On Sound, Breath, Attention, and Living with Chronic Pain
As some of you may already know, I had been practicing various forms of mindfulness and meditation for over thirty years by the time chronic pain came into my life. I had learned different ways of working with my attention, my breath, and the constant activity of my own mind.
But pain changed the equation. Many of the things I knew how to do suddenly felt much harder to access when my body and brain were overwhelmed by pain that was both acute and relentless. This was also a time when the anchors of my daily life were slipping away, and the identity I’d built seemed to disappear.
Chanting had always been a significant part of my personal practice. Fortunately, by the time pain arrived in my life, I had built up a large collection of favorite chants over the years. I had memorized each of them and incorporated them into my days. At a time when my world seemed filled with fear and uncertainty, chanting was one of the few things I could still turn to.
Around then, a friend told me about the Hanuman Chalisa, a forty-verse chant in the Awadhi language, which I began listening to every day. I hadn’t heard of it before, but the theme seemed relevant to my situation. I learned it little by little, phrase by phrase, over the course of about a year. During one of the darkest periods of my life, learning those words became a project I could focus on every day and gave my mind something very specific to do:
Listen. Repeat the phrase. Take another breath.
When pain occupied nearly every corner of my awareness, the chant gave my attention somewhere else to go. It didn't make the pain disappear, but that wasn't what I expected it to do. Instead, it helped carry me from one breath to the next when thinking much beyond that felt impossible.
I want to be clear about something before I go further: I'm not offering chanting as medical guidance or suggesting that it treats chronic pain. I'm sharing something from my own lived experience, based on what I noticed during years of practicing meditation and chanting before and after pain became part of my life.
And what I've noticed is that chanting can bring several things together at once.
Something to come back to
One of the hardest things about intense pain is how aggressively it demands our energy and attention. We feel it. Measure it. Wonder whether it’s changed. Anticipate what it might do next. Sometimes we're barely aware we're doing any of this because monitoring the pain has become part of the background activity of the mind, like an ever-flowing undercurrent.
Chanting gives the mind another point of focus.
That might sound like “distraction,” and perhaps it is. I don't think distraction is inherently bad; there are times when getting some distance from pain is exactly what I need. But chanting has often felt a little different to me. Rather than desperately fighting to get my mind away from pain, I'm giving it somewhere else to rest. It takes me from a kind of battle stance to something much softer.
There's a difference between “Don't think about the pain” and “Come back to this.”
That distinction matters a lot to me.
Focusing on the breath, without making the breath the “assignment”
Breathwork can be helpful for many people, but I've sometimes found that the minute we turn breathing into something we're supposed to be doing correctly, we've given ourselves just another job, another task to perform.
Chanting approaches the breath differently. We need breath to produce sound, so breathing becomes part of the practice without necessarily being its sole focus. A phrase ends. We breathe. Another begins.
For me, that rhythm can be easier to settle into than telling myself to “pay attention to my breathing.” It feels far more natural, more organic.
Sound is something we can feel
Chanting isn't only words. It's also sound, and sound has a physical quality.
When we chant aloud, we can feel vibration in the chest, throat, face, or elsewhere in the body. Even when I'm listening rather than chanting myself, there's something about being surrounded by a repeated sound and rhythm that feels different from sitting in silence. Personally, I've found that silence can leave the door wide open for intrusive thoughts and worry.
And for someone living in a body that offers an enormous amount of unpleasant sensory information, having another physical sensation available, even a small one, can matter more than one might think.
I'm not suggesting that one sensation cancels out another. Mine certainly didn't. But the sound and vibration created by my voice gave me something else I could feel besides the pain.
Repetition can give the mind less to do
There is something quite reassuring about repetition.
Chants often repeat. Melodies return. Familiar phrases arrive where we expect them. Once I knew the Hanuman Chalisa well, I knew what was coming next. My mind knew the path.
By contrast, chronic pain can involve an extraordinary amount of uncertainty. What will I feel in an hour? Will this get worse? How much can I do today? What does this particular sensation mean?
A familiar chant doesn't ask me to solve anything.
It just continues.
Mindfulness doesn't have to mean silence
I think we sometimes picture mindfulness as someone sitting perfectly still in a quiet room, eyes closed, calmly observing their breath, with no desire whatsoever to look at the clock or pick up their cell phone.
I’m the first to admit that hasn’t always been my experience.
Mindfulness is fundamentally about attention, and chanting gives attention something concrete to hold on to. I can listen to a voice. Follow a phrase. Realize my mind has wandered and come back.
In that sense, chanting can become another way of practicing presence without requiring silence or an empty mind. Besides, an empty mind isn't really the goal anyway.
It isn't always about getting away from the pain
I know this may sound contradictory after everything I've just said, but chanting hasn't always been about escaping pain for me.
More often than not, it’s helped me stay with what’s happening without fighting quite so hard against it.
I've written elsewhere about melting into it: allowing myself, when I can, to soften some of the resistance around pain rather than continually bracing against it. Chanting can sometimes help me do that because I don't have to choose between focusing completely on the pain and frantically trying not to feel it.
The chant can simply be there alongside it.
Pain is here.
Sound is here.
Breath is here.
And I am here too.
That’s very different from trying to make the pain disappear.
A practice and a tool for difficult moments
I also don't think chanting has to be reserved for the moments when everything is falling apart.
In the beginning, listening to the Hanuman Chalisa every day mattered partly because it helped make the chant familiar to my mind. But later, during flares and on days when things felt harder to manage, it gave me something to lean on.
I still listen to it every day, and it’s become something I do whether the pain feels more bearable or intolerable. There’s a great deal of comfort in that kind of stability when it matters most.
It doesn't have to mean something specific for you
Chanting has deep roots in religious and spiritual traditions around the world, and for many people its spiritual meaning is inseparable from the practice. I don't want to neglect the history or significance of that.
But I also don't think someone has to adopt a particular spiritual belief in order to be curious about repetitive vocalization, sound, rhythm, breath, and attention.
What matters is being respectful about where a particular chant comes from and deciding what kind of practice makes sense for you. For one person, that may be devotional chanting. For someone else, it may be repeating a simple sound or phrase. Some people may prefer to just listen rather than chant along.
There isn't any singular experience we're all supposed to have, and there’s nothing that should feel forced about this.
One book that helped expand the way I think about chanting is Chanting: Discovering Spirit in Sound, by Robert Gass and Kathleen Brehony. I was already familiar with Gass's music by the time I found the book, and I loved the warmth and accessibility of the way it approached chant as something rooted in spiritual traditions, but also as an experience of sound, breath, connection, and presence that people can explore from many different perspectives. It’s a book I highly recommend.
Yes, you might feel ridiculous at first
If you've never chanted before, sitting alone and making the same sound repeatedly may feel pretty strange.
That's okay.
You don't have to start with forty verses in a language you don't know. You don't have to chant for an hour. You don't have to buy anything or sit in a particular position, and you don’t have to transform yourself into someone who wears clothing made solely of natural fibers.
You could begin with a single recording and simply listen.
You could hum along.
You could repeat one sound or one short phrase for a minute and notice what happens — not whether you did it right, but simply what you observe within yourself.
🍃 Does your breathing change?
🍃 Does your attention have somewhere to land?
🍃 Can you feel the sound in your body?
🍃 Does repetition feel comforting, annoying, calming, boring?
All of those are information, and they're some of the same things I've noticed throughout my own practice.
Chanting didn't cure my pain. It didn't make those years “easy,” and it wasn't a practice I mastered so thoroughly that pain could no longer affect me. What it gave me was much more subtle than that. During some of the hardest times, it helped carry me from one moment to the next, and from one breath to the next.
If chanting is unfamiliar to you, perhaps the invitation I’d leave you with isn't to decide whether it “works,” but simply to become curious about it. Listen to one recording. Hum along if you feel like it. Notice what happens to your breath, your attention, or the way you inhabit your body for those few minutes. You may find it isn't for you at all. Or you may find yourself curious enough to listen again.
A few of my favorite chants
The Hanuman Chalisa is only one of many chants that have been part of my practice over the years. If you're curious to explore more, I've included a few recordings below that I love for different reasons.
Hanuman Chalisa by Krishna Das – There are countless versions of this ancient chant, but this is the one I listened to every day while learning it phrase by phrase. It begins with an invocation, and the chant itself starts at about 1:30 min.
The Heart Sutra by Deva Premal– One I reach for when I want something slower and easier to follow with the breath.
Om Namah Shivaya by Robert Gass and On Wings of Song–A beautiful extended chant that brings me peace and solace.
Gyatri Mantra by Deva Premal– Another stunning and very ancient chant by this incredible, world-renowned artist.
Ra Ma Da Sa Healingby Ajeet Kaur – A simple, repetitive chant that feels like compassion draped in sound.
With you on the journey,
Julie 🦋