Ambient Meditative Music

I sometimes find it useful to listen to ambient music while meditating.  There's tons of this stuff out there, but I do have some possibly unique angles on this.

Here are some suggestions.  I'll finish with a pleasant piece, but I want to get into the notion of working with the unpleasant, the unsatisfactory.

Sister Waize

I stumbled onto Sister Waize (David Mekler) by way of a reddit post where he had made the Realignment Series available for free (at the time).  The so called "folding drone" music provides an interesting, constantly changing acoustic landscape with good ambient qualities.  But the soundscapes come with a bit of an edge - while pleasant and ambient at times, there are also some challenging, gritty, dissonant, industrial elements.  I find this combination particularly useful for working through challenging or unsatisfactory emotional material.  It tends to provide a support for feeling and releasing such material.  Out of the various Sister Waize albums, my first recommendation might be to try the Realignment Series as well as some of the others I've listed here:

• 2010 - Torn Stone Fall
• 2011 - A Dawning of Wonder
• 2011 - Realignment Series Part I
• 2011 - Realignment Series Part II
• 2011 - Realignment Series Part III
• 2012 - Perennial Suicide

Sister Waize's music is available at low cost through Bandcamp.

Jeffrey Thompson

Jeffrey Thompson has been a fixture of the new age meditative music scene for decades.  He has many titles that would be good for relaxing listening (I would recommend the Alpha Relaxation System, for example), but my suggestion for some music that provides a foundation for the emotional work mentioned above would be:

•  1994 - Sri Yantra

As near as I can figure, Sri Yantra is out of print so I am making it available here:
Sri Yantra part 1
Sri Yantra part 2

Unknown

This track has very little in the way of dissonance, although it has some slightly eerie sounds and other parts that sound something like Tibetan chanting.  Generally this track is more pure relaxation.  It comes from a youtube video a number of years ago.  As I can no longer find any links or references to it, I'm making it available here, this is the original track name:

Out of Body Experience_ Low Bass OBE Meditation Trance _ Binaural Beats

(I'm neither endorsing nor not endorsing binaural beats or out of body experiences, I just really like the track.)  


Back to the idea of the less purely relaxing music, part of the game is that there are unpleasant phases.  The trick, as with everything, is to fully experience the unpleasantness, the fear, the angst, the anxiety, the nausea, the depression, allow it to be, surrender to it, and in that way become less attached to it, to let go of what can be let go of.

But it can be difficult to stay with such sensations.  We want to escape it, to divert ourselves, distract ourselves.  Meditation is a great opportunity to stay with what is actually happening.  But even then we might consciously or unconsciously divert ourselves away from dealing with some minor unpleasantness.

There is a sense here of exposing oneself to one's fears as a way of overcoming them, a prominent technique for dealing with phobias.

I find this kind of music to be mildly evocative of these unpleasant states and useful for keeping one's focus on these elements and thus ultimately working through them.

Streaming

Even easier, stream Drone Zone from somafm.com.