We hear from friends about how meditation (and its cousin, mindfulness) offers beneficial effects to restore and revive the whole person - mind and body.

You may have the idea that meditation is to be done in a certain way and comes from a certain tradition. My idea used to be that it involved sitting cross-legged while gazing at a flame.

Many traditions of meditation

A recent study helped me expand my ideas.

The study invited views from meditators from a number of spiritual traditions - Tibetan Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Yoga, Hinduism, Tantra, Sri Chinmoy, Kundalini Yoga, Osho-Meditation, Christianity, Sufism, Brahma Kumaris and Qi Gong.

20 top methods of meditation

They found that there is no single way to meditate.

This is good news in case we have tried one way of meditation and it didn’t suit us. There could be other approaches to try. Among the myriad ways, the study identified the top 20 methods and grouped them according to:

activation - how passive or ‘active’ they were
and body orientation

On the left of this matrix are the less ‘active’ methods. On the right are the more ‘active’ methods.

At the bottom of the matrix are less ‘body oriented’ methods. To the top are the more ‘body oriented’ methods.

Have you tried any of these? Which ones did you like? Or which intrigue you to try them?

Types of meditation - seven groupings

These 20 types were grouped into 7 clusters. Does this analysis shed light on your preferences? Do you enjoy types of meditation from a single cluster? Or struggle with another group of meditation techniques?

Awareness Through Movement® as meditation

How many of these forms of meditating might we encounter in an Awareness Through Movement® class?

I think it is the majority, particularly the groups:

Meditation with Movement
Body-Centred Meditation
Mindful Observation

Sometimes, we also include visualisation and contemplating a question or a paradox.

Do you agree? I invite you to give it a try. You can come to your first Zoom class for free. And, at the end, let me know how it seems to you.

The magic of meditation - more does not equal more

Zen Buddhist Koans are similar to riddles, which encourage people to shift their way of seeing the world. Spending more time pondering or meditating does not always give you a better answer.

Koans are cryptic, whimsical and paradoxical. Here is a simple one: what colour is the wind?

Maybe this is another:

Me - "If I meditate 4 hours a day, how long will it take me to transcend?"
Master - "Perhaps you will transcend in 10 years."
Me - "What if I meditated 8 hours a day...?"
Master - "Perhaps you will transcend in 20 years."

In the Feldenkrais Method®, we know this principle of “less is more”. In his Learn to Learn pamphlet Moshe Feldenkrais gives us these pointers:

Do not “try” to do well
Do not “try” to do nicely
It is easier to tell differences [learn] when the effort is light
Do not concentrate
Do a little less than you can