Yoga With A Music Playlist: Is This Really Yoga?

In many yoga classes and studios, music is becoming a mainstay. I am not talking about the soft sounds of the sitar or the quiet chanting of a New Age songbird sifting in the background, but loud popular music, heavy base lines, rippin' guitar riffs, trance, electronica, rock'n'roll and rap. Like other recent arrivals to yoga, including non-plastic water bottles, eco-friendly yoga mats, blocks and straps, the addition of music brings with it a similar controvesy: Is it really yoga?

The following essay is my conflict, love affair and expanding relationship with yoga and music.

When I was in the summer that fell between sixth and seventh grade, elementary school and junior high, being a child and becoming a woman, I got my first record album as a present. It was The Bee Gees -Saturday Night Fever. The givers of this much longed for present were my grandparents. They had no idea what the music was all about, they only knew that I had begged them for it. Wore them down. When I received that first album, I stepped into a new world. I was Alice sliding down the rabbit hole. I can still remember taking the plastic off of the cover and the smell of a new album. The way the cardboard edge felt under my finger tips. In that moment of unwrapping my precious first record, I began to grow up. Music became an accesible vehicle to give voice to newly emerging feelings; highs and lows, knowing and uncertainty, self love and self loathing as I outgrew childhood.

I grew up with parents who did not listen to music. Nothing. They never even had the car radio on. Although they were in their 20s and 30s in the last half of the 1960s and throughout the 1970's when so much exciting political and life changing music was happening, they were understandably too busy making a living and raising four young children to give it much attention. With no older siblings to expose me to music, I had to rely on friends. There were countless afternoons where groups of us sat around in someone's living room or basement and listened to music for hours. By that time, I was a little older. We were probably smoking cigarettes, maybe even pot. But what I remember most is not the high from any substance but the high from the music. According to Nina Simone, “Music is my God.” Throughout my teens, my Gods were Queen, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Who, Pink Floyd, Yes, The Doors and I could go on and on.

At twenty, I fell in love with the man who was to become my husband of twenty years because of music. We grew up in the same era, in the same neighborhood, with the same friends, and with a ton of overlapping life experience. It was no surprise that we shared the same musical taste. By the time I started dating Matthew, I had a love affair with The Dead, James Taylor, Bob Marley, Neil Young, Crosby Stills and Nash. In our two decades together we have disagreed on a lot, but very little when it comes to musical taste. Our biggest musical estrangement is that I will never be a fan of Bruce Springsteen and Matthew would be just fine if he never had to listen to Tori Amos ever again.

At some point in my late twenties, I stopped listening to music. It slowly fell out of my life. One day it was just not there anymore. I felt little connection to the music I had so adored in my early teens and early twenties. I no longer recognized the names or sounds of popular new bands. The current music scene was edgy in a way I could not relate to. It felt overwhelming for me to conceive of catching up. Where would I start? Besides I was too busy. My life had gone in new directions. For the most part, I was content with my role as wife, full time employee and new mother but something was missing. I felt more important and more needed than ever before but less alive. I felt constricted. I was slowly turning into my own parents.

When I found yoga, I found music again. Simple as that. I was 31 years old when I took my first yoga class. My teacher, who was in his 70s, was playing the most beautiful (and current) music out of his portable cd player. The haunting voice of Loreena Mckennitt to the music of the cello woke something up inside of me. As we practiced pigeon and cows face, I remembered for the first time in a long time what it was like to be emotionally stirred up because of a song, a rythym, a voice. From that moment on, music slowly came back into my life. Sarah McLaughlin, Tory Amos, Lenny Kravitz and others. My taste had changed. I had changed. The refound connection to music that I experienced in my early yoga practice encouraged me to seek out the music that spoke to the woman I had become. It would take ten years but eventually I would fall back in love with all of the music that I had once loved and open up to much much more.

I went on to become a Kripalu yoga teacher. In a traditional Kripalu class, music is played only prior to class, during warm-ups and in Sivasana. According to tradition, the music should be soft and non-invasive. The breath is the focus. The breath is the truth. Loud music, drum beats and lyrics that talk about pain, pleasure, and political agendas will only serve as external distraction. Knowing that popular and current music did not conincide with my traditional learnings of yoga, I experimented with it anyways. I felt part yoga teacher, part yoga teacher imposter, part rebel, and part artist. My experiments with yoga and music almost lost me my first teaching job at a “real” yoga studio. A job I really wanted. The owner of the studio did hire me but after a strong lecture about my musical choices. She hired me because I had a obvious understanding of teaching alignment and technique but she took a hard-line approach to the music I had chosen to play in that first demo class. She told me “no” to my music. It would not be tolerated. It was simply too non-traditional and not what her yoga community wanted. I didn't like the feeling of my new found creativity to be rejected but I also wanted the job. When in Rome.....

In addition to teaching at the more formal yoga studio, I was also teaching at a gym. Here I could be as non-traditional as I wanted as long as my numbers were good. And good they were. People were coming to my classes in droves. Music became one of the foundations of my teaching. At first it was strictly Yoga music which I devoured. Pre I-Tunes, I poured over the World and New Age section of Borders. I spent hours at the Kripalu Shop, with headphones in my ears, listening to samples of the newest Yoga artists. I became intimate with Wah, Deva Premal, and the well-deserved king of contemporary Kirtan- Krishna Das. But I also added the quieter songs of The Beatles, Eva Cassidy, and The Rolling Stones into my mix. I was becoming as much a deejay as teacher. I put as much thought into my music selection as into sequence, techinique and philosophy.

In 2005, I went to Los Angelas to visit my brother. I randomly took a Yoga class led by a teacher named Light in Steve Ross's Maha Yoga Studio and I was blown away. During a two hour Power Class, he seemed to play all of my favorite songs. Loud and without apology. Throughout the practice, my eyes welled up with tears and at one point streamed down my face. After class the woman next to me said she was sorry if she bothered me because she cried during the entire class. It was not only me who was moved to tears.

As a studio owner, I see the benefits of practicing with music. It draws people in who otherwise wouldn't come to a yoga class. It works well for Type A people who, if not distracted with music, would otherwise spend the class in their heads instead of their hearts. Practicing with music also allows students to access moods viscerally, to process emotions they might not otherwise unearth without intellectualizing or analyzing them. In my power classes, I see this daily. In simple words, “Music allows people to let go of their emotional crap and feel totally exhilerated.” Music can evoke feelings of sadness, grief as well as feelings of celebration, compassion and love. For me, music gets me out of my head and into my body. My critical self becomes open and receptive. Receptive to the teachings, the breath, the combined energy of the yogis in the room. All of us on the same path for the next hour. All of us unique and precious. Music opens up my limited ways of thinking. It helps me to go underneath my self-imposed labels and every day responsibilities. Music helps me to let go of doing. This is essential to a spritual practice. To let go of identifying with oneself as the doer. When that happens, then what will remain is the truth. My truth as the woman I am;,creative, compassionate, a lover of life, and vibrantly alive.

But there is a downside to music in a yoga class. Music might be exotic. exciting and lift people up and out of the mundane. But isn't that the point of yoga, to be with the mundane? To face ourselves on every level, including the mundane. If this is the case, then practicing with music can be a distraction from the path. Patanjali laid out that the aim of yoga is to control the fluctuations of the mind. “Yoga citta vritti nirodah.” (Yoga Sutra of Panjali, 1.2) The mind must be observed constantly and with unwavering discipline. How is one to observe the movement of the mind while it is being flooded with a drumbeat and lyrics that glorify acquisition and luxury, and other external distractions that do not support the aim of yoga?

Unfortunately I have been in classes where the instructor leans too heavily on the beat of the music and goes light on instruction. I have personally witnessed sequencing as nonsensical, asanas as barely taught, students who wobble unguided in poses they haven't properly learned and breath that is unchecked, inconsequential and hardly referenced. To turn on music and command poses without technical guidance or philosophical reference waters down the practice and allows the term “yoga” to float somewher between fitness regime and latest pop culture trend. This is also a set up for poorly learned yoga and the reinforcement of bad habits which can lead to long term damage. Just because the monkey mind is being momentarily drowned out by The Black Eyed Peas does not mean the students are in touch with their bodies. As we move deeper into the body, into the muscles, joints, subtle energy body and stored psychology, isn't more focused attention, without distraction, crucial to uncover, release, deepen and expand?

These days I choose to play my music. But with discretion. I feel that a loud and distracting music playlist is not appropriate for beginners. For them I choose the gentle sitar or softer artists like Eva Cassidy and Ben Harper. In my beginner style classes I am careful to not drown out the collective sound of inhale and exhale. The Ujayaii breath is a vulnerable and sacred mantra.

These days I play my music only in my intermediate-level classes. Here's where it works. It is desirable to encourage yoga as a celebration. Grunting your way through a challenging standing series while The Jackshon 5's “Can You Feel It?” blares all around you is fun. It is certainly more fun than grunting your way through a challenging standing series to the cacophany of demons in your head.

As a long-time yoga practioner, I know too well the pitfalls of a rigid path. For five of my last ten years of yoga practice, I studied with a demanding and rigid teacher and noticed myself taking my yoga and my life much too seriously. During these five years, there was no loud rocking music of any kind in my classes. This is what I thought was “truthful” yoga. During this period of my own hardcore yoga, I thought I was seeing the truth. But in reality I was not seeing. Yoga's truth is joy. The point of yoga is expansion. Opening up to all of who we are and all that this lifetime has to offer.

When the ancient yogis laid down their philosophy, guidelines and techniques, the world was smaller. As our world expands, so does yoga. If you are really practicing yoga, you are looking inward and you are focused on yourself. You are not worred about what other people are doing. You are not concerned with whether it is “traditional” or “not.” Yoga is union. Sun and Moon, earth and sky, black and white, kirtan and kanye. These days you will find Adam Lambert's brilliant stripped down interpretation of “Mad World” playing in my Power Classes. It's all yoga and its all good.