Fundamentally, meditation is a device to regain mastery over your mind and discover your true nature. Once the mind knows its place, there is reduction in thoughts. Hence your fears or daydreams or anxieties do not pull you into the future or the past (where all experiences are stored). Once that happens, you can experience peace and stillness firsthand and a taste of it is enough to keep going higher in consciousness.

In this chapter, I want to cover various types of broad meditation categories. Meditation is a knack and hence it is important to understand that anything that we do can be a meditation once you have a knack. These types and classifications are to put some important perspective but I want to start this chapter with a truth that acts as an important disclaimer.

“The Zen hall is not the only Zen hall. For all those who practice Zen, their own body is also a Zen hall. Then you can practice non stop, when you are standing, walking, sitting or lying down – even when you are silent or speaking. This means one can always stay in Zen hall”

–Zen Master Man Gong

“What is this true meditation? It is to make everything: coughing, swallowing, waving the arms, motion, stillness, words, action, the evil and the good, prosperity and shame, gain and loss, right and wrong, into one single koan”

– Zen Master Hakuin Ekaku

Man Gong and Hakuin point at the eternal truth. In essence, all meditation methods are just devices to get started and reach a certain point in uplifting our consciousness, where spontaneous meditativeness takes over and methods can be dropped slowly, then you can truly walk in Zen or sit in Zen. However, in present scenario of the modern world, our daily lives are very stressed due to lot of pressures both existential and mental, thus these methods become very important to get a taste of peace and tranquility. Meditation thus becomes a map to navigate to the destination called bliss.