The Top 10 Songs to Help You Meditate « Carolyn Anderson – Wellness & Productivity Expert, Surgeon

The Top 10 Songs to Help You Meditate

April 11th, 2012

Meditation helps us to be more resilient, more productive and more in tune with our inner voice. The discovery and expression of our deepest humanity through this practice leads us to be more compassionate, wise and powerful.

I try to meditate a couple of times a day for 10 minutes or so. I think the operative word here is try! More often than not I can’t turn off the persistent chatter in my brain. You know the train of thoughts….have to do this, forgot to do that, oh crap I never returned that email….on and on it goes.

I find if I can somehow just sit quietly, breathe deeply and relax it really helps to clear the mind. If the thoughts come up don’t fight them. Like that Adam Sandler flick from last year …Just go with it. Picture yourself sitting on the bank of a river and let the thoughts just flow by.

The other helpful tool is relaxing music in the background. I recently found a list of the top 10 most relaxing songs and I found two of my favorite downtime tunes on this list. Strawberry Swing by Coldplay and Watermark by Enya.

Recently a British band called Marconi Union compiled a song called Weightless that is apparently the most relaxing song in the world and likely the best to crank on when trying to meditate. In the article, they described how the song was designed with “specific rhythms, tones, frequencies and intervals to relax the listener.” Even the beat was purposely set to a continuous 60 BPM which can cause our heart rate and even brainwaves to slow down to synchronize with the rhythm. Other relaxing elements included underlying bass tones and a whooshing sound to calm listeners.

Dr David Lewis, one of the UK’s leading stress specialists said: “Weightless induced the greatest relaxation – higher than any of the other music tested. Brain imaging studies have shown that music works at a very deep level within the brain, stimulating not only those regions responsible for processing sound but also ones associated with emotions.”

While not all songs are intentionally created to be relaxing they can still have a calming effect. Here is the rest of the list of the top 10 most relaxing songs. I would caution you not to crank up this play list while you are driving.