Carolyn Green: The Healing Power of Mantras

Ross Tayler: Today on Sacred Sundays, we're joined by Carolyn Green, a modern mystic, master energy healer and spiritual teacher who bridges ancient wisdom with modern life. For over 20 years, Carolyn has taught and guided students, healers and seekers through the timeless teachings of yoga, Ayurveda, meditation and nature-based spirituality. Known for her calm, inspiring presence and her gift for translating deep spiritual truths into practical insight, Carolyn helps people awaken to their inner wisdom and live with greater peace, purpose, and connection. Carolyn, welcome to Sacred Sundays.

Carolyn Green: Hi there, I'm coming from the beautiful lands of the Squamish [?] people, and it's a lovely fall day, so thanks for having me.

Ross Tayler: You're welcome, so good to have you. Carolyn and I have a personal connection. We were trying to figure out before we started chatting how long we've known each other, but let's just say at least 15 years. We used to live in Squamish together, and we share the same birthday. It's cool to have you on the podcast and to have this conversation.

Carolyn Green: Thanks, brother.

Ross Tayler: You're welcome. Carolyn is actually going to begin by chanting a Vedic mantra for us, and I'll hand it over to Carolyn for that beginning piece.

Carolyn Green: Yeah, this mantra is a very special mantra for right now. The essence of this mantra, if you settle into your seat while you listen, is very grounding. It's a very nurturing, Mother Earth kind of feel to it. We'll sit back and enjoy, and maybe it's an invitation to place your hand on your heart, maybe one on your belly, and feel the seat below you. I'll be chanting for a while. It's very simple, and you're welcome to sing along for yourself when it feels good. We're just going to go straight into the essence of this mantra. Allow the sounds to echo in the canyon of your mind. Allow the chant to anchor into your heart, tucked into the memory of your favorite songs from your childhood, tucked into an innocent space. We'll integrate that with another mantra that's a bit of an invocation, to connect your heart and your spirit even more firmly.

[Carolyn Green chants Vedic mantras.]

Carolyn Green: Thank you for receiving and practicing some connection with me in this offering.

Ross Tayler: That was beautiful, Carolyn. Thank you.

Carolyn Green: My pleasure. It's a win-win.

Ross Tayler: Where I'd like to start is that I really believe we're moving through the world so quickly at the moment. It seems to me that the practices you share with the world are really about helping people to slow down and stop and come into the present moment. I'm curious what you would want to say about that.

Carolyn Green: I kind of think in metaphors, and one of the images that comes for these times is like a figure eight. We all know we're going through something, this upgrade, whatever you want to call it. We're going through a bit of an eye of the needle, so to speak. The concept of time is held in the mind, and there's everything out there that is speeding up our mind. All these commitments and times, and everything we learn around the globe, our brain is just so busy. It's not until we get into these deeper realms of nature, with the sounds of the mantra but also just in nature in general, like the forests, that it gives us a body experience of slowness, almost even timelessness, which is really medicine right now.

Ross Tayler: Why do you think that medicine is so important right now?

Carolyn Green: There are a couple of things. One is my physical experience of just playing with chanting. It's instant alignment for me. I'm a mom. I have relationships with my mom and my sister and my partner and my kids and community members, and we're all going through intense times right now. Having a tool that is as efficient as this, I've subtly experienced that after I chant mantras, and I play them in my car, I play them around, I chant with other people, I have both a sense of grounding and a sense of upliftedness. Something rises up that allows some of the stresses to fall away. Then I've learned, in my studying of the Vedic and yoga philosophies, that this is a time that was meant to be very busy, and they said that this was the medicine for it. Chanting mantras is the medicine for us in this specific time. But I go with my body's experience with anything. We could read about all this stuff that's good for us. Do this, do that, try this self care, it's going to be good for everybody. But honestly, right now we have to get less in the mind to prove that it's going to be good for us and just experience it. We have to stop doing, a lot of the time, to experience it.

Ross Tayler: I love that. There are two pieces in there, but the first question I want to come back to is this: I'm imagining that there might be some people listening for whom it's their first time hearing a mantra or hearing the music that you're playing. What would you want to say to those people?

Carolyn Green: I would say that these traditions, throughout the entire human experience, all over the world, humans have always sung together. They've always chanted together. There's a sense of community and a sense of remembrance, and, without going into too much detail, the heart remembers chanting in general. Somewhere along the line, maybe 500 years ago, our traditional ancestors stopped chanting and singing and turned it more into a performance thing. So I would say a couple of things. Mantras are not something where you think, that song is pretty, I'm going to listen to that, or that person has a nice voice, they can sing mantra. The difference is that we are given this voice. Our voice is in the most fragile place, in our neck, right? But it is really medicine for us. If we can chant these mantras ourselves, I'll share that one of my favorite people to chant and sing with is very tone deaf. He doesn't get the song right, but he sings just like a child, with complete freedom, complete trust, absolute allowing for the experience. So I would say, one, this is not about religion or dogmatic practices. It's about finding chants that resonate with you on an experience basis. It's not about making you sound good. It's literally about recalibrating your own vibration.

Ross Tayler: One of the things that really speaks to me is the piece around voice, because on my own journey there was a long period of time where I didn't feel like I had access to my voice. I'm hearing that this is medicine to reclaim our voice and reconnect with it, and express ourselves in ways that we might not have been giving ourselves access to. I love that you mentioned that in history we've always sung together, and yet that isn't necessarily accessible to everyone in our culture, and music is such a big part of our culture, to listen to anyway.

Carolyn Green: Yeah, and it's such medicine. They've said scientifically, I think, that we have three times more neurological receptors [?] from our ears, and the vibrations they pick up, to our brain than from even our eyes. We are given this gift of sound, even if we have minor hearing impairments, and it is such a doorway. I was talking to a Sufi meditation leader, and he said that in their culture the eyes are the windows to the soul, which we've heard, but the ears are the doorways to the soul. Just listening can open up something for us and shift our state of being. We could have a really bad day, and all of a sudden a song comes on the radio that was your favorite song when you were a kid, and there's just this natural lift. Or even more subtle musical tones, like children's laughter on the playground. Our nervous system really is wired to respond to sound, so we use it, and it turns into sound medicine. These mantras are medicine in just a very simple way. My kids chant these mantras. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to do this part of your evolution. It's pretty magical, actually.

Ross Tayler: I love that. You mentioned that these heavier times were predicted. Perhaps you could say a little more about that.

Carolyn Green: Yeah. In one of the lineages, the bhakti yoga lineage, what they saw, similar to the way we have circadian rhythms throughout the day, with different qualities in the morning, then in the highest, warmest part of the day, then the gentler afternoons, and the same as the seasons, we have these different vibrations that come in through the different seasons. In these very ancient cultures, they kept verbal and oral records that there are also seasons and cycles in eras. It was foretold that we were coming into a new age called the Kali Yuga. The yugas are the eras. The Vedas are really ancient Indigenous knowledge. They were very succinct and chanted so that the mind could retain all the information, very detailed. It was an era of a bunch of things, intensity and forgetfulness, and one of them is forgetting the daily practices that a lot of these ancient peoples would do to keep themselves balanced physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. So a whole bunch of these gurus said, okay, let's write these down and pass them forward. They did it in the form of a lot of stories and metaphors, and also some very specific details that seem more sciencey.

This era is really interesting because, as intense as it is, it was predicted to be very paradoxical, with polar situations, the extremes of one thing and the extremes of the other. We can see that in our politics and in so many things. There's actually so much going on that's beautiful in the world right now, but it can be overshadowed by sensational media. The yuga that comes after this one goes into another golden age, where everything is in perfect harmony. We're just a well-tuned instrument for the divine to play, and people knew and felt with their hearts much more strongly what their purpose was. But we're in a time where we've forgotten a lot of these healthier practices. For each of the yugas, there's an avatar spirit that comes in, a teacher and leader, to tell us what the medicine is for this era. Apparently he's already come and gone. His name is Chaitanya [?]. He was not a musician. He came and taught people that the medicine to get through this very intense, darker time was to be that diamond radiating in the hot mess that we are in, and it is to chant mantras. It's to sing and have just the lightness in the heart, and that's enough. I think that's so beautiful, because some of the other eras were more based on yoga asana poses, all things that make you feel good, which are great, but this one is the purest medicine that we can get.

I had an Ayurvedic doctor who told me, and they're so beautiful in their languages, getting outside of the Western articulation of it, that this time is supposed to be intense for us. It's supposed to be so chaotic for us so that the only place we can go to feel what's really freedom is to go inside. It forces us to go inside, and the inside is the heart. The strongest reminder of where that heart is, is singing and chanting these uplifting songs. It's really beautiful to know how simple it is, and yet we overcomplicate it with trying to control the chaos in the outside world, when really we just have to keep going back, keep realigning. You could chant a mantra for five minutes and it will align you enough to be clear in terms of your next steps in the outside world.

Ross Tayler: Wow. There are so many things you just brought up that I want to ask about, and I'm trying to pick one. Let me ask the first question, which is, what would you say to someone who says, this isn't my culture? Do I have a right to connect with something that isn't part of my direct culture?

Carolyn Green: As Caucasian people, the majority of us have lost a lot of our Indigenous roots, which are very nature-based, very harmonious. In my learnings and my teachings, when we come with an open heart and learn from that, we do have our hidden ignorance and biases, so it's about coming with an authentic heart and finding some guidance within these cultures. I think you start small. You go on Spotify or one of the music platforms and listen to the mantras, or you listen to some YouTube recordings of people in those cultures who share these beautiful wisdoms. I can tell you I've always been embraced, because we are a tribe of lost peoples who have lost our actual foundational tribes. In order to reconnect to the earth and to our universal tribe, which is part of the earth, I think it's important to look and explore and feel what resonates, and also look to the guidance of Indigenous people, using it very respectfully. You start small, you ask questions, you get clarifications. I think we can't really do this on our own. A lot of people feel lost right now, so using these ancient wisdoms and practices is a really important thing. There are certain things I wouldn't do, because I don't know how that culture would feel if I all of a sudden jumped in and started doing them. So it's keeping a humbleness about it, knowing that we are students trying to reconnect. But I can honestly say that as soon as there's an ounce of curiosity with a genuine open heart, there's definitely a very warm, inviting community somewhere, for sure.

Ross Tayler: What you said earlier, about how it feels so good in your body, is in itself such a clear signal that it is aligned, that it is helpful, and that it is accessible in that way.

Carolyn Green: That's the thing. It keeps that innocence, like I said, kids chant these mantras. There's no judgment required about how this feels. You just experience it. You don't have to go into the details of this mantra meaning this and that meaning that. It's literally experience-based. A woman shared with me, and she suffered from a lot of trauma and probably did tons of talk therapy to try to heal her wounds, which is fantastic, and sometimes we need to go to a place where the mind and the words and the articulations can dissolve to just feel peace and feel love. All she had to do was be present for a couple of mantras, and she said she doesn't remember ever being in such a deep state of peace, just listening to some mantras for 20 minutes. It really is something you have to experience, and then you go with it. You try to have more.

Ross Tayler: I also wanted to touch back on your reference to this being the time of the Kali Yuga. I wanted to reflect that this shows up in other modalities. The same messages are coming across, whether it's Buddhism, Tao, human design, the Gene Keys, astrology. The message is similar throughout all of these, that we are in a time of change. When you talk about the golden age coming, it's really interesting to consider how we're going to get from where we are right now to this state of harmony and beauty, and what is going to have to happen for that to change. The clear thing is that the message is being shared in many different places, and there's a consistency within it.

Carolyn Green: Yeah, it's been going on for a while. Lots of holy people, we'll call them, from Indigenous cultures all over, over the last couple of decades, have really been behind the scenes connecting in various ways and saying this. It's so lovely to know that they're holding space for us and doing all their prayers in their ways, and it's also not up to them to save us from the suffering, if that makes sense. Knowing that this is part of the cycle, and that we're actually going to be in it for a while, it's not necessarily about making it through to the next one. It's about doing our part and being of service. A big piece of the bhakti philosophies is devotional service from the state of the heart, from the state of the divine. How can we best serve our humanity? Beings in all worlds are looking to us to help. We're at this tipping point of how we can embrace the truest heart that we have. That means we need to create a relationship with that heart and that connection, so that we can floss out the impurities of our own hearts and show up in our world at each given moment as the truest form of us. In the yoga culture, as I said, we talk about dharma. Dharma is not necessarily always this future thing in front of us. My dharma is to be this. It's also the micro steps along the way. Maybe my dharma was to chant a mantra because I was off, and then go to the grocery store, and my presence alone and my smile alone, to one individual, was enough to bring more lightness to their heart. It's like the butterfly effect. We don't know the beautiful orchestra that nature's intelligence, this divine creation, does behind the scenes to create this beautiful harmony.

Our job is to stay attuned and aligned. The best way I can describe it again is with these beautiful metaphors. I don't know if anyone has heard of the goddess Saraswati. She plays a veena, which is a stringed instrument. The teaching around it is that we are one of an infinite number of strings on this beautiful instrument that the divine plays, that the divine creates with us. It creates beauty, books, wisdoms, art, everything, and it's our job to stay in tune. It's the same idea as an orchestra. If you had one instrument just slightly out of tune, you might not notice it, but the people performing around that person would be subtly off, and they'd have to work harder to re-attune themselves to their instruments. This is why, in this time, we have to keep going back to ourselves. We know that in order to be of service to bring more light into these times, to set the pace for these beautiful transformations for humanity, it's really beautiful, and the struggle is real, right? The struggle is real to do the simple self-care things that keep us aligned. It's probably the hardest, actually.

Ross Tayler: I would totally agree. To double back to what you said a little while ago, that the only way to access freedom and our heart is to go inside, that's a theme that has been showing up a lot in my awareness through different people, conversations and experiences. To what you just said, it is literally the hardest journey to go inside, because we've been so distracted by everything going on outside of ourselves. We're literally orienting to the external when the answer is actually internal.

Carolyn Green: Yeah, I see it like a compass. Our heart is the only thing pointing us north. There's no point grasping at the fog that we're in and trying to hold on to these imaginary things. It's really about taking time to sit and pull out that compass and ask the heart, what do I need right now? Which is a step on your path, a step on this golden path. What does this body and this nervous system need right this minute? It's usually something really simple, like taking some breaths, or making a cup of tea, or being honest with yourself that you have to have a conversation with someone and be brave. But unless we actually take the time, we're just going to get caught up in that hamster wheel. It's real.

Ross Tayler: I love the metaphor of grasping at the fog. For anyone who's been on the journey a long time and can access those things, it can actually be a radical act. To do something for you before someone else is a radical act.

Carolyn Green: Yeah, I think it goes against our Western culture. One of the beliefs that was strong when you and I were kids was, you can't be selfish. Redefining what selfish is, is really important. It's like the metaphor of being on a plane, where you're supposed to put the mask on yourself before your own child. That's counterintuitive, but it's for a purpose, because they need you to survive and not fall unconscious so that you can help the more vulnerable people. We could talk about this forever, but there are many beautiful healers in the world, and hopefully they're also doing their work by healing themselves so that they can be that better person for the vulnerable people in their communities. Healing the healers, or caring for the caregivers. These are really big things, to help dissolve that whole idea of what selfishness is. Selfishness is not a nice word, but if we shift it to self care, or capital-S Self, the bigger Self, it's all in language.

Ross Tayler: I remember somebody I came across who had a nice turnaround for selfishness. I think it was radical something, I wish I could remember, but it was really helpful to turn that around.

Carolyn Green: Yeah, there are so many radical things, but I think it's usually states of being. I'd say radical acceptance is huge, because we need to remember that we're human and we are in a very heavy time, and we really need to put that mask on and take care of ourselves. We can get caught up in, I have to do this, I was told this is the right thing to do. But honestly, just sitting and being and finding out what this nervous system needs is almost a form of self-mastery. It's the nervous system that's getting a big upgrade in our bodies, so it's important to get to know it.

Ross Tayler: What I love about that is the universality of the nervous system. We all have that same nervous system, so really what we need is each other. If I'm regulated, then you will become regulated just by being in my presence. That intermingling of the states we're in, which is what you said about going into the grocery store and radiating that energy, is what we need to start doing, trying not to do it alone and instead doing it in community, which is the essence of what you were just saying.

Carolyn Green: Exactly. Especially in our Western culture, it's so much about doing. You're not an efficient part of humanity or your community if you're not productive and doing things. Our sense of wealth is based on money and accomplishments, which are linked to doing and having. But it's the being, what state of being we're in, that is way more of what we need to focus on, so that we can attune ourselves and be that person. There's a big difference between the grumpy version of yourself and the version that's like, I'm so rested and I just had the most beautiful sound bath, going into Walmart at Christmas time. We have to put ourselves in these extreme situations to realize the impact.

Ross Tayler: I love that you mentioned that, because I have this little internal practice of, can I go to Costco and maintain balance and peace and smile through the experience? If I can't, I know something's out of alignment that I need to work on. Most of the time I can cruise through Costco and have a peaceful time. I think it's an extreme environment in a lot of ways because of the intense energy that shows up there.

Carolyn Green: Yeah, that's exactly it. It's a good training ground, that's for sure. Another piece is that, in these times, our nervous systems, our antenna that's picking up, we have our own vibrations, and some of us, whether it's neurodiversity or just whatever the wiring is in us or our DNA, are a little more sensitive. When you go to some of these environments, you're not just getting triggered by your own past experiences and what's coming up for you, you're picking up on other people's. Costco is a great example, because the lineups are long and people are rushing and the carts are so big and the aisles are so small for the carts. It's a really good test of our own patience, but you can pick up on other people's anxieties. A really great practice in those experiences is to breathe, and even ask, how much of this anxiety, or impatience, whatever it is, is actually mine? I guarantee it will never be 100 percent. It probably won't even be really close to 100 percent, if you've been doing this practice for a while. It's almost like you can brush it off. You can feel it, but you don't have to own it as if something is wrong. It just is. It's a great practice to see where you are. And sometimes when we've got a lot going on in our own world, maybe it's choosing, is it a good day to go to Costco for my nervous system? No, I'm going to do something else instead.

Ross Tayler: Exactly. Yeah, so true. All right, I feel like this conversation could easily keep going, but I would like to bring it to a close, and I'll close by asking you the question that I like to ask on every episode: what is one simple way that someone could connect with the sacred today?

Carolyn Green: A simple way is to get outside, even just opening your door and looking up at the sky, having this lift, feeling the connection and this lift of wholeness, and breathing into that state of being. If you can be in a forest, fantastic, but if you're in an environment where you can't just all of a sudden go on a weekend retreat somewhere, I would say just breathe with the expansive sky and have this lift, looking at clouds or not, and feel connected to the whole, and trust with your heart that you're exactly connected to everybody, and all you have to do is tune in to what you need. Just a little stillness.

Ross Tayler: I appreciate that answer. I love the simplicity of that. For people who want to stay connected or explore more of your work, what's the best place for them to find you?

Carolyn Green: Probably the best place is going to my website and signing up for the newsletter. It doesn't go out very often, but there are some events on there, and the newsletter is probably the best way, with some tips and connections. I'm doing some online classes and workshops, in person and online. Some of them are community-based by donation and some of them are paid. That's the best way to connect with me.

Ross Tayler: Excellent, and we'll make sure we put those links in the show notes. I just want to say thank you so much, Carolyn, for making time today for this conversation. It was great to connect with you and share these bits of information and banter back and forth. So happy that you were able to be here.

Carolyn Green: Thank you. I'm so grateful that you're doing this podcast for people to hear the guidance that's necessary right now for everybody. Thanks for having me.

Ross Tayler: You're very welcome. And to everyone listening, thanks for tuning in, and until next time, take good care.