The Repetition Already in the Breath

So ham, sometimes rendered I am that, is called ajapa japa, the repetition that is not recited, because the tradition holds it to be already occurring in the breath itself and only in need of noticing: sa on the inhalation and ham on the exhalation, so that every breath is understood to be silently affirming the identity of the self with the ultimate. Reversed, the same syllables read hamsa, the swan or gander, an old symbol of the liberated soul and of the discriminating mind, and the pair so ham / hamsa is much played upon in the yogic and Vedantic literature.

As a practice it belongs to breath-based meditation: the practitioner does not impose the syllables so much as attend to them as the natural sound of breathing, letting attention rest on the seam between in-breath and out-breath. Its philosophical content is the great identity of Advaita Vedanta, that the innermost self is not other than brahman, but here that claim is not argued but installed in the most involuntary of bodily rhythms, so that the whole of a life's breathing is reframed as an unbroken, wordless assertion of it.