There are a lot very good reasons for developing a meditation practice. You are likely to be healthy both physically and mentally. You’ll have less stress. You might gain some insight into the workings of your own mind. Your friends may find that you are easier to be around.

Then there are the spiritual goals. Some people use meditation as a form of prayer. For some it means learning to be in the moment, with the hope that this more natural and peaceful state of mind can be carried into everyday life and activities. Other find that meditation helps them to become more compassionate.

Whatever your reasons for meditating, it also can just be pleasurable and interesting. If you want to make it more pleasurable and more interesting, there are some things you can try. The following are just a few examples.

New Meditation Experiences

The first thing you might want to try is meditation CDs or other recordings that use brainwave entrainment technologies. These make meditating easy. Just put on your headphones and listen - that’s all it takes. You will be guided into an Alpha state or deeper without any effort.

Some of these recordings are designed strictly for meditation. They are often sold as sets, with each CD or MP3 download meant to take you into a deeper state of consciousness. Others are meant to take you in and out of deeper states on a sort of brainwave roller coaster ride. These might be more useful for stimulating creative thought, or for entertainment than for meditating.

One thing about this powerful technology that makes it very interesting, is that it does the work for you. Some will claim that you lose something if you replace regular meditation practices with brainwave entrainment, and this is a possibility. On the other hand, there is no reason you can’t do it both ways. The power of this technology (if you listen while laying down, you’ll probably fall asleep in minutes) means you can meditate in places and circumstances that are normally ruled out.

For example, you might not ordinarily think of meditating in the lunch room at your place of employment, or in a coffee shop. But with a meditation recording on an MP3 player, you can do this easily. Sit back and close your eyes and hit the play button. The others in the room will assume you are listening to music, and the recording will diminish the volume of all the distracting sounds in the room.

You can also take a walk while meditating. Just clip that MP3 player to your belt or drop it into your shirt pocket as I do, and put in the ear-buds. I like to walk the woods or along a beach while listening to a brainwave entrainment recording. You might try it on city streets as well. In fact, the small size and almost meaningless weight of MP3 players has opened up many interesting ways to practice meditation using brainwave technologies.