Music can deepen your meditation and drown out your noisy thoughts. How to find music most conducive to meditation? Ideally the performer has meditated before playing or singing. Performers with many years of experience in meditation will have learned how to go deep inside to touch their inner source, and from there to bring forth the resonance of their music.
Musicians who meditate find that it helps them enter into a flow when they play or sing – that state when the mind is still and the consciousness soars into a peaceful, expansive state. When a group of musicians meditates together before performing, they often report that they feel a part of a larger whole creating together harmoniously.
Those who have reached the highest states of meditation may be the best able to induce a meditative state in their listeners. It is as though they have learned how to enter into that highest state at will and maintain it while performing an earthly, physical function like singing and playing a harmonium. Because music and consciousness are both inherently vibrational, one person’s higher consciousness expressed through music can entrain the consciousness of the listener with its resonance and lift the listener to a higher state.
Examples of meditative music include the ringing resonance of Tibetan bowls, ancient Sanskrit chants with harmonium, and some Western classical music, especially that composed for church services (late medieval, early Renaissance). Some people find the unearthly, soaring, luminous songs of Hildegard von Bingen to be the ultimate in heavenly music.
For those of us graced to be students of Sri Chinmoy, his resonant voice and the ringing tones of his harmonium or cello or the ethereal flights of his flute communicated something deep within our hearts to our souls. His recordings and videos of his concerts still do that; in the videos you can see how he was meditating while playing.
Examples of his recordings are here:
A free download of his Flute Music for Meditation is here
and examples of his concert videos are here
