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What are the Types Of Meditation?
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There are several techniques of meditation, most of which fall into one of
two basic approaches: concentrative and mindfulness.
Concentrative Meditation
Concentrative meditation focuses on bringing about a calm and tranquil mind
by solely concentrating on one's breathing, a single sound or an object. One common
technique used involves the following simple steps...
- Lie or sit in a quiet place
- With eyes closed and attention focused on the rhythm of your breathing, inhale
slowly and deeply through
your nose for a count of 3 seconds and exhale slowly through your mouth for a count
of 5 seconds. Do this repeatedly throughout the amount of time that you want
to meditate.
Mindfulness
Meditation
This type of meditation
helps you to gain a more calm, clear, and
non-reactive state of mind.
Mindfulness requires you sit quietly and
simply allow various
sensations and feelings including images, anxiety symptoms, worries, sounds, thoughts, smell -- to
go through your mind and not react to or become involved with them.
Transcendental Meditation
Transcendental meditation is one of the types of
meditation techniques that have
gained popularity in recent years. It involves bringing about a state of
relaxation in which the body is totally at rest, but the mind is alert. It is
believed to be helpful in reducing blood pressure, controlling anxiety, and
boosting immune system.
Guided
Imagery
Guided imagery is one
of the types of meditation that takes patients on a journey through their own
inner self. The idea behind it is for patient to seek out the cancer (or whatever
illness they have) and destroy it or discover where the pain is and stop it.
This is one type of meditation that scientists
have even studied. This technique
is used often in patients with
cancer or that have chronic pain and many clinics that deal with cancer patients
offer guided meditation to their clients.
Lamaze and Yoga
Meditation is incorporated in the Lamaze technique used by many women during
childbirth. The idea is for a woman to control pain using a conditioned response
to labor contractions and using various techniques of controlled breathing.
Meditation is also used when doing
Yoga, a mind-body exercise. Yoga
incorporates controlled breathing and a narrowing of the mind's focus that leads
to a higher level of relaxation and control.
By using meditation, many find that they are more relaxed, they have health
benefits including lowered blood pressure and that they have reduced stress in
their lives.
The different
types of meditation have the common factor of
involving a meditative state induced by controlled breathing and relaxation that then has
side benefits to improve a person's physical as well as emotional well being.
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