How do you express your faith in God? My mind is so preoccupied with chanting his name that it takes a toll on my productivity. How do you escape that fear and reaffirm your faith without the need to chant all the time?

You can learn meditation. Practicing sitting meditation teaches us how to remain in a state where we are aware of the awareness that all life appears in, and we are aware of the creative energy that is one with this awareness, and we are in tune with the intelligence of life that is one with this awareness. We practice and then throughout the day we learn to stay in this state more and more, we learn to maintain meditativeness throughout the day. From this state, we are both in faith and we are able to function in the world.

Basically, everything is God. So we learn to surrender to this truth by living in tune with it. Practicing chanting is a vocal tool for this, practice of meditation is a silent tool. But the core truth behind this is, we are one with God and we learn to place our attention to the deepest aspects of God while living our lives so that we live (and consequently learn to live) more and more from God realization.

You can discover this while chanting, you can bring your attention to these deepest aspects while chanting. But the idea should not be that chanting itself is giving you this. If you remain with this idea, you get stuck to the form of chanting. To be able to evolve your understanding beyond this idea, you can practice meditation to experience the deeper states, or I think, you can truly increase your devotion in your chanting, so much to lose yourself during it. Now, you chant with so much devotion that you disappear as a personality in your experience and only the experience of pure awareness remains. This is one step beyond practicing/remaining with the idea that “now I am practicing chanting and it is chanting that can give me God”. This is practicing with such devotion that you intentionally are losing yourself in God, and awakening to your oneness with God. You are starting with the idea that everything is God already, and you are already one with God, which is different from trying to get your oneness with God from chanting itself. See the difference? One is an attachment to chanting itself and consequently keeps you chanting and the other is willing to let go of everything to experience God/truth itself while chanting. If you are going from the chanting path, the idea is, eventually chanting won’t be a necessity; we are supposed to be able to realize God, realize our oneness with God while we are doing anything or everything right?

To better understand this difference through experience, I suggest you explore the following path for as long as you feel guided from within. A genuine meditation practice will effectively lead you to experience the formless aspect of God, the awareness that is the container of everything in existence, and more and more the creative energy aspect of God, which is Divine Love and is one with all the forms, and more and more the Intelligence aspect of God, which basically guides all creation. These articles (1, 2), written by a God realized person, give 4 types of meditation practices which can directly lead you more and more to the experience of Awareness, Creative Energy (Divine Love) and Higher Intelligence; the deepest aspects of God. This article describes these aspects as the aspects of Higher Self within God. What these words refer to is understood through experience, and the article explains it in detail. Ultimately, let’s not get stuck on words and even practices, but truly work with the intention to understand and experience the truth they point to.

Basically, through the practice of meditation with an informed understanding, with the intention to realize God (or truth or to see the truth of existence or to see things as they are; the words describing the intention really depends on where you are coming from), we can continue to live our lives and continue to evolve in understanding. We can learn to function in the world as our understanding evolves to God realization. A step by step article from the same source can give you an information and guidance on realizing God and living in the world from this realization, which also encompasses the above 3 articles. Basically, it is a rare accurate resource on these topics created by an enlightened person. My experience is we can function in the world and be still meditative and keep growing spiritually, and there are challenges of growth or one may say.. lessons on the way. Depending on the person and the path, the experiences and challenges may vary, but the overall ultimate realizations will be the same in essence.