Hello and I am once again tuning in

practicing human the podcast where every day we are getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Miskara, and I am once again tuning in from a car parked on the side of the road.

I gotta say, I am enjoying recording these episodes in the car.

It's quiet, the acoustics are great, I feel cool. So maybe this will turn into a thing. Who knows?

In today's episode, we are going to talk about whether or not you should use music in meditation.

Before we get into that, let's settle in with the bells. D' So one of the most common questions I get is whether or not it's okay to use music in the background during meditation.

And by music we might mean bamboo flutes or a waterfall or the sound of a river, anything that is somewhat soothing and relaxing.

In the early stages of my teaching, I generally discouraged using music.

In more recent years, I've softened and shifted my perspectives a bit and they're more nuanced now.

So I'm going to share the potential cons of using music or why I might

typically discourage it as well as the prose and where it might be beneficial.

Let's start with why I used to discourage it and why I might still discourage it.

The first and potentially biggest thing is simply that when it comes to real life

in our most difficult moments or stressful moments.

We most often don't have a nice theme song playing in the background.

We don't have a babbling brook or really relaxing flute music.

The reality of our life is going to be what it's going to be.

And what I've always appreciated about meditation is that it's a practice of meeting the moment as it is,

not needing to decorate it, not needing to make it any better and not trying to induce some trance-like

state that relaxes us more deeply, but simply meeting the moment as it is. And if that means it's boring or there's noise, we get to work with that.

As soon as we bring music in, we're setting up the meditation in such a way that we need to manipulate the moment just a bit in order to do the practice.

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