Music for Mindfulness, From a Former Skeptic

My relationship with mindfulness has always been magnetic, because I’ve been repelled from it as much as the idea has drawn me in. The idea of improving my attentional control has always been attractive, but this has too often been counteracted by frustration, procrastination, or my instinctual contrarian streak that resists what other people think is good for me. This snarl of pulls and pushes has (ironically) captured my attention, and I’ve spent a good deal of time researching mindfulness in healthcare and how music may make it easier to practice.

I’d like to briefly share a trick that’s helped me, and some of the research that you can draw on to inform your own experimentation.

A music therapy professor and researcher at the University of Iowa has theorized that music can play three roles in mindfulness meditation: music can be a support (creating a conducive environment), a focus for mindful listening (the object you keep returning your awareness to), or a focus for mindful engagement (participation as the object of focus).

The third of these functions aligns well with a number of other papers I found, which describe how participants quickly achieved mindful states when researchers modified the sounds people heard in accordance with their breathing patterns. As participants took deeper or shallower breaths, they would hear changes in soundscapes or music, which reinforced the connection of their bodily and cognitive experiences. 

Focusing on my breath had never been stimulating enough to work as a mindful focus, but what has worked for me is letting my breath influence the music I hear. I do this with my imagination, but you could try it with a keyboard app on your phone. As I breathe in, I pretend to sing a rising major scale (like The Sound of Music): “do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do.” When it’s time to exhale–no matter what note I’m on–I reverse course and go down until I’m in the mood to inhale again. I find it interesting to see what melody takes shape, or whether I end up mostly in an octave higher or lower than I began. The point is that the music makes my breath an interesting thing to return my focus to, and the need to keep track of where I am in the scale incentivizes that attentional control. The deeper and more varied my breaths are, the better (for my intrigue and my health).

How would you adapt this idea for hitting drums, or tapping on your leg? I’ll leave you with the best advice anyone gave me regarding mindfulness difficulties. I had met a friend-of-a-friend who I’ve never seen again, but who had just completed a training course for instructors of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. I told him “I usually forget to practice, and most of the times I remember I hear a voice in my head that simply says ‘nah…’ So what can I do differently?” He took a moment to consider, and simply responded, “I would try having compassion for that voice.” It was the reminder I needed that the non-judgment pillar of mindfulness should extend outside the practice itself, to our unending struggle to be the healthiest we can be.