During the last thirty years I’ve used so many different forms of meditation, from the sublime to the downright foolish.

It all began for me further back than even that. I remember at the age of 15 being given a book on the life of Buddha by my house master at school. I fell in the love with not just the story, but also with the idea behind the words.

At that time nothing amazing happened, but a seed had certainly been planted, because, a couple of years on and  A First Zen Reader, found its way into my hands. The rest has been a blast and, an amazing journey.

Why sound? Why not, I am something of a noisy person, my wife Raine says that I can be like a cartoon character complete with sound effects and no volume control. Is that a bad thing?

Sound to me makes a lot of sense. I really connect emotionally to music and have done since I was young, add to that six years in a band in the 80s and, music is such a mood shifter, where I’m concerned. I imagine you are probably much the same.

I first came around to the idea of connecting sound and meditation together when I stopped to think how depending on what music was playing, my emotions and mood would change, including dropping down into deep relaxation, not when listening to Ozzy Osbourne I grant you, but at times, depending on what was playing.

Sound is a perfect meditation focus, because of the way it changes our emotional and mental states. We only have to think about the way a song can change our mood in an instant. How often have we been feeling despondent and, suddenly a song comes on the radio and we’re instantly taken back in time.

It doesn’t even matter whether the song reminds us of our true love or the worst breakup we ever experienced. All that matters is the way a song or piece of music has that transformational ability, when it comes to our mental or emotional systems.

We need only think back to life events and recall hearing Happy Birthdays sung and, in an instant we experience thought, images and emotions, whether we like it or not, because sound is that powerful a game changer for us.

Sound meditation is strictly speaking not a classic or true form of meditation, like TM or Mindfulness, though it does integrate well with any Mindfulness practice very well in my experience.

The human condition is very subjective and different people will enjoy different sounds, it’s not unlike tastes in food, different folks enjoy different dishes.

The secret here is to sample as many sounds as possible and really tune into and become as body-aware as we can. Trying not to rely on the intellect too much, as this will only tell us what we should like or listen to.

Instead, we need to tune into our feelings, if we let our gut decide how a piece of music or sound makes us feel, we’ll get better access to the truth of things, our truth. Some sounds will make us happy, excited, and even wide awake and ready to party. So, we do need to give this a chance and not give up after a couple of tracks.

The obvious choice is to listen to ambient spa tracks or Yoga sounds, but, this isn’t all there is out there and so, we need to cast around and look beyond the obvious.

We can try going beyond music for our inspired sound source. The following are possibilities:

• Bird sounds
• Whales and dolphins
• Nature sounds
• Gongs
• Tibetan Singing bowls
• Bells
• Drumming
• Voices – such as chanting or mantra

We can even try Binaural Beats, now these are not to everyone’s taste, but, isn’t that why we’re trying different sounds anyway? Healthline.com has this to say about them:

When you hear two tones, one in each ear, that are slightly different in frequency, your brain processes a beat at the difference of the frequencies. This is called a binaural beat. Let’s say you’re listening to a sound in your left ear that’s at a frequency of 132 Hertz (Hz). And in your right ear, you’re listening to a sound that’s at a frequency of 121 Hz. Your brain, however, gradually falls into synchrony with the difference — or 11 Hz. Instead of hearing two different tones, you instead hear a tone at 11 Hz (in addition to the two tones given to each ear).

We can also make use of the many guided meditations which are available, however, these tend to be on a particular subject and because of this can be difficult to get on with, especially if all we want is to do a basic relaxation style meditation when we hit the cushion.

Sound can be perfect before a longer meditation session, as it can relax us very quickly, because as a state changer it is second to none.