How to Use Audio Therapy as Part of Your Meditation Routine
What Is Audio Therapy?
Audio therapy, as the name suggests, is a way of using sound to assist with any therapeutic process you enter into. Meditation is one such therapeutic process and sound can be integral to its success. Many people struggle to focus on one thing; with meditation, you are intended to focus on your breathing and nothing else.
Distractions can often hinder the process of meditation. A barking dog, for example, may break your concentration away from the meditative task. Any external sound can impede your focus and prevent you from achieving that all-important state of "Zen", which basically means you are relaxed, calm, and focused.
Audio therapy is great because it removes external variables such as background or environmental sounds. We're not talking babbling brooks or rain on the window, here; those can actually help with meditation. We're talking car alarms, construction sounds, or noisy animals; all sounds that are associated with a busy life and which can hinder our focus and internal calm.
Not only that, but audio therapy provides you with something to focus on while it cuts through life's noise. It can feature natural rhythms, undulating beats and tones, and even sounds from nature. All of these are a great way to help you focus on meditating rather than on the traffic outside.
Binaural Beats And Isochronic Tones
It may surprise you that simply playing a continuous frequency into your ears may apply a change to your mental state. The main methods of presenting these frequencies are via binaural beats and/or isochronic tones.
They're very similar in that they both play a sound signal into each ear, with a slight alteration in frequency between the left and right ear. The difference is that binaural beats have moments of silence interrupting the sound signal, hence "beats". Isochronic tones are continuous, hence it is a "tone".
As mentioned, playing different frequencies into your ears can change your mental state. It is said that certain frequencies can assist with lucid dreaming, deep meditation, or even the relief of stress and anxiety. Now, as with most holistic therapies, this is unlikely to work for everyone.
However, if you are curious you should try it out. There are plenty of apps available that can play binaural beats and isochronic tones.
How To Incorporate Audio Therapy Into Your Meditation Routine
The first thing we would recommend is using a pair of good headphones. You can use regular speakers, but these won't provide you with the immersion you need to be able to focus on the audio therapy sounds. External noise will still interrupt and we are trying to prevent this happening.
Any headphones will work but try and use good quality ones preferably headphones or earbuds with active noise canceling as these will remove a lot of the disruptive sounds going on around you. If you want a recommendation, though, the Kokoon sleep headphones are an excellent choice.
The Kokoon headphones might be a little on the pricey side for a beginner, so we recommend trying sound therapy out with some less expensive headphones, first. However, they are designed to allow you to sleep, so they are great for meditation as well. They have an ergonomic design and feature both active and passive noise-canceling, so you should be able to meditate perfectly well using these cathartic cans.
In addition to the headphones, you are going to require some sound to play through them. You can access binaural beats and isochronic tones via the apps mentioned earlier. One of the most comprehensive apps for assisting with audio therapy is "Atmosphere", which is available via the Google Play and Apple App stores respectively.
Once you are equipped with headphones and an app, you're pretty much ready to relax. Just choose a moment in the day when you'd like to cut out the noise from your daily life, pop your headphones on, and launch the app.
How Can You Use Binaural Beats And Isochronic Tones?
Here, we will use the Atmosphere app as an example. The app has a wide range of sounds that are broken down into different categories. There are city sounds (not the most relaxing - you might want to avoid these unless you relax to the sound of a jackhammer), ocean sounds, and there is even a category for East Asia, which features Tibetan chanting, singing bowls, and the sound of the wind blowing through bamboo shoots.
However, it is the "Binaural and Isochronic" section you want to be paying attention to, here. There are 15 in total, and you can play up to eight at any one time. Each option represents a different frequency and they are all labeled with the effect each frequency could have on the brain. So, you have options such as "Circulation", "Stimulate Creativity", and "Regeneration".
Each option sounds slightly different and you can customize the tone by playing several at once. So, if you want to enter a meditative state and stimulate your mental clarity at the same time, you can select both tones and they will play simultaneously. Concentrating on these tones will clear your mind and allow you to focus on meditation, helping you to relax in the process.
Binaural beats and isochronic tones work differently for different people. For some, they may not work at all in terms of the effects they are intended to have on your brain activity. However, they can still offer you a point of focus if you struggle to drown out external distractions. Experimenting with them is fun and may set you off on a path to enlightenment!
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