>>11827849Broadly speaking, meditation is a kind of action, and a meditation technique specifies a controlled/deliberate way of acting, which you perform for the purpose of changing your mental state. Giving your eyes a rest from the monitor is a meditation.
More narrowly, meditation is associated with a set of esoteric techniques for influencing your state of mind using only actions that you can perform introspectively. In an even more exclusive sense, meditation is typically taken to mean buddhist techniques.
I think some people are researching meditation with fMRI's but I'm jealous of their expensive machines so I tend to repress their existence; can't help you there.
In the interest of maximizing your personal benefits, and in terms of cost-efficiency, the only meditation techniques that stand out as being worth everyone's time and effort to go out of your way and practice, are the concentration techniques. The main benefits are calming down and less ADHD.
There's a whole bunch of trial and error involved in learning all the wrong ways to do it until you finally deduce how to really do it by process of elimination, so I don't think technical descriptions are super helpful.
Generally, you want to do whatever you find works best, to end up in a state of mind where you are focused on performing a task which you find mildly pleasant and mildly boring, and then you focus on your enjoyment in doing it, such that gradually, it becomes effortless for you to stay concentrated on doing it without becoming bored or distracted, and without having to use a lot of effort to overcome your boredom, or your desire to start daydreaming to alleviate your boredom, or sleepiness.
It doesn't matter what task you perform, since it's just practicing how to enter a positive feedback loop where you reward yourself for doing what you're doing, and then that makes you do it even more willingly, which makes it even more enjoyable to do. This is the skill.
