Music To Meditate And Relax The Mind

When you sit silently meditating, you quickly realize how difficult it is to keep your mind calm and your attention in the present. Some practices can help us, such as practicing a little yoga before to reach meditation in a more conducive state of mind or resorting to some relaxing music or music to meditate that helps us to be more calm and concentrate.

Music has great power to influence our emotions and our state of mind, giving it great potential as a tool for meditation. Music can activate or relax us, cheer us up or sadden us. When it comes to meditating, we can do it in silence or we can help ourselves with music. If we opt for the latter, what interests us is to find music that relaxes us and keeps us attentive, improving our sensory experience.

This has been intuitively known to people who meditate and have used relaxing music to achieve the necessary mental calm. Some prefer music with sounds of nature, others resort to compositions with Tibetan bowls or musical pieces in which bells or chants sound that transport them to distant temples. The music new age, the Gregorian chants and even classical music have also been a source of inspiration for many meditators.

The possibilities are multiple … and each one finds relaxation and concentration in music according to their musical preferences or the music that resonates the most within them. However, more and more is known about why some types of music relax more than others and how meditative states can be induced through certain types of music, so it should be open and encouraged to try new things. You can even dare to get hold of some Tibetan bowls and meditate with them.

Here we present a selection of meditation music with varied proposals of different styles, from some classics to recent compositions based on the latest research in neuroscience, so that you can choose according to the moment and test which ones work best for you. You can also use them simply to relax.

If your head drifts to other thoughts, or even if you find yourself thinking about the music, calmly redirect your attention to the present moment: to how the music sounds and the sensations it produces in you.

1. Weightless, by Marconi Union (relaxing music)

Marconi Union is a British ambient group. When creating this composition, he set out to achieve “the most relaxing song in the world.” To do this, they collaborated with experts in sonotherapy, who based on scientific research helped them develop a piece that manages to reduce blood pressure, stress levels and heart rate.

The piece was studied by a team of neuroscientists from Mindlab International led by Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson, who compared it to a selection of nine other relaxing songs based on online ratings and the judgment of a group of experts. After comparing the effects of the ten pieces on the physiological constants of a group of 20 people, he placed Weighless in a clear first position. “The power of this composition is extraordinary, far superior to any of the other musical pieces we have studied. Weightess reduces anxiety by 65%. “

The composition begins with 60 beats per minute that gradually decrease until reaching 50, which gradually reduces the heart rate of the listener. The melody, a succession of soft and relaxing sounds that subtly transport nature, does not repeat itself, which as explained from Mindlab “allows the brain to disconnect because it stops trying to predict what is going to come next.”

There is a free 10-hour version that you can take advantage of for your meditation practice or to create a relaxing environment wherever you are.

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2. Whole being regeneration, by Magnetic Minds (binaural beats)

Thanks to bioacoustics, a branch of science that studies how we perceive sounds and how this influences our experiences, we can determine that there are some types of relaxing music that are especially suitable for meditation, for example because they stimulate the production of a certain of waves in the brain that are the most favorable for meditation.

One of the most studied types of music for meditation is music based on binaural beats, also known as 3D or 8D music. Since this type of music began to be studied in the 1970s, it has been known that it induces a vibrational frequency of 4 to 8 Hz in the brain, the frequency at which theta waves, associated with meditative states, are generated in the brain. It is also known that it can be used effectively to reduce anxiety.

The group Magnetic Minds, whose compositions can be heard through the popular Insight Timer meditation music app, specializes in this type of meditation music. This musical piece, whose title could be translated as “Complete Regeneration of the Being”, contains frequencies associated with well-being, such as the so-called Schumann resonance (a very low frequency of 7.83 Hz associated with the vibratory frequency of the Earth) and the one that favors delta waves (3.5 Hz), which occur in states of deep relaxation in which the body can regenerate.

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3. When the earth responds, by Eva Julián (nature recordings)

The work of Eva Julián, creator of Sound and Life, goes beyond music to meditate. It is part of a project to investigate the vibrational response of natural spaces to human presence. He invites us to communicate with nature and open our hearts to let it, with its music, allow us to “connect with a highly coherent internal wisdom connected to the whole”, in his own words.

This recording is the result of an experiment in which 14 people were asked to calmly enter a cave (the San Genadio cave, in the Valley of Silence, in León) and there, in the place where they felt most Comfortable, they did a work of connection with the mountain and asked, singing, to emit a frequency of 10 Hz, related to states of consciousness that occur in relaxation.

“The earth can sing for you if you ask it,” says Eva Julián in the text that accompanies the piece, “and it does so by emitting frequencies to which our body and brain respond almost immediately, modulating new states of consciousness” .

You may also be interested in listening to its sonic mandala.

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4. Spiegel im Spiegel, by Arvo Pärt (minimalist classical music)

Classical music offers many possibilities for meditation. This beautiful piece by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, written for piano and violin in 1978 shortly before his exile from the Soviet Union, is composed only of the melody of the violin, sometimes substituted by cello as in this version, and the three-note accompaniment. at the piano. A tinkling and minimalist music in which Arvo Pärt, as he himself explained, set out to leave his ego behind.

Spiegel im Spiegel means “mirror in the mirror” in German. The piece creates an effect of infinite continuum and a distance between notes after which one always returns to a starting point, creating a feeling of coming and going that Arvo Pärt described as “coming home after spending time away”.

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5. Music for Yoga Meditation, by Tony Scott (yoga music)

Tony Scott’s meditation music is a classic. This jazz clarinetist collaborated with Sarah Vaughn and Billie Holiday in the 1950s, but on a tour of Asia he ended up in a Hindu temple that deeply influenced him. In the mid-sixties he released his first album of Zen meditation music.

In Music for Yoga Meditation , a recommendation from the New York magazine Vulture , you can meditate to the sound of your clarinet, with movements designed to increase the kundalini energy chakra by chakra throughout the compositions that make up the entire album.

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6. Tibetan bowl music, with the irregularity of nature

This 34-minute piece is a recommendation from Gerard Arlandes, a Taoist meditation teacher in Barcelona and a regular contributor to Cuerpomente . He usually meditates in silence, but considers that if music is used it is best to choose compositions that do not have obvious melodies, as is the case with this music played with bowls and Tibetan bells.

“When we meditate, the evident melodies become a song that excessively dominates the interior of the person who meditates and does not allow him to be with himself. The song takes him away and returns to another time that is not the present and to another place that is not here “, explains Arlandes.

“In this piece the sounds have the regular irregularity of the sounds of nature and can accompany the meditation without entering as an intruder inside the person who meditates. Another option would be to go directly to the sounds of nature, such as the sounds of the forest. or the sea, “he adds.

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7. Reflection, by Brian Eno (ambient music)

Famous British composer and music producer Brian Eno, a former Roxy Music member and considered a pioneer of ambient music, has created numerous pieces of music that can be used for relaxation or as meditation music, since his first Ambient 1: Music for Airports de the seventies to his Thursday Afternoons of the mid-eighties. But in 2017 he created this piece as a clear statement of intent.

Reflection is meditation music created as Eno’s personal reflection on meditation, with sustained stillness and little cathartic glimpses. It’s almost 55 minutes of music.

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8. Theta Mare, by Guenther Goerg (binaural beats)

Guenther Goerg, another Insight Timer regular, is an Austrian composer who writes music specifically designed to influence brain wave activity and induce theta states, associated with deep meditation. The music combines binaural beats with electronic music.

According to Goerg, we could consider this method, known as Brainwave or Neural Entrainment, with a kind of guided meditation. There is no voice that guides you, but the music itself guides you.

You have five hours of recording and you can use it as music to meditate or to sleep.

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9. Balancing the chakras, from Calm Whale Tunes

This relaxing composition with shaman drums, designed to balance the 7 chakras and shared by the YouTube channel Calm Whale Tunes, is a recommendation from Lidia González Alija, author of the Medita Me blog, who shares a guided meditation with us every month.

“What I like about this music is that it introduces organic and deep sounds that help in the immersion towards the space of consciousness, mixed with drumbeats that help to release stagnant energies in the body”, comments Lidia.

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10. Wet land, by Hiroshi Yoshimura (sounds of nature)

Yoshimura is a Japanese musician and composer considered a pioneer of Japanese ambient music. It combines soft electronic melodies with sounds of nature : the water of the streams or the waves of the sea, the soft patter of the rain, the chirping of the birds …

Wet land is an example. It lasts 38 minutes but the piece has several pauses, if you want to do a shorter meditation : the first section, for example, barely lasts 5 minutes.

If you like music to meditate with sounds of nature, be sure to explore other Yoshimura titles, such as Air , Green or Quiet Forest .

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11. Tibetan Bells III, by Henry Wolf and Nancy Hennings (Tibetan bowls)

This is another of the recommendations for meditation from the Vulture magazine . It is the work of the duo formed by Henry Wolf and Nancy Hennings, who with their first version of Tibetan Bells became one of the first to record the sound of Tibetan bells in a recording and thus lay the foundations of what would later become the new age. This piece by Tibetan Bells II I is called Crossing the line and lasts about 11 minutes, but you can continue listening to other pieces of the album on YouTube.