Types of Meditation, from Focused Attention to Loving-Kindness
Meditation is not one activity. The main families train genuinely different things, and most people who conclude they cannot meditate have simply met the wrong one first.
Types of meditation get treated as interchangeable, which produces a predictable outcome: someone tries twenty minutes of silent breath-focus, finds it maddening, and decides the whole category is not for them.
The main types of meditation train different capacities. Knowing which one does what is most of the work of choosing.
Focused Attention
The foundational practice, and the one nearly everyone should meet first. Attention rests on a single object, usually the breath. When it wanders, you notice and bring it back.
What it trains is the noticing and the returning, not the staying. This is the point most often misunderstood, and misunderstanding it is the main reason people quit. A mind that wanders forty times in ten minutes, noticed each time, has done forty repetitions of the actual exercise.
Suits people who want a clear instruction and visible progress. Ten minutes is a real session.
Open Monitoring
Instead of holding attention on one object, you let it rest wide and notice whatever becomes prominent: sound, sensation, thought, mood. Nothing is selected and nothing is pushed away.
It is harder than it sounds and generally taught after focused attention, because without some stability of attention it becomes drifting rather than monitoring. What it trains is a different relationship to mental events: seeing a thought as an event that has arisen rather than as an instruction to be followed.
Open monitoring suits people who find single-pointed focus claustrophobic, and people whose difficulty is rumination rather than distraction.
Body Scan
Attention moves through the body in a set sequence, noticing what is present at each region without trying to change it. Usually done lying down, usually twenty to forty-five minutes.
The body scan trains interoception, the sense of your own internal state, and it is the practice with the strongest track record in persistent pain. It is also widely disliked in the first fortnight and widely named as the most valuable one by week eight, a reversal consistent enough to expect.
Suits people managing physical symptoms, and anyone who finds sitting practice too abstract.
Loving-Kindness and Compassion Practice
Rather than observing, you deliberately generate a stance: goodwill toward yourself, then toward someone close, then someone neutral, then someone difficult. Usually done with repeated phrases.
Loving-kindness divides people sharply. Some find it the most affecting practice they have met; others find the phrases hollow. It is studied mainly for effects on social emotion and self-criticism rather than attention.
Suits people whose difficulty is harshness toward themselves. Worth trying even if the description makes you wince, since the wincing is often the relevant information.
Mantra and Repetition
A word, sound or phrase is repeated silently, giving attention something rhythmic to rest on. Transcendental meditation is the best-known branded form; the underlying technique is ancient and unbranded.
The repetition occupies enough of the verbal mind to quieten it, which is exactly why some people find it far easier than breath-focus. It has its own research literature that does not transfer to or from mindfulness studies.
Suits people whose minds are relentlessly verbal.
Movement Practice
Walking meditation, mindful movement and gentle yoga are meditation with a moving object of attention. The instruction is the same; the object is sensation in a moving body rather than the breath.
For a great many people this is the sustainable entry point, and treating it as a lesser form is a mistake. Sitting still is a difficulty to be worked with, not a requirement of the practice.
Suits people who are restless, in pain when still, or who have tried sitting practice repeatedly without it taking.
Types of Meditation: A Short Way to Choose
| If your difficulty is | Start with |
|---|---|
| Distraction and a scattered mind | Focused attention |
| Rumination and circling thoughts | Open monitoring |
| Physical symptoms or feeling disembodied | Body scan |
| Self-criticism | Loving-kindness |
| A relentlessly verbal mind | Mantra |
| Restlessness, or pain when still | Movement practice |
Whichever of the types of meditation you pick, give it two weeks before judging it. Almost nothing in this category reveals itself in a single session, and the first week of any practice is mostly about getting used to the instruction.
The eight-week MBSR course combines four of these in a fixed sequence, which is one reason it works as a structured introduction: it exposes you to several before you have to choose.