Meditation can be an excellent technique for lowering stress, improving health and balancing the emotions. As an idealistic type A personality trying to be a calm type B person, I’ve always needed and enjoyed taking time out to breathe deeply, think of good things, and regain/retain a sense of peace and balance.
Learning Meditation
Learning Meditation is an excellent site for learning simple forms of meditation. It removes the mystique and gives a simple introduction, simple meditations for different needs and text and music meditations you can play from the site. Highly recommended.
The Meditation Center also has excellent free meditations you can read and try. The color healing meditation and centering meditations are particularly good. Visit the site glossary for an explanation of chakras and mantras.
Christian Meditation
A solid site on Christian Meditation is WCCM – the World Community for Christian Meditation. The Welcome page has links to the beautiful opening and closing prayers of Dom John Main and Laurence Freeman, and the Essential Teaching for Christian Meditation.
Buddhist Meditation
Wild Mind is one of the best sites on Buddhist Meditation. A very thorough site, starting with posture, various forms of meditation such as mindfulness meditation, lovingkindness meditation, mantra meditation, walking meditation, and an extremely detailed section on yoga and meditation which includes many yoga positions and pictures. An incredible amount of information here.
TM – Transcendental Meditation
Transcendental Medition (TM) is the most well-known form of meditation. Transcendental Meditation is the program of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for gaining deep relaxation, elimination stress, promoting health, increasing creativity and intelligence and attaining inner happiness and fulfillment. There is usually an official TM site in each country (eg TM-USA) that will list courses and teachers available to teach you about Transcendental Meditation. For online researchers it is a surprise to go to the official website and discover that you cannot get an overview of TM. Apparently it can only be taught personally. And at a significant financial cost.
The internet is a wonderful tool. It lets you find wonderfully enlightening sites such as Meditation Information Network, which happily shares some “common” TM mantras, and Suggestibility, which explains TM from the point of an ex-TM-teacher. His scary tale used to be at Trancenet, but seems to have vanished.