Meditation

Meditation is a practice of sustained attention or contemplation, used to cultivate awareness, concentration, calm, or spiritual insight. Its methods range from focused attention to open monitoring and structured contemplation.

Focused-attention meditation: A meditation method that repeatedly directs attention to a chosen object, such as the breath. It shows how returning attention to one object can train concentration.
Dhyana: A Sanskrit term for meditative absorption or sustained contemplation in Indian religious traditions. The term names a major strand of meditation in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain contexts.
Mindfulness-based stress reduction: An eight-week program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn that teaches mindfulness practices for managing stress and pain. It is a prominent secular program adapting meditation for health settings.
Prayer: A form of communication or communion with a deity or sacred reality in religious practice. Prayer may include meditation, but often involves petition, praise, or dialogue.
Open monitoring meditation: A meditation method that observes sensations, thoughts, and emotions without selecting one as the exclusive focus. It contrasts narrow focus with receptive awareness of changing experience.
Early Buddhism: The teachings and communities associated with the Buddha and the earliest periods of Buddhism. Early Buddhist texts preserve influential practices of mindfulness and concentration.
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy: A therapy combining mindfulness training with cognitive therapy, developed to help prevent recurrent depression. It applies meditation skills to recognizing and disengaging from depressive thought patterns.
Hypnosis: A state or procedure involving focused attention and increased responsiveness to suggestion. Its use of focused attention can resemble meditation while pursuing different processes and aims.
Mindfulness: A quality of attention involving awareness of present experience with reduced reactivity and judgment. Many meditation practices cultivate mindfulness by noticing experience as it unfolds.
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A classical Sanskrit text that organizes the philosophy and practice of yoga into 196 aphorisms. Its account of meditation became influential in later yoga traditions.

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