7 POWERFUL MEDITATION TYPES, AND HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT ONE FOR ME?

First, let’s learn about Meditation and what is meditating. What are its types? And is it good and beneficial for me or just a waste of time and effort, and finally how to practice it?

What is Meditation?

Meditation may be an ancient tradition, but now it is more famous and practiced worldwide after knowing its benefits; it offers our body – these days during our busy schedules and demanding lives – the Time for relaxation and heightened awareness.

Research suggests that Meditation has the potential for more than just temporary stress relief، it also offers a chance to improve physical well-being, help to focus and feel more connected to the present moment, improve health, and improve pain tolerance.

Over Time, experts have developed a lot of meditation forms; this variety suggests that there must be a form of Meditation suitable for every one of us regardless of personality or gender, or lifestyle.
Although there is no right or wrong way to meditate, exploring these different forms of Meditation is essential until you find the most suitable structure for your needs and complement your passion to stick with it.

These are the popular forms of Meditation:

1- body scan meditation (progressive relaxation):

This form of Meditation encourages people to scan their bodies for areas of tension; its goal is to notice tension and to allow it to release; this form of Meditation involves slowly tightening and relaxing one muscle group at a time throughout the body, also sometimes encourage a person to visualize a wave, drifting over their body to release tension.
During a progressive relaxation session, practitioners start at one end of their body, usually their feet, and work through the whole.

As an example, you can do the following process :
1. Focus on your feet and how they feel on the floor. Breathe in, and then try to relax your feet as you exhale. 
2. Next, move up to your legs and notice how they feel like part of your body. Breathe in, and then try to relax your legs as you exhale. 
3. You can repeat this process as you move up the body, focusing on your arms, shoulders, and head. You can also start at your head and work your way down. 

Meditation often relieves anxiety and stress, such as tight shoulders or a tense neck, to help people suffering from chronic pain. Finally, because it slowly and steadily relaxes the body, some people use this form of Meditation to help them sleep.

2- Focused (breath awareness ) Meditation: 

Involves concentration using any of the five senses.
For example, you can focus on something internal, like your breath, or you can bring in external influences to help focus your attention.
When focusing on your breath, you need to breathe slowly and deeply, counting your breaths or otherwise focusing on your breaths.
The goal is to focus only on breathing and ignore other thoughts that enter the mind.
This practice may be simple in theory, but it can be difficult for beginners to hold their focus for longer than a few minutes at first.
If your mind does wander, you must return to the practice and refocus.

Focused Meditation offers many benefits, such as mindfulness, reduced Anxiety, improved concentration, and greater emotional flexibility.

3- Walking meditation:

Although most people think of yoga when they hear about movement as a kind of Meditation, walking as a gentle form of motion is a very beneficial form of Meditation.
Instead of using the breath as the object of awareness, walking Meditation encourages you to focus on each footstep to be fully present in the “here and now” process; This involves concentrating on the movement of each foot; noticing the action of lifting, lowering, and having each foot touch the ground, one step after another; the activities of each arm, how it makes harmony with your foot movement. 

 Walking Meditation is suitable for people who find peace in action and prefer to let their minds wander; it’s an excellent substitution for people having difficulty standing still for a period to meditate.

4- Mindfulness meditation:

Mindfulness is a form of Meditation that urges practitioners to focus on the “here and now” process; this means focusing only on the present moment without any memories or Anxiety about the future; you only pay attention to your thoughts as they pass through your mind.
There is a common misconception that mindfulness meditation is all about having no thoughts at all -which is practically impossible-no it is all about simply redirecting them, and coming back to “here and now” again.

As Mindfulness meditation is something people can do almost anywhere, While waiting in an ATM line, for example, a person might calmly notice his surrounding- including the sights, sounds, and movements they experience- it is a very popular and practiced meditation in the West.
The real challenge is making this kind of Meditation a daily process and learning mindfulness tricks to reduce Anxiety and stress.

Finally, research shows that mindfulness can reduce fixation on negative emotions, improve focus and memory, and teach better relationship satisfaction.
Here are our ten mindfulness tricks to reduce Anxiety and stress in this harsh, demanding world.

5- Loving-kindness Meditation:

Loving-kindness is a meditation that strengthens compassion and acceptance for yourself and others.
It involves receiving love from others While breathing deeply and then sending a series of good wishes to loved ones, friends, and even people we don’t like or love.
In most forms of this Meditation, the key is to repeat the message many times until one feels an attitude of loving-kindness.

For an example of the loving-kindness meditation process, you can do the following:
1- after sitting in a conformable position, close one’s eyes and practice breathing meditation.
2- Think about yourself in your head without judgment. Then, either out loud or in your head, repeat, “May I be happy. May I be healthy? May I be safe?” 
3- Next, think about someone you love, and direct that same positivity toward them, repeating, “May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe.”
4- and the best of all with Bonus points will be after a while, felt is to repeat step number three but with someone you don’t like or always disagree with him.

This Meditation, as it goes with every religious and spiritual intention, has many advantages; it can help those who suffer from anger and frustration and can affirmatively decrease depression and Anxiety.

6- Mantra meditation:

Despite being brought over from India and secularized for a Western audience, this form of Meditation is very famous in the West, especially in the USA; it is also prominent in many teachings, including Hindu and Buddhist traditions.
Mantra meditation uses a repetitive sound to clear the mind, focusing on a specific mantra – acts as the object of awareness for the practitioner, just like breathing – which can be a word, phrase, or sound, such as the popular “Om.”

It doesn’t matter if you repeat the mantra loudly or quietly. After repeating this process for some time, you will mostly be more alert and in tune with your environment, giving you higher levels of awareness.
This form of Meditation is suitable for people who Don’t like silence focusing and enjoy repetition.

 7- mindful eating meditation:

 Mindful eating is simply paying attention to the “here and now” process as we eat, paying attention to our food, its kind, its taste, its color, on purpose, moment by moment, feeling the sentiments of every bite we take, testing our satisfaction and above all without any distractions.

Haven’t we all sometimes wondered why Although we pay significant attention to studying all kinds of diets to determine which is the most suitable for us and after a while doing that kind of diet, we still come up with the same result: all sorts of diets are effective in the short term, and none is effective in a long time.
And for some self-evident reason, simply without behavior change, a diet is useless, which is the mindful eating meditation.

How long does Meditation take to work?

The bottom line is Don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and try different types. It often takes a little trial and error until you find the one that fits, and you need to know that Meditation is not a results-focused undertaking. Fixating too much on the results can provoke Anxiety that undermines the benefits of Meditation.

However, most research shows that Meditation can work quickly after weeks or months, not years. Many meditation practitioners report an immediate improvement following a meditation session, such as feeling less stressed, more accepting, and at greater peace.
Hopefully, these sensations may continue over time and with practice outside of meditation sessions.

How to get started

As we all say, the key to Meditation is discipline and being kind to yourself. Of course, to get started, there are all kinds of meditation courses available online, and life is an excellent way to begin with professional assistance.
But the easiest way to begin is to sit quietly and focus on your breath.
It’s best to start in small moments, even 5 or 10 minutes, and grow from there; couple that with an additional 2 to 5 minutes of Meditation throughout the day to break up the chaos, and you will soon be feeling the benefits.

Finally pairing meditation with a daily habit you do – like doing your 10 mins exercises or brushing your hair – can help you commit to your practice and be a very important time of your daily life.