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Sacred Correspondences
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Performed alone

This page groups practices by whether they are carried out alone or with others. Wikipedia distinguishes "communal rites, whether of worship, where a community comes together to worship" from "rites of personal devotion, where an individual worships, including prayer and pilgrimages." Browsing this way lets a visitor separate a group ceremony from a practice one person performs alone.

Facts
Overview
What Defines This Grouping
Disciplines of sustained, trained attention - calm abiding, insight, recitation of a formula, visualisation, fixed gazing, contemplative reading and prayer. The English word covers techniques with incompatible aims: samatha and vipassana are distinguished within Buddhism itself, and lectio divina, Sufi muraqabah and Daoist internal alchemy are not one thing under different names. 2
Origins
Whose Classification This Is
The modern comparative category owes much to twentieth-century Buddhist modernism, which recast meditation as a technique separable from monastic life and doctrine and presented it in that form to Western audiences; the Burmese insight movement from Ledi Sayadaw onward is the clearest case. 4
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed 5
Directory
Category
Practices 1
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Several of these disciplines now circulate detached from the traditions that transmit them - mindfulness as a secular clinical and corporate technique, yoga as exercise, meditation as a movement in its own right - and the detachment is itself contested by practitioners and by scholars. 3
Learn More
The Meditative Practices

This group holds meditative practices, the disciplines of stilling, focusing or training the mind, from breath awareness and mantra recitation to visualisation and contemplative absorption. Such practices are especially developed in the Indian and Buddhist traditions but appear across many religions.

The browser will find meditative practices from various traditions. The entries describe each practice's technique, aim and lineage, noting how differently the traditions understand the goal of meditation.

Performed alone
Filter Results26 entries

Astral projection

Performed alone

Bhastrika

Performed alone

Chod

Performed alone

Deity yoga and visualization

Performed alone

Dream Yoga (Milam)

Performed alone

Grounding and Centering

Performed alone

Hesychasm (the Jesus Prayer)

Performed alone

Hitbodedut

Performed alone

Hitbonenut

Performed alone

Internal alchemy (neidan)

Performed alone

Kapalabhati

Performed alone

Kyerim and Dzogrim

Performed alone

Lectio divina

Performed alone

Lucid dreaming

Performed alone

Microcosmic orbit

Performed alone

Muraqabah

Performed alone

Nadi Shodhana

Performed alone

Six Yogas of Naropa

Performed alone

Sungazing

Performed alone

Taixi (Embryonic Breathing)

Performed alone

Tonglen (giving and taking)

Performed alone

Transcendental Meditation

Performed alone

Trataka (fixed gazing)

Performed alone

Trekcho and Togal

Performed alone

Tummo

Performed alone

Zuowang

Performed alone
Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. MeditationView the Source
3. Transcendent in America: Hindu-Inspired Meditation Movements as New Religion
Lola Williamson, New York University Press, 2010
4. The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw
Erik Braun, University of Chicago Press, 2013View the Source
5. Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience
Robert H. Sharf, Numen, 1995View the Source
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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