Meditation is not Relaxation and the Meditation Music Myth

Let me try to clear up a couple of misunderstandings about meditation.

One:
There is a difference between meditation and relaxation.
There is a long standing myth that meditation should be relaxing.
Believe me please, meditation and relaxation do not go together well. One falls asleep if meditation turns into relaxation. That's why we generally do not meditate while lying down.
Time after time students have asked me if they could please lie down during meditation.
Time after time their snoring soon resonated through the studio.
Don't take me wrong: sleeping is great. But I do not teach sleeping. I teach meditation and mindfulness.
Meditation is training the mind. The mind needs to work.
Sleeping immediately after meditation is great and highly recommended.

Two:
Meditation and music do not go together.
You're either listening to music or you're meditating. You can't do both at the same time.
It's like saying you're going for a swim in the desert.
So whomever invented 'meditation music' did not really know much about meditation.
Voila, yet another item you do not have to bother buying: meditation music CD's.

Three:
Another myth: Meditation teachers know all about healthy diets and other health related matters.
Meditation teachers know a lot about meditation. That's all.
Dieting is not necessary in order to meditate, neither is it necessary to be a vegetarian, or a vegan...
Often meditation leads to elimination of not only food items, but also of alcohol and other drugs, cigarettes...
This however is a result, not a cause of skillful meditation.

Good meditation teachers are often a bit fat. Because they sit a lot.

A great website on Zen-meditation is the Do Not zzz site by the Kodaiji Zen Temple in Kyoto. It shows how you can meditate on the toilet, but you cannot zzz. The site was made in the early 1990ies and is still stunningly beautiful.