There are so many types of meditation and the one that works for you doesn’t need you to sit silently with your eyes closed. Some widely known ones being transcendental, vipassana, and metta meditation techniques. All bring up the image of sitting still with eyes closed. Silent.

However, I’ve also heard of others meditating by taking a long walk in the woods, doing yoga, running or focusing on one’s heart rate. Some practices are ten minutes long while others might be a few hours. There seem to be a lot of options.

Like most things I do, it can get competitive. The internal dialogue of “Am I doing this right? What is right? Am I improving? How do I measure this?” would get louder as I continued the practice of meditation.

My journey with meditation has been bumpy. It started with apps to help me get in a rhythm. To build the habit, so to speak. It started with the purpose of coping with my anger. It’s been quite effective and I’ve happily been able to limit the dozens of rage bursts in 2015 to less than five in 2020.

But my purpose around meditation evolved to wanting to train the mind. Just like how I trained my body 4-6x a week, I wanted to consistently train the mind. I didn’t know what that necessarily meant so I floated from reflecting on the self to learning to listen to the subconscious to being present. All the while not knowing what all of those specifically meant but I inherently believed I would know if it worked.

I iterated my practice from daily 10 minutes, a needs-based 15 minutes, a focus on breathing, trying it out in the morning vs. night, to the most recent one of 45 minutes of letting thoughts run wild in the morning. All the while, I continued on with my daily journaling practice. What I realized was that the amount of things I’d write in my journal noticeable decreased after the 45-minute meditation sessions.

My days would normally start with a 45-minute meditation and lead to a journal. On days I didn’t meditate, I would fill out 2-3 pages of longhand. On days I meditated, it would be about a page. My journaling practice had evolved independently over the years and as I reflected on it, it was really the written form of my 45-minute meditation. I let my thoughts run wild in the morning and tried to contain it all in writing after an affirmation. Quite similar to Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages.

As I realized that writing three pages took about 45 minutes every morning, I realized my journaling practice could be my own way of meditating. After all, no method is right. I think to believe there is a ‘right way’ might be contrary to the point of meditating.

With the purpose of making meditating a practice of learning to get closer to my subconscious and think independently, I’ve been learning to let journaling be that practice for me. Switching the mindset from doing more and more to doing more with less.

This led to questions of: How could I not have seen this? I love hitting two birds with one stone and constantly parallel processing. Why didn’t I think journaling could be a meditative process? Why didn’t I think my daily 1 hour walks couldn’t be my form of meditating?

This might sound meta but all of these practices, the constant trial and error, may have been the reason I was able to have such a realization for myself. It’s not that I started journaling because I thought it could also be meditative. But it turns out it works for me. Furthermore, I didn’t think about how I could consider improving my journaling by doing it in a mediative environment. If I set out to meditate in a quiet place with no distractions, why not set out to do the same with my journaling instead of at a coffee shop with my morning coffee?

A further combination of two separate practices into one has been a fun discovery for me. It further pushes me to believe that the best form of meditation is one that an individual can stick with. Not because it’s the best way but because all the other ways don’t stick and this is something they don’t mind doing day in and day out. It could be a daily walk without anything in one’s ear. It could be running. It could be sweating in a sauna. I don’t know.

Like most things in life, I’m compelled to believe there isn’t one right way. This certainly is the case for meditation. I think we can choose to try all sorts of things and see what sticks. I also imagine my practice could evolve in the future but it’s been a long time since I’ve felt good and secure about a practice and that’s a win. It’s worth recognizing that for the self.