Using music, whether passively or actively, can often enhance your meditation sessions especially if you are a beginner. Many beginning meditators find it hard to quiet their minds and shut off their thoughts. Listening to calm, relaxing music can help to quiet your thoughts and give you something else to focus on besides the chatter in your head.
Meditation music is also helpful when you are trying to focus in a noisy area. For example, in many urban areas it is impossible to completely shut out the sounds of traffic, construction, people in the streets, or in the halls of your building. By using music you can mask some of those sounds to give you a more peaceful and calming meditation experience.
Sometimes just a five minute music break is all you need to relieve stress during the course of a busy day. Put on a favorite piece of music, close your eyes and just let the vibrations of the music seep into your being, and you have a wonderful mini-meditation as close as your mp3 player.
Integrating music into your meditation is a personal choice, and how you integrate it will depend on the type of music you choose. Most experts suggest that you choose something in a classical, instrumental style that is played at about sixty beats per minute — the rate of a resting heart beat. The reason for this is two-fold: it allows you to synchronize your breathing with the beat of the
music, and the lack of words means that the music is not suggesting more thoughts to you when you are trying to clear your mind.
However, if hard driving rock and roll, or techno dance music is what it takes to move you into a meditative state, then by all means use that to your advantage. The style of music you choose for your meditation is not nearly as important as the consistent practice of meditating itself. The music is really only there to help quiet your mind and move you into a meditative state. Once you reach that place, you won’t really notice the music anyways.
Check out this selection of Relaxation Music to aid your meditation.
