The Impact of Meditating Every Day
This type of meditation - a secularized form of Vipassana in which one passively observers mental events - is very popular in the West.<p>But it's not the only one, and shouldn't be called merely "meditation" without regard to the vast body of practices that exist.<p>Another form of meditation that's traditionally talked about in Buddhism is shamatha, which translates to something like "concentration" or "tranquility." In this type of practice, the meditator works with a meditation object, commonly the breath, but possibly a sound, mental image, etc. The meditator learns to stabilize the mind and remain fully aware of the object, and in the process learns to debug the mechanisms that direct (and destabilize) conscious attention.<p>A recently published book called _The_Mind_Illustrated_ by John Yates is fa fantastic resource for this kind of practice.<p>If you're interested in scientific attempts to categorize and study meditation, the Center for Healthy Minds at UW-Madison does some fantastic neuroscience & psychology research.<p><a href="https://centerhealthyminds.org/assets/files-publications/DahlReconstructingTICS.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://centerhealthyminds.org/assets/files-publications/Dah...</a><p>In the scientific terminology that is emerging these days, Attentional, Constructive, and Deconstructive types of meditation are mapped onto various types of traditional practices (there's a handy chart in the paper).