These 9 types of meditation will keep you cool as a cucumber.

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Hapi Wellness

6 min readJan 7, 2017

You’ve probably heard of some of the benefits of meditation, but what is meditation exactly? There are three distinct modes of meditation, each containing different practices. In this article I outline the three modes and nine types of meditation. This is not meant to be a comprehensive article, but should be a helpful introduction to meditation and the different categories of mental practices.

The three modes consist of Focused Attention, Open Monitoring, and Effortless Presence. If we advance our ability to focus attention, and openly monitor our thoughts, we can eventually learn to access an effortless presence.

Focused Attention

This mode involves using executive functioning to direct our attention towards some kind of information about subjective experience. When we notice an intrusive thought, or a chain of thoughts has distracted us, we avoid judging the thought, or judging ourselves. Then we direct our attention back to the point of focus.

1. Breathing Meditation

The point of focus is the breath. In some practices, you simply breathe naturally and monitor the perception of your breath, and in others you perform breathing exercises or count breathing cycles.

2. Sensing Meditation

The point of focus is on the sense of your physical self — a physical perception such as a touch, sound, sight, smell or taste. Some practices will make you focus on a single body part, others will involve moving the attention around the body. The most well known Sensing Meditation is body-scanning, which is used in modern psychotherapies such as Mindfulness-integrated Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. We are not limited to scanning the body, however — we can focus on the sight of a candle in front of us, scan the sounds around us, focus on the smell of an incense, or the taste of a raisin in our mouths.

3. Loving-Kindness Meditation

The point of focus is in the creation of empathetic or compassionate wishes. It might be interpreted by some as similar to a deistic prayer. Love towards ourselves, then love towards others. As we become more consistent and genuine about the love we invoke, we send our love to beings more and more distant or alien to us. We start feeling love for our enemies, for animals, and eventually the entire universe.

4. Mantra Meditation

A mantra is a thought that is repeated frequently — a word, statement, or a sound. As we become practised, the mantra drowns out interrupting thoughts. Effective mantras are often hard to find and select, and so, the mantra is usually selected by an instructor, and is personalised to the person meditating.

5. Visualisation Meditation

The imagination can be harnessed for meditation. A large variety of things can be imagined — real or unreal objects, deities or places. Real objects such as a candle or idol, or the room we are sitting in. Unreal objects such as an impossible object. Often practitioners will imagine a deity they favour, and sometimes a palace within which the deity resides. This last one is similar to building a mind-palace, also known as the Method of Loci. The difference is that the palace is imagined piece by additional piece — each time a detail of the visualisation is lost in the mind’s eye we start from scratch, building the deity and/or palace up again from a blank slate.

6. Yogic Meditation

Mystical schools of meditation will use imaginary energies or body parts instead of physical body parts. It is similar to body-scanning, but we attempt to sense things like the Third Eye, or the Chakras, or Kundalini Energies, or Qi or Prana, within one’s self.

Open Monitoring

Contrasting focused attention is an open mode of meditation, one which is open to monitoring thoughts rather than redirecting them. The purpose is observation without judgement, , prompting a division between the thoughts and the thinker. This practice helps us better understand the brain we are given. While focused attention uses an object to occupy our minds, open monitoring forms a sense of acceptance and equanimity.

7. Mindfulness Meditation

Instead of focusing on a single object, mindfulness meditation aims for an openness to all experience. It’s a bit like blanking out and waiting for something to happen. Instead of directing attention away from intrusive thoughts, the thoughts are allowed to come into being, are observed without judgement, then are let to pass into non-existence. When thoughts are acknowledged without judgement and allowed to pass, eventually thought loops cease and new thoughts arise, which are again acknowledged without judgement and transformed to non-existence.

8. Existential Meditation

The most common form is known as Self Inquiry, or “I am” meditation. Existential meditation is the open mindfulness to the qualia of ontology — usually Open Individualism or No Individualism regarding the nature of self, and Dualism or Non-dualism regarding the nature of the universe. These concepts are beyond the scope of this article, but I highly recommend reading the linked articles for further explanation.

9. Emptiness Meditation

When open monitoring meditations have been sufficiently practised, momentary opportunities of thoughtlessness start to appear. Emptiness meditation is the end-goal of most meditative religions. Practitioners like to call it things like “choice-less awareness”, “pure being”, “pure presence” — and refer to being in the moment, without internal distraction, for meaningfully long periods of time. Some practitioners refer to this state as being blissful contentment — if so, then true emptiness of experience is not what they have achieved — hedonic tone, or valence, still exists to some extent.

Effortless Presence

Some schools of Buddhism translate Nirvana to English as “Annihilation”, while others translate it as “Extinguishment with return to existence in another way”… perhaps this is thoughtlessness without valence, and is the purest expression of Emptiness Meditation? This is often considered meditation no longer, but is a mode of being. Is fundamental information of the present moment being received by the practitioner, yet no higher level processing occurs? Or not even fundamental information is received, yet some fundamental experience exists? Possibly there’s neither fundamental information nor fundamental experience… at which point it’s experientially no different to being asleep or dead, but with the returning memory of “existence in another way”.