12 Meditation Styles That Lift Me Up
From deep breathing to self-therapy
Meditation is one of the most versatile spiritual practices there is. Before I started doing it myself I had certain ideas about what the discipline involved — visions of Tibetan monks sitting in the lotus position for hours on end until they entered the astral plane, or American stockbrokers in sharp suits doing deep breathing during their lunch break to make them feel more centred before going back to yelling at people on the phone.
Now that I meditate (nearly) every day I see that there are a million different ways of doing it, and they all bring about slightly different states of mind and get slightly different results in my life. A lot of these “styles” deserve posts of their own, but for now I just want to collect a few of them in one place. See if any resonate with you.
Disclaimer: I’m not a monk, guru, Zen master, Taoist, psychologist or expert of any kind. Just someone who likes to meditate.
(1) SIMPLE DEEP BREATHING
The classic: follow the in-breath, follow the out-breath. This is a great one if you don’t have very long and just need to take a minute to calm an agitated mind. The idea is that the more present you are to what’s actually happening right now — your body takes in air, your body lets it out again — the less room you give your mind to obsess over the past or worry about the future. If anxious thoughts intrude — and they will — don’t panic, get angry or judge them. Just notice them and say “Thinking” to yourself. Then gently return to your breathing.
If I’m extremely agitated then five minutes of deep breathing isn’t enough to de-escalate the situation, but if I’m just heading into a mildly worrying encounter and need to calm down first it’s a useful way to centre myself.
(2) PICTURING A BEAUTIFUL PLACE
I’m not a very visual person and honestly, this one doesn’t always work for me. Especially because my brain has this annoying habit of tossing images into my happy place that I don’t like — if ever proof was needed that you and your mind aren’t the same thing…
But when visualisation works, it works. I like to imagine myself in a cave in the middle of a forest (make of that what you will, Jungians). Or sitting in a shallow pool in a forest, soaking in the scene. Or sitting watching the river flow through a forest, an image I got from my favourite novel, Siddhartha.
Yes, I like forests.
The best thing about visualisations is that they’re so rich in connotations — “worth a thousand words” and all that. My Siddhartha scene is full of resonances and associations from the book, which gave me a different perspective on a lot of the things that I find hardest to deal with. The cave denotes safety and peace. The pool suggests stillness, centredness, beauty and a glimpse of an inner self that exists somewhere beyond language.
(3) PICTURING THE GRID
If I want to transcend my narcissism and self-involvement for a few minutes the visualisation I go for is “the grid”. I imagine a sort of blue neon grid stretching across space, with individual links pulsing and sending light back and forth. This reminds me that I’m not a free-floating planet in the cosmic abyss, I’m a square in the grid. The pulses I send to the other squares emanate from my talents, attributes and decisions but they don’t “belong” to me as such. They’re just part of everything that’s going on.
Picturing the grid doesn’t magically transform me into the world’s most compassionate, self-sacrificing person, but it does give me a sense of openness, freedom and interconnectivity that I enjoy. If I carry just a fraction of that sense of openness with me about my day then I’m that much more receptive to other people and that much less irritated by their “impositions”.
If you find the imagery of grids and outer space a bit alienating you might prefer this metaphor.
(4) THE QUADRINITY CHECK-IN
You may have heard of this one. Pioneered by the Hoffman Institute, the check-in is a 20-minute exercise where you focus on each component of your being in turn and listen to what it’s saying to you. How does the body feel today, and what does it want? What emotions are running through you, and what do they want? What’s the mind thinking about, and what does it want? How are these three “selves” interacting with each other — are they united or divided?
Finally, you access your “spiritual self” and see what it’s saying to you. The idea of a spiritual self distinct from your thoughts and feelings reminds me of the Hindu concept of atman, the “true self” that exists beyond the world of change and appearances. Doing a deep dive into yourself sounds like the antithesis of the grid exercise’s self-transcendence, but another Hindu idea I like is that our true self is the part of us that’s one with everything else. The deeper you delve into it, the more you experience your unity with all other beings. (Note: not all Hindus believe this.)
If you want more details about the Quadrinity exercise or the Hoffman Institute, check out these links.
(5) APPROACHING PROBLEMS
Meditation proper is about being in the moment, not planning for the future or ruminating about the past, but who says it always has to be done properly? Sometimes I find that the sense of calm spaciousness created by deep breathing enables me to raise practical questions without suffering from the anxiety they’d usually cause.
This doesn’t mean I think everything through with my rational mind — as Seng-ts’an puts it, ‘If you work on your mind with your mind, how can you avoid an immense confusion?’ It means that instead of trying to figure things out until everything’s fine, I start with ‘Everything’s fine’ then allow my gut to weigh in on what it thinks I should do. Where the mind tends to pick two options at random then obsesses over their relative merits, the gut prefers lateral thinking, simple answers and self-protection. It’s well worth listening to.
(6) UNMASKING SCRIPTS
All of us have core beliefs, some helpful and some incredibly unhelpful. They manifest themselves as scripts that we repeat to ourselves on a loop day in, day out (‘Everything I do fails’), and they take everything that happens as confirmation that they’re true (‘I knew that idea wouldn’t work — how could it when everything I do fails’). Extreme oversimplifications and binary thinking are their stock in trade, and they always generate strong emotions.
Meditation provides a forum where you can let these scripts come to the surface — they operate so stealthily we often don’t even know they’re there — and examine them in a detached way. You might laugh at them. Listen to them impassively. Remind yourself they’re only stories, and you’re not the one telling them. Or transcend them by focusing on the beauty of the present moment. There are endless approaches — have fun with it.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
(7) RECITING MANTRAS
Nothing to do with learning off Sanskrit expressions or unlocking spiritual powers in my case. I just like to reassure myself with English phrases that I think I need to hear: ‘Everything’s OK’, or ‘You’re doing fine’. The scripts we learn in childhood (or even carry in our genes?) may be telling us a disheartening story, but it’s in our power to tell ourselves a better one.
This won’t necessarily eliminate the discouraging story — at least not right away — but at least it questions it. By telling yourself the truth day after day you gradually reprogram your subconscious, which takes your monkey mind with it.
(8) SORTING THROUGH EMOTIONS
I often pass through several stages during meditation. At first the monkey mind whizzes around thinking about things I need to do or a movie I’ve just seen, and I have to periodically bring myself back to my breath.
As my breathing slows, emotions come up instead: I’m excited about my next post, that person hurt me yesterday, I don’t want to face this meeting later. I might even recall a childhood trauma or something I still have to forgive myself for. Sometimes I quickly transition to the next stage (read on, dear reader), but other times it’s better to stay in this emotional layer.
After I’ve been breathing deeply for long enough and the breaths are coming sloooow, it’s a lot easier to look past the surface chatter of everyday feeling — ‘They shouldn’t get away with that, it’s outrageous’, ‘If I do this then this will happen which will make that happen which will make that happen’, ‘Just my luck, this always happens to me’, ‘I have no right to feel annoyed about this’ — and get to the simple, pure primary emotions beneath.
I am sad.
I am angry.
I am afraid.
(9) …RIGHT, AND THEN WHAT? THE THICH NHAT HANH METHOD
In True Love, Thich Nhat Hanh says that ‘if we are mindfulness, if we are love, we are also ignorance, we are also suffering, and there is no reason to suppress anything at all’. Here and in his other books Anger and Fear he describes anger and fear as seeds deep down in our consciousness, and says the best way to deal with these “energies” is not to fight, suppress or judge them but to invite them up into awareness. Facing our fears and rages in the context of deep breathing robs them of their power to overwhelm us.
Our attention and awareness constitute the “seed of mindfulness”, a positive “energy” that has the power to transmute difficult feelings rather than being swamped by them. The process is simple: first we become fully aware of our breathing until it’s slowed down, then we become aware of what we’re most afraid of and angry about. When we embrace these painful emotions — nurture and soothe them — we transform them the way a mother’s care soothes a crying baby.
I’ve tried this method and it works really, really well.
(10) FORGIVENESS
Meditation assists forgiveness in a lot of ways. First off, the sense of perspective it creates often turns big problems into small ones and small ones into nothings. You realise that most slights are only as damaging as you let them be. Secondly, the more centred and happy in your own skin you feel, the less others can hurt you — and if you don’t feel hurt in the first place, then there’s nothing to forgive.
Meditation also encourages self-reflection and self-awareness, which helps you understand how trapped you are by your own nature. If everyone else is equally trapped, that means the people who spread the most misery are the ones most to be pitied — look at the genetic inheritance they’re living with. Finally, the “grid” mentality reminds you that if you and other people are basically the same thing then there’s nothing there to hate.
(11) SWITCHING THINGS UP
Confession: I don’t sit properly when I meditate. I’m in the lotus position on the floor alright, but I don’t sit perfectly straight and I support my back with my armchair. (Full disclosure: occasionally I’ll just sit in the armchair.)
I do different things with my hands depending on the form of meditation I’m doing and what I feel in the moment. They normally rest on my legs palms down, but sometimes I’ll turn them upwards for a little while. If I’m in the right state of mind, this immediately creates a sense of profound openness and peace. I’m not really a chakras-and-acupuncture type and I hate using phrases like “taking in love from the universe”, but I’m afraid that’s what the palms-upwards posture feels like. I don’t know what to tell you.
Equally difficult to admit, but just as effective — if I’m doing some form of self-therapy I’ll often put my hands on my belly. As you’d expect, this suggests love, nurture, reassurance. Even as someone who can take or leave hugging etc, I find this kind of simple physical gesture surprisingly powerful. I suppose when you’re too old to get it from your mother you’ve got to get it from somewhere.
Finally, walking meditation really helps with getting away from my mind and into my body. I like to do it outside and move in circles - going from A to B would make the process too purposeful.
(12) SWIMMING IN THE TAO
My favourite kind of meditation is difficult to describe.
All of the meditation styles I’ve described so far involve doing something, often something that requires a fair amount of concentration and intention. Even basic five-minute deep breathing sessions are goal-oriented if you’re using them to calm yourself down. But for me the ultimate form of meditation involves doing nothing and achieving nothing.
If I meditate for 20 minutes or more, sometimes I’ll pass through the initial monkey-mind-chattering stage, progress through the emotional stage (maybe nothing particularly strong arises, or maybe I deal with it and move on), then — if I’m lucky — enter the “swimming in the Tao” phase. I say “if I’m lucky” because you can’t force the Tao. That’s the beauty of it.
The classic books on the Tao usually describe it in terms of absence: just breathing, not thinking about anything much, not feeling anything too specific, just being. Some Taoists talk about being “drunk on life” and there’s something to that — there’s that sense of freedom, of nowness, of a simple joy that consists of nothing but itself.
Maybe it’s experiencing reality as directly as possible, without your thoughts and emotions carving it into slices. Maybe it’s a physiological state as much as anything. As a Christian, I think of it as sitting in the presence of God without any expectation on either side. Either way, the experience is entirely unshowy, unpsychedelic, quiet — empty, but somehow full. It’s beautiful.
Photo by Larisa Kisakova on Unsplash
I’ve barely got started talking about the benefits of meditation, and I’d like to go into a lot of these “styles” in more detail, but this is an article and not a book so I’ll leave it here for now. To be continued, and in the meantime I’d love to hear about some of the ways you like to meditate. Happy centering.
I like your idea of using different forms of meditation. I find sketching an object or scene can be meditative and 'in the present moment'.