My Favorite Music for Meditation

Ten hours of trance-inducing music

I’ve recently made changes to my daily regimen—these include more exercise, less sugar and carbs, and other building blocks toward serenity and physical health. But the biggest change has been daily meditation.

I try to find forty minutes per day for it. That’s not easy—like many of you, I lead a busy life. To find time for meditation, I’ve had to give up other things.

And what can I give up?

I eventually made the obvious decision. I gave up screen time to make room for contemplation.

This was a wise choice. I now get a double benefit—I’m less caught in by the noise and dopamine-driven ephemera of digital life, and I add to this the inner peace and joyfulness that comes from meditating. It feels like I’m detoxing my heart and soul.

I should have done this a long time ago. Now that I can feel the benefits, I can’t imagine going back.

But my quiet time meditating isn’t really quiet. I use music as part of my pathway to serenity.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on meditation, so I will avoid giving any detailed advice—you can find other teachers for that. But I do know music, and have quite a bit of expertise on how sound impacts our bodies and spirits. I’ve been researching that subject for more than 25 years.

So I will share some useful soundtrack suggestions for your own forays into meditation. May you find bliss on your journey.

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John Luther Adams: Become Ocean

In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, mystic and author Romain Rolland claimed that we experience an “oceanic feeling” when we connect with eternity and achieve a sense of “being one with the external world as a whole.” This oceanic feeling is at the heart of both mysticism and meditation. Freud believed that it originated in that glorious moment in infancy before we are even aware of our ego or individuality.

John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean is a musical evocation of that feeling, and also a pathway into experiencing it. For 42 minutes, the listener is swept away by huge orchestral sounds that earned Adams a Pulitzer Prize in Music. This is one of the most powerful immersive works of music I’ve ever heard, and feels almost as inexhaustible as the natural forces it aims to channel.

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Miles Davis: In a Silent Way

In the music history books, this 1969 album gets eclipsed by Davis’s million-selling Bitches Brew from the following year. And it’s tempting to take it for granted—Miles recorded it in a single day, and the hard work of turning it into a commercial album fell on the shoulders of producer Teo Macero. That’s why some dismiss it as a cut-and-paste job from an artist destined for greater things.

But that’s a mistake.