Listen Deeply To Music And It Becomes Your Meditation
If we listen to music with words that keep our intellect engaged or keep invoking certain emotions, that type of music may not help us settle down or stop the internal chatter. Regardless of the soundtrack you select, you should leave your meditation practice feeling both calm and rejuvenated. It may take some experimenting to figure out which style works best for you, but once you pinpoint which one works for you, it could be just what you need to take your practice to a whole new level.
They are regular beats of a tone and are usually used alongside binaural beats and monaural beats in a process called entrainment. A chant (the word comes from French chanter, from Latin cantare, “to sing”) is the iterative speaking or singing of words or sounds, often mostly on one or two main pitches called reciting tones. Listening to Gregorian chants written 500 years ago can be a really solemn, transformational experience. Sometimes binaural tones will be listened to by themselves, but more often they’ll be combined with other musical elements to form more harmonically interesting soundscapes. The beat then forms an almost imperceptible background tone, often in a similar key to the other musical elements.
Music therapy is administered by a credentialed provider who assesses the individual’s needs. Treatment involves creating, listening, singing, or moving to music. It’s used for physical rehab, pain management, and brain injuries. Healing with sound is believed to date back to ancient Greece, when music was used in an attempt to cure mental disorders.
When you combine the benefits of meditation with the benefits of music you can experience amazing changes. Just because you start meditating with music doesn’t mean you have to do the whole session listening to it. If you’re an advanced level meditation practitioner then you can easily use music to go up to the second stage of meditation and then keep meditating without it. This does not affect your focus or concentration at all during deep meditation. Meditation music can help improve focus while doing mechanical tasks. A Relaxing Music To Sleep To June 2019 study that observed neurosurgeons performing microsurgical training bypasses with and without meditation music showed a slight improvement in the total time utilized by novice surgeons.
Music can provide many psychological benefits including stress reduction, improved memory, and general improvement to cognitive performance. Research shows that the activity of listening to music can aid in detaching a person from their surroundings and help focus on their own thoughts and actions. When applied specifically to a meditative setting, music can aid in mindfulness, visualization, and contemplation.
Raise your hand if you think that you need silence in order to meditate. A lot of people don’t believe it’s possible to enter a meditative state why listening to music. The problem is, there are certain methods that either require you to focus solely on your breath or utilize a mantra practice. Neither of these methods is conducive to practicing with music. But there is a practice style you can use called mindfulness that does allow for listening to your favorite music created by your favorite musicians.
Certified music therapists are professionals trained in using music to improve mental and physical health. A music therapist can assess a person’s individual needs and create a treatment plan that can involve both listening to and creating music. For more information on music therapy, talk with your doctor or visit the American Music Therapy Association. If you do have trouble meditating with music that has lyrics or loud instruments, try the more traditional meditation music, like instrumental music, meditation bells, or nature sounds. For me, this simple benefit alone should be more highlighted more often to promote hearing music while meditating. Improved focus, concentration and mental clarity are also some of the less-focused benefits of meditating with music.
In the Buddha’s day the vast majority of meditation would have taken place outdoors. Even when meditation took place indoors, the buildings would have lacked glass windows and silence would have been extremely rare. So you could argue that meditating in the presence of natural sounds is closer to the original practice of meditation. On the other hand, just because silence was rare in the Buddha’s day doesn’t mean that people then wouldn’t have found silence useful as a background for their practice. Stress is becoming a side effect of modern life and if it’s not taken care of, can lead to serious conditions, such as anxiety and depression. Both music and meditation have been shown to have an positive influence on a persons mental, emotional and physical state.