Music Meditation 101 (with my own Video Game Piano Performance)

[ardacigin]

This time I wanted to do something different. Many people enjoy listening to music. I've observed that some people on this forum are also musicians themselves so I wanted to share my own piano performance and teach you guys how to listen and meditate deeply at the same time. 

If you are a TMI meditator, I'll also make a slight alteration and teach you how to combine it with TMI as well.

Here is my piano performance:

Aside from piano, business, psychology and meditation, I play video games in my spare time. I've purposefully played a relatively easy and slow 'new age' piece from a great JRPG called Ni No Kuni. The reason is that these sort of pieces have well defined and clear phrase structures which means we can use it as a training material for our music meditation.

Here is the technique:

1- Close your eyes. 

2- Put your attention on the ending of every clear phrase structure. (Find that longer pause that arises every 4-5 notes or so)

3- Once you are comfortable with that, now clarify the attentional skill further by clearly experiencing EVERY note (regardless of how fast or slow it arises) before the next one comes up. This is not that easy. The mind won't initially enjoy this way of experiencing music. It tends to listen with phrase structures, not with individual notes.

4- Now maintain this level of attentional depth and open your eyes. See if you can combine the sight and sound in a relaxed manner. Your concentration object is the sound of individual notes. By adding the visual component, I want you to relax a little bit and find some balance with visual awareness. Don't lose the clarity of attention but also take in more sensory information with visuals. Relax the whole body.

5- Finally add the body component with awareness. Attention is on the sounds. Awareness is on both the visuals and the body. Try to feel the whole body as the clearly as you can while listening with the same attentional stability. In this state of consciousness, there is no longer any conscious bandwidth for thoughts. If there is monkey mind, go back to step 2 and try again. Give yourself more time and practice.

6- Takes this music on loop, have an alarm clock and continue to meditate with step 5 for an hour (or however long you want to meditate)

The technique alteration for TMI practitioners:

It is the same with the regular instructions above but you stabilize attention not to the sounds, but to the breath. Do your usual breath meditation but this time bring your highly developed extrospective awareness to the sounds while maintaining clear attention to the breath.

After this, bring the awareness to the whole body and visuals as instructed. All the other steps are the same.

That's it.

Try it and let me know if it makes your more conscious. The more you do it, the more effective this will become.