God, I feel foolish. I’m doing something called “cathartic shaking”. It’s the first part of a new electronic music meditation session at Akasha spa, in the bowels of the Hotel Café Royal in London. I squint my eyes open to check for security cameras in this lovely cocoon of a room. Because if there are cameras, the security guys must be falling off their chairs laughing as I jerk like an electric eel trying to mimic the cool, sexy moves by the spa’s spiritual mentor, Belinda Matwali.
We all know meditation is good for us. The NHS website recommends it for anxiety, stress and pain relief, among other ailments, and suggests “sitting silently and paying attention to thoughts, sounds, the sensations of breathing or parts of the body, bringing your attention back whenever the mind starts to wander”. Seriously? A look on Google shows “Why is meditation so hard?” is a common theme. Traditional meditation must have been fine once upon a time when external stimuli were limited to the odd mooing cow, and it may be great for those who can dedicate their life to sitting cross-legged in an ashram. But in a world where I’m battling through Piccadilly Circus’s honking horns, flashing lights, a sea of bodies each with their own crackling energy, wondering if the leak in my bathroom is from the lavatory (hope not) or the shower (better), to then be asked to stare at a candle flame and clear my thoughts would be setting myself up for failure. And possible violence.
So perhaps music meditation is the answer, as it requires neither stillness nor silence. Sound healing is nothing new. Didgeridoos, for example, have been used in aboriginal healing for thousands of years. But what is fresh is the science backing it up. A 2019 paper by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where 74 undergraduates randomly undertook didgeridoo sound meditation or silent meditation, showed that the instruments proved more effective for relaxation and acute stress reduction, with higher levels of enjoyment and greater likelihood of attending this type of meditation again.
This is something the spa industry has long been aware of. Over the past ten years on my wellbeing adventures I’ve noticed a surge in sound being used as a way to achieve a meditative state. At Joali Being, the first Maldivian island entirely devoted to wellness, I twanged and gonged vast instruments along a discovery path created by the sound healer Aurelio C Hammer. I had an out-of-body experience at a crystal-bowl healing session in a golden meditation dome at Sangha Retreat in China. I slept for what felt like two hours but was in fact 20 minutes in the Somadome at RePlace in Notting Hill, a coloured light-filled capsule with binaural beats playing through headphones that encourage the brain to create a third beat in a frequency to either calm or stimulate. And residents at One Hyde Park, home to London’s most expensive penthouse apartment, have their own sound meditation gong master, Athena Ko, who also works on the psychiatric ward of London’s Nightingale Hospital. However, be warned — group sound meditation can be hazardous. About 15 years ago at Yeotown wellness retreat in Devon, the blind practitioner began playing her crystal bowls, which felt like warm treacle being poured into my ears… until the man beside me began snoring, and in her own state of deep relaxation a woman across the room delivered a bliss-shattering fart.
Back at Akasha spa, after the crazy shaking Matwali guided us to move only our hands and fingers to house music, which focuses the mind to be present without it being a mental struggle. Then we sat down and hummed to ambient music to stimulate the vagus nerve responsible for the regulation of breathing, digestion and heart rate. After that we lay down for a guided meditation to isochronic tones — regular beats of a single tone said to enhance the theta brainwaves, which occur in that delicious moment as you drift off to sleep.
Advertisement
Matwali’s method has taken all the pressure off meditation and made it fun — like a night in Ibiza without the comedown. As the session ends the foolish feeling is long gone, replaced instead with what I can only describe as expansiveness in body and clarity of mind. Sound good?
Electronic music meditation with Belinda Matwali, £125, hotelcaferoyal.com/wellness
