People often assume meditation is meditation is meditation. You sit, you quiet your mind, you feel peaceful, all is well. Right? But the truth is, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different meditation techniques, and they each have different benefits and orientations. Meditation has been around in some form for virtually all of human history, as part of many different cultural traditions - healing, divination, sports, the arts, and, of course, religion and spirituality.
So how do you know which approach is best for you? Like in most things, it takes some exploration and experimentation. One of the easiest ways to start is to clarify for yourself why you want to meditate - that is, what are you hoping to get from it? To help you get
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Techniques vary, but the relaxation response (the same technique as from the health-based listing above) is a common one, because of its proven medical benefits.
Concentration/Focus Improvement: Everyone from Olympic athletes to poker players have begun to incorporate some form of meditation into their training regimes, because it helps them detach from distractions and hone their focus. For the same reason, Zen meditation was incorporated into martial arts training centuries ago, and Zen meditation is still one of the most common forms used for this purpose (and championed by such illustrious sports figures as Phil Jackson, coach of the LA Lakers.) Although there are many Zen variations, a good book to start with is Zen Meditation Plain and Simple by Albert Low.
Intuition Development: Many occult and spiritual traditions teach that we all posses an intuitive level of knowledge within us, but that we can only tap into it when we let go of our ego-based thoughts and emotions. For this reason, meditation is a big component of most intuition-development training programs. There are thousands of such programs, so it is difficult to recommend just one, but Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz offers a grounded, modern approach in her book Awakening