There’s a myriad of meditation techniques, but I fail to see the difference among them, most of them involving not a lot more (to my untrained eye) than sit still and focus on your breathing. I want to know what’s different in the practice of these meditation techniques.
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“Just sit still and focus on your breathing” is pretty specifically mindfulness meditation. The others, by comparison:
* Transcendental meditation usually involves a *mantra,* a chant meant to have no meaning, but rather to act as a sort of pervasive experience that drives out other things. That “driving out” part is what leads to the same kind of peaceful awareness that most meditation techniques seek out.
* Vipassana, in a sense, *builds on* mindfulness (or, I guess, any other meditation technique), by using the resulting meditative state of consciousness to seek revelatory insight into the nature of existence, both your own and the world around you.
* “Zazen” is less one specific technique of meditation and more…any form of meditation at all, when practiced as part of Buddhism. However, one particular form of zazen meditation is the Japanese *shikantaza* (“just sitting”) method, where you don’t specifically focus on anything–no koans, no mantras, no breath. You just sit. The goal is to quiet the mind by just…letting observation happen, which with practice can slowly quiet the rest of your mind.
In some ways, “mindfulness” meditation both is before and after these other things. It is “before” them in the sense that something like the state referred to as “mindfulness” is the goal of *most* forms of meditation, and it is “after” them in the sense that a unifying conception of what this is is a modern thing, not something that would have been known even two or three centuries ago, let alone the thousands of years that Hinduism and Buddhism have been practiced.
The only example I can think of of a technique that differs really strongly from these is the much more intense, almost “aggressive” form of one-point meditation (breathing and mantras are other examples of one-point meditation), e.g. the way Robert Jordan described the fictional “the Flame and the Void” method in *The Wheel of Time.* With this method, you are sort of gripping your own consciousness with immense focus and intensity, “burning up” every thought the moment it appears. This can still produce mindfulness, but it is an intense and even draining experience, whereas most other meditation techniques are quiet, placid, almost passive.
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