Illustration: Johnny Automatic and The Magazine of Yoga

Music is everywhere

If you listen carefully, every day life is a symphony

BY MAGAZINE COLUMNIST EMMANUELLE LAMBERT

If you are anything like me, you have only dreamt of playing a music instrument. Any music instrument, even triangle would do. Yet you have never got to take classes and learn the tricks of the musical trade that would allow you to show off and make big bucks. You are musically challenged, in a way.

Come closer, I have great news for you. Yes, you, reading these very words: you are a musician in your own right. I am not kidding you, I promise.

You are a musician and you don’t know it. Truth is, we all are. Every living organism on the planet, even that unicellular thingy you cannot see unless you view it through a microscope.

Everyone, non-humans more than included, have their own music, a specific melody we play, to which we tune in.

We usually define music as “musical” sounds, harmonious sounds created by man by means of an instrument. But what about noises outside? What about our internal rhythms inside?

Can you hear it?

John Cage once said

Music is everywhere, you just have to open your ears to hear it.

How can it be found? How can it be heard? By doing exactly what our dear Johnny advocates: open up your ears!

As yoga practitioners and teachers, we are taught and we teach how to find joy in everything, to see what remains most of times unseen, to pay attention to what we have in front of our own two eyes. Heck, sometimes with our own three eyes for that matter.

I say, let’s also learn and teach how to listen.

Not only a conversation or music on a CD, but also music in everything that surrounds us. It is difficult to escape from the noises of daily life, especially when you live in a buzzing and vibrant city. And I can understand that car horns and angry people might not be your soundtrack of choice.

Listen to the whole symphony

However let’s look at the big picture, or rather let’s listen to the whole symphony. Because it is a symphony, directed by life. And we, as orchestra musicians, have a part to play in making it more harmonious. I guess if Einstürzende Neubauten can make us believe a circular saw is indeed a music instrument, then we can do anything.

If we are aware of our own music, that is. This is when yoga chimes in.
(No pun intended.)

You move to the rhythm of your breath when you practice asanas, you listen to what is playing inside when you sit in meditation. Meditation is not passive, there are a lot of wonderful things going on in there while you sit still.

You listen to the music of your heart, you let the melody of your thoughts passing by, like a faint tune in the back. You tune in to yourself and listen to what it has to say, to the song it will sing to you.

Do you ever get that feeling, when you are sitting still in meditation, that you are moving and flowing from side to side, when actually you are not? That’s it, you are dancing to your own music!

I told you we were all musicians in our own right.

Shhhh

Music can be found everywhere and anywhere. It can even be found in silence.

Silence doesn’t mean nothing (as in “no thing”). Silence is a place where you retreat from the cacophony, a place to find your tone and listen to your own little music, the song your heart sings, the music your soul plays. We all have a different rhythm, a different vibration, a different voice waiting to be heard.

As I am writing this I am sipping on a cup of Classic Yogi Tea. Want to know what the small label reads? “The beating of your heart is the rhythm of your soul.” See?

Serendipity at its best.

I know, it looks like over-flowery language, but it definitely resonates (ok this time pun intended) with own feelings and experiences. Especially as I am a bass guitar fiend, as you all know by now.

So I am asking you a favor now, dear readers: open, not only your heart, your hips, your shoulders and your mind, but do not lend a deaf ear (getting better isn’t it?) on what you hear, too.

There is music to be found everywhere, and we play our own.

Have you found out what the music you play is? Do you know what makes your soul dance? Listen carefully, and you will find that every noise, every sound is like music to your ears!

Find Emmanuelle here on The Magazine every month in Music Matters. But don’t lose touch with her great style of living real – read her smart, hip and honest blog Plans on a Comet.

© 2011, The Magazine of Yoga, LLC.