Meditation: Definition, Benefits, & Types

My legs cramped up, my back hurt, and my mind—well, my mind rebelled. It hated having nothing to work on. As participants in the retreat, we had surrendered our phones and computers, our books and journals. Food was prepared for us, and being in the (blissfully air-conditioned) meditation spaces was our only purpose each day. Deprived of all my usual activities, I was incredibly disoriented. And just as the retreat came to an end, I began to appreciate its impact. In those hours of meditation, I had watched more negative thoughts and feelings come—and go—than ever before in my life. I lived through moments of surrender to stillness, leading to a deep sense of peace. I understood the impermanence of every moment and experience in life.

Even without a regular meditation practice in my life today, those lessons stick with me. As I understand it, many, if not most, people have a complex and difficult relationship with meditation—but they stick with it because of the benefits for the rest of their daily lives. Let’s look at what the science says about the power of meditation.

Meditation can refer to any number of approaches to becoming more aware of one’s present-moment experience (Ospina et al., 2007). Often this involves some degree of relaxation into one’s body and out of the nonstop stream of thoughts that typically constitutes the soundtrack of our lives. In meditation, one usually becomes something of an observer, trying to get distance from one’s experiences. Whether one is experiencing meditation through yoga or through a traditional form of sedentary meditation, the goal is to become more present and more aware: aware of what thoughts and feelings are surfacing, aware of how one’s body is alive and alert to the world. This is often experienced by meditators as an altered state of consciousness (Ospina et al., 2007).

Meditation often has a religious context or origin, but it can be practiced without any religious grounding or inspiration. In modern-day settings, many people aiming to experience increased wellness see meditation simply as a primary mindfulness practice. This is part of what makes meditation, like yoga, a powerful and common practice—though not one without controversy. Meditation as we understand it began as a religious practice undertaken by followers of the Buddha, wherein the goal was to recognize the impermanence of all experiences and the importance of surrendering attachment to those experiences (Hickey, 2008). Ideally, one became so detached from trying to hold on to desires and dreams, as well as resisting painful moments, that one reached a state of absolute liberation, happiness, and inner peace.​

Most meditators today have a less lofty goal: They just want more separation from their thoughts and feelings and more access to peaceful experience. In its contemporary and Western form, meditation is generally understood to be a process of concentrating on the breath and inner sensations while also consciously distancing oneself from thoughts and feelings—especially the negative ones that we normally get stuck on (Hickey, 2008). When our minds get quieter, we know ourselves on a deeper level and we experience more freedom from anxiety and psychological pain in general.

The benefits of meditation for one’s mental health are a somewhat contested topic. One review of the research found that while meditation improves our mental well-being, at least in the West, it is not usually employed as the primary treatment for psychological issues (Saeed et al., 2010). Rather, it is often recommended as an adjunctive treatment, or something that supplements the primary treatment approach. So for example, adding yoga or a meditation practice to one’s life may be a useful complement to starting psychotherapy for depression or anxiety, but psychologists generally would not recommend trying only yoga or meditation as a primary treatment.

On the other hand, some researchers, in reviewing the evidence, have found a stronger case for meditation’s positive impacts on mental health. Specifically, Goyal and colleagues (2014) found evidence for moderate improvements in anxiety, depression, and experiences of pain in general, simply as a result of engaging in mindfulness meditation programs. They noted that mindfulness meditation did not distinguish itself as better or worse than other therapies for depression and anxiety.

The research findings may underestimate the benefits of meditation because many interventions are by necessity brief in nature, so participants do not show the benefits of a more in-depth or long-term practice. Martin and colleagues (2023) found that it was people who experienced a more persistent sense of self-transcendence—an important goal of meditation—who showed the strongest psychological benefits from their meditation practices.

If we’re being really nitpicky about how research works, some of the traits that make people dedicated and persistent meditators are probably also responsible for them experiencing better outcomes than less persistent meditators. Think about it: If you have the ability to stay committed to a practice like this, you are probably demonstrating that level of determination or willpower in other areas of your life too.

Other areas of our lives can be more directly and powerfully impacted by meditation. For example, another study found that the more people meditate, the more compassion they demonstrate when responding to others (Condon et al., 2013). Why might this be? When we experience the de-stressing effects of meditation, when we become more relaxed and less reactive to the world, we are probably better able to see beyond ourselves and care about what’s happening to the people around us (Hussain & Bhushan, 2010).
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It is important to note also that research on meditation has considered many different kinds of meditation, with the practices involved having different effects on their practitioners and research participants (Sedlmeier et al., 2012). Given this variation across meditation practices, more attention is needed from psychologists to figure out which particular aspects of meditation are most helpful.

The types of meditation range from techniques developed millenia ago to those being honed and refined as you read this (Ospina et al., 2007). Some, such as transcendental meditation, use a single mantra, repeated again and again, to attempt to transcend one’s typical thoughts and attentional patterns. Vipassana meditation—the kind taught at the retreat I attended in 2022—focuses on awareness of the breath and bodily sensations to steer us away from our thoughts and feelings and into awareness of the impermanence of all things. Still other approaches, such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), see present-moment awareness and acceptance as the main goal.

​One way to differentiate among these types is to consider them as focused on mindfulness, concentration, or self-transcendence (Chiesa & Malinowski, 2011). MBSR, for example, is not focused on achieving nirvana but rather on becoming more mindful of the present moment. A loving-kindness meditation, by contrast, tries to focus the mind on positive thoughts and feelings. And something like yoga, which can also be considered a meditative practice, combines concentration and mindfulness to bring us into our bodies as much as possible.

Some of the techniques or types of meditation I’ve covered in less detail up to this point include loving-kindness meditation and compassion meditation. Both of these meditations are about intentionally focusing on fostering positive feelings toward oneself, other people, and often the whole world. They are often more strongly guided than other meditations might be, with the meditation teacher providing instructions somewhat regularly about how to think. These kinds of mindfulness-based meditations have been shown to increase the amount of positive thoughts and feelings that people have, leading psychologists to suggest that they may be especially helpful in treating mental health disorders that feature a surplus of negative emotions and not enough positivity (Hofmann et al., 2011).

There is some overlap between visualization techniques and meditation techniques, and both are practices that go back thousands of years in many religious faiths (Utay & Miller, 2006). Some visualization techniques are not very meditative, and many meditation techniques are about disengaging from thoughts rather than visualizing specific things. That said, in more directive or guided meditation, one may be instructed to maintain one’s focus on the image of a desired or beloved object or person. There is preliminary data to suggest that these techniques can be used together to promote better mental health (Margolin et al., 2011).

• “Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It is a way of entering into the quiet that is already there—buried under the 50,000 thoughts the average person thinks every day.” ― Deepak Chopra
• “One way to look at meditation is as a kind of intrapsychic technology that’s been developed over thousands of years by traditions that know a lot about the mind/body connection.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
• “Meditation provides a way of learning how to let go. As we sit, the self we’ve been trying to construct and make into a nice, neat package continues to unravel.” ― John Welwood
• “When you begin to meditate you may notice changes right away. Or nothing much may seem to change. Don’t count on anything dramatic. Most changes happen slowly.” ― Ram Dass
• “Sometimes you need to sit lonely on the floor in a quiet room in order to hear your own voice and not let it drown in the noise of others.” ― Charlotte Eriksson
• “Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh

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