CD: Swimming with Dolphins by Val Delph

By Sophie Elena View Profile
This is a well-recorded CD with lovely, gentle panpipe music accompanying the sounds of the sea and occasional dolphin calls. I feel this CD is perhaps best-suited to the novice meditator; there is a long introduction to grounding and preparing yourself prior to the meditation, which the more experienced meditator might find too long and un-necessary, perhaps even frustrating. The CD guides the listener to a beach location and gently into the sea. Again, it is some time before the dolphin element of the CD is introduced and more experienced meditators might find themselves journeying off on their own meditation at this point, and not hearing the words of the CD. Whilst this of itself is not necessarily a criticism, the ending of the CD may cause a problem if this occurs, as it did to me on one occasion. The reason I say this, is that if the actual meditation is followed in full, the listener is brought back to shore and into their own consciousness once more, again through quite a slow process, however, the same sea/pan pipe music is then re-started for a few minutes but ends abruptly, and if the listener has floated away from the narrator's voice and into their own meditation, the sudden jolt as the music ends can bring the listener out of their meditation in a potentially harmful way. The narrator has a pleasant and soothing voice, however, I found it very monotone, which I feel does not aid a novice in preparing to re-enter their waking consciousness at the end of the meditation, with no clear definition from the voice guiding the meditation, versus the voice when giving instructions on ending the experience. For the novice meditator who is finding it difficult to let go of daily thoughts entering......more