The idea of meditation and its role in your fitness life is a relatively vague one, and trying to pin down the best processes for meditation is going to be a frustrating task. If you’ve tried a quick search for the right way to meditate, you may be familiar with the complexity that awaits you.

Trainers and coaches can give you a good menu of physical fitness activities designed for your body. They can hand out info on exactly how your various muscle groups and body structures will react to a particular program. But when it comes to the mind, these professionals can’t do as much to identify the right plan for any given client. When it comes to meditation, the individual has to be active in finding his or her “right way”. Trainers can give centering and breathing tips, and group classes of yoga or other ancient relaxation arts can do wonders, but if you’re looking for an everyday way to move stress out of your life, you may need to do a little more personal research.

Some who are experienced in the general art of meditation say that going into a meditation without your own personal plan is like showing up at an airport with a blank ticket and no destination. It’s going to yield some very unknown results. In comparison, students of historic meditation can show you very detailed meditative strategies practiced by spiritualists and others in both the east and the west. Many of these programs involve concentration on letters, words, pictures and defined associations. These provide one way to center yourself during meditation, but unless you feel a deep connection to one or another of them, they may not do much for you.

Other encourage beginning meditation seekers to engage their own creativity in the process. A common example involves taking yoga or tai chi poses and adapting them to fit your own mindset during meditative time. Another strategy involves an association with something larger than yourself, as in an “oceanic” meditation, where the individual reflects on the physical world as the surface of the ocean, and a meditative state as existing far below, near the ocean bottom.

Associative meditation can be effective, but in other meditative disciplines, participants try to empty their minds entirely, freeing themselves from association. Although it may not seem like it, this is a definitive plan as well. It gives the individual something to focus on. In these kinds of routines, static elements like a candle flame are useful in helping participants “find their center” and release associations and emotions.

The bottom line is that any kind of focused meditation isn’t going to be as effective if it’s not something you can embrace. If you’re seeking out “the right kind of meditation”, try to sample a few different varieties, with a constant attention to what fits your mentality, until you have a defined idea in mind, a road map you can use for developing the stress-busting qualities of meditiation.