![]() Tony Scott, Music for Yoga Meditation (1972) As British-born Zen philosopher Alan Watts once esteemed: “If you can’t meditate in a boiler room, you can’t meditate.” Set them at the lowest volume on your Sonos or crank them up in your earbuds. Pay attention or tune them out as you will. Some come from 40 years ago, some from the new century. Some are serene, some hushed, some with washes of noise and drone at their root. And so, here are a few albums to cue up and enliven your next meditation attempt. ![]() ![]() To our ears, dull meditation music is not all that enlightening either, even if it’s functional when playing at the spa or at your next Bikram yoga class. “Without music, meditation lacks something without music, meditation is a little dull, unalive.” “Music and meditation are two aspects of the same phenomenon,” wrote Indian mystic and guru Osho. ![]() Dating back to the late ’60s, New Age music arose thanks to the sonic questing of composers and musicians like Iasos, Paul Horn, Steven Halpern and Irv Teibel and his influential Environments series. That ability to both tune in and drop out to a sound led to a cottage industry of meditation music catering to relaxation, stress relief, lucid dreaming, chakra auditing, yoga, and meditation. As he wrote on the back of Music for Airports, his intent with the music was to “accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” With albums like 1975’s Discreet Music and 1978’s Music for Airports, Eno introduced a way of perceiving - or not perceiving - sound that was equally valid. They weren’t alone: Musicians like Tony Scott and Paul Horn began to travel with their horns through the East, bringing such sensibilities back with them.Īnd when Brian Eno began releasing a series of albums in the mid-’70s under the banner of “ambient,” a new sound world emanated from turntables in living rooms everywhere. Jazz musicians like John and Alice Coltrane sought to infuse Eastern sensibilities to Western music to achieve a universal sound, which often included sitar and tambura in a jazz setting. With the surge in interest in Eastern philosophy and meditation in the West beginning in the 1960s, music was often used to transport its audience into heightened states of awareness. “Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,” so goes the oft-misquoted line from playwright William Congreve, but music also has the ability to calm the monkey mind and allow a greater sense of calm to come to its listeners. Regardless, you will soon find yourself face to face with what many teachers and practitioners refer to as “monkey mind.” Leaping, playing, spinning, making lists of chores to finish and emails to fire off, phone calls that need to be made, that “monkey mind” makes us realize that calming the modern mind is not a simple task, but in fact a Herculean one. ![]() But then, maybe you focus on your breath and immediately Faith Hill’s “Breathe” plays back in your mind (or else Fabolous’s “Breathe”). Even the most eager yogi can sit, take a deep breath, find themselves relaxing and congratulate themselves on how well meditation is going. Easy peasy, right?īut anyone who has attempted meditation, either laying in bed, sitting in a chair or in full lotus position, will tell you it’s not that simple. From the outside, meditation seems like the simplest of tasks: sit silently and focus on your breath as it moves in and out of your body so as to be completely in the present. ![]()
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