Yoga Supplies

Billed as "traditional African Meditation Music," this provocative mix of tribal wails, chants, and hypnotic percussion patterns is the first posthumous release from a Nigerian master whose impact on Western culture was profound and demands attention. Linked to the African education of Malcolm X, John Coltrane, and inspiring Martin Luther King, Jr., Olatunji (who died in April 2003) later collaborated with the Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart to create the ultimate percussion supergroup, Planet Drum. Healing Session was recorded in 1992 when Olatunji was at the height of his powers, and it features all the key members of his renowned Drums of Passion ensemble. You'll probably just enjoy grooving along to the cool, polyrhythmic thumping sounds; exotic inventions; and impassioned tribal cries, but in actuality he's allowing listeners to experience the heart of his native Yoruban culture, designed for healing and guided meditation. These honor and invoke the Yoruban gods, the potent backbone of the healing and trance rituals of voodoo, Santeria, and candomble traditions in the New World. It's tribal music at its most pure and raw, designed for hardcore fans of deep Africa but also intriguing for those who simply like a lot of rhythmic variation. ~ Jonathan Widran, All Music Guide

While the last Bobo Stenson Trio offering found the band cohesively searching for a new harmonic language together and separately as composers, on War Orphans they seem to have found it. Stenson (piano), Anders Jormin (double bass), and Jon Christensen (drums) have sought to distill their tonal language into meditational musical space. They are content to open everything up slowly to get everybody on board and then head for new harmonic directions constantly, through melodic invention and lyrical interplay. As evidence of this, only one of the album's eight selections is by Stenson, three are by Jormin, and the rest by Ornette Coleman (two works including the title), Duke Ellington, and Silvio Rodriguez, whose "Oleo de Mujer Con Sombrero" opens the album. Stenson plays the melody in the upper register, a full octave higher than the original. Jormin takes a Mingus-like role, playing melody and counterpoint simultaneously and never stepping out of Christensen's rhythmic boundaries. On Coleman's title track, the trio fuels a quiet fire with responsive harmonic invention by tracking mode and interval to the melodic source -- and if you can't hear melody in Coleman, then you can't hear. Stenson takes the melodic idea, reduces it to five notes, and allows Jormin to bow in near silence as if he were playing a drum. The tonal range of his restraint is noted in the way Stenson reassembles the melody and brings with it the resident deep emotion it was composed with. Christensen whispers along his cymbals and snare. The delicate overtonal balance is swaying between piano and bass, fragile, sorrowful, and sharp. When Stenson finds the melodic part of the tune coming around again, he stutters and staggers the harmony, and just when you think it will go into overdrive, his glistens head to a shimmering, near-silent close. This was truly a meditation on death. On Jormin's "Sediment" we hear the lighter side of the trio playing out a series of chromatic interludes that resemble preludes but are actually interludes with a melodic framework to guide them through their open, spatial architecture here. On this tune, we can hear Paul Bley's influence come to bear on Stenson, as he organizes the melodic frame around the space Jormin has given him to play it. It's cool and collected and musically out of this world when Stenson's arpeggios begin to move angularly against the rhythm. The set closes with a gorgeous reading of Ellington's "Melancholia," a healthy dose of balladic psychosis wrapped around a creative jazz fugue. Everyone seems to be playing out of time, but the time is in the center of the changes that are stretched out to the breaking point and left for dead as new ones enter the intervallic proscenium. Stenson's power as a pianist is in full evidence here; one can hear every year he put in with Charles Lloyd holding down the ever-weird fort where melody and harmonic strangeness fought each and every night and resolution was temporal and fleeting. As the trio moves through the middle and end of the tune, it's Christensen who shows its true flavor by stomping the sh*t out of the rhythm and changing it to suit his own improvisational needs since the band is so adaptable. Seven time signatures reveal themselves before it's all done and a flurry of soft arpeggios on top of diminished ninths. As the melody disappears into silence, the listener becomes aware that he or she has just witnessed something aurally so special he or she will be tempted never to play it again for fear of losing its feeling. Not to worry; it happens every time.

Children learn yoga, story structure, geography, Spanish, poetry, philosophy, peace education and relaxation with this DVD that features beautiful stick puppets enacting the ...

There are some music buyers out there who will need nothing more than to see the word "shaman" in the title to know that they must have this disc. There are others who will see that word and immediately shy away, especially when they see the jacket copy describing the disc's content as "soothing trance music" that "invites you to remember your own inner peace." It's not clear that David & Steve Gordon are actually party, in any meaningful sense, to the ancient and venerable mystical tradition of shamanism, which raises a question: when it comes to music, especially purportedly spiritual and meditational music, does authenticity matter? The answer is probably that it matters less to the extent that the music itself is the point, and that it matters more to the extent that those selling the music are making claims about its effect on your soul. In other words, if the label claims that its shamanic music will "nourish your meditation" and assist you in taking "a shamanic journey," then the spiritual bona fides of the musicians probably do matter. In this case, the Gordons have, to their credit, made the effort to find actual shamanic material with which to work; each of the four 17-minute-long tracks on this album incorporates actual chants from a variety of mystical traditions, including Aboriginal, Lakota, Mayan, and Sanskrit. The melodies are soothing and understated, the rhythms insistent but gentle, and everything is softened with generous layers of smooth synthesizer. There's not enough difference from one track to another to be worth noting, but that's part of its function: this is instrumental music in the sense that it exists to accomplish a task, not to be evaluated specifically on its musical merits. As for the promised shamanic journey, you may or may not find yourself embarking on one as you listen, depending in part on your listening environment (e.g., home or work). Your mystical mileage may vary.

In the early '90s, a band called Enigma made an international name for itself by combining laid-back club beats, Gregorian chant, and whispered French sex talk into a massive dance music hit called "Sadeness." Founding member Jens Gad is working on his own 15 years later, exploring a more specifically meditational mode. Le Spa Sonique offers exactly what its name implies: smooth, soothing music designed to help you relax and "experience your own personal spa retreat." Gad is no goopy new age hack, at least not most of the time: his beats may be gentle, but if you listen closely they're fairly complex, and there are clear hints of a sharp musical intellect buried in the cottony softness. Notice, for example, the heavily distorted vocal that brings a welcome edge to "Navajo," and the beautifully arranged female vocals that are layered lusciously throughout "Cape Blanc." On the other hand, he's also not completely immune to the call of goopiness, as the saccharine faux-choral passages on "Glass Palace" make clear. Overall, though, Le Spa Sonique does a good job of balancing the purely utilitarian requirements of meditational music with the more visceral attractions of pop music. Recommended.

With spirit dedicated to North, the element of water, and the fundamental tone of yu, this album promises music to calm the temperament. Excellent meditational music, devoutly pretty, useful also as a background for T'ai Chi practice. The booklet includes a basic introduction to Feng Shui.

Suzanne Deason introduces students to basic poses

A workout to keep you fluid and loose

Lisa Bennett acts as your yoga instructor for this easy to follow yoga session. Yoga Zone: Power Yoga concentrates on providing stress relief during the workout. Each exercise increases flexibility, muscle strength, and inner peace. Easy to follow for beginners but challenging enough for intermediates. ~ Laura Mahnken, All Movie Guide

This stress-relieving video shows a simulated aquarium filled with saltwater, white sand, and colorful sea life. Designed to aid relaxation and tranquility, this program offers a full tank scene and close-ups of individual fish, accompanied by the sound of waves on the beach, bubbling water, and new age meditation music. Learn detailed information about the care and feeding of different species of fish and their natural habitat. Some of the species include the Majestic Angelfish, Yellow Mimic Tang, and Green Chromis. Other programs in the Aquaria series include The Exotic Aquarium, The Freshwater Aquarium, and The Coral Reef Aquarium.