My Favorite Meditation Resources
Books, podcasts, guided meditations, and tweets that have shaped my practice.
Meditation has been instrumental to a dramatic improvement in my well-being over the past two years. I’m no expert and I’m not a teacher, but I’ve spent a lot of time searching for and consuming meditation materials: I’ve completed 8 week-long retreats, listened to 100+ podcasts, started dozens of books (and engaged deeply with a handful), tried quite a few techniques, and spent countless hours on meditation twitter.
I’ve mostly spent time in Buddhist circles, though I’ve also been influenced by teachers from yogic traditions and some that had direct awakenings outside of any tradition. Here are my favorite resources, framed as a list of recommended steps for someone newish to meditation:
Internalize that meditation is about relaxation, not grinding. From Nick Cammarata: “I would bet every single follower new to meditation that tries to meditate tries too hard. Def at least 99%. Try less hard. If you try to try less hard you’ll still try too hard. Take meditation 1/10th as seriously, it’s all relaxing, whatever gets you to try less hard do that.”
Get oriented to practice with The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young. Ideally, use this audio program, which comes with great guided meditations, though you can read the book if you prefer. This is the best single resource I know of to learn what’s possible with meditation, how it works, and how to do it.
Learn the basics with the Waking Up beginner course. This 28-day course has a daily 10-15 guided minute meditation along with ~5-10 minutes of theory instruction. He jumps into instructions to look for the lack of a concrete self before most users are ready for it, but other than that, it’s solid.
Open your heart with metta (loving-kindness) meditation. My takeaway from many teachers and advanced practitioners is that metta (or other heart-opening practices) should probably be 20%+ of most people’s practice, and a mostly-metta approach works well for many. My favorite short metta meditations are on Waking Up, and my favorite longer ones are from Rob Burbea’s metta retreat (this one starts at ~17 minutes). TWIM is also popular.
Connect with your body with somatic meditation. To get the full benefits of meditation, you need pretty solid interoception, and a better connection with your body helps you in daily life as you can listen to the wisdom coming to you all the time from somatic signals. I started out pretty disembodied, but many reps with Reggie Ray’s Ten Points Practice really helped; his book is The Awakening Body. The Realization Process audiobook is also a nice resource, especially if you’re starting out disembodied or have had what feels like a head-centric awakening.
Relax and restore with Yoga Nidra. This overlaps with the point above since it heavily utilizes body scanning, but I’m calling it out separately as it probably has the highest success rate of resources I’ve shared with friends. It’s a super relaxing guided meditation method you do laying down that is often as restorative as a nap even if you remain awake. I enjoy Ally Boothroyd’s tracks.
Hear about the available dramatic improvements in well-being from some experienced lay practitioners. Podcast interviews with Roger Thisdell and Romeo Stevens, along with Nick Cammarata’s twitter feed helped sell me on the upside of deep practice.
Learn about how Insight, Concentration, and Integration progress together. Romeo Steven’s threefold training model is some of the most useful meditation and emotional healing content I’ve seen. Importantly for me, it emphasized the role of therapeutic practices alongside meditation. He discusses it in the link above and in this podcast.
Learn about the jhanas, the states of bliss and peace you can reach in meditation. I assembled my favorite jhana resources here and and described the formula that worked for me here.
Do a retreat. You can go much deeper on retreat than in typical daily practice. My top recommendation is Jhourney. If you find a teacher you resonate with, try to retreat with them. In lieu of that, Spirit Rock and IMS have beginner-friendly retreats, and the Goenka Vipassana org offers free (donation-based) retreats at centers around the globe.
In this post, I break out more of my favorite meditation podcasts.