Types Of Meditation

There are literally hundreds of types of mediation that one can learn. I started by learning a type of meditation called ‘Raja Yoga’ But over the years the ‘brand’ of meditation didn’t matter to me too much and so I adopted an open approach and just started experimenting. Whatever felt beneficial to me, I use.

Here are some of the types of mediation that I do that I have just learned over time, not through reading, but through experimenting and seeing which ones work best for me.

Open Meditation

– The term ‘open meditation’ is just something I coined from the top of my head. Open meditation, this is where I sit, relax, and just let my thoughts flow naturally. I don’t try and change my thinking pattern or alter my thinking in any way. I just sit and observe the thoughts that pop into my head. This is useful because it gives me the opportunity to understand where my thoughts are going to. So if I particular person pops into my head, at a later time I may ask myself why that person popped into my head? I also observe the feelings that I feel when a particular thought go through my head. If I observe that a particular event made me feel angry or frustrated, I ask myself what it was about that that made me feel that way? I keep this quite relaxed, I don’t strain and struggle with my thoughts, I just allow them to flow.

Breathing Meditation

– This is where I focus on my breathing to re-invigorate the body. Very often I breathe poorly through the day and that makes me feel lethargic, unfocused and lazy. In this particular case I will try and go outside to an open space, take a few slow, powerful, deep breaths to recharge my battery. I prefer doing this one outside as it never has the same effect when I’m in an enclosed space or an office that has air con.

Moment Meditations

– This is where I will aim to utilise the few moments of free time that I have throughout the day. So if I’m sitting at my computer and waiting for a file to download, I’ll close my eyes and whisper to myself, in my mind, a few powerful thoughts that re-ignite the zeal fire that may have burned out. I had a severe challenge to this the other day where I was sitting in front of someone’s computer trying to fix it for them. It took a total of five hours of various scans to get this thing working and during that time I had nothing else to do so I kept my meditation going for a while and if I got bored or started to loose focus I put on some music on my iPod to break up that moment. If you do try and force the meditation it can be counter productive so if it isn’t fairly natural and you feel yourself losing focus, try and stop for a few minutes, do something else and then continue shortly afterwards. So if you’re sitting in a traffic jam, standing in a queue, try a few moment meditations.

Chanting Meditation

– Not something that I do that often but a Buddhist friend of my once taught me one of the Buddhist chants: Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. I don’t know why but I really enjoyed that chant and so I do use it now and again as I find using vocals for meditation can be quite soothing.

Brain Storming Meditation

– This is where I use the power of questions to generate new ideas. If I want a to generate ideas for articles then this is what I would do.

Quiet Meditation

– I sometimes just quiet my mind to listen to what’s going on in the universe and listen to god. In this case I often keep a note pad in front of me and anything comes to me, new ideas, I write these down and use them in any way that I can.

These are just some of the types of meditation that I do, it’s not bound by any set rules but these are just a few of the things that I’ve found to be useful and productive for my personal, spiritual and life progress.

Try some meditation for yourself to see what works for you.