There are hundreds of meditation traditions and a Wikipedia page that lists them all. Most aren't useful when you're trying to decide what to do for the next ten minutes. This is the short list — eight techniques that cover almost everything you'll encounter in apps, classes, and books, with a clear sense of when to reach for each.
A meditation technique is a specific instruction for what to do with attention during a session. Sit upright. Breathe. Now do what? The technique is the answer to that question. Different techniques point attention at different objects — the body, the breath, a phrase, a feeling, an image, or nothing at all.
Almost every named tradition you'll encounter is built on one or two techniques from the list below. Vipassana centers body sensations and breath. Transcendental Meditation uses mantra. Metta is loving-kindness. Zen leans heavily on open awareness. Most modern apps mix and match. Knowing the eight underlying techniques is what lets you read past the branding and figure out what's actually being asked of you in any given session.
If you're new to meditation entirely, the practical question isn't which one is best. It's which one will you actually do. The most useful technique is the one that gets you to sit down for ten minutes, log the session, and come back tomorrow.
Less than the meditation industry tends to suggest. The research on which technique produces which outcome is real but small in effect, and consistently overshadowed by a much larger predictor: how often you practice and for how long.
A 2014 meta-analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine (Goyal et al.) reviewed 47 randomized trials covering more than 3,500 participants. The takeaway was that mindfulness-based programs produced moderate improvements in anxiety, depression, and pain, with effect sizes comparable to other active treatments. Notably, the differences between mindfulness techniques were smaller than the differences between meditating and not meditating.
A 2017 review in Mindfulness (Sedlmeier et al.) compared focused-attention practices (like breath awareness and mantra) against open-monitoring practices (like open awareness). Both produced benefits. The variance within each technique was larger than the variance between them.
The practical implication: if you're choosing between two techniques and stuck, pick the one you'll actually keep doing. A boring technique done daily beats an exotic technique done twice.
Most lists either go too long — thirty traditions and their lineages — or too short, collapsing the entire field into "mindfulness vs. transcendental." Neither helps when you're standing in front of an app picker trying to choose a technique.
Long lists fail because they conflate technique with tradition. Vipassana, Zen, Theravada, Tibetan, Sufi — these are schools, not techniques. Underneath them, the actual instructions overlap heavily. Categorizing by school produces an academic answer to a practical question.
Short lists fail in the opposite direction. "Mindfulness vs. transcendental" treats two enormous categories as if they were the only options, ignoring that body scan, loving-kindness, and visualization are all different things asking attention to do different work.
The eight techniques below are the smallest set that still tells you what's happening inside a session. They map cleanly to what most apps and meditation chip pickers actually offer — including the Type chips in memorist's Calm meditation logger. Pick from this list and you'll know what you're being asked to do, regardless of who's branding it.
Labels matter only after they help you notice patterns. The first month of a meditation practice, the technique label is mostly noise — you're learning to sit still, not learning to distinguish loving-kindness from open awareness.
Six months in, labels start to earn their keep. You begin to notice that body scans before bed help you sleep but mantra meditation doesn't. Or that breath awareness is your default but loving-kindness is what you reach for after a hard conversation. Those distinctions are useful only because you have something to compare. The label is the comparison key.
This is exactly why a Calm entry's technique chip is optional. If you don't know what kind of meditation you did or don't care, leave it untyped. The session still saves, still counts, still feeds your patterns over time. Add the label only when it would help you find this session again later — or when you'd like Drift Insights to surface, say, "loving-kindness has been quiet lately."
What follows is the working list — eight techniques that cover most of what you'll encounter, with a one-line description of what attention is doing in each.
Someone else — a recorded voice, a teacher, a video — tells you what to do moment to moment. The guidance can be any of the other techniques on this list (a guided body scan, a guided loving-kindness session, a guided breath practice). Guided sessions are about delivery: an instructor's voice removes the uncertainty of "wait, what am I supposed to be doing now?"
Reach for it when: You're new, you're tired, you can't focus, or you want to learn a new technique without reading about it first.
Silent practice. You sit, set a timer, and direct your own attention. Like Guided, this is a delivery format rather than a content technique — an unguided session can use any of the other six approaches.
Reach for it when: You know what you want to do and a voice would get in the way. Most experienced meditators end up here.
Attention moves slowly through the body, head to feet or feet to head, noticing whatever sensation is there — tension, warmth, tingling, nothing. The instruction is observe, not change. Body scan is a foundational practice in MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) and many therapeutic protocols.
Reach for it when: You're stuck in your head, you're tense, or you can't sleep. The body is more concrete than the mind, and tracking sensation is something attention can actually do.
Attention rests on the breath — the feeling at the nostrils, the rise of the belly, the pause between inhale and exhale. When the mind wanders (which it will), notice and return to the breath. This is the canonical "mindfulness" instruction and the most common entry point in the field. Breath awareness is observation, not control — if you want a structured pattern, that crosses into breathwork like box breathing.
Reach for it when: You want a default. Breath awareness is the technique that's hardest to fail at — the breath is always there, and "noticing you got distracted" is the practice, not a setback.
You silently direct goodwill toward someone — yourself, a loved one, a neutral person, a difficult person, all beings — using phrases like "may you be well, may you be safe, may you be happy." It sounds saccharine in writing and works in practice. Loving-kindness has the strongest research base of any meditation for shifting how you feel about other people.
Reach for it when: You're holding a grudge, processing a hard conversation, or noticing that your inner monologue has gotten harsh.
Attention rests on a mental image — a place, a scene, a light, a body of water, a deity in some traditions. The image is the anchor. Visualization is core to many Tibetan practices and shows up everywhere in sports performance and therapy.
Reach for it when: Verbal anchors (mantra, phrases) don't hold your attention. Some people are strongly visual; for them, an image works where words don't.
A word or short phrase, repeated silently or aloud, holds attention. The mantra can be a meaningful word in any language, a sound chosen for its acoustic properties, or a phrase of intention. Transcendental Meditation is the most recognized mantra-based tradition; chanting practices in many religions use the same mechanism.
Reach for it when: The breath feels too thin to anchor on, or you find that repetition steadies you better than observation does.
Attention isn't placed on any specific object. You sit and notice whatever arises — a thought, a sound, a sensation, a feeling — without choosing or following any of it. Open awareness goes by many names (choiceless awareness, shikantaza, pure awareness) and is generally considered an advanced practice because it offers attention nothing to hold on to.
Reach for it when: You've spent enough time with the focused practices that the mind is steady on its own. Trying open awareness as a beginner usually just produces wandering — that's not a failure, but it's also not the practice.
The list above is the working majority, not the entirety. Walking meditation, eating meditation, sound bath, breathwork-as-meditation, somatic experiencing, and dozens of niche practices exist. If what you did doesn't match any of the eight, log it as Other — the session still counts, and the chip captures that something happened that didn't fit a standard category.
Logging a meditation in memorist takes one tap, plus an optional second tap for the technique. The Type chips map directly to the eight techniques above, with Other for everything else.
The full walkthrough is on the how to log a meditation session page. The companion how to log a breathwork session covers the same flow for breathwork techniques.
Once you start tagging technique, the Drift screen turns the labels into observations. The Calm card on Drift shows a "Top techniques" panel — the methods you reached for most in the selected period, with counts.
That panel is where the labels start earning their keep. Six months of body scans before bed appear as one row. A spring of loving-kindness sessions tied to a hard relationship appears as another. A stretch of mantra practice during a stressful project appears as a third. None of it required you to remember any of this — the chip selection on each session was enough.
Over a longer horizon, Drift Insights notice when a technique stream goes quiet ("loving-kindness used to come up around once a week and hasn't in a while") or settles into a rhythm ("body scan has been a quiet constant"). These patterns surface as in-app notifications. They're observations, never advice.
Tags add another dimension. A loving-kindness session tagged #mom contributes to the mom tag profile alongside everything else you've ever tagged that way. The technique becomes part of the relationship's record, not a meditation-app statistic.
Yes. The technique you tag on a session is part of the Calm entry, which is end-to-end encrypted when encryption is enabled. memorist can't see which techniques you used. The Drift Top Techniques panel is computed locally from your decrypted data on your own device.
The non-mood Drift detectors that run server-side use only minimal metadata — dates and tag presence — never the contents of your sessions. Even the activity-stream identity that lets the engine treat meditation and breathwork as separate streams is a synthetic, namespaced token, not the technique label. End-to-end encryption is the foundation; the engine architecture preserves it.
The technique you pick on any single session matters less than whether you sit down at all. If you're trying to make meditation a thing that lasts, the most useful frame is to stop chasing daily streaks and start noticing your actual rhythm. Most of life fades fast; the techniques worth knowing are the ones still working a year from now.
Pick the technique that gets you to sit down. Log it in memorist, or don't — either way, the practice is the practice.
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