Meditation Techniques - Different Types and Its Benefits

Meditation is widely recommended as a healthy way to manage stress. It provides many health benefits, such as reducing symptoms of stress and anxiety, can alleviate physical complaints such as headaches, and even boost your immune system.

Meditation can be practiced in various ways. While there are a number different meditation techniques, a commonality runs through almost all meditative techniques:

Quiet Mind

When you meditate, your thinking mind becomes quiet. You stop focusing on your lifes problems, as well as solving these problems. You allow that voice in your head be quiet.

Being In The Now

All meditative practices involve focusing on the right now or present moment as opposed to the past or the future. It's about experiencing each moment and letting it go and experiencing the next. This takes effort and practice as most of us are continually thinking toward the future or have our heads in the past.

Altered State of Consciousness

An altered level of consciousness that isn't a sleeping state but is neither your average wakeful state, is a state you can achieve through maintaining a quiet mind and focusing on the present moment. Meditation increases brain activity in an area of the brain associated with happiness and positive thoughts and emotions. With regular practice prolonged positive changes in these areas can be achieved.

Meditation Techniques

Researchers classify meditation techniques into two different categories. Concentrative and Non-Concentrative. Concentrative techniques require focusing on an object that's generally outside of oneself: a candle's flame, the sound of an instrument, or a mantra. Non-concentrative meditation can include a wider focus: the sounds in one's environment such as one's own breathing.

There are so many different ways to meditate. I will outline a few basic meditation techniques so that you can understand how they differ from one another.

Focused Meditation Techniques

With this type of technique, you focus on something intently. You can focus on something visual, like a statue or something auditory, like the sound of ocean waves, or on your own breathing. Some people find this easier to do this than to focus on nothing at all as the mind tend to wander. So having a point of focus is helpful and allows you to slip into that altered state of consciousness.

Activity-Oriented

This type of meditation involves a repetitive activity, or one where you can get 'in the zone' and experience 'flow.' Here too this type of technique quiets the mind, and allows your brain to shift. Effective forms of activity-oriented meditation are things like practicing yoga, gardening or creating any type of artwork. Due to it's repetitiveness these activities are all considered a type of meditation.

Basic Meditation

This requires sitting in a comfortable position and just trying to quiet your mind by thinking of nothing. This technique involves practice as it is not always easy to sit and think of nothing. But a good way to start is to think of yourself as an 'observer of your thoughts'. just notice what the voice in your head says then let it go without judging. As thoughts pop up in your mind, just let them go.

Sometimes for the beginner meditation can be a little unnerving. Don't get too consumed the perfecting any one technique. The key here is to try to develop a routine and a regular time that you meditate and start with something simple, otherwise you could become frustrated with the process.