The benefits of Rudraksha Malas: Wearing a Rudraksha can certainly be of assistance towards your overall health and well-being. But it works on many other levels as well. 1. For people that travel often and tend to eat and sleep in different places, a Rudraksha can be very useful as it has the power to create a protective shield of your own energy. You may have experienced that when you first visit some places, it is difficult to fall asleep. This may happen in certain places, but in other spots – though they are still unfamiliar – you can sleep very easily. In other words, the reverberation of a place may suit your energy or not. Wearing a Rudraksha modulates these effects so that the impact that a place or external situations can have on you is reduced. This has been of great significance in the past for ascetics and monks, who traditionally had a rule that they were not to sleep in the same place twice. In a somewhat similar fashion, today, the modern way of living requires people to be constantly on the move. Wearing a Rudraksha mala can assist in creating an atmosphere of ease wherever one is. 2. Furthermore, Rudraksha beads and malas were utilized as a very useful tool for ascetics in the past for identifying the quality of drinking water. What they would do, to understand whether the water they found is drinkable or not, is to let the Rudraksha mala hang above the water. When the water is drinkable, the mala would tend to rotate in a clockwise direction (when seen from above), and when it is not drinkable, the mala would rotate in a counter-clockwise direction. 3. Similarly a Rudraksha can be used to identify the quality of a particular item of food. In yoga, food is classified in three categories; positive, negative, and zero pranic food. Prana means the vital life energy in the body. When food increases the prana in the system, it is termed positive pranic, and when it depletes the prana, it is called negative pranic or non-pranic. Zero pranic food does not affect the prana in any way. When holding a Rudraksha mala above a positive pranic food item such as fresh fruits, it rotates clockwise, and when it is held above a negative pranic item, such as chili or onion, the Rudraksha rotates counter clockwise. When food is zero pranic, the mala does not rotate at all, or may sway slightly from side to side. 4. The Rudraksha also helps against certain negative influences. For example, in the Atharva Veda, one of the Vedas, many processes are described, which could be used by unscrupulous people to cause harm to another person through negative energies. If somebody has command over this, they can cause suffering or even death. Rudraksha has the power to protect against these negative energies. Even if one thinks that there can be nobody who would harm him, they would not be totally safe. There is always the risk of being subjected to these energies by mistake when they are directed at someone else. There is no reason for fear for such things but a Rudraksha can protect against such instances on the rare occasions when they may occur. 5. A Rudraksha is also very supportive for this involved in certain practices like chanting of a mantra etc
