"It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth"

I have been thinking a lot about music recently (recently, as in, all my life).

Music poignantly frames the images of our lives, providing soundtracks that catalogue moments of heartache, joy, profound insight, insouciance, indolence, eroticism, energy, and enquiry in a way that not only allows us to recall, but allows us to deepen and process. Music shows us the universality of the human condition, the shared experience, art mirroring life. The uniting of the lyrical with the melodic, the marrying of intellect and emotion, the stirring of the dying embers of our forgotten youth with the burning desires of our hopeful futures.

These are not just songs.

Yet, while we consume music, we seldom stop and think about this remarkable value that it brings to our lives. Even the most musicphobe amongst us has surely had a moment when a rhythm has carried them to a deeper part of themselves? For me, this is an almost daily occurrence. I have used music to express the deepest and most profound love. It has helped create the most remarkable bond with my son (my Wonderwall). It has been a therapist, an anger management consultant, a motivator on long runs, an advisor, a catalyst for tears and a way for me to express myself in those moments I would normally be too scared to. It has taught me more about myself, about people, beauty, truth, humanity, grief and loss than I have learnt from any text, or person, or ideology. I share it (a risky pursuit, I recently discovered), isolate with it, and work with it.

Yes… music makes its way into the śālā. I use it extensively in my transformational breathwork sessions and, to a lesser extent, in my yoga classes. I refer to it in coaching sessions, use it in somatic healing workshops, and obviously in ecstatic dance.

When it comes to yoga, the idea of using music is a controversial one. Yoga, after all, is about the inward journey, not about melodic distraction. But there are times when I feel it has a place in my class and can, in fact, help us find that inner peace and focus. But it is more than that. Music is vibration, and vibration is an extremely important part of the spiritual journey that is yoga. Music aside, all my yoga classes, for example, open and close with “oṃ shāntiḥ shāntiḥ shāntiḥ” and contain some element of mantra chanting – not music, but vibration nonetheless.

In the classical yoga tradition (from which we have perhaps strayed too far), chanting isn’t simply an add-on or a way for the teacher to impress with their tonal range and “cool” knowledge. Chanting is the practice.

The Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā and the Upaniṣads both treat sound as one of the most direct pathways to dissolving the boundary between individual and universal consciousness. This is yoga. While āsana works with the body and prāṇāyāma with the breath, nāda (sound) works through vibration itself, which, from the yogic perspective, is the very substance of reality. And there is a reason for this. Nāda Brahman (Brahman as sound) makes the delicious claim that the entire universe arose from and exists as vibration. This is Oṃ, and it is not a metaphor or an analogy; it is ontology. The Nāda Bindu Upaniṣad opens with this directly: all of existence is permeated by sound, and liberation (mokṣa) can be reached through the contemplation of that sound. The Chāndogya Upaniṣad tells us that Oṃ is not something humans invented to describe the divine; it is what was already resonating before the universe differentiated into form.

Music, it seems, is quite literally, life.

At first, I found this idea confusing – like jazz, or Bon Iver lyrics – but the more I sat with it, the more it made sense. Creation mythology and science are generally confusing. No matter what explanation is presented, we face a paradox of precedence, or how something arose from nothing.

The Vedāntic solution is that Oṃ is not a sound in the ordinary sense, it’s not a vibration in air. It’s the potential for vibration. The form that consciousness takes at the threshold of becoming. Think of it this way: before a wave breaks, the ocean already contains the impulse toward waving. Oṃ is that impulse – the first stir in pure, undifferentiated awareness before anything is manifested. Oṃ doesn’t precede creation as one event preceding another in time. It precedes creation the way a thought precedes speech – not earlier in the clock sense, but ontologically prior: the ground from which the thing emerges.

So… mildly less confusing than jazz, then.

The modern echo of this is remarkable. As we so often point out in our yoga teacher training, modern science has a habit of converging with yogic insight. Cosmologists speak of “the universe being born from a quantum fluctuation in the void”. A spontaneous ripple in nothingness that became everything. The ṛṣis called that ripple Oṃ. Physics, as Mr Morkel tried valiantly to explain during my schoolday science classes, shows that at its most fundamental level, the universe is not matter but waveforms, oscillating fields of energy. Vibrations… music.

But what does all this really have to do with music, where this essay began three choruses ago?

Well, if Oṃ is the seed-vibration of all creation, then music (all music, even Blink-182) is a further articulation of that same impulse.

But you all know this… there’s a reason certain music stops time, opens the chest, or makes your hair stand up. There is a reason music can move the heart like fingers across harp strings. There is a reason that a song can rip you to pieces or make you feel whole.

It’s not sentimentality, it’s the nervous system recognising resonance with something it already knows. The yogis called it smṛti: remembrance. Not learning something new, but remembering what you already are.

And what we are, is music.

But, less philosophically and more melodically, stop reading. Find a comfortable place to sit and put on that song that stirs you; that takes all the fibres of your being, untangles them and rearranges them slightly differently. For me, that might be “Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires”, a song that reliably transports me to a moment of bliss. Dance. Shout and scream. Get lost in those lyrics of love. Fearlessly send someone a song. Sing.

Give your life the soundtrack that you know it deserves. Listen carefully. It may already be playing.

“Never for money, always for love Cover us and say goodnight Say goodnight.”