Music as meditation

Some thoughts on using music as a meditative practice...

​You don’t have to sit cross-legged and stare at a candle to meditate. You can benefit from meditating when listening to, practicing and even performing music. In fact, the good news is that you already do it to a degree. You can probably go deeper into that meditative state though, and for longer periods of time. This can benefit your appreciation and enjoyment of music, your musical development,your performances, your creativity and perhaps your general well-being too.

What is meditation practice?
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Put simply, you are meditating when you: 

• Focus on experiencing the present moment through any of the senses.
• Notice when thoughts come into your mind and interrupt your experiencing of the present moment (these thoughts are often language-based – an internal monologue. They are mostly thoughts about the past or future.)
• Let these thoughts go and return to experiencing the present moment.

The blissful state
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​With practice, invasive thoughts lessen. You are then freer to purely experience the present moment, and this can be blissful. 
 
Even without practicing meditation, we have all had at least some glimpses of this blissful state in our lives. For example, the novelty of a new situation often knocks us into present moment awareness (thus quieting our mental chatter.) Travel to a new place would be an example of this. Also, a dangerous situation can force our attention to the present moment. The consequence of not intensely focusing on the present could be injury or even death. Extreme sports are appealing to many for this reason. For example, rock climbing, freefalling, MMA fighting, etc… Drug taking would be another situation when internal dialogue subsides and attention is free to deeply focus on the present moment: MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, alcohol…

Ideas for meditating when listening to music
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1. Listen to an instrumental piece of music (no words) and focus on the textures, the sounds of the different instruments, the groove. Notice when a thought pops into your head. This could be an assessment, a judgment of the music. It could be some annoyance at someone making a noise and disturbing your listening. It could be a thought for the future, what you will eat for dinner, or some fearful thought of an upcoming challenge, an exam, a job interview. Or, it could be a memory of last weekend or something in your distant past, long forgotten. Whatever it is, now is not the time to dwell on it. Drop the thought, let it go and bring your attention back to the music. You don’t have to love the music, just keep bringing your attention back to the music. That’s the practice. You may need to re-focus back to the music several times a minute. This is normal. Eventually, you can go for longer periods without intrusive thoughts entering your mind.
2. Focus on one instrument in the track. Notice subtle nuances, changes in dynamics, textures. Then, play the track again, this time focusing on another instrument.
3. Start small, with short songs lasting say 4 minutes, rather than an epic John Coltrane solo.
4. Listen with headphones and focus on the mix. Notice the frequencies of  each instrument, i.e., whether they are treble or bass. Where is each instrument in the stereo mix? Hard left, close to center, etc..? Well-recorded and well-mixed tracks have a lot of separation (i.e., you can hear each instrument distinctly) and are great for this particular practice.

Ideas for meditating when practicing music
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1. Play a piece of music to a metronome beat. Where a note you play coincides with a metronome beat, try to play your note at precisely the same time as the metronome beat, as far as possible. Watch out for ‘flams’, i.e., when you are slightly out-of-time with the metronome beat and they can be clearly heard as two beats, albeit very close together. Can you eliminate the flams? When you catch yourself drifting from the metronome, try to get back. 
2. Concentrate on playing with maximum groove, with great rhythm. Literally dance to the music you are making. Try exaggerating your body movements, to various degrees, and notice what happens. When you get your whole body moving, does it improve your groovy-ness and ability to keep time? 
3. Experiment with subtle changes of position and pressure. For example, the way you hold your guitar pick, the way your arm rests on the top of the guitar, the angle your pick attacks the strings, the amount of pressure you use to grip the strings… Do these experiments help you to play with better tone, greater freedom, more fluently, faster…?
4. Focus on the texture of your playing, the dynamics: accents, variations in volume and attack. Experiment with making your playing as dynamic  and textured as possible. Loud notes very loud; quiet notes very quiet, even ridiculously so. 
5. Again, start this meditative practice with short durations. Don’t aim to hold your focus for a full half an hour to begin. Five minutes would be enough to begin.

 

Batting away compelling thoughts
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​As you continue to practice meditation, be it through music or any method, increasingly compelling thoughts come to visit you. It is as if your mind is saying, “Don’t forget me! Pay me some attention! I’ve got something REALLY interesting for you!” You will want to dwell on these thoughts. It is harder to simply bat away these compelling thoughts and return to your object of focus. Such thoughts could be:

• Nostalgic thoughts, nice memories, sometimes long since forgotten.
• Something ‘urgent’ suddenly remembered. You simply must go now and get pen and paper to jot it down otherwise you will forget it.
• A great creative idea, very exciting. Again, must get pen and paper now!

 
Well, you could break your meditation practice to jot something down, or you could adopt the attitude that ‘the good s**t sticks’ and trust that something truly worth remembering will be remembered later.
 

Summary

I imagine if you have made it thought to the end of this short post, you have some interest in meditation and, through it, getting more out of your music appreciation, practice, performance and perhaps improving your creativity and general well-being too. I don’t profess to be an enlightened yogi or a zen master yet, far from it, but I certainly have benefitted from mediation practice. And, if you decide to give it a go, I hope you will benefit too.
 
 Mark Baxter, originally posted 7th May 2018