Top 5 Meditation Techniques that you NEED to Follow!

We delved a bit into the schools and ideologies of meditation in the previous blog, but there are so many techniques and practices that you would easily get overwhelmed!

So here is the top 5 meditation techniques/types that I think are easy, interesting and also provide great benefits.

If you have not yet read how to meditate for beginners, here's the link.

So, here are "Top 5 Meditation Techniques that you NEED to Follow!"

1.Breathing Meditation

This is one of the most basic and easy meditations to start with, but difficult to master. You start by taking a few deep breaths with open eyes and a soft focus, and then returning to normal breathing while you close your eyes.

Calm your body and focus only on the breaths.

Easier version requires you to count your breaths so that you don’t get distracted in thoughts. But only count till 10 and start again from 1.

You may count inhale and exhale separately or both combined as one breath. As you progress, you can stop counting and just focus on the breathing.

Don’t control, just observe!

You can do this for as much time you want but do go for long hours at the beginning. Read this article to know more!

2. Body scan:

Body scan is a simple exercise you can even do in the beginning of any type of meditation. You simple become a scanner and scan you whole body. But this scan is interesting than a scanner, let me tell you how!

• Start from the top of your head and go to the soles of your feet.
• Don’t run you eyeballs to look at every part you are studying! Just observe through the mind’s eye!
• Scan each and every little part of your body, it might look simpler, but let me tell you, you will miss many parts of your body and don’t even realize that you missed them.
• So, what to look for? It is really simple, just look for anything! Feeling, emotion, itching, pain, strain, mood, sweat…
• Once you complete the scan, you can move to other portion of the meditation where you practice different technique, or just simply count 10 breadths and start from the head again.

3. Awareness Meditation:

This meditation is really simple but not for the beginners! You start normally, and observe everything. That’s it!

Sounds simple in you head? Let me tell you why its not.

• You need to focus on each and every thing all at once.
• To make it simpler, consider all five senses.
• Yes you also need to sense what is the taste in you mouth! But don’t remember the coffee that you just had 😊!
• Observe taste, sensations of touch, voices and noises, breathing, weight of your body on the floor, smell of the surrounding, and every other thing that you can think of.
• So as the number of things you focus on will increase, so will increase the possibilities of thoughts arising from those feelings.

“Senses initiate thoughts, thoughts initiates feelings, feelings initiate cravings, and cravings make us things that we would rather not do! Like eating an ice cream!”

• The task here is not to stop the thouhgts. Because that is just impossible, you think of stopping the thoughts and that itself is a new thought!
• Instead, consider yourself the sun, and the thoughts as every other planet, start, galaxy, meteor, and all other bodies found in space.
• Some like earth and other planets will continue on their path and not disturb you, while some like meteors might disturb you!
• Planets are like normal thoughts while meteors are like feelings, they always hit hard!
• Your plan of action is just to observe from a distance, and most importantly not get carried away by the meteors or start to follow the orbit of planets! Simple enough?
• Yes it is simple but it needs practice!

4. Concentration Meditation

As the name suggests, you have to focus on something!

Breathing meditation is one type of concentration meditation, and there are as many types as there are objects to focus.

Some objects to focus are:

1. Breadth
2. Physical thing like Candle
3. Sound (music, or aum)
4. Thoughts (quite advanced!)

So you start normally, again if you wish to know how to start a meditation, from the point you sit to the point you stand up, here is the beginners guide to meditation.

5. Visualisation Meditation

Visualization meditation is a different kind of meditation than most of the others.

I doubt if it helps much but I can surely tell you, if you are tired of doing one type, switch to this and go back again to the primary meditation techniques that you follow. This will not let your meditation sessions become dull or uninteresting!

Things to visualize:

• You can visualize a small spark inside your body that increases gradually in volume and covers the universe entirely. The basic aim of this exercise is not to let your focus get away from the spark of light.
• You can also visualize being with someone that is not any more, a loved one or a family member. (you can cry!)
• Visualizing a calm and happy place in all its details, for example a garden in the morning with butterflies.

What I think is that the basic aim of this exercise is just like the concentration meditation, just a bit animated type, which is not to let you focus fly everywhere, or for that matter, anyware but the visualization.

Forget where you are sitting, forget every sensation just focus on the visualization!

So these are the 'Top 5 Meditation Techniques that you NEED to Follow!' 

One of the reasons is that these would cover variety of the meditation techniques, and are interesting!

You can cycle between these meditation techniques to make the exercise more interesting than it actually is! (it actually is a really interesting exercise one you get the hang of it 😊)

I will be posting the proven benefits of meditation soon on the blog, so subscribe, like and share
among your friends. Follow my Pinterest and Instagram. Keep meditating! Keep sharing! And keep promoting meditation!

-A Mere Meditator