Music can bring a transcendent quality to your time on the mat. While skilled teachers can fill a room’s energy with the breath and movement of their students alone, there’s a special art to utilizing music in a way that facilitates what we’re trying to accomplish on the mat: increasing introspection and honing pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses from external stimuli), soothing the nervous system, building stamina and a healthy sense of willpower, to name just a few.
Music can bring a transcendent quality to your time on the mat.
Why?
- Brain stimulation: Listening to music activates more regions of the brain than almost any other activity can accomplish. That includes the corpus callosum, prefrontal cortex, nucleus accumbens, amygdala, sensory cortex, auditory cortex, hippocampus, and visual cortex. The neurobiology of yoga is complex, but we are continuously unpacking how yoga activates different parts of the brain in a way the weaves new relationships to challenge, discomfort, and relaxation. Music can enhance this process.
- Feel-good hormones: It has been noted that music, especially music we like, activates a rush of hormones and chemicals in our body. In songs with great rhythm, for example, the brain begins releasing dopamine before the beat drops in anticipation. This can be an asset for enhancing our nervous systems’ capacity for stress management.
- Stamina: More up-tempo beats can increase our heart rate and our tolerance of pain. In segments of the practice where we are challenging the body and holding postures for several breaths, the right song can buttress students in a helpful way.
Don’t get me wrong — minus a keen ear guiding the playlist, music can do the exact opposite: distract and agitate the yogi and diminish the physical experience on the mat.
With the right music, we can pave a beautiful path that guides us from integration to movement to challenge to rest and final meditation.
I credit my friend and mentor Ray Mucci with showing me how it’s done right: using mostly instrumental pieces or songs light on lyrics, staying within a proper tempo range, and creating a song sequence with an intensity that follows a nice bell curve. With the right music, we can pave a beautiful path that guides us from integration to movement to challenge to rest and final meditation.
Enjoy these mixes, which have been favorites of my students over the last several years. Titles correspond to a genre or peak song in the mix:
Discover Your Yoga 