When you go online to look for a meditation practice that can help bring calmness and peace to your life, you are met by hundreds of meditation styles that promise to help you find the inner light you are looking for.

They all have different approaches to meditation, different goals to strive for, and meditation teachers with different concepts of the practice.

So this begs the question, why are there so many different styles of meditation, and what’s the deal with each?

Well, Siddhartha Gautama, famously known as the Buddha once said, “Doubt everything. Find your own light.”

And this is more of what speaks volume of the purpose of the wide variety of meditation types we have today.

We will be taking a deep look at these different styles of meditation we have, why we have them, and why we don’t have one meditation for helping with everything that meditation, as a whole, has to offer.

How Many Types of Meditation Are There?

To begin with, we first need to ask ourselves how many meditation forms we have in the world at the moment so that we know where to begin our quest of finding an answer to the bigger question.

And to be honest, there is no specific figure that has been given by any statistics or research studies of how many of them there are.

Why is this, you ask?

Well, meditation has become a vast industry by itself and it is filled with innovators that strive to develop and tweak the existing meditation forms to fit the needs of other people who may want to benefit from meditation.

They seem to be making the most of the saying that goes, “If you don’t find the path, create one”. Don’t they?

An estimated figure of 200 to 500 million people across the world engages in the practice of meditation.

2012 Research showed that meditation was among the most common complementary health approaches used by adults.

And since 2012, the number of people who do meditation has tripled.

This means meditation is growing more popular every year.

And if you look at the history of meditation, you will realize that the more popular it gets, the more we get newer styles of meditation that are designed for a specific group of people.

See, in the East where meditation is believed to have its roots, people who lived during that old. age did not have the same lifestyle we have today.

People back then never had to take the bus to go to work, they didn’t have all the technology we have now and certainly didn’t experience the challenges that technology comes with as well as the many other challenges we experience.

Theirs was a simple life.

So the meditation forms they did then were a perfect fit for the kind of environment and life they were living.

However, as technology advances and changes the world, we need to also adapt our self-improvement practices to handle the hectic lives that the change brings.

Since meditation was brought to western countries, it has been modified to be more fruitful to the western people.

If you consider dynamic meditation created by Osho, you will see how this plays out.

Osho himself explains the reason in this video how he had to create dynamic meditation to help the people of the West due to the vast mental “garbage” the western life came with.

That being said, the few meditation styles that were known back then have been divided and further enhanced to be of use in this other corner of the world.

The bottom line, there is no specific count of the meditation styles we have at the moment.

On top of that, the number will keep increasing as meditation spreads across the world to be in line with people of different beliefs, religions and who also go through unique challenges.

While this is the case, some styles are more popular and embraced by a huge number of people than others.

The well-known meditation styles include:

– Mindfulness meditation (for enhancing our level of mindfulness)

– Vipassana meditation (for increasing insight about our lives and the universe)

– Transcendental meditation (for gaining relaxed wakefulness through self-transcendence)

– Loving-kindness meditation (for establishing virtues of love, generosity, and genuine concern for others)

– Compassion meditation (for being more compassionate)

– Concentration meditation (for increasing our levels of concentration)

– Zen meditation (for regulating attention)

– Chakra meditation (for balancing our chakras)

– Walking meditation (for enhancing calmness and inner harmony and making meditation more interactive)

– Standing meditation (for tranquility, mental relaxation, and awareness)

These are just among the sought-after styles that have been well-received by people and have brought life-changing benefits.

Many others are also loved and rounding up the number of recognized meditation forms, the number could be more than 20.

Why Do We Have Those Many Types?

The reason why we have so many meditations is that of the many needs we have as human beings which we are aiming to keep in a good balance so that we can be at peace and in harmony with ourselves and the universe.

If you think about it, there are many aspects of our lives that we are always trying to work on.

We have the work aspect, physical aspect (taking care of our bodies), emotional aspect, and spiritual aspect, just to name a few.

When one aspect is not going well for us, we tend to be imbalanced and it affects our overall peace and happiness, not to mention that it also slowly starts to affect the other aspects.

Now meditation has been designed to help with the different needing areas of our lives.

For example, considering the stress, anxiety, and depression that millions of people throughout the world are affected by, you would see why we have mindfulness meditation or vipassana meditation.

Studies show that people have been overwhelmed by stress in the last few months, especially after Covid-19 became a global issue and started impacting people’s lives. directly.

People lost jobs, others lost their loved ones, the economy was about to collapse and others even lost their homes because they could no longer afford the rent after their salary was reduced by half or were put on hold.

And I’ve barely scratched the surface as far stress-inducing factors are concerned.

Mindfulness meditation becomes an essential tool during such times to keep our mental health in check as well-being able to have that mental space for thought and planning on how we are going to manage things and get back up.

Also, we know that when it comes to productivity at work and learning in school, we tend to fall short. At times, we are not able to do as much as we would want. We lose focus fast and easily drift off to other things that don’t benefit us.

Meditation forms like concentration meditation and focused attention play a huge role in helping people redirect their attention and maintain their focus and concentration on the right things and get to put out more.

Looking at our emotional life, there are times people who are close to us hurt us deeply which pulls us away from them, makes us become selfish and hateful, and not wanting to forgive them because they let us down and made us suffer.

And in the grand scheme of things, doing this not only makes them suffer but we also get punished by these negative actions and decisions we make of cutting them off.

Forgiveness meditation, compassion meditation, and loving-kindness meditation become useful in these instances to help us heal, open up again, understand and forgive these people so that we can remain together despite our weaknesses.

Essentially, each form of meditation that is available is designed to help us solve a specific problem in our lives, and since there are many problems in life, it is only right to have many meditation styles.

Some other types of meditation are also created to build upon other meditation types that don’t seem effective for a certain group of people.

For instance, dynamic meditation was created by Osho for the people of the new generation after the old forms of meditation didn’t work for many because of the mental baggage they dragged along with them when meditating which only made it impossible for them to benefit from the exercise.

And it is pretty clear that even more meditation styles will come up in the future as the practice grows popular and as we evolve into the technological era.

Isn’t There One Meditation Style That Can Do Everything?

With the shortest answer possible, NO.

There is no single meditation exercise that can help with all the problems we have as human beings.

And I also feel like there shouldn’t be one.

Meditation styles available aim at zooming in on a particular area of your life that is troubling you and help you solve it in the long term.

And the fact that the meditation exercise you are doing is designed for that specific area, you have higher chances of solving the problems you are facing in that area in the best way possible if you do the practice as you should, and do it frequently.

If you think about having one meditation style that is widely accepted as a replacement for all other meditation styles and which can be used for concentration, forgiveness, gaining insight into life, becoming more compassionate and peaceful, it is clear that you may not get the best results with it.

See, one meditation style for everything is like having one course in universities and colleges that allows you to take on any job you want in life including being a lawyer, a doctor, a soldier, a businessman, a scientist, a priest, and many others.

It is just not practical.

And if it was possible, the people who would take that course would not get any good results with it if they mind about the quality of learning.

One general course will cover all these areas on a general level and only teach you the basics of these professions but you can’t use it to master the profession you are interested in.

You would have to take another course for that specific profession to be a master at it.

In the same way, meditation for all aspects of life won’t help you solve the precise issue you are having.

You won’t get to fully explore the area you are more interested in or build a specific trait that you would want to.

However, it is worth noting that, while the one-size-fits-all meditation approach can’t be any useful, certain meditation styles combine two other meditation styles to become more potent for the meditator.

For instance, vipassana meditation is a practice that helps the practitioner gain more insight into themselves and the universe.

It is more advanced than awareness meditation but it uses some of its basic concepts.

The first stage of this meditation is to root yourself in the present moment and remain aware.

After succeeding in that, you get to the second stage where you use that awareness to inquire about the self and the universe which lets you learn more about the two aspects and in turn give way to your self-transformation.

Also, it is okay for you to combine two meditation styles to help you improve yourself in two areas of your life.

For example, I do mindfulness meditation as well as focused attention meditation to help me be more mindful, and remain attentive and focused.

However, you have to space them out in your day so that you are able to fully benefit from them.

Ideally, we should seek to work on various personal aspects slowly by slowly without rushing things.

The beauty of meditation is that you get as much value from each meditation session as you can and you do that by ensuring you are giving yourself time with each style and you are fully utilizing it for the area you want to improve on.

Don’t seek to look for a quick fix from meditation or buy into a meditation style that promises to solve all your life problems.

Conclusion

In summary, the fact that, as human beings, we are different from each other and we have different views of life, different beliefs, and even different brain and body chemistry, it is only fair that we have several meditation practices that resonate with everyone and is easy to get along with and which solve our various problems.

So to benefit from meditation as an individual, you have to think about what you want from the practice, what you stand for as a person, your ideologies, and then look for a style that aligns with that.

You are more likely to find that more rewarding and fulfilling as opposed to just picking any style you get out there without making any considerations or looking for a quick fix for all your challenges.