I’m not quite sure what your question means. If you don’t already understand the words of the mantra, then I don’t think you should try to understand the meaning of the mantra as you’re chanting it. I’d suggest you reflect on the meaning outside of your practice, so that the chanting evokes the meaning naturally, without your having to split your attention by both chanting and thinking about the meaning of the chanting. But if you understand the words of the mantra, then of course by all means chant and be aware of the meaning of what you’re chanting.

I’m afraid I’d just be guessing about the tension and the problem in your throat. I tend to go for the simplest explanations first, such as emotional strain, problems with your posture, or, in the case of our throat, an allergy or infection.

You’re correct that a relaxed and effortless meditation is the most effective. Visualizing need not be effortful at all, at least in the sense of conscious effort. The conscious mind does not generate imagery — it simply makes the request, and the unconscious mind supplies the visualization. If you consciously try to “make” an image in your mind, you’ll find that it either doesn’t work at all and you just see the inside of your eyelids, or you’ll produce a very fuzzy image. If you just relax and allow imagery to appear, however, it will be crisp, clear, and effortless.

I see the problem as being a bandwidth one. Bear with me and I’ll explain. I’m sure you’ve had the experience that when you’re uploading or downloading a file on a computer, it’s very difficult to do anything else online, because there’s not enough bandwidth available. So you’ll be trying to connect to a web page and it’s happening very slowly, because the computer’s connection with the world is already in use.

I think meditation works in a similar way. The mind has a limited bandwidth, and if we’re paying full attention to a mantra (or any other object of concentration) there’s simply no bandwidth left for distractions. So the amount of distracting thought decreases. We’re fully attentive to the object of the meditation, and the mind becomes calmer.

But what happens when we pay less attention to the mantra, perhaps because we’ve become so used to doing the meditation that it’s an automatic action — one we can do without needing to be mindful of our actions? Bandwidth has been freed up, and so other activities can take place in the mind. In other words we experience distraction.

So what do we do to deal with this situation? We need to increase the “download rate” of the mantra so that there’s less bandwidth available for our distractions. Assuming you’re chanting out loud, you can do this by paying much more conscious attention to the body, and especially to the movements of the lips, tongue, and the breathing (including the diaphragm). If you’re repeating the mantra internally, then I’d suggest “hearing” more than one voice. You could imagine that the mantra is being chanted by a choir of devas, for example. Or you could introduce more visualization, so that you’re in effect downloading video rather than audio — and as we know, video requires more bandwidth.

In other forms of meditation, we can be more aware of the sensations from the outside world, or sensation in the body, for example. This has the same effect of using up the brain’s “bandwidth” so that there’s simply no opportunity for distracting thoughts to arise.

I hope this helps.

I think what you’re doing is great, and very meditative. I wouldn’t describe it as a form of mantra meditation, however. With mantras, the meditator is generating the sound, either internally or out loud, whereas you’re just listening to the sound. Also, mantras tend to be generally more evocative, symbolic, and non-conceptual — more right-brain, if you will — while sutras tend to be more left-brained. Of course one can recite sutras, and you can involve your right brain in listening to or chanting sutras (and some mantras, like the Vajrasattva mantra, are more conceptual), so the distinction between the two isn’t absolute, but what you describe isn’t what I’d think of as mantra meditation.

That doesn’t mean it’s any better or worse than mantra meditation — just different. I’m curious why you asked, actually!

All the best,
Bodhipaksa