Breathing meditation (Mindfulness)

👉 Bottom line:  Too simplistic, not sustainable, and you’ll outgrow it quickly.

Its strength is that it’s very accessible to teach and practice.  Yet the flip-side of that accessibility is that it doesn’t take you very deep;  it’s boring after any significant length of practice;  and it won’t give you much more than calm (a body quality), as opposed to peace (a soul quality).

As a spiritual practice-for-life, if you are honest with yourself, you’ll often wonder why you’re doing it, and have to whip yourself into practice with the hope that the payoff is “just around the corner”.  It will definitely feel like work.

Due to the finite nature of the breath, focusing on it will not take you to the infinite aspect of who you are, except only by accident.  You will be cultivating breath consciousness, not soul consciousness.  You will think there has to be something more to meditation than what you’re getting from this.

Body scan meditation (Vipassana)

👉 Bottom line:  This is a macho meditation format.  You will struggle with it.  It’s not sustainable.

Like breath-based meditation, its strength is that it’s very accessible to understand and practice, but it won’t take you very deep.  You will have finite, body consciousness, not infinite soul consciousness.  Your awareness will be glued to your body versus your thoughts, which will seem like a benefit at first, but in this format, the mind is rarely escaped, and only by accident.  Due to what is described next, your mind will have even more thoughts, which will not be pleasant.

The process often is taught to ignore painful body signals and discourages being physically comfortable for alleged healing reasons.  This prevents those with body issues from participating, with the underlying message implying that you cannot spiritually evolve because you will not sit through intense body pains.  And that healing needs to be aggressively forced into a spiritual practice.

You will believe that spiritual growth is “very hard” and takes “a lot of work.”

Self-hypnosis meditation (Joe Dispenza)

👉  Bottom line:  Possibly less spiritual theater, at times soul deep, but not sustainable as a path for life, nor empowering.

Depending upon the emphasis, this is much less of a spiritual path and much more of a “fix me” path.  (Which is not a bad thing—personal development is important.)  When personal development mixes with spirituality, the spiritual component inevitably becomes diluted and places a distant second.  It’s simply easier, and much more marketable, to talk about human stuff.

So you hear a lot about neuroplasticity.  Epigenetic changes.  Conditioned emotions.  All based in the body and brain.  All finite-based.  All easier to relate to and market to than focusing squarely on the experience of the soul, the infinite.

The larger issues is that this is not a practice to empower you to be free from the provider.

As an example from Dr. Joe Dispenza, you will buy many, many guided meditations.  Which is self-hypnosis, and no different than what you’d receive from a competent hypnotherapist.

These will help your life but you will not be free from a recorded voice to shift your state.  You will not be free from Joe Dispenza.  You might be told that the soul is who you are but not be empowered to return there at any given moment.

Energy manipulation meditation (Kriya Yoga)

👉  Bottom line:  There’s something simple buried in the vast complexity that is desirable.  But it’s hard work to get to it.  You will either love or hate the heavy layers of spiritual theater that permeate the teaching.

Its undeniable pull is that you will feel spiritual and elite here.  There is plenty of mystique, complicated rules, and authoritative tradition to cause you to suspend your discernment.  You know, only your discernment that normally keeps you safe.  

Should you believe the spiritual marketing claim that “Kriya Yoga is the highest method of God contact,” you will have to ignore that there are many systems of Kriya Yoga that differ from each other like night and day—even from the same lineage of teachers.  So which Kriya is the “highest”?  And for whom does that claim apply?  Monastics?

In the west, Kriya has a deceased rock star-like figurehead by the way of Paramahansa Yogananda.

In his variant of Kriya, you will manipulate energy under the premise that you must active energies in the base of your spine, moving them up to your skull and back down again.  You will trust the claim that this is the key to growing spiritually.  You will think to yourself but not ask aloud:  what does manipulating the energetic dimension have anything to do with being aware of the spiritual dimension?  Or sitting in special postures.  Or meditating in special locations.  Or breathing a certain way.  You will be expected to “see” through your 3rd eye.  If you are serious, you must take monastic vows.  Enlightenment will be just around the corner.

From all the spiritual theater and complex practices that Kriya provides, you’ll be distracted from the reality that this meditation format is finite-based, serious work, unsustainable, only meant for a select few.  You won’t be told the soul is simple and readily accessible—as it doesn’t need effort, postures, a body warm-up, special breathing, energy manipulation, secret initiation, nor renunciation.

Open awareness meditation (Vipassana, Zen, Sahaja Yoga???)

👉  Bottom line:  I hope you like rules.  And myths.  And hard work.

Want to meditate to feel better?  Well hold on, buckaroo!  Before you can do that, and like any other religion, first you’ll need to be indoctrinated.  Just because Buddhism looks exotic, you won’t be exempt from adopting a new set of beliefs.

In Buddhist thought, you will first have to learn 8 “limbs” or prerequisites in order to be enlightened.  (Or from their viewpoint: it’s your materialist behavior that is retarding your spiritual growth 🧐🤷)  But wait, there’s more!  Many, many more beliefs.

“I just want to feel better,” you’ll think but won’t dare say out loud.

Your new teachers will sound confident in their encyclopedic esoteric knowledge and you’ll feel dumb, inferring that meditation is hard, serious work.  To get anywhere significant, you will have to shave your head and give up your life—giving up everything material is the ultimate goal.  In order to gain... what exactly?  But wait, you will hear whispers of special spiritual abilities and demons to entice and scare you simultaneously.

Critical thinking won’t work here.  How many modern Buddhas are there to validate this line of thought?  There should be at least hundreds of thousands because of how many Buddhists have existed.  Yet if The Buddha didn’t have all of these rules, if he abandoned the common thinking of his day, then why do you need any of these religious rules?

From all of the intellectual baggage you must adopt, you’ll be distracted from the reality that this meditation format is finite-based, glacial, boring and ultimately unhealthy.  You won’t be told the soul is simple and readily accessible—as it doesn’t need rigid rules, behavior modification, nor renunciation.

Visualization meditation (hypnosis, therapeutic, New Age)

👉  Bottom line:  It’s popcorn spirituality... lovely, pleasurable, mostly cheap, sometimes deep.  But not sustainable as a meditation practice for a lifetime.  

Let’s get this out of the way: visualization is hypnosis. And in the hands of a skillful hypnosis practitioner who is spiritually adept, you can do anything with it—even rest in the stillness of your soul.  Which is great!  But let’s face it, rare as hens teeth for the simple reason that visualization tends to veer towards spiritual-adjacent topics, rather than stick with the soul.  (A common issue among all meditation formats.)

If you’re listening to a recording, you are reliant on your technology working, putting a limit on when and where you are able to access your peace.

Even if you could find someone who could provide a deep, spiritual visualization for you, you'd get bored without a new mindscape to explore every day.  Being reliant on another is not healthy for you or the teacher.

And forget having AI do this for you, as your mind would inevitably find the patterns, get bored and give up.

If you dig around enough, you’ll hear a refrain that “all hypnosis is self-hypnosis”.  At some point, you will want to take the power away from the practitioner and try to do it all yourself.  Then you’ll wonder what the difference between this is and prayer?  After all... it’s just thoughts.

Mantra repetition meditation (jappa)

👉  Bottom line:  Dirt cheap, simple, empowering, deep.  Can take you to your soul.  This is not designed for western minds—you’ll likely have to acquiesce to another culture’s lingo and mythology.

Mantra repetition has a lot going for it in terms of results, but it doesn’t have the flash other formats carry.  It’s just too simple, so it gets passed over for the next, more emotional thing.  Which is too bad, as mantra repetition can induce awareness of the stillness of the soul.

This practice appears too simple at first blush: you’ll repeat over and over a significant word or phrase in your mind.  You stop repeating the word, wait, and rest in the stillness that emerges.  The stillness is significant and you will hope it is emphasized by your teacher, rather than any other aspect of the process, otherwise it will all feel like a major chore.

This “significant word” will be assigned to you.  You will be told that it is “sacred”.  You can possibly swallow that it is somehow “sacred”, but you will wonder, but dare not to ask, why you cannot pick the equivalent word in your own language?  If you are especially fortunate, you will be instructed on how to choose your own meaningful word, thus increasing the odds you’ll actually stick with the practice.

Regardless, the one major downside is that you will want some variety, which this practice usually doesn’t provide.

Those caveats aside, you could do a lot worse than pick this meditation format.  Though its simplicity and depth virtually demand a highly experienced teacher—so that you don’t get in your head as you go about it.  On the other hand, since this format is predominantly from India, you will likely adopt a teacher with religious-leaning concepts.

Chanting or singing meditation (satsang)

👉 Bottom line:  Time inefficient, a lot of work to take you to your soul, and limits when and where you can practice.

Its strength is that it is easy to grasp and appreciate.  However, it’s not a practice you can do anywhere, any time—you will likely not be able to chant in any public place or even your own home if others are to be considered.  This limits when the benefits are available.

Chanting intensely can induce touching the stillness of the soul right after the chanting process has stopped and during the pause.  But why should you have to do all that work, possibly stressing your vocal chords, to access the largest part of who you are? 

The underlying assumption is that if you chant long enough, passionately enough, connecting to the meaning of the phrases, you will have spiritual benefits.  This is ultimately dis-empowering because it makes the non-physical a physical exercise.  This is not time efficient nor deep.

If you love singing, you will love this meditation format, but there will eventually come a point where it will feel like work—after all, it is physical work—and you will have to push yourself to chant.  You should never have to push yourself to experience your soul, the most intimate part about you.

Unless you were born in the chanting culture, you will not connect to the concepts you are chanting.  You will have to trust that vocalizing sounds that don’t make sense to your mind will have an effect on your consciousness.  “Why not just sing the lyrics translated into my own language?” you’ll think, but not ask.  If you do, you’ll be told that this language is spiritually sacred (and therefore your language is not).

Finally, what happens when you have a sore throat?

Self-Transcending meditation (TM)

👉 Bottom line:  Transcendental Meditation (“TM”) can take you to your soul, does not feel like work, is sustainable, yet the organization has much dirty laundry, and the teaching is overly expensive $$$ for what it does.  

Its strength is that it has a large community, it has an upscale cachet, and that it manages to be deeper than most other forms of meditation.  Amidst the heavy caveats below, this is still praiseworthy as the bar is so low for an effective spiritual meditation practice that takes you to the stillness of your soul.

Yet there are many issues here.  So many issues.

The first is that the community is now split between former, original inner circle members who say TM has always been an unhealthy cult... and those who are too identified with it to acknowledge TM’s messy, problematic reality .

Should you buy into the marketing (“it has scientific results;  it’s not a religion;  celebrities endorse it”), you will pay $500 - $1,000 USD, be prayed over, and receive your one-word mantra.  This word-sound comes from a table based on your age.  You will have to trust this meaningless word-sound does something to your consciousness to justify a significant time and expense.  “Advanced” mantras are $1,000 USD and up.  Strangely, it’s a mega-rich organization.

The practice is a one-size-fits-most model of meditation that does not consider the uniqueness of you.

Contemplative prayer (__)

👉  Bottom line:  

Psychedelic spirituality (__)

👉  Bottom line:  Is accessible and effortless, and it has spiritual benefits, but is not sustainable nor healthy.

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Focused attention meditation (Insight, Zen, Diamond Way Buddhism??)

👉 Bottom line:  Does not take you to your soul, feels like work, it’s a boring treadmill, and you’ll wonder what’s the point?

Its strength is that it’s simple to understand:  you focus on some external object or imagine moving energy through you.  What could be easier or feel more meditation-y?  These will even take your awareness off of your thoughts and you will get relief in that regard.  At least when you’re not having to label your thoughts.  

But this is a smokescreen.  Moving energy—as if to open an energy center—does not need to actually occur to experience the simplicity and of the stillness of your soul, as in right now.  You will have energy and object consciousness, not soul consciousness.  Or why focus on an object instead of resting back into the peacefulness of the soul?  

It's a waste of time disguised as peak spiritual theater because there’s no way to evaluate the broader claims.  

Specialness is often used to justify the process and to gaslight you that spirituality has to do with energy manipulation or unwavering focus.  Not sustainable by nature.

Kitchen sink meditation (Kundalini Yoga)

👉  Bottom line:  A treadmill of busywork for the mind and body that bypasses the simplicity of the soul.  Has a mystique and encyclopedic scope.

Its strength is its community of spiritual theater, which will make even the most rational person doubt themselves.  There is no single, simple meditation practice, but an unending series of mini-practices with a myriad of corner-cases to master.  It will eventually feel like work, and will distract you from the simplicity of soul consciousness.

This practice is not so much about meditation as it is about being with the spiritual group.  You will have a strong community to support you in becoming integrated, yet you will secretly wonder why you’re not getting “it” when everyone seems so spiritually confident... unless your identity has already merged with the group.

This is not empowering for the individual as the message is that you need to ascend the group hierarchy and its secrets to grow spiritually.  Ironically, this kind of multi-tasked meditation is sustainable as the group creates a reason to stick around and see what comes next.  But that’s not healthy nor soul-based.