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    Quieting the Monkey Mind: How to Meditate With Music
    Quieting the Monkey Mind: How to Meditate With Music
    Quieting the Monkey Mind: How to Meditate With Music
    Ebook232 pages1 hour

    Quieting the Monkey Mind: How to Meditate With Music

    By Dudley Evenson, Dean Evenson M.S., Joel Levey and

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    About this ebook

    Quieting the Monkey Mind: How to Meditate with Music by respected music pioneers and purveyors of peace, Dudley and Dean Evenson, helps make meditation understandable, accessible, and simple to do.

    Whether you have been meditating for years, or are just beginning on your path, you will benefit significantly from this beautiful guidebook designed for all ages and practices.

    Drawing from over four decades of creating music for meditation and yoga, Quieting the Monkey Mind is filled with practical tips, exercises, photos, and illustrations to support readers on an empowering journey of finding peace within.

    Quieting the Monkey Mind shares some basic principles of meditation along with a wide array of sound tools and practices that can be used to take one into deeper states of inner peace and meditative bliss.

    No matter where you are in your meditation practice, the Evensons believe readers will find useful tools and techniques that will allow you to access deeper levels of inner stillness leading to a more rewarding sense of self and personal empowerment.

    Quieting the Monkey Mind provides some helpful answers to these questions and many more:

    What is the difference between prayer and meditation?

    How can we let go of our busy thinking?

    How do we choose music that enhances meditation?

    How can we create personal sanctuary

    How do we use breath and vocal toning to focus the mind?

    What is the role of affirmations, mantra, and chant in meditation?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateMar 1, 2019
    ISBN9780999137918
    Quieting the Monkey Mind: How to Meditate With Music

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      Book preview

      Quieting the Monkey Mind - Dudley Evenson

      Foreword by

      Joel & Michelle Levey

      Deep listening and creative modulation of rhythms, tunes, and songs have been employed by humans since the beginning of time as a source of delight, synchronization, recalibration, and refinement of consciousness. This gentle hacking of our brains has also been brought about by lullaby-singing mamas, inspired musicians, ancient shamans, and modern DJs. While such experiences can occur spontaneously, they can also be intentionally cultivated through the practices of meditation introduced in this valuable guidebook.

      This precious treasure that you hold in your hands is the distillation of years of deep listening, study, practice, meditation, creative experimentation, and research by two of the world’s leading experts. They share the many ways that music can inspire meditation to refine, harmonize, and expand human consciousness. Drawing insight from over 100 combined years of research and exploration with some of the world’s wisest and inspired musicians, mystics, contemplatives, and techno-savvy souls, Dudley and Dean Evenson have skillfully composed this creative guide for using music as a tool for enhancing meditation. They offer sage advice for integrating meditative practices of sounding, chanting, mantra, affirmations, kirtan, working with singing bowls, and many other creative methods to expand the self-tuning options you can bring to life.

      For half a million years, humans have been singing and creating musical sounds to elevate their consciousness and convey the depths of their feelings, complex visions, and experience beyond words. For tens of millions of years, whales have been singing their songs across the oceans of the world. While studying the Neolithic cave paintings in the Arcy-sur-Cure caves of France, University of Paris ethnomusicologist, Legor Reznikoff, discovered that the areas of the cave with the highest concentrations of paintings were those in the most acoustically resonant chambers of the cave, located more than a kilometer below the surface. He theorized that the Neanderthal communities sought out these power spots deep in the earth and gathered there to sing and chant in these dark, resonant chambers that served to magically expand the resonance of their voices, imbuing the images they painted with greater meaning and potency.

      As our instruments, technology, methods, brains, and communities continue to evolve, humans are becoming ever more creative and adept at using music and sound to alter our moods and to shift our states of personal and collective consciousness. Quieting the Monkey Mind offers its readers a brilliant medicine bundle of inspirations for how to participate in this age-old search for deep, meaningful, sonic resonance in our lives, relationships, and world.

      While this book will certainly inspire you to learn how to quiet the rambunctiousness of your distractible wild monkey mind and calm your distress, it will also introduce you to a variety of powerful ways to open your heart and mind. It will aid you in discovering and awakening more deeply to the rare and precious human resources of inner peace, clarity, mindfulness, loving kindness, and compassion. You’ll learn time-tested methods that have been cherished and passed down for generations from teachers to students across millennia that will now help you to open and expand your awareness to discover extraordinary harmonics of serenity, harmony, unity, connectedness, and beauty that are ever present and available within and around you.

      As the great Indian mystic and musician, Hazrat Inayat Khan, wrote in his classic work, The Mysticism of Sound and Music, The true use of music is to become musical in one’s thoughts, words, and actions. One should be able to give the harmony for which the soul yearns and longs for every moment. All the tragedy in the world, in the individual and the multitude, comes from a lack of harmony, and harmony is best given by producing it in one’s own life.

      Quieting the Monkey Mind offers a wealth of practical guidance for developing and sustaining a personal meditation practice with music. For those more experienced in contemplative practice or modern psychonauts who are seeking new ways to refine, deepen, and expand their consciousness, musical practices are offered to help one listen more deeply to the subtle interweaving harmonies of complex waveforms of the music of life. For beginners or for experienced meditators, this book is a jewel with the power and potential to heal the world.

      Intentional listening is the key to meditation, music, and mystical wisdom. Some of the Indian musical gurus that we have studied with offer the classical instruction for serious students of music to devote the first year of their studies simply singing the sound ‘Sa’ (which in Indian music is like the ‘Do’ or ‘middle C’ of the Western musical scale). As one goes deeper and deeper into this practice and refines and deepens one’s inner listening over time, one comes to realize that all the myriad notes in the musical scale, and all the octaves in an infinite extension, are harmonics of this single note. And as you travel further into the seemingly ‘simple’ yet profound practices offered in this guidebook, we encourage you to bring a sense of curiosity, open mindedness, and reverence for the wonders that they may reveal to you. As Brother David Steindl-Rast has reminded us, Another name for God is surprise – and this book is sure to evoke many resonant surprises for you!

      In a recent study from Apple and Sonos, researchers explored the power of listening to music to help people make meaningful connections. The study revealed that on average, people listen to 4.5 hours of music a day at home. And when listening to music the distance between housemates decreased by 12%, and they are 15% more likely to laugh together, 33% more likely to cook together, 18% more likely to say I love you, and 37% more likely to have sex! These statistics support the belief that we can use the power of music to help us to connect more deeply with ourselves, each other, and the world around us. This connection can happen whether in the intimacy of our own home, with thousands of fellow dancers at a festival with multiple stages, or in work settings where people are grooving to the same tunes while working together. The profound power of music to help us connect more deeply with ourselves and others is amplified through exercises like those introduced in this book, when we learn to listen to music in a mindful, curious, and deliberate manner.

      Dudley and Dean Evenson, wise elders in contemplative acoustic science, have done their homework and research, honed their skills, and refined their creative spirits as composers, musicians, performers, videographers, and recording artists. They have generated a vast archive of profoundly potent and moving musical medicine that they have offered to ease the stress, open the hearts, and expand the minds of countless people around the world. As you experience this book, and as you learn to listen ever more deeply, you can rejoice in knowing that you’re in resonance with an ever-expanding field of vibrant hearts and minds attuned to the powerful harmonies of inner peace, wholeness, and higher awareness!

      Joel & Michelle Levey; Founders, Wisdom at Work • Authors of Living in Balance and Mindfulness, Meditation, and MindFitness • Faculty, University of Minnesota Medical School • WisdomAtWork.com

      Caption for collage (clockwise from top left): Dean before college band performance; Dean with daughters Sarah and Cristen; Dudley and Dean with daughter Cristen (Eva Rainbow) in front of Woodstock tipi; Dudley Dickinson living in Japan; Soundings of the Planet first five cassettes display 1979; Thomas Banyacya, Hopi Prophecy keeper, Tibetan monk, Dean with video camera; Santa Cruz musicians and kids Dean, Dudley, Khabira, Aziz, Sarah, Cristen, Kahlila; Dudley posing for cover of Desert Dawn Song; John Denver and Dean playing at Chief Fool’s Crow’s 88th Birthday Pow Wow Pine Ridge, SD; Dudley and Dean in Moscow’s Red Square on Citizen Diplomacy Artist Ambassador tour; Dudley, Dean and son Elijah in front of Afghan yurt.

      Prelude by Dudley & Dean Evenson

      Dean Evenson and I are excited to share with you what we have been learning about meditation, its interaction with music, and how it can help improve our lives.

      When we first became exposed to meditation many decades ago, we found that it made a powerful impact on our quality of life. Since then, we have continued to practice and learn as much as we could about meditation and its benefits in order to help bring peace into our often less-than-peaceful world. In a way, our story is the story of a generation, the one that came of age in the turbulent ‘60s, a powerful time of awakening to something that had been hidden deep within us. After a decade of civil rights protests and anti-war

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