Does your meditation practice fit?

Burning Incense by kevinpoh on Flickr 

In life (and in meditation) everyone’s journey is unique .. I am often heard to say ‘there are many roads up the mountain’ and part of our life journey is to find and travel our own unique road.

When I was designing the Exploring Meditation course I was mindful of the journey that I had taken with my own meditation practice .. and I wanted to share an insight into different meditation techniques so that participants could find a practice that 'resonated' with them.  Not the practice that I was doing. Not what might be currently hot in the media.

A study published online in Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing (2012) highlighted the importance of ensuring that new meditators select methods with which they are most comfortable, rather than those that are most popular or what ‘everyone else is doing’.

When you select a meditation practice that YOU are most comfortable with, you are likely to increase your chance of sticking with it, says Adam Burke, the author of the study and a professor of health education at San Francisco State University.

Burke’s study compared four popular meditation methods — Mantra, Mindfulness, Zen and Qigong Visualization — to see if new meditation practitioners favored one over the others. The study’s 247 participants were taught each method and asked to practice at home and, at the end of the study, evaluate which they preferred.

The two simpler methods, Mantra and Mindfulness, were preferred by 31 percent of study participants, with about 22 percent preferring Zen and 14.8 percent preferring Qigong.

This study shows the value of providing new practitioners with a simple, accessible method of meditation, and emphasizes that no one technique is best for everyone.

“If someone is exposed to a particular technique through the media or a health care provider, they might assume because it’s popular it’s the best for everyone,” Burke said. “But that’s like saying because a pink dress or a blue sport coat is popular this year, it’s going to look good on everybody. In truth, different people like different things. One size does not fit all.”

FIND YOUR FIT

I spent many years wandering through various schools of meditation, learning from different teachers, exploring different methods .. and when I came to sharing my passion for meditation with others I knew that I wanted to share some of those 'flavours’ .. so that participants could the best fit for them.

Ultimately meditation practice is not going to be effective for you, unless you like doing it – and you do it!

Some people will find a single technique that works well for them and will continue with that practice for a lifetime; others might find their original practice needing a little polishing or its just time to explore a different technique. 

It is those who stick with a practice that is obviously not working for them, that often declare they are no good at this or it’s too hard or it just doesn’t work.

What is your practice?