Life can feel overwhelming for autistic adults, with sensory sensitivities, social pressures, and a busy mind contributing to stress. You may find it hard to decompress and renew your energy in a fast-paced world that demands so much of you. What if there were a way to quiet your mind and reconnect with your inner calm? In this post, I will invite you to explore two powerful practices—mindfulness and mantra meditation—that can help you reduce stress, balance your emotions, and embrace your authentic self. You might feel skeptical, wondering if these practices are too “spiritual” or abstract to fit into your life. Or perhaps you’ve tried meditation before and felt it wasn’t for you.
In this post, I will provide you with some practical insights into how the practices of mindfulness and mantra meditation work, and compare their benefits and challenges, especially for autistic individuals. By understanding the processes involved in these practices, you can begin to try them for yourself to find which one works best for you and how to make it a meaningful part of your life.
You will discover how starting small is an important key to building your regular practice. You will learn how to integrate mindfulness or mantra meditation into your routine using a technique called habit-stacking that can be used to remind you daily to stop and redirect your focus. I have found that it only takes a few minutes each day to make a significant difference in my emotional well-being.
What is Mindfulness Meditation? (Explained for Beginners)
Mindfulness is simply the practice of focusing on the present moment. Often your mind is preoccupied with future plans or going over the past. Techniques like breathwork that focus your attention on your breathing or body scans that focus on different bodily sensations anchor you in the present. This way, you find that the worries or regrets that come to mind have very little space in your consciousness to bother you.
Mindfulness meditation can help bring calm to your racing mind. You might find that your ability to concentrate improves. Your anxiety starts to subside. You may notice these benefits not just during your practice but throughout the day. For you as an autistic individual, it may also enhance your awareness of when sensations might be beginning to overload you so that you can avoid them and improve your emotional regulation.
A word of caution: It’s important to acknowledge that for some autistic people, mindfulness can bring challenges. Focusing on your bodily rhythms, such as your breath or heartbeat, for too long can sometimes create a sense of unease that adversely affects these rhythms. For example, I began to occasionally jerk during muscle relaxation. When you become aware of anything like this, continuing to focus can speed up these rhythms, producing a feedback loop that leads to anxiety rather than calm.
What is Mantra Meditation? (A Simple Guide)
Mantra meditation is a practice of repeating a word or phrase for a given period. The word or phrase is referred to as the “mantra” and can be anything, but there can be advantages in the mantra being meaningful to you in some way. This process centres your attention on the mantra and, just as we saw in mindfulness, takes your mind off any other thoughts that you might have.
Similarly, mantra meditation can help in creating a steady focus not just during the meditation but also as you go about your day. Regular meditation can even lessen your distractions. Some say that mantra meditation can also offer you a sense of integration that brings together any disjointed sense of identity that you may have, helping you to feel more whole and experience a greater alignment of body, mind, and spirit.
This practice has the advantage of avoiding over-focusing on bodily rhythms in the way that mindfulness does. The focus is purely on repeating the mantra. Nevertheless, there are still challenges for autistic individuals. You may find the repetition of the mantra to be boring, making it difficult to persevere. This may be helped by finding one that is meaningful to you, but you may find that search a struggle.
Mindfulness vs. Meditation: Which is Better for Autism?
The roots of both mindfulness practices and mantra meditation can be found in ancient Eastern religions, and there is evidence of mantra meditation making its way into Western contemplative practices used by Christian monastics and mystics. This may make some autistic people skeptical. Nevertheless, more recently, you can see Western psychology developing an interest in these practices, especially mindfulness, and in fact, there is plenty of scientific research to support their effectiveness.
Research indicates that both of these practices can have great benefits for people’s mental health. They show that they can reduce many physical indicators that someone is experiencing a response to stress, such as heart rate and blood pressure. Both mindfulness and mantras have been shown to improve emotional resilience and enhance well-being. For autistic adults, this research includes support for both practices improving sensory integration and assisting recovery from overload. This is exactly what I have found using these practices myself.
The evidence indicates that both methods are effective in supporting mental health and helping neurodivergent individuals navigate their challenges. So it would appear that whether you use one, the other, or both is a matter of personal choice. However, I need to acknowledge that some autistic individuals may find the focus on bodily sensations in mindfulness problematic, whereas mantra meditation bypasses this by offering the mantra as a neutral focal point.
How to Build a Daily Meditation Habit (Tips for Beginners)
Whether you choose mindfulness or mantra meditation or both, to be effective you will need to cultivate a regular habit. For example, I used to practice mindfulness using muscle relaxation exercises, but then I found that I lost interest. Autistic individuals have a tendancy towards strong routines, and a method that has proven effective in leveraging routines is habit-stacking. Habit-stacking encourages you to add an activity to your daily routine following an activity that you perform daily.
Habit-stacking recommends starting small with the smallest duration of the habit you wish to cultivate, such as five minutes. Think of your morning routine. Pick something you already do regularly every morning, like brushing your teeth, and commit to meditating immediately after that. When that is working, you can add another five minutes after an activity in your bedtime routine and then gradually increase the duration to ten minutes.
This process can be adapted to your needs. For example, the best place for my morning practice is after I read and before I start work. I began doing five minutes of mantra meditation every morning and then added another five minutes to my bedtime routine. I’ve also experimented with adding five minutes of a mindful body scan and breathwork before my mantra meditation so that I’ve relaxed myself before I meditate.
Choosing the Right Practice for You (A Personal Journey)
Once you have decided to build five minutes of meditation into your routine, then you can begin to work on deciding whether that will involve mindfulness, mantra meditation, or some combination of both. I would encourage you to experiment with a view to finding out which resonates with you the most, feels more natural, or provides you with the most benefits. Either practice can be beneficial, so try not to overthink this stage.
What is important is that you keep track of your experiences and insights, making the necessary adjustments in order to settle on a regular practice. Reflecting on feelings can be a challenge for autistic individuals, but handwriting a journal and looking through lists of “feeling words” can help. Examine the meditation itself and your day to look for signs that the practice may be regulating your emotions and not increasing anxiety.
When you’re experimenting with mantra meditation, you may try more than one mantra, but when you are happy with one, there is no need to change it unless you have a real problem. Similarly, you may try various body scans and breathing practices. All practices offer benefits. The goal is to settle on a practice that aligns with your needs and strengthens your ability to navigate life as an autistic individual.
Once you have developed this practice as part of your routine, whether mindfulness, mantra meditation, or some combination of the two, you will have a reliable anchor to help you face life’s challenges. I have found that my regular practice of 5-10 minutes once or twice a day allows me to build emotional resilience, calm my mind, and embrace my strengths as an autistic person.
These practices aren’t just about managing stress—they’re tools for personal transformation. Whether you choose mindfulness, mantra meditation, or a blend of both, they can help you begin to understand yourself and experience the world with greater clarity, empathy, and joy. By focusing on your inner calm, you can turn your sensitivity into a source of strength and intuition. As you explore your inner self, you can find your true compassionate nature, share this with others, and be a positive influence on the world.