You can close your eyes. You cannot close your ears.
Sight can be shut off with a blink. Taste and smell fade when there is nothing to taste or smell. But hearing continues through sleep, through darkness, through the deepest inattention. Sound reaches you whether you consent to it or not.
The yogic tradition noticed this and drew a conclusion from it. If there is one sense that never fully closes, then there is one door that is always open — and a door that is always open is worth learning to walk through.
That is the starting point of Nada Yoga: the systematic use of sound, and eventually of listening itself, as a path to meditative absorption.
It is not a niche accessory to “real” yoga. In the Hatha Yoga Pradipika — one of the two or three most important manuals in the entire hatha tradition — the final chapter, the chapter on samadhi, devotes its longest and most detailed section not to breath retention or advanced posture, but to listening to inner sound. Svatmarama calls it the chief method among all the practices of dissolution.
That placement is not decorative. It tells you that sound was understood as an endgame practice, not a warm-up.
What “Nada” Actually Means
Nada (नाद) comes from the Sanskrit verbal root √nad, meaning to sound, to resound, to roar, to make a noise. In its plainest sense it simply means sound or tone.
But in yogic and musicological usage it means something narrower and stranger than “noise.” Nada refers to sound understood as vibration — as a moving, living process rather than a static object.
The thirteenth-century music treatise Sangita Ratnakara opens its first chapter not with notes or scales but with an account of where sound comes from. Sharngadeva describes nada as arising in the body from the meeting of prana (vital breath) and agni (fire, metabolic heat), rising through the centres of the body and finally emerging as audible tone.
The same text offers a traditional etymology that yoga teachers still quote: na standing for prana, da for agni, their union producing nada. This is a mnemonic rather than a strict linguistic derivation — the real root is √nad — but it encodes a genuine teaching. Sound, in this view, is not something that happens to the body. It is something the body does, out of breath and heat.
That is why sound sits so naturally alongside pranayama in the yogic system. They are two views of the same movement.
Nada Brahma: Sound as the Substance of Things
The phrase most often attached to Nada Yoga is Nada Brahma — usually rendered “sound is God” or “the world is sound.”
The claim is metaphysical, and it deserves to be stated precisely rather than romantically.
Vedic and tantric cosmology describes manifestation as a process of progressive condensation. From undifferentiated consciousness arises vibration; from vibration, differentiated form; from form, the world of objects. Sound is not a metaphor in this scheme — it is the name given to the first stirring, the point at which the unmanifest becomes something rather than nothing.
Brahman is the unchanging absolute. Nada Brahma proposes that vibration is how the absolute appears as a world.
This is not the same as saying “everything vibrates, therefore everything is sound.” The physics-flavoured version of the argument is common in modern sound-healing marketing and it is not what the tradition is saying. The tradition is making a claim about the order of manifestation, not about acoustics.
Practically, the consequence is this: if the world unfolds out of vibration, then tracing vibration back to its source is a way of tracing the world back to its source. Nada Yoga is that tracing, done with attention.
Where Nada Yoga Sits Within the Tradition
One honest note before going further. Nada Yoga is not a formally named school in the way that Raja Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, or Karma Yoga are named in the Bhagavad Gita. You will not find a text called The Nada Yoga Sutras.
What you will find is a coherent body of teaching on sound distributed across several traditions, which later teachers gathered under one name. Knowing where those pieces come from is what separates real study from repeating slogans.
The Upanishads. The Mandukya Upanishad analyses AUM as a map of consciousness — waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and the fourth state beyond them. The Nada Bindu Upanishad gives direct instruction on listening to inner sound and describes the progression of what the practitioner hears. The Hamsa Upanishad lists ten inner sounds in sequence.
The Yoga Sutras. Patanjali does not build a sound yoga, but he gives it a foundation. In Sutra 1.27 he states that the expression of Ishvara is the pranava — the syllable Om. In 1.28 he prescribes its repetition together with contemplation of its meaning. In 1.29 he says the result is turning inward and the removal of obstacles. That is a compact instruction in mantra practice, placed early and treated as significant.
The Hatha Yoga Pradipika. Chapter Four presents nadanusandhana — the pursuit or investigation of sound — as the foremost among the many methods of laya (dissolution of mind). Svatmarama gives explicit technique: sit in muktasana, adopt shambhavi mudra, close the gates of the senses, and listen for the sound within the right ear. He then describes four stages of development in the practice and catalogues the sounds heard at each.
The music treatises. Sangita Ratnakara and its predecessors, especially Matanga’s Brihaddeshi, treat music and yoga as continuous rather than separate. Indian classical music inherited its metaphysics of sound from this material, which is why raga and yoga have never fully parted company.
The Natha lineage. The Natha yogis, associated with Gorakhnath and Matsyendranath, kept anahata listening central to their practice. Much of the transmission that reaches modern Nada Yoga passes through them.
So Nada Yoga is not invented, and it is not a single ancient system either. It is a genuine tradition assembled from real sources — and a teacher who tells you it comes from one text is either simplifying or hasn’t looked.
Nada Yoga Is Not Sound Healing
This distinction matters more than any other in the subject, because the confusion is now nearly universal.
Sound healing is a modern therapeutic modality. It is generally passive — you lie down, a practitioner plays bowls or gongs, and you receive the sound. The aim is relaxation, nervous-system regulation, emotional release. These are real and worthwhile aims, and there is nothing dishonest about pursuing them.
Nada Yoga is a meditative discipline. It is active — you produce sound, or you listen with sustained deliberate attention, and the object is the training of consciousness. Relaxation may occur. It is not the point.
The clearest way to see the difference is to ask what happens when the sound stops.
In a sound bath, the session ends when the last gong fades. In Nada Yoga, that is precisely where the practice becomes interesting — because the external sound was only ever a bridge to the internal one.
There is no need to be dismissive here. A good sound bath is a good sound bath. But a practitioner who has only ever received sound has not yet begun the yoga.
Ahata and Anahata: The Two Kinds of Sound
The entire architecture of Nada Yoga rests on one distinction, and it appears in both the yogic and the musicological texts.
Ahata nada — struck sound. Sound produced by contact: two objects meeting, air moving over vocal cords, a mallet on a bowl, a bow on a string. All audible sound is ahata. It has a beginning and an end. It travels through a medium. It can be recorded, measured, and shared.
Anahata nada — unstruck sound. Sound not produced by contact. It has no source and no cause in the ordinary sense, and it is not transmitted through air. It is described as continuous, self-existing, and heard internally.
The heart centre is called Anahata chakra for exactly this reason — it is named after the unstruck sound, not the other way around.
Now the important part, which is often skipped: the two are not in competition. Ahata is the method. Anahata is the destination.
You use struck sound — chanting, drone, mantra, instrument — to refine attention to the point where it can register something subtler. The audible sound is a training object. When attention becomes fine enough, it begins to notice what was always there underneath.
This is why Nada Yoga can begin with something as ordinary as chanting Om out loud and end somewhere the texts describe as beyond words. The path from one to the other is continuous, not a leap.
The Four Levels of Sound: Vaikhari to Para
The tradition maps sound in four levels, moving from the grossest to the most subtle. This scheme comes from the grammarian-philosopher Bhartrhari and from Kashmir Shaiva sources, and it is the most useful single framework in the whole subject.
Vaikhari — articulated sound. Audible speech. What comes out of the mouth and can be heard by another person. Associated with the throat and mouth.
Madhyama — intermediate sound. Mental sound: the inner voice, silent recitation, sound as it exists in thought before it is spoken. Associated with the heart region.
Pashyanti — “the seeing” or visible sound. Here sound is no longer sequential. It is not yet broken into words and syllables — it is apprehended as a whole, like grasping the entire meaning of a sentence before the words arrive. Associated with the navel region.
Para — supreme, transcendent sound. Undifferentiated vibration, prior to any distinction between sound and silence, knower and known. Associated with the base of the spine, or with no location at all depending on the source.
Different traditions place these in slightly different bodily locations, and it is worth being honest that the correspondences are not fixed.
The practical direction of the practice is inward: Vaikhari → Madhyama → Pashyanti → Para. You begin with what you can hear and move toward what you cannot.
Any student of mantra has already made the first step. When chanting aloud becomes whispering, and whispering becomes mental repetition, you have moved from Vaikhari to Madhyama. The tradition simply says the ladder continues.
One clarification that saves a great deal of confusion: these four levels are not the same as the four avasthas — arambha, ghata, parichaya, nishpatti — described in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. The four levels describe grades of sound itself. The four avasthas describe stages in a practitioner’s progress. They are frequently conflated in online summaries. They are different maps.
Why Sound Works as a Meditation Object
Meditation instruction, stripped to its mechanism, is nearly always the same problem: the mind requires an object, and most objects are unsatisfactory.
Visual objects invite analysis. Thoughts invite more thoughts. The breath works well, which is why it is so widely used, but it is subtle and easy to lose.
Sound has three properties that make it unusually well suited to the task.
It is continuous. A sustained tone or a repeated mantra offers an unbroken thread. The moment attention wanders, the thread is still there to return to. Nothing needs to be reconstructed.
It occupies the faculty that produces distraction. Most mental wandering is verbal — an inner monologue running commentary. Chanting engages the same channel. The mind cannot easily narrate and chant at the same time, so the commentary quiets not through suppression but through occupation.
It naturally refines. A sound can get quieter, subtler, more interior — and attention must refine to keep tracking it. The object itself trains the faculty. This is the structural feature that makes sound a full path rather than a single technique.
There is also a straightforward physical dimension to chanting. Extended vocalisation lengthens the exhalation considerably, which is the same mechanism that makes slow-breathing practices calming. Humming and chanting have been studied for effects on breathing rate and autonomic tone, and the findings are broadly consistent with what practitioners report — though the research is modest in size, and the tradition’s claims run far beyond what any study has examined.
What the Practice Offers
Nada Yoga supports concentration, emotional steadiness, and meditative depth. It is not a medical treatment, and it should not be presented as one. What follows is what the tradition claims and what practitioners consistently report.
Concentration that builds by itself. Because sound refines as the practice deepens, each stage of attention prepares the next. Students who struggle to sit with the breath often find they can sit with sound, because sound is easier to hold.
Quieting of verbal thought. The occupation of the verbal channel described above is the most immediately noticeable effect. Many practitioners describe their first sustained chanting session as the first time the inner commentary genuinely stopped.
Emotional release. The voice carries emotion in a way that thought does not. Sustained chanting frequently surfaces feeling — sometimes unexpectedly. This is worth knowing in advance rather than discovering mid-practice.
Refinement of hearing. Practitioners report becoming noticeably more sensitive to sound in ordinary life: to tone in others’ voices, to the texture of a room, to the difference between hearing and listening.
A usable path toward absorption. Laya — the dissolution of the mind’s ordinary activity — is the stated goal. The texts treat nadanusandhana not as one option among many but as the most accessible route to it, including for practitioners who cannot reach the goal by intellectual means.
Continuity with music. For anyone with a musical background, Nada Yoga connects practice to something already familiar. Indian classical music was built on this metaphysics; a raga is closer to a meditation than to a performance, and studying one illuminates the other.
Tools of the Practice
Nada Yoga uses instruments, but for reasons that differ from ordinary music-making. Each tool exists to support a particular kind of attention.
The voice. The primary instrument, and the only indispensable one. It requires nothing, is available always, and produces vibration you feel as well as hear. Every classical text assumes the voice first.
The tanpura. A long-necked drone instrument with four or five strings, plucked in a continuous cycle. It plays no melody. Its function is to hold a stable tonal field rich in overtones, against which attention can settle. The tanpura is the closest thing Nada Yoga has to a signature instrument, precisely because it does not go anywhere.
The harmonium. A hand-pumped reed organ, used to hold pitch in chanting and kirtan. Practical rather than mystical: it keeps a group in tune.
Singing bowls. Bells of metal or crystal, struck or rimmed. Useful as an object of listening, particularly for tracking the long decay of a tone to the edge of audibility — which is genuinely good training. Their prominence in modern sound work is a recent development, and the classical Indian texts do not treat them as central.
Bells, gongs, and cymbals. Used to mark beginnings, endings, and transitions in practice and ritual.
The instrument matters far less than the quality of attention brought to it. A tanpura in a distracted room is furniture.
Before You Begin: Six Principles
1. Sound is the vehicle, not the destination. The goal is not to make a beautiful sound. It is to arrive at attention fine enough to hear what is beneath sound.
2. Voice quality is irrelevant. Nada Yoga has no aesthetic standard. A trained singer and a person who has been told they cannot sing are on identical footing here. The only thing being trained is attention.
3. Never force the voice. Chanting should never strain or hurt. Volume is not depth. If your throat is sore afterward, you were pushing.
4. Pronunciation deserves respect. Sanskrit is phonetically precise, and mantra practice assumes correct sound. Learn from someone who knows, or from a good recording. This is not pedantry — in a discipline built on sound, sound accuracy is the whole point.
5. Consistency beats intensity. Fifteen minutes daily builds something. Two hours once a month does not. The refinement of attention is cumulative and slow.
6. Advanced practice needs a teacher. Sustained anahata listening, prolonged breath retention combined with sound, and intensive mantra work can produce disorienting experiences. The texts insist on guidance for a reason, and it is not institutional self-interest.
Core Practices
1. Pranava Japa — Chanting Om
Best for: Everyone, at any level. The foundation practice.
Effect: Grounding, focusing, verbally quieting.
Level: Beginner.
Sit with the spine upright and the body settled. Let the eyes close.
Take a few natural breaths without altering them. Let the body arrive.
Inhale fully but without strain.
On the exhalation, sound A (as in “father”) — open, from the belly, resonating low in the abdomen.
Let it move into U (as in “put”) — the sound rounding, the resonance rising to the chest.
Close into M — lips together, humming, the resonance moving into the head. Let this final portion take roughly half the exhalation.
At the end of the sound, do not rush to the next breath. Sit inside the silence that follows. This gap is not a pause between repetitions — it is the most instructive part of the practice.
Repeat for nine, eighteen, or twenty-seven rounds.
The three sounds correspond to the three states of consciousness described in the Mandukya Upanishad: waking, dreaming, deep sleep. The silence after them is the fourth. You are not merely chanting a syllable — you are tracing a map of your own awareness.
2. Bhramari — The Humming Bee Breath
Best for: Anxiety, mental agitation, difficulty settling.
Effect: Strongly calming.
Level: Beginner.
Sit comfortably with the spine upright.
Close the eyes. Rest the index fingers lightly on the tragus — the small flap of cartilage in front of each ear canal — pressing just enough to soften external sound. Do not push into the canal itself.
Inhale through the nose, fully and easily.
Exhale with a smooth, continuous hum — mouth closed, jaw relaxed, the sound low and even rather than loud.
Feel the vibration in the skull, particularly behind the forehead and around the sinuses.
Continue for five to ten rounds.
Then release the hands, keep the eyes closed, and simply listen. The residue after bhramari is a useful preview of what internal listening feels like.
Bhramari is the most reliable bridge practice in the whole system. It produces audible sound while directing attention inward, so it sits exactly on the boundary between ahata and anahata.
3. Ahata Listening — Meditation on External Sound
Best for: Beginners; anyone who finds mantra difficult.
Effect: Sharpening, receptive.
Level: Beginner.
Sit in any quiet place — quiet, not silent. A room with a fan, distant traffic, or birdsong is ideal.
Close the eyes and do nothing for a minute.
Now listen without selecting. Do not choose one sound over another; do not name them. Let hearing be wide.
When you find yourself labelling (“that’s a car”), notice the labelling and return to raw hearing.
After several minutes, narrow to a single sound. Follow it until it disappears.
Then widen again.
Continue for ten to fifteen minutes.
This trains a distinction most people have never made: the difference between hearing, which is automatic, and listening, which is an act of attention. Nada Yoga is entirely built on the second.
4. Drone Listening — Practising with a Tanpura
Best for: Developing sustained attention; musicians.
Effect: Absorbing, stabilising.
Level: Beginner to intermediate.
Use a tanpura, a tanpura recording, or a tanpura app set to a comfortable pitch.
Sit upright and let the drone run.
Listen first to the fundamental — the main pitch.
Then let attention move to the overtones. A well-tuned tanpura produces a shimmering field of harmonics above the fundamental; with patience they become distinctly audible.
Do not analyse them. Simply let attention rest in the field.
Continue for fifteen to twenty minutes.
The tanpura is valuable because it has no narrative. Melody pulls the mind forward in time — a drone does not. There is nowhere for attention to go except deeper into what is already sounding.
5. Mantra Japa — Repetition Toward the Interior
Best for: Students ready to move beyond audible practice.
Effect: Concentrating, interiorising.
Level: Intermediate.
Choose a mantra you know and can pronounce correctly. Om, the Gayatri, or a mantra given by a teacher.
Begin vaikhari — chanting aloud, clearly, for several minutes.
Move to upamshu — whispered repetition, barely audible, lips moving.
Move to manasika — silent mental repetition, no movement at all.
Stay in mental repetition, and let the mantra become quieter within the mind rather than faster.
Eventually, let even the mental repetition thin. Rest in whatever remains.
Continue for fifteen to thirty minutes.
This is the four-level map made practical. You are walking from Vaikhari into Madhyama by deliberate steps, and the final thinning is the doorway toward Pashyanti.
6. Nadanusandhana — Listening for the Unstruck Sound
Best for: Established practitioners.
Effect: Absorbing; oriented toward laya.
Level: Advanced. Best learned with a teacher.
Sit in a stable, comfortable posture that you can hold without adjustment.
Close the ears — either with the thumbs, or using shanmukhi mudra, in which the fingers close ears, eyes, nostrils lightly, and mouth. Never obstruct the breath.
Do nothing for a minute. Let the mind settle.
Now direct attention to the right ear, as the Hatha Yoga Pradipika specifies, and listen inward.
At first you will hear the body: blood, pulse, muscular hum. This is normal. Do not treat it as failure and do not treat it as the goal.
Continue listening past it, without straining and without expectation.
If a sound presents itself, do not analyse or chase it. Rest attention on it as it is.
Practise for ten to twenty minutes to begin with.
The Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the Nada Bindu Upanishad both catalogue what the practitioner hears — and both describe a movement from gross to subtle. In the early stages, loud and dense sounds: ocean, thunder, kettledrum. Later, more defined tones: conch, bell, horn. Finally the subtlest: flute, vina, and the humming of a bee.
The texts are equally clear that the specific sound heard is not the achievement. The absorption is. A practitioner who becomes a connoisseur of inner sounds has substituted a refined distraction for a coarse one.
A Sample Forty-Minute Practice
Step 1. Sit and settle. Three to five minutes of natural breathing with no technique.
Step 2. Nine rounds of Om, with full attention to the silence after each.
Step 3. Five rounds of bhramari.
Step 4. Ten minutes of ahata listening, or drone listening if a tanpura is available.
Step 5. Ten minutes of mantra japa, moving from aloud to whispered to mental.
Step 6. Five minutes of silence — no technique, no object. Simply remain.
Step 7. Sit for a further minute before opening the eyes. Notice how the room sounds now compared to when you began.
The sequence is deliberately shaped: it moves outward-to-inward, gross-to-subtle, doing-to-not-doing. That shape matters more than the specific timings.
Listening Beyond the Cushion
The most durable result of Nada Yoga is not what happens during practice. It is what happens to your ordinary hearing.
Most people spend their lives hearing without listening. Sound arrives, is instantly categorised, and is discarded. The mind takes what it needs — is that a threat, is that my name, is that relevant — and dismisses the rest before it is fully received.
Sustained sound practice interrupts this habit. You begin to notice tone in a colleague’s voice before you notice their words. You notice how a room sounds when you enter it. You notice the difference between a silence that is empty and one that is full.
And you notice something about your own speaking. A practitioner who has spent months attending to sound tends to speak less carelessly, because the mechanism producing the speech has come under observation.
This is the quiet argument for Nada Yoga as an ethical practice as much as a meditative one. The tradition would not have separated the two.
Common Misunderstandings
1. “You need a good voice.” You do not. There is no audience and no standard. This misconception stops more people from beginning than any other, and it is entirely without basis in the tradition.
2. “Nada Yoga is sound healing.” Sound healing is a modern therapeutic practice, generally passive and aimed at relaxation. Nada Yoga is an active meditative discipline aimed at absorption. The overlap in equipment obscures a fundamental difference in purpose.
3. “The point is to hear the inner sounds.” The sounds catalogued in the texts are signposts, not trophies. Collecting them is a way of missing the practice while appearing to succeed at it.
4. “It’s just chanting.” Chanting is the entry point, roughly as asana is the entry point to hatha yoga. Treating the whole path as its first stage understates it considerably.
5. “Anahata nada is a physical sound you can measure.” It is explicitly defined as sound not produced by contact and not transmitted through a medium. Attempts to identify it with tinnitus or with the sound of blood flow confuse the training ground with the destination. If a doctor could record it, it would be ahata by definition.
6. “Any sound will do — it’s all vibration.” The tradition is specific about pronunciation, pitch stability, and the use of particular mantras. The claim that all sound is equivalent is a modern flattening, not a traditional teaching.
7. “It’s a substitute for treatment.” It is not. Sound practice can genuinely support mental steadiness and emotional regulation, and many people find it valuable alongside other care. It does not replace medical or psychological treatment, and anyone with a serious condition should be working with a professional.
8. “You can learn it all from articles and videos.” The foundations, yes — the practices above are safe and can be started alone. The deeper work, particularly sustained anahata listening, has traditionally been transmitted directly, and the reasons are practical rather than mystical.
Conclusion
You can close your eyes. You cannot close your ears.
The tradition took that fact seriously and built a complete path on it — from the first syllable chanted aloud to the sound that no one strikes and no one produces.
For a beginner, Nada Yoga offers something rare: a meditation practice that is genuinely easy to start. Sitting with an unfamiliar breath technique is hard. Chanting Om is not.
For a serious student, it offers a structure that keeps going. The four levels of sound describe a path that does not run out after the first year, or the fifth.
For a teacher, it offers a way to reach students that asana and breathwork sometimes cannot — particularly students who find silence intimidating, or whose minds are too verbal to settle on the breath.
And for the advanced practitioner, it offers what Svatmarama claimed for it: the most direct of the many paths to dissolution.
The practice begins with making sound. It continues with listening to sound. It ends, if it ends anywhere, with the listener and the sound no longer being two things.
Everything else in Nada Yoga is preparation for that.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Nada Yoga?
Nada Yoga is the yogic path of sound — a discipline that uses chanting, mantra, drone, and internal listening to concentrate the mind and lead it toward meditative absorption. It moves from audible sound (ahata nada) toward the unstruck inner sound (anahata nada).
Is Nada Yoga the same as sound healing?
No. Sound healing is a modern therapeutic practice in which a participant usually receives sound passively for relaxation. Nada Yoga is an active meditative discipline in which the practitioner produces sound or listens with sustained attention, with absorption rather than relaxation as the aim.
Do I need to be able to sing to practise Nada Yoga?
No. There is no aesthetic standard in Nada Yoga and no audience. Vocal ability is irrelevant to the practice, which trains attention rather than tone.
What is anahata nada?
Anahata nada is the “unstruck sound” — sound not produced by the contact of two objects and not transmitted through air. It is described in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the Nada Bindu Upanishad as continuous and self-existing, heard internally when attention becomes sufficiently refined.
Which texts describe Nada Yoga?
The main sources are the Hatha Yoga Pradipika (Chapter Four), the Nada Bindu Upanishad, the Hamsa Upanishad, the Mandukya Upanishad on AUM, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras 1.27–1.29 on the pranava, and the music treatise Sangita Ratnakara.
How long should I practise Nada Yoga each day?
Twenty to forty minutes daily is a productive range for most students. Consistency matters far more than duration — a shorter daily practice develops the refinement of attention that the path depends on, while occasional long sessions generally do not.
Can beginners practise Nada Yoga?
Yes. Chanting Om, bhramari, and listening meditation are all safe and appropriate for complete beginners. The advanced practice of nadanusandhana — sustained listening for the unstruck sound — is where a teacher becomes important.
What is a tanpura used for in Nada Yoga?
A tanpura is a drone instrument that holds a single stable pitch rich in overtones, with no melody. Because it does not move forward in time, it gives attention nowhere to travel except deeper into the sound itself, which makes it an unusually effective meditation object.
Is Nada Yoga connected to Kundalini Yoga?
They overlap but are not the same. Both work with the subtle body and both use mantra, but Kundalini Yoga is organised around the awakening and ascent of energy through the chakras, while Nada Yoga is organised around sound and the dissolution of mind through listening.
What is Nada Yoga teacher training?
A Nada Yoga teacher training is a specialised program focused on the yoga of sound — covering mantra and correct Sanskrit pronunciation, chanting and kirtan, the philosophy and textual sources of nada, work with drone instruments, and the meditative practices of internal listening, along with how to teach them. Some are offered as continuing education for teachers who already hold a credential; others, including ours, are Yoga Alliance registered 200-hour programs, so graduates can register as an RYT 200 while spending the whole month on sound rather than on general asana methodology.