a meaningful difference. A practice of achieving a state ends when the state fades. A practice of recognizing what you already are can be returned to at any moment, which is exactly what a repeated mantra makes possible.
After the list of objects, the lyric turns inward: "And then I ride the mantra into my heart." The movement is from the wide field of awareness down into a single point, the heart, which in many contemplative traditions is treated as the seat of attention and feeling rather than merely the organ of the body. Riding the mantra into the heart describes a descent: the phrase is no longer heard in the head but felt somewhere lower and warmer.
The track then describes what happens there: "In my heart, I see a doorway, or a veil to the next plane. Soul land." This is the most imagistic passage in the lyric, and it deserves a careful reading rather than a literal one. The doorway and the veil suggest that the heart is not a dead end but a threshold, something that can be looked through as well as stood in. "The next plane" and "soul land" point to a state the practice opens toward, a dimension of experience beyond the ordinary sense of self and the thinking mind's map of the world.
What the track does not do is explain the plane or the land. It offers the image and leaves the listener to meet it on their own terms. That restraint is consistent with the rest of the lyric. The track tells you how to hold the phrase and where the holding leads, then steps back. The arrival is the listener's to notice.
Listen for the texture as well as the words. The transcript of the official audio marks applause in several places, scattered among the spoken and sung passages and the music. Whatever the production history, the effect on a listener is that the spoken lines feel placed in a space rather than dropped into a studio booth. Applause in a meditation recording can work against stillness, reminding you that you are listening to a performance. Here it does the opposite. It keeps the phrase tied to a shared, social setting, which suits a practice whose core claim is that loving awareness extends outward to "other people."
The music itself stays out of the way. Long stretches of the track carry only a sustained bed under the words, so that the phrase is never buried. For anyone trying the practice, that is the most useful production choice: the track keeps returning to a clear, unhurried space where the words can be heard and repeated.
Honesty about the material matters here. The source for this piece is the track's official audio, its published lyrics, its credits, and a timestamped transcript. Those sources establish the mantra, its order of images, and the credits: East Forest and Ram Dass, with Krishna Das featured. They do not include a history of how the collaboration came together, a biography of the performers, or a commentary from the artists on their own intentions. Anything beyond the words and credits on the page would be guesswork, and this article does not guess.
What the material does show is reach. The official audio has drawn more than 540,000 views on YouTube since it was posted in January 2019, which suggests that a four-word phrase set to sparse music has found a long-running audience. For a listener, that is a practical invitation. The track is short enough to return to daily and open enough that its phrase can become your own.
Start with the practice rather than the analysis. Put the track on, or simply say the phrase yourself, and notice the first moment the thinking mind begins its commentary. Then return to the phrase. You do not need to believe the lyric in advance. Test it: say "I am loving awareness" for a few minutes, let the words move from your head toward your heart, and see what you notice when you reach for the sky, the room, your body, or the people around you.
For the full recording, the track is available on the major streaming services through the links in its official description, and the artists' own sites are listed there as well: eastforest.org and ramdass.org. If you want to keep exploring, follow the phrase rather than the platform. Notice where else in your listening a repeated line does the same job, pulling you out of thought and toward the ground the lyric calls awareness.
