So I’ve been diving a bit more in to music for Yoga as well as Mantra set to music and most of the powerful music I’m coming up with is from Kundalini yoga. I was wondering which songs the teachers and students on here are using.
Also - Are there musicians related to AYP Yoga as there are for Kundalini Yoga? If not, I wonder if anyone here has recorded their own music or is using AI to make music that would be wonderful for our classes and personal practice.
In AYP, most techniques involve the introversion of senses, so that deliberately adding music or sounds during sitting practices might reduce their effectiveness:
Along my path to discovering meditation and yoga, I was drawn to certain types of sounds produced by gongs and singing bowls. Listening to such sounds can induce deep relaxation and a meditative state, without doing anything special besides listening. Those sounds are very difficult to record and to play back, and a lot is lost during recording and playback. So they are best experienced live. But here is one excellent recording of singing bowls:
So outside your normal sitting practice, if you want to try it out, I would recommend listening to it (preferably with some good headphones) following the Deep Meditation procedure, but replacing the mantra with these external sounds. So, you easily favor the sounds with your awareness, and whenever you realize you’re not gently favoring them, you gently return to easily favoring the sounds with your awareness.
Unlike the mantra, physical external sound lacks the ability to naturally refine in the mind to stillness. Yet, somehow these sounds (through their intrinsic characteristics and also through the special way the bowls are played) still make me feel “at home”, a feeling I know otherwise only from Deep Meditation.
I mostly use the tracks on insight timer to go to sleep to. I find the singing bowls, rain and waves sounds can help to induce deep states as I fall to sleep.
I don’t use any music during meditation, but outside of meditation I experiment with bajans and with drumming. I’ve recently discovered that drumming can alter your state of consciousness, in fact drumming is and has been used all over the world in just about every culture in order to induce deep states whereby one can commune with the unconscious.
I am careful not to overdo these practices as they can interfere with my regular AYP practice.