Meditation Practice -Types of Meditation

Parag Saxena
5 min readDec 12, 2021
Photo by Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash

What is Meditation?

Meditation is not only a Practice to calm your mind, it’s not about spiritual practice but it can make you calmer, focused, and have clear thoughts. We Usually connect meditation practice to some yogi or monk, but it's for exercising your mind to calmer yourself.

Meditation is the art of being aware of yourself and your surroundings, it is not just letting go of the negative thoughts and focusing only on one thought, our nature is to have multiple thoughts, we just need to serve only one thought and let the other thoughts pass.

But whenever you feel you are stuck to other thoughts, just bring back your attention to the thought you want.

But Why Meditation is important?

As We exercise, our body parts get stronger & healthier, it increases the blood flow and makes us fit. Similarly, to Make healthier minds, meditation can help us to make calmer, focused, stress relief, and more clear thoughts. By Meditation our mind creates more brain patterns (brain patterns are the go-to patterns for performing a task we created when we repeat a task again and again). Through Meditation you can make yourself calm in any situation and create more focus on a single task.

But Why I need to focus on a single task, where I can capable of doing multiple tasks?

To understand this, first, we need to understand how our brain accumulates the task and performs it, usually, when we perform a task our brain focuses and performs the task using the knowledge of the task it has, but if we perform multiple tasks at the same time like Doing school-work while watching YouTube, it goes to and frow between each task of creating a stream of focus but by switching we didn’t focus on anything.

Okay, we understand meditation, now how to do that, what methods are we using… there are multiple types of meditation to perform.

Types of Meditation

1. Mantra Meditation

Mantra Meditation is the old Indian Yoga Technique where the person sits in a quiet place in yogh mudra [comfortable folding legs and hands-on lap. After that, you can choose a phrase or Mantra that you like or that excites you.

  • Take 3 deep breaths and with each breath calm yourself.
  • Choose a Mantra like OM or you can choose phrases like I AM ENERGY.
  • Now Inhale a Deep breath and Chant the Mantra while exhaling through the Mouth.
  • Repeat the process and let go of the thoughts.
  • Meditation Time: 20–30 minutes

2. Body Scan Meditation

When we visit doctors for body checks… they perform body scans to check whether any disease occurs in any part of the body. Similarly, we can perform body scans while meditation. It’s a simple technique to get aware of your body.

  • Sits in a comfortable position of yogh mudra.
  • Take a few deep breaths in-out.
  • Now start from the top of your head, focus on the region like an MRI machine scan you, get the awareness of that area, then to your face, shoulder, following to stomach, waist, legs till the toe.
  • Meditation Time: 15–20 Minutes.

3. Breath Meditation

In Breath Meditation, we usually focus on the inflow and outflow of the breath. For Warm-up you can do three types of in-out flow

  1. Take a breath through the nose and exhale from the nose (Repeat x3).
  2. Take a Breath through the Nose and Exhale from the Mouth (Repeat x3).
  3. Take a Breath through the Mouth and Exhale from the Mouth (Repeat x3).
  • After Warm-up, get into yogh Mudra with open eyes.
  • Get a few deep breaths into the nose and out through the mouth.
  • When you feel calmer, close your eyes and repeat the process.
  • Meditation Time: 15–20 Minutes.

In Breath Meditation, there is awareness of breath in-out flow, how your lungs expand and collapse. Your stomach stretches and shrinks.

4. Sound or Guided Meditation

The Morning Bird’s Chipping, soothing voice of river flow or rain, oceans waves make you calmer, that’s the Sound Meditation in which we meditate with the soothing sounds of nature which make you calmer and feel like no noise is around you.

In Guided Meditation, which can we experience today on many applications (e.g. Headspace) wherein the recorded or live sessions of the instructor guide you with the process of meditation when to inhale-exhale breath, clear your mind, and feel calmer.

  • Sits in a comfortable position of yogh mudra.
  • Take a few deep breaths in-out with eyes open, get relaxed with each breath, and as you are ready close your eyes with ease-in breaths.
  • Now the instructor will guide you during the whole session so that your mind will not wander around.
  • Meditation Time: (20 or More)Minutes.

5. Aroma & Frangance Meditation

Aroma or Frangance Meditation can use to relax and quiet the mind too. Meditation combines the benefits of aromatherapy with the simplicity of a focus even for those who are new to meditation or find the practice to be challenging. By Practicing frequently, you will feel less stressed in the present moment.

Using a stick of incense with different scents like lavender (for calming properties), sage (for cleansing abilities), and peppermint (for mental focus).

  • Sits in a comfortable position of yogh mudra with eyes open.
  • Light a stick of incense according to the directions.
  • As the trails of smoke curl and waft upwards, just focus on watching. Let yourself become immersed in the different paths and patterns the trail of smoke begins to take.
  • If other thoughts come into your head, gently bring your attention back to the trail of smoke left from the incense. Just stay in the present moment and enjoy the simple and elegant display.
  • You can close your eyes and immerse in the scent and get relaxed.

That’s are the methods of meditation you can practice as per your comfortable and availability. Meditation practice at starting of the day and help relexed your mind the whole day.

Thank you for reading the blog, you can leave a like if you find it helpful and comment your meditation technique, till then Happy Meditating :)

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Parag Saxena

Working as Fronted Dev, Writing Blogs on Technologies i found fascinating. Also, fond of playing around with API’s & UI/UX Design.