Meditation Music: Useful or Unhelpful?

Mindfulness is the undistracted awareness of the experience of the present moment. Mindfulness meditation is the practice that trains your mind to cultivate this awareness.

Listening to Music While Meditating

Listening to music while meditating is comfortable and soothing, but it's not beneficial for developing mindfulness. The goal of mindfulness meditation is to train your mind to return to the present moment throughout your day, and music doesn't help us to do this.

Building a Dependency on Music During Meditation

Your brain naturally focuses on the present moment when listening to music as it focuses on the note being played and anticipates the next note. This brings you into the present moment which is why meditation teachers ring a bell at the start of the practice, but if it is constant you may become dependent on music to sit and meditate.

Align Your Meditation with Your Daily Life

The ideal meditation practices should resemble the experiences you encounter in your everyday life as much as possible. This way, the training you gain through meditation can directly translate to your daily activities.

Leisure Experience vs Mental Training

I am not knocking guided visualisations, leisure meditations and adult bedtime stories. They are just not mental training. It's important to separate a mellow sound bath or music meditation from the mental discipline of mindfulness meditation.

Focus on Time-Tested Practices

For true mindfulness training, focus on established practices that have been proven effective over thousands of years and by hundreds of millions of meditators.