Three Types of Meditation

“Meditation is about cultivating constructive emotions, like altruism, compassion.” ~ Matthieu Ricard

Renowned meditation researchers Cortland Dahl, Antoine Lutz, and Richard Davidson of The Center for Healthy Minds put meditation practices into three families: attentional, constructive, and deconstructive.¹

Attentional: Beginning with the attentional family, these are meditation practices that include counting the breath, body scanning, and mantra recitation. All of them train your ability to take conscious control of your attention and focus it on some object of meditation.

So in the case of the three types of meditation just mentioned, that object would be the breath, the body, or some repeated phrase. While each one uses a different ‘anchor,’ they all help train stable and sustained attention.

Constructive: The constructive family allows you to cultivate certain healthy states of mind. Practices in this family aim to change the mind’s habitual thought and emotion patterns, like positive psychology. Examples include loving-kindness (also known as metta) and contemplations of mortality. The meditator calls to mind a specific mental attitude, such as compassion, in loving-kindness meditation. It holds it in their mind as they rewire neural patterns to fire this way more often, e.g., the love meditation.

Deconstructive: Finally, we have the deconstructive family, which uses self-inquiry to bring about insights into the nature of consciousness. Put another way; deconstructive meditation is all about understanding the mind and how it creates your reality in the form of thoughts, emotions, sensations, etc. Such practices include insight (also known as vipassana), Dzogchen, and Mahamudra practices.

These techniques are considered more advanced by most meditation teachers. They all require a certain level of concentration and ask the meditator to investigate their present-moment experience closely. Many YouTube videos, Apps, Books, and local teachers can help you deepen your practice of prayer and meditation.

How effective you become with prayer and meditation is directly connected to your view of God, Higher Power, or the Spirit World. If you struggle with prayer meditation, I encourage you to start by reflecting and discussing your understanding and conception of God. If you view God as a dictator, authority figure, or a punishing God, your prayer and meditation practice will be along the lines of duty and drudgery. Most of the time, your struggles with prayer and meditation have more to do with your relationship with God than your technique.

As a meditator who worships a Jesus-looking God and practices a Jesus-centered life, I lean more on the constructive practice of meditation. Jesus gave us the love commandment to love God, love others as ourselves, and help change the world. When I meditate, so much of my practice shift my thoughts and emotions toward this commandment, then using my imagination to see myself practicing the love commandment in all areas of my life.

My view of salvation also heavily influences my constructive practice of meditation. For many, heaven is out there in space; when we die, we go somewhere else. My understanding of salvation is that God will restore God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. In other words, heaven is coming to earth. Creation will be restored to its rightful origin on the very ground that I am preparing this devotion. As a Kingdom person, I am tasked with helping usher in the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. Therefore my meditation practice engages my imagination, imagining what the Kingdom of God looks like in all areas of my life, then asking for direction for carrying it out.

Regardless of your approach to prayer and meditation, I hope you take it seriously and use it as a tool for connecting to your Higher Power, becoming a trusted servant to God and society, and experiencing all the promises that a committed prayer and meditation discipline will provide.

God of all relationships, You give us the ability to connect with You through prayer and meditation. We struggle at times because we struggle with our relationship with You, God. Please help us better practice spending time with You, in silence and with guided prayer and reflection. Would you please remove all the darkness and corruption in our minds that block us from You and our people? Free our imaginations to visualize Your will being carried through our lives, helping change the world to what You would have it be. In Your Spirit and Name, we pray these things. May Your will not ours always materialize, now and forever. Amen. 

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash