—An Interview with Mike Hardin, Part One—
This two part meditation testimonial and interview features Mike Hardin who speaks on Meditation Practice, Creating Meditation Soundtracks, and his Music for Meditation.
Meditation How: Do you meditate?
Mike: Yes I do. I haven’t been as faithful to my meditation practice in the last couple of weeks and as a result, my sleep has been light and restless. I’ve had a guest from out of town who just left this morning.I will be doing about an hour after this portion of the interview. OOOHHHMMM!
Meditation How: Sounds great. What form or method of meditation do you practice, and how did you first get involved on meditation?
Mike: I clear my mind and focus on a purple pastel color that I see behind my eyelids. (Painting the inside of my eyelids purple sucks up most of my meditation time…) But seriously, focusing away from distraction occupied more time when I first started. I actually created the Planets.mp3 track to help keep me “in state”. It worked so well that I made other meditation soundtracks which I alternate between days/sessions. I put the best stuff on Blissfulsounds.com.
I guess the closest category would have to be Zen meditation but what I practice is a form I kinda came up with on my own. I started meditating regularly around 1992 while in Honolulu. I was working at night in a club near Pearl Harbor playing rock music. I would use the local bus system to get back and fourth from work and also to see the sights during the day. Between stops, I started practicing meditation. I guess the spiritual vibe in Hawaii was my catalyst.
Meditation How: You painted a vivid picture of your practicing meditation. Thank you. When you refer to “in state” it sounds to me like you have found a deeper space beyond distractions where you needn’t struggle to maintain the clarity of a purer awareness. It does sound vet much like the no-mind of zen, and the single point of focus on this color was how you in essence “starved” the ego of it’s otherwise mental pre-occupation and found this deeper space. Am I reading too much into this, or is this a semblance of what happened for you? Also, how does the music in particular play into this?
Mike: The key to producing the “music” for meditation is to avoid any sort of rhythmic pulse or spike in volume… nothing that fights with your mantra or creates distraction. The meditation soundtracks on Blissfulsounds.com are engineered to be a sort of random wash of sound… a man-made environment that draws on sounds and inspiration from nature and the universe.
Meditation How: Can you explain more about how specific choices musically would be disruptive to meditation, and also how know what these are?
Mike: Basically, any sounds, notes or sonic elements that “jump out” of the track. For instance, a sound that could potentially startle the listener because it is too loud. Tones that are dissonant are also undesirable. The track has to be calming and should not draw attention to itself. For some people, the type of music I do is used prior to but not during meditation. The meditation soundtracks I create are also beneficial to the meditation process when used in this way. They help calm the individual by creating a “winding down” period prior to a meditation session in a silent environment.
>>> Part Two: Music for Meditation – mp3, Meditative States, Blissful Sounds