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How to find your most beneficial personal meditation style
Types of meditation
There are many different meditation styles to suit your personal approach to meditation. Beginners usually choose to start with guided meditation and then experiment with other different approaches.
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Your approach to meditation
There is not a right or wrong way when seeking a meditation style. Do remember that influences have an impact on you that will affect your approach to meditation.
Length of meditation time
The length of meditation will impact on how successful it will be.
- One study reported 5 hours' worth of meditation over a two-week period was enough for smokers to reduce their intake.
- Another study noted that regular 30 minutes meditation sessions can increase the density of brain matter in areas associated with memory, stress and empathy.
Frequency of meditation
10 minutes a day can be enough when it is part of a daily routine. Longer periods might be required if it is done less frequently.
Qualitative considerations
It is not possible to always be successful with your meditation sessions.
Acceptance of the outcome of a meditation session is a factor when considering if it has been successful or not.
Meditation settings
Try multiple settings to find which place suits your personal meditation style.
It could be a dedicated spot or a useful place that also serves other purposes.
Finding your personal meditation style
- A valuable tool to understand your own style is to keep a journal. It can help you to work out the similarities and qualitative considerations for multiple types of meditations.
- Neurofeedback devices can provide actual quantitative measurements of brain activity during meditation.
- Feedback sessions with your mentor can also be beneficial.
Self-optimization and mindfulness
Developing a meditation style should not be a self-optimization goal.
You may find more success if you develop your own style along the way to a wider set of meditative purposes.
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Reducing Stress
Many styles of meditation can help reduce stress.
- In an eight-week study, a meditation style called "mindfulness meditation" reduced the inflammation response caused by stres...
Controlling Anxiety
Less stress leads to less anxiety.
Regular meditation helps reduce anxiety and anxiety-related mental health issues like social anxiety, phobias and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.
Promoting Emotional Health
Some types of meditation can improve depression and help you maintain these benefits.
- Two studies of mindfulness meditation found decreased depression in over 4,600 adults.
- One study found that participants experienced a long-term decrease in depression.
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Loving-kindness meditation
Also known as Metta meditation; the goal is to cultivate an attitude of love and kindness toward everything.
During meditation, practitioners send and repeat messages of loving-kind...
Body scan or progressive relaxation
The goal is to notice tension and to allow it to be released.
Practitioners start at one end of their body, usually their feet, and work through the whole. They might tense and then relax muscles or they might visualize a wave moving over their body to release tension.
Mindfulness meditation
It encourages practitioners to notice their surroundings without judgement, instead of dwelling on the past or future.
Mindfulness can be done almost anywhere, even in a grocery store, for example.
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Meditation
It is a practice to control the power of thought and to cultivate more peace, clarity and happiness.
Meditation enables us to move from higher frequency brain waves to lower frequency waves, ...
5 Categories of Brain Waves
- Gamma State: (30 - 100Hz) The state of hyperactivity and active learning.
- Beta State: (13 - 30Hz) It is associated with the alert mind state where we function for most of the day.
- Alpha State: (9 - 13Hz) Brain waves start to slow down out of thinking mind. We feel more calm and peaceful.
- Theta State: (4 - 8Hz) The verbal/thinking mind transitions to the meditative/visual mind.
- Delta State: (1-3 Hz) Most of us reach this final state during deep, dreamless sleep.
Breath meditation
- Sit comfortably in your chair with your shoulders relaxed and spine tall.
- Place your hands mindfully on your lap.
- Try to eliminate any stimulus that may distract you.
- Focus on your breath to slow the brain waves down from Beta or Alpha to the Theta State.