{"id":813,"date":"2009-09-20T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-20T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/2009\/09\/music-and-meditation.html"},"modified":"2009-09-20T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-09-20T09:00:00","slug":"music-and-meditation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/09\/music-and-meditation.html","title":{"rendered":"Music and Meditation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Music has a lot of power.  It can make you laugh, it can make you cry,
\nit can bring back memories long forgotten and it can help you create
\nnew ones.  I love music and my tastes are about as eclectic as they
\ncome.  Music of any type or genre can be enjoyed if it speaks to you in
\njust the right way.  My parents brought me up to give any and all music
\na try, if I liked it: great, if not: that’s fine too.  I played a few
\ninstruments as a kid, primarily the flute and piccolo and I played in a
\nvariety of styles and ensembles from chamber orchestras to marching
\nbands.  As an adult, I’m more of a listener than a player.  I listen to
\nall sorts of music, everything from classical to rock to hip-hop and
\njazz with a few detours into Bhangra and world music.  I listen to
\nmusic while doing just about everything in my life; I listen when I
\nrun, when I drive, when I work and when I do yoga.  But one aspect of
\nmy life has continued to be completely music-free, in a word: meditation.  Before
\nlearning to meditate formally, I think I did use music as a kind of
\n“proto-meditation” during which I’d use a cleverly crafted playlist to
\nhelp cheer me up (or, as a teenager, to stay pissed off at just about
\neverybody).  But, once I became a regular meditator, I learned to turn
\nthe mp3 player off and just sit with my thoughts and whatever sounds
\njust happen to waft in.  Lately, I’ve been listening to a series of
\npodcasts on Music and the Brain<\/a>
\nand it got me wondering about meditation with music.  If you do a
\ngoogle or itunes search, a variety of sites come up offering music for
\neverything from relaxation and sleep to yoga and meditation.  To be
\nhonest, I’d never taken these types of things seriously.  As I see it,
\nif you want to meditate, all you really need is your own breath and
\nyour mind.  Why bother buying these “meditation” CDs?  Do they work? 
\nOr, do they just provide a distraction to help you space out instead of
\nfacing the tough thoughts that can churn up in meditation?  On
\nMonday, I decided to find out.  So, I downloaded a few tracks of meditation music and sat down for my evening
\nzazen with my headphones on.  I listened to music for the
\nfirst 10min or so of my usual daily sit for the rest of the week.  This
\nis what I found:<\/p>\n


\nI started out the week listening to tracks from the “Enhanced Healing”<\/a>
\npodcast (music for relaxation, meditation and stress relief) but by
\nmid-week I’d switched to a quickmix of some of my more “chill” Pandora
\nstations.  Throughout the week, I meditated with a variety of musical
\nstyles.  Some of the tracks I meditated with were instrumental while
\nothers had lyrics both in English and in other languages that I did not
\nunderstand.  My little experiment was very interesting and (dare I say
\nit?) enlightening.  My going in position was that music would basically
\nbecome a distraction and that meditating with music wasn’t really
\nmeditation at all.  However, as I reflect on my experience over the
\npast week, I think the answer is more complicated than that.<\/p>\n

I
\nthink most of us have had some experience of how music can affect our
\nminds and our mood.  I remember driving home from work one day and
\nKanye West’s “Family Business” came up on my playlist; I’d heard the
\nsong probably thirty times but for some reason, that day it brought me
\nto tears.  I was just driving along and something in that song
\nconnected with a little part of me that was missing home and family and
\nI found myself crying quite unexpectedly.  Scientific research has
\nshown that music can and does affect how the brain functions.  Music theapy<\/a>
\nhas been prescribed for a variety of conditions from depression and
\nanxiety to Parkinson’s and Alzheimers.  At the same time, I’d suspect
\nthat the majority of people reading this blog have also had some
\nexperience of how meditation also affects our minds and our mood.  I
\nknow I can tell multiple stories of sitting in meditation and being
\nbrought to tears as certain old un-healed wounds rise up.  Like music,
\nthere is also a lot of interesting research<\/a> being conducted on how meditation affects brain functioning and why it works.<\/a> 
\nSo, you have to ask yourself: if meditation affects the mind and music
\naffects the mind, what happens when you put the two together?<\/p>\n

After
\nmy first few “musical meditation” sessions, I dismissed the music as a
\ndistraction and was glad to be rid of it to get down to the “real work”
\nof watching my mind.  However, after I switched from “relaxation” music
\n(written specifically for that purpose) to “normal” music (written for
\na variety of purposes) I found myself able to watch my mind as I
\nlistened to the music.  Certain tracks would bring up certain emotions
\nor thoughts and I could use my meditation as a way to observe this
\nprocess and watch how my mind reacted to the stimulus.  In many ways,
\nthis is no different from sitting with slight knee pain or with a dog barking
\noutside.  The pain or the barking may irritate you but the point of
\nmeditation is to watch that irritation and see that it isn’t you and
\nwill eventually pass away.  I found that music had much the same
\neffect.  A track that I recognized would come on and I could watch my
\nreaction to it and note: “recognition,” another track might come on
\nthat I didn’t like and I could just note: “aversion” then watch how my
\nmood or even my body reacted.  So the music became less of a distraction and more of a tool and an object of meditation.<\/p>\n

In
\nthe Zen tradition, we’re taught that everything can be meditation. 
\nWhen you’re fully present, sweeping the floor is meditation, sneezing is
\nmeditation and now I think that listening to music can be meditation.  While, I have no plan
\nto use music as a part of my daily meditation practice, I think that
\nthis little experiment has taught me to expand my notion about what
\nmeditation can be.  Music doesn’t have to be a distraction from
\nmeditation.  In fact, you can use it as the object of meditation and
\nwatch how your mind and emotions react to what you’re hearing.  It
\nwould be interesting to read a study about what parts of the brain are
\nactivated when a person both listens to music and practices meditation
\nsimultaneously.  I don’t know what the long term effects of musical
\nmeditation might be but it would certainly be interesting to put a long
\ntime meditator in the fMRI<\/a> machine, crank up some Slim Shady and just sit back and watch.  Maybe I should write in to the Mind and Life Institute…   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Music has a lot of power.  It can make you laugh, it can make you cry, it can bring back memories long forgotten and it can help you create new ones.  I love music and my tastes are about as eclectic as they come.  Music of any type or genre can be enjoyed if it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":205,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-and-media","category-meditation"],"yoast_head":"\nMusic and Meditation - One City<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/09\/music-and-meditation.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Music and Meditation - 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