Music for Yoga Classes

One of the things I do when I'm at Omega every summer is I spend time in the Omega Shop listening to different CDs and collecting new music for my classes. They have such a great selection and I can round up a bunch of CDs, put them in a pile and then load them into a portable CD player with headphones and take a listen. I know, it's a fairly low-tech way to do it but it works. It usually takes me about 45 minutes, maybe because I have to do it without my daughter around and that's all the time I can get, and I wind up coming home with some new music to play in my classes.

This year I didn't find anything that I felt I HAD to have - maybe I rushed. But I also made a list and checked out the websites of the CDs I wanted before buying them and the thing that struck me the most was how much cheaper it would be for me to just download the songs from iTunes instead of buying the CD. Sorry, Jean (it's her shop). I took my very short list and downloaded them straight to my iPod Touch last night. It's still ten bucks U.S. an album, but I don't have to unwrap the CD for one thing (how do they ever figure anyone's going to get those things open), it's loaded straight to my system, and I don't have to figure out what to do with the CD and I won't break the case and lose it, etc.

When I'm shopping for music for my classes there are a lot of things I'm thinking about. How does this music make me feel? Of course I want to feel good with it on, so it just has to be a style I like. Does it have lyrics? If so, are they distracting? If the lyrics are loud and pronounced, it can distract people and make it hard to hear instructions in a class. A beginning class would have a different situation than an intermediate class too. Can I just let the music play? Some albums have a song or two that seem to stick out and I don't want to have to manage the music while I'm teaching. Is it current? There are some recordings I have for yoga classes that are decades old now but sometimes those synthesizers that were popular in the '80s just irritate me now. Also, music I've played over time collects memories and I like to play stuff that doesn't remind me of other times and places.

One album I put on my Like List this summer happens to be from a Canadian group, Eccodek, I'd never heard of. Here's their site and you can take a listen and see what you think. You could also just come to my class this morning at 9 and take a listen to Shiva Boom at Rama Lotus.