Product Description
2: Rain Meditation
3: Whirling Meditation
4: Prana Meditation
5: Sunset Meditation (in the West)
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Alluring and suggestive, serene and stimulating, intimate and devout, The Disciple’s Meditation is beautiful healing music born from Mark’s reverent playing of the divine instrument — the Bansuri flute. With melodic variations on traditional Indian ragas and entrancing percussive grooves, the five sensuous tracks elevate the body, mind and spirit.
Evocative whispers fill the ears, sweet sound floats through the air to be breathed in as much as heard. The music’s calming nature is a balm from an eternal source. Breathe deeper and each breath brings a greater sense of awareness. Surrender to the sound as the tabla beats move you. The mantra fills the body, breathing is deep and circular, time becomes elastic; become one with the sound…
Sixty-seven minutes of music for deep meditation, yoga practice, spiritual and heart-centered disciplines.
The Disciple’s Meditation is Mark’s third solo album and the third release in the Disciple Series. Mark explains, “The first, Disciple, honors the interweaving of flute and human voice: Guru Mantras by female Indian vocalists blend with the flute to create a deep sense of devotion. The second, The Disciple’s Path, continues with some of these elements but a stronger focus on steady drumming while the soundscapes reflect the mystifying and challenging aspects of a disciple’s path. The Disciple’s Meditation brings this series to maturity. The percussion grooves reflect the beat of life, the heartbeat, the earth; the ever-present drones and their effect of equanimity and serenity expand the calm waters of meditative states of consciousness. Above it all – as if hovering over calm waters – the flute and its long breath is the expression of spirit, much as in old testament Hebrew, ‘we ruach Elohim merachefet al peneh tehom’ (‘and the spirit of goddess hovered above the waters’).”
Mark Seelig’s music is part of his Gesamtkunstwerk (’total art work’): a life devoted to learning humanity’s sacred customs and rituals of all races and times in the pursuit of raising consciousness. To this end, Mark works in academia, transpersonal psychotherapy, neo-shamanic ceremonial work, and music. The Disciple Series is recorded with the intention of supporting people in processes of transformation; it’s specifically crafted to help facilitate settings of ceremonial work, breathwork and meditation.
Full selection of ark Seelig’s CDs
Artist Bio:
With over 19 albums in collaboration with Steve Roach, Byron Metcalf, Loren Nerell, and Andres Condon, Mark has developed a wide body of diverse recorded work.
Born in 1957, Mark felt a fascination with the world’s spiritual traditions from an early age. His interests have taken him to India, the USA, South America, and Germany. After many years of therapeutic and academic training Mark left the scholarly world behind. The influence of Asian mysticism and spirituality, South American ceremonial rituals, and the musical traditions of India have worked their magic on his life in many humbling ways. In 1999 at age 42 Mark’s focus shifted. During a deep vision quest, he felt encouraged to take up the North Indian bamboo Bansuri flute. This was a rather late age for picking up a new instrument, yet he took the plunge; for 10 years he studied as a disciple of Indian Bansuri maestro R.K. Bikramjit Singh.
In his work with groups and individuals as a clinical psychotherapist and in private practice, Mark embraces the approaches of Transpersonal Psychotherapy and indigenous ritual traditions. He facilitates breathwork and shamanic rituals in which he uses music and non-ordinary states of consciousness to create a space of ceremony and healing. Mark’s music and work is offered hoping to make a small contribution to raising consciousness. May we all learn to face our shadows, honor our skills, and live in harmony with each other and the universe.
A part of the proceeds from Mark’s work supports the Lakota Waldorf School on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
padmin –
From CD HotList
Mark Seelig took up the bansuri (the bamboo flute used in Indian classical music) in middle age, as part of an ongoing general spiritual and psychological quest. He is now three albums into a series of releases exploring the flute as “the expression of spirit.” It would be easy to dismiss this as dilletantish dabbling, but while neither Seelig nor tabla player Vito Gregoli demonstrates the breathtaking virtuosity of India’s finest classical musicians, they do show genuine respect for the ragas on which their musical meditations are based, and this music is much more suited to meditation and/or yoga practice than genuine classical music would be, with its focus on exciting thematic development and technical prowess. -Rick Anderson
padmin –
From Synth & Sequences
A very good album of fluty meditation supported by great visions of hypnotic trance.
Listening to Mark Seelig’s music is like listening to a synthesist playing his tunes and solos in an acoustic environment. Except that here, the synthesist is replaced by a flutist and the solos come out of a flute. The Bansuri flute! The Disciple’s Meditation is the last album of the Disciple trilogy started in 2005 with the eponymous album and followed in 2020 with The Disciple’s Path. And if Mark was alone on this last album, here he is surrounded with Byron Metcalf on Udu percussion and Synth Drone, Vito Gregoli on electronic percussion and tabla, as well as Tamboura drones. The sitar-drone guitar is also played by Dashmesh, while Frore performs on synth drones and the Aspen Winds, a more heavenly flute. Together, they provide an even more powerful album than The Disciple’s Path, both musically and in terms of the passion that emerges from the good spiritual trance structures.
It’s on a bed of caustic reverberations that Mountain Meditation makes Mark Seelig’s enchanting flute play. The first breaths are as musical as they are warm, flowing its calm over these sinuous waves with sizzling contours. Without rhythms, nor beats, this first track of The Disciple’s Meditation draws the push of its movement in the strength of the fluted harmonies, as well as in the secret impulses of the scratched texture of sound radioactivity. And the further into the track one goes, the more Seelig’s performance is imbued with emotion, intensity and creativity. Rain Meditation begins with a flute and reverberating effects duet that zigzags as if caused by a circular instrument. This seemingly dichotomous duet makes us float up to its rhythmic edge just after the 3-minute mark. In addition to structuring a lascivious pagan trance, the various percussion instruments weave a shadow of bass with elastic gizzard’s strokes. The percussions’ arrangements are in tune, charming our ears on more than one occasion with a well-placed hit that does not go unnoticed. The flute is as tenacious as these percussions with high whistled harmonies on a slow and lascivious rhythm. Although conceived in a quasi-similar structure, Whirling Meditation offers an infectious energy with an excellent mesh between the tribal and the more electronic percussions. The flute is more than magnetizing with sustained arias that only magical fingers could extract from a synth. Is Frore, better known by his real name Paul Casper, lending his Aspen Winds breaths here, I’m more certain for Rain Meditation, or is Mark Seelig using the multi-layered of flutes technique? Still, his playing and inspirations are incredible, both in the whole album and on Whirling Meditation which offers a rhythmless finale for the last 3 minutes of the track. The intonations of this flute charm in the first 3 minutes of Prana Meditation which imposes a slow and very magnetizing rhythm. The shadow of the bass makes doung-doung while the play of the percussions is simply divine on this title which little by little increases its rhythmic capacity without harming its morphic texture lying in the magnificent breaths of the flute and of the winds. To this effect, the chiseled melody is sculpted in such a way as to slyly create an earworm that will haunt us for hours afterwards. Very good and the percussions are WoW! Here too this rhythm fades a little too soon to leave Prana Meditation three minutes of ambient visions that have lost all flavor to a duet of flutes. Sunset Meditation (in the West) ends The Disciple’s Meditation as Mountain Meditation had opened it. That is to say without rhythms or beats. But beautiful flute fighting for serenity on a bed of more controlled reverberations.
You have no idea how many times I listened to this The Disciple’s Meditation. In loop, I made it turn. To read mostly and to savor this percussion texture that makes Mark Seelig’s fluted euphonies even more beautiful. A very good album of meditation, my Lise finds that the flute is too intense to make dodo, supported by great visions of hypnotic trance. Rating: 4 out of 5 -Sylvain Lupari (July 28th, 2021)