ATTENTION TRAINING AND PRACTICES TO EXPAND SELF-AWARENESS are found in almost all psychological views of mental health and in virtually all spiritual approaches, including the contemplative wings of all major religions.

Straightforward and simple (though not easy), meditation practice extends skills you already have. It refines and deepens the inherent human capacities of concentration, curiosity, and intuition. Meditation practice combines discipline (training attention, staying with the practice, coming back to it when it is difficult) and wildness (naturalness, freedom, openness to whatever happens without prejudgment or control). This integration of discipline and wildness is the essence of aliveness.

Meditation is non-violent, non-manipulative, and non-mechanistic. It allows for the organic self-regulation, natural self-disclosure, and inherent growth potential of the human being. Meditation practice is both therapeutic (healing and restorative) and maieutic (growthful, related to midwifery, a sort of self-birthing).

A PSYCHOLOGICALLY-ORIENTED DEFINITION: "Meditation is a set of attentional practices leading to an altered state or trait of consciousness characterized by expanded awareness, greater presence, and a more integrated sense of self."

It centers on focusing attention (either on one object or on all contents of awareness). The "more integrated sense of self" eventually leads to a transcendence of the sense of separateness to an integration into a larger, transpersonal sense of identity.

RELATED PSYCHOLOGICAL PRACTICES

Many psychological practices (formal and informal) are similar to meditation. These include: Visualization, certain kinds of prayer, contemplation, affirmations, self-hypnosis, Focusing (Gendlin), Open focus (Fehmi), present-centeredness (Gestalt), Sensory Awareness (Selver), biofeedback

Shifts of attention that are in some ways similar to meditation are found in other activities: athletics such as running or long-distance swimming, ritual, love-making, shamanic journeying, music and dance, massage, flow activities such as play and peak experiences

Use this definition to see the ways these practices are the same as meditation or different. For instance, some kinds of chanting are meditation practices and others are not, depending on whether the focus is the expansion of attention or not. Repeating a prayer as an attention practice is meditative while affirmations to achieve a particular result probably are not. It is important to keep crisp boundaries on definitions of meditation. Otherwise, the notion gets too watered down, and its essence and power are diminished.