Types of Meditation (And Why the Differences Matter)
This is post 7 of 9 of the Meditation Series (Stillness as a Practice)
At some point (usually after a few weeks of practice) a question starts to surface: am I doing the right kind of meditation?
It’s worth answering clearly, because the landscape of meditation can feel overwhelming from the outside. Mindfulness, focused attention, open awareness, visualization, breathwork, body scans, loving-kindness… the list goes on, and most of it comes without a map.
Here is a simple map.
Two fundamental movements
Almost every form of meditation, across traditions and techniques, is a variation on one of two basic movements of attention, or a combination of both.
The first is focused attention. You choose an object: the breath, a sensation in the body, a mental count, an image; and you return to it, repeatedly, every time the mind wanders. The practice is in the returning. Each return is one repetition. Over time, the capacity to sustain attention on a chosen object grows stronger, the intervals between wandering get longer, and a quality of interior calm begins to accumulate.
In Buddhist tradition this is called Samatha, often translated as tranquility or calm-abiding. Think of it as the center of a torch beam: concentrated, bright, steady.
The second is open awareness. Rather than holding attention on a single point, you allow it to rest in a wide, receptive field: aware of everything that’s arising without latching onto any of it. Sounds, sensations, thoughts, emotions… they come and go, and you simply notice. No grasping, no pushing away. Just witnessing.
This is Vipassana, often called insight meditation or mindfulness. The torch beam equivalent would be the full spread of light: diffuse, inclusive, seeing the whole space rather than illuminating one point.
Both are real practices. Both develop something important. And they work best in sequence.
Why sequence matters
Open awareness sounds freer and more appealing to many people, less effortful, less constraining. And for some personalities it does feel more natural at first.
But here’s what tends to happen without a foundation in focused attention: the “open awareness” becomes something closer to ordinary mind-wandering with a meditation label on it. The attention isn’t wide and receptive, it’s just unfocused. And unfocused attention doesn’t build the self-observation capacity we’re after. It just reproduces the default state with slightly more ambient calm.
Focused attention first builds the muscle. It teaches you what it actually feels like to hold attention somewhere deliberately, so that when you open the field, you know what you’re doing and can feel when the quality of awareness shifts. The open practice becomes genuinely different from ordinary thinking, rather than indistinguishable from it.
This is why the 42-day program in the next post starts with two rounds of focused practice before introducing open awareness. Not because focused attention is superior, it isn’t, but because it prepares the ground.
Focused attention in practice
The most accessible anchor for focused attention is the body itself: the physical sensations of breathing, temperature, weight, subtle internal feeling. Something real and immediate that the mind can actually land on rather than slide off.
Alternatively: a mental count. Counting breaths from one to ten, then starting over. Simple to the point of seeming trivial, yet surprisingly powerful! Precisely because of that simplicity. When the mind is given something genuinely easy to do, the background noise tends to quiet. And the moment you lose count, you know with certainty that the attention wandered, which deepens the capacity to recognize the wandering itself.
There’s also a subcategory worth knowing about: generative meditation. Rather than a neutral object of attention, you deliberately evoke and sustain an emotional quality: compassion, gratitude, calm. You’re not performing the emotion. You’re locating a genuine seed of it and letting it expand through sustained attention.
This is powerful work, and it connects directly to the relational dimension of what Happinetics is about. The capacity to deliberately access a quality like genuine warmth or patience; rather than waiting for it to arise spontaneously, is something that can be trained. But it works best once you have a stable foundation in neutral focused attention. Trying to sustain a positive emotion before you can reliably sustain attention on a breath tends to produce performance rather than genuine inner state.
Build the foundation first.
Open awareness in practice
Once focused attention is reasonably stable (you can hold the breath or the count for meaningful stretches, you can feel the wandering happen and return without drama) open awareness becomes available as a genuine practice rather than an approximation of one.
You let the attention expand. No single object to maintain. Instead: everything that arises, perceived without preference. A sound appears, you notice it, you don’t follow the story it triggers. A thought surfaces, you see it forming and dissolving, rather than climbing inside it. An emotion moves through, you feel its texture without becoming its narrator.
What develops here is subtler and harder to describe than what focused attention builds. It’s something like perspective. The sense of a witness that is not identical to the contents of experience. A growing recognition that you are the one watching the thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. Deep, yet active relaxation also ensues.
In Happinetics terms, this is self-observation at its most direct. Not observing a pattern after the fact, in reflection. Observing the arising of mental and emotional events in real time, which is exactly the capacity needed to catch an activation pattern before it fully runs.
Other forms of meditation worth knowing
Beyond these two fundamental movements, there are variations worth being aware of; not to practice all of them, but to have a sense of the landscape.
- Movement-based practices: walking meditation, mindful movement, and certain forms of yoga. They bring the same quality of attention into the body in motion. Useful for people who find stillness physically difficult, and a natural bridge to in-life awareness practice.
- Visualization-based practices use internal imagery: light, color, or particular scenes, as the object of focused attention. More elaborate than breath or body, and for some people more engaging.
- Mantra-based practices use a repeated sound or phrase as the anchor, using repetition to quiet discursive thinking and settle into a more unified state.
All of these can take you as far as you need to go. The point isn’t to sample widely, it’s to go deep enough in one direction to find out what’s actually there.
One thing to avoid
Collecting techniques.
The part of us that likes to know things, to have more options, to feel like we’re being comprehensive, will suggest, at various moments, that you should be trying a different approach. That this other technique is more advanced, more effective, more suited to you.
Sometimes that’s genuine discernment. More often it’s the same avoidance mechanism from the previous post (the crucial moment of actually sitting to meditate) wearing a more sophisticated outfit. Depth in one practice consistently beats breadth across many. Pick a direction that resonates and stay with it long enough to find out what it’s actually offering.
The technique, ultimately, is just the vehicle. What matters is where it takes you.
Continue to the next post of the Meditation Series: A 42-day meditation program
The Happinetics app is being built to bring this kind of awareness into daily life, not just formal practice, but the ongoing work of noticing patterns, journaling through what surfaces, and developing the in-life mindfulness that changes how you show up in relationship. Join the waitlist below.
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Any practice, taken seriously enough, leads to the same place: yourself; seen more clearly than before.