Arowah on Meditation for Musicians

What if I told you that starting a meditation practice in Zen Buddhism completely revolutionised my approach to music?

Just a few years ago, there was no way that I would have considered prioritising meditation when I was already working crazy hours as a full time musician. Buddhism doesn’t exactly fit into the glamorous lifestyle of fame or fortune to which a musician is supposed to aspire, and, more importantly, meditation would have taken away from my precious practice time.

But by some chance of fate, I found my way to a meditation group practising in the Plum Village tradition of Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn, and I began what became a completely transformative journey, both for me and for my music practice.

Now I lead guided meditations accompanied by music, I formed a sangha (meditation group) specifically for artists, musicians and cultural workers, and I’m even writing a book on music as spiritual practice.

Here are some of the momentous ways that meditation, along with the Zen teachings, has made me a better musician.

Being in the present moment

In music we enter into a profound relationship with time. Music can only be experienced in the present moment. The second we hear a note, it has already gone.

In this way, music echoes Buddha’s teachings that life can only be experienced in the present moment. The past has gone, the future has not yet come to be.

In fact, both past and future are actually held within the present moment, the same way that the beauty we perceive in music is only allowed because of the memory of what we just heard and what we are about to hear, creating the musical elements of rhythm, harmony and melody.

As musicians, we know deeply that when we feel truly one with the music or “lost in the moment” we experience a state of total joy. I think that some of the magic or mystique that audiences may perceive musicians to have derives from the ability music gives us to really be totally present on stage, in moments that are so alive and so salient that the audience can experience this state of presence through us too.

It may seem obvious that we exist in the present moment (where else would we be?), but our minds are constantly pulling us into regrets about the past or anxieties about the future. Buddhism suggests that this is the cause of much of our suffering.

Such was definitely true in my experience. When I was playing, I often found myself obsessing over a mistake I might have made earlier in the piece, or tensing up in worry about a difficult passage coming up. I’d even start worrying about what other people might have thought about my mistake, what this gig might mean for my career, if I’d be able to get enough gigs to pay my rent this month, and a hundred other things, instead of focusing simply on the next note I was about to play.

With meditation practice, I learnt that these worries didn’t exist in the present moment, and I could begin to let them go. My focus and enjoyment of playing massively increased.

Learning to listen

While we may think of listening as a passive activity, our mind is always influencing what we are hearing. Both our conscious and unconscious judgements direct our focus, and act as a filter for what we hear. We may unconsciously tune out the background ticking of a clock, or consciously focus on the sound of someone’s voice in a noisy room.

Just think how much information sound gives us about the world around us. Our ability to identify sounds and immediately react to them, has huge evolutionary advantages in helping us to survive. Identifying the rustle of leaves over other background sounds and being able to tell the direction it was coming from could help us react to a potential predator, or hearing the anger in another person’s voice could alert us to an upcoming threat.

Sound, and especially music, are also processed near the regions of the brain that process emotions and memories, so sounds can hold deep emotional resonance and personal significance. This also contributes to the visceral emotional reactions we may have when listening to music.

Judging the sounds we hear is an ongoing process, especially when musicians are listening to music. With meditation, we train ourselves to become more aware of the conscious and unconscious judgements we are making.

In Buddhist teachings, we learn the dangers of both aversions and attachments, and aspire towards a state of equanimity, free from judgements. We may think that our judgments of sounds can only be useful to us as a musician, but they may hold more significance than we initially realise.

For example, I noticed that while I was playing I was tuning my ear to only listen for mistakes. While this method was intended to help me find areas of my playing to improve, in the long run this way of listening was totally ruining my relationship to the sounds I was making and convincing me that everything I played sounded terrible. I was experiencing a huge aversion to my own music.

In contrast, we may have strong attachments or preferences for certain sounds. This becomes our “taste”, and helps us shape what we come to think of as our unique “voice”, especially for composers or improvising musicians. However, this can lead us towards having a very limited criteria for judging whether music is “good” or not.

We might say that music is only “good” if it demonstrates masterful playing, complex rhythm or advanced harmonic progressions, but miss out on a whole world of enjoyment we could have gotten if we were listening to music for our emotional and physical reactions, the very thing that might have ignited our love of music in the first place.

Practicing even deeper listening

During sangha we always practice ‘dharma sharing’. During dharma sharing, one person speaks from their heart at a time while everyone else practices ‘deep listening’.

We don’t listen in order to think of a response. In fact, in dharma sharing we never respond to what someone has shared. Instead, we are encouraged to listen to ourselves and our internal responses to what is being said.

We focus on our breathing and staying present in our bodies, so we may see when someone’s words may cause a flicker of jealousy in our gut, a squeeze of sympathy in our heart, or the rising of anger in our blood. We listen very intensely, so as to hear both what is said and what is not said, and to listen in a way without judgement, rejection or praise, only with acceptance and equanimity.

This practice trained me to listen in a brand new way. Especially when playing in free improvisation ensembles, I found I was able to properly hear all the musical elements around me and to respond more freely and authentically from the emotional reactions they produced in me.

I heard a quote from the great jazz guitarist Pat Methene which goes something like - “when I’m playing, I ask the listener inside my head what they would like to hear next, and then I play it”. Through practicing deep listening, I ultimately found that I was better able to serve the music, and I try to bring this musical insight into my daily life too.

Practising self-compassion

For me, the single greatest gift for my playing was Zen Buddhism’s teachings on self compassion. With meditation practice I realised that what I had previously thought of as having good self-esteem, or liking myself, had been totally conditional on my ability to achieve certain things or have certain qualities.

I saw the roots of this in our education system, in my music career, and throughout society in general. The music industry also makes you focus a lot on your ego and self-identification through your “image” or “artist brand”, to develop your unique selling point or an easily marketable identity.

Usefully, having a right understanding of “the ego” or “the self” is one of the most fundamental teachings in Buddhism. When we look deeply at ourselves we see that we are made up of many non-self elements: our parents, the food we eat, the rain, the sunshine. Thich Naht Hahn calls this the teaching of “interbeing”.

With this teaching we see the interdependence of us with everything around us and we can practice self-compassion. There is a particular meditation called ‘metta’ or ‘love meditation’, which allows us to focus on our compassion practice.

In healing some of my complexes around ego and learning to be less harsh on myself, I can say those twenty minutes of metta meditation a day did far more to actually improve my playing than one hour of scales practice.

Meditation for wellbeing

Many of us think of meditation as a tool for relaxing our bodies and minds or helping us to improve our concentration, but its greatest power is in helping us to look deeply.

Looking deeply at the types of people who are drawn to becoming musicians, we may see some common characteristics. There may be an unmet need for attention behind their calling to perform, a childhood trauma of shame in their seeking of praise and external validation, a drive to control behind their perfectionism.

The need for creative self-expression itself speaks to an innate desire to have our deep inner worlds witnessed, for all their light and shadow. We also know that musicians suffer from a higher rate of mental health problems than the rest of the population - a 2016 study by Help Musicians suggested that it may be up to three times higher.

Many things in current musical working culture exacerbate these issues, and there are woefully few spaces to address these challenges. Through the Zen Buddhist teachings and my meditation practice I found that, while these challenges didn’t necessarily go away, my capacity to hold them grew. I hope that I can help others in my musical community to do the same.