Types of Meditation

Meditation is not a single practice. It’s a broad category of techniques that share a common intention — the deliberate training of attention and awareness — but differ significantly in their methods, their objects of focus, and the specific capacities they’re designed to develop. Understanding the landscape before choosing a practice is useful, because different techniques suit different people, different temperaments, and different goals, and the assumption that meditation means one particular thing is one of the more common reasons people try it once and conclude it isn’t for them.

The techniques covered in this section fall into a few broad categories that are worth understanding as organizing principles rather than rigid divisions. Focused attention practices — which include breath awareness meditation, focused attention meditation, and mantra meditation — train the capacity to sustain attention on a chosen object, returning to it each time the mind wanders. These are generally the most accessible entry points for beginners because they give the mind something specific to do, and the instruction is clear enough to follow even without prior experience.

Open monitoring practices — which include mindfulness meditation and open monitoring meditation — train a broader, more receptive quality of awareness that observes whatever arises in experience without directing attention toward any specific object. These tend to be more challenging for beginners because the instruction is less concrete, but they develop a quality of present-moment awareness that focused attention practices alone don’t fully cultivate.

Body-based practices — including the body scan and walking meditation — ground the attention in physical sensation and movement rather than a mental object, which makes them particularly accessible for people who find purely mental practices difficult to sustain. They also produce their own distinct benefits around body awareness, physical relaxation, and the integration of mindfulness into everyday activity rather than a dedicated sitting practice.

Generative practices — loving kindness meditation and visualization meditation — work differently from the attention-training practices by deliberately cultivating specific mental states or qualities. Loving kindness develops compassion and positive regard toward self and others. Visualization uses directed mental imagery for a range of purposes from performance preparation to emotional processing. These practices complement the attention-training techniques and address dimensions of wellbeing that pure attention training doesn’t fully reach.

Finally, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction — the structured eight-week program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn — sits in its own category as a comprehensive curriculum that integrates multiple techniques within a clinical framework designed specifically for stress reduction and its downstream effects on health. It’s the most studied meditation intervention in existence and deserves its own page.

The most important thing to take from this overview is that finding a practice that suits you is worth more than practicing the objectively correct technique. The best meditation practice is the one you’ll actually do consistently, and that tends to be the one that feels most natural to your temperament and most compatible with your daily life.