Over 50 Free Guided Meditations
Guided meditation can be a fantastic way to get started with home practice, allowing you to simply sit, press play and relax into the experience. While there are some great apps on the market that include guided meditations there are also many other sources of excellent mp3 practices free online. For a while now I have been creating a list for you of online sources for free audio meditations, and below are links to over 50 for you to choose from.
To start with, I should mention that I have created two guided meditations for you and uploaded them over here. One is six minutes long, the other ten, and both are simple breath-centred practices without music.
Here are my current favourite online sources for guided practices, from a vairety of teachers.
There are many places that offer Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) courses, including the University of California. There are free meditations offered by both UCLA and UCSD websites.
Insight meditation is a Western evolution of the Therevadan Buddhist approach to meditation and the dharma path, and focuses on mindfulness meditation. Here are three great teachers who have free resources on their websites: Tara Brach, Gill Fronsdal, and Joseph Goldstein. I suggest starting with these three teachers, who all have years of teaching experience and present their ideas simply and eloquently.
You’ll find a long list of meditations on the Insight Los Angeles website.
Dharma Seed online has many talks on buddhism and mindfulness, which include some guided meditations and instruction. Highlights include Jack Kornfield and Sylvia Boorstein.
You can try two guided vipassana (insight) practices created by Sam Harris.
Mrs Mindfulness also has audio meditations on her website, along with two free meditations with Professor Mark Williams still viewable at the wonderful Mindfulness Summit site, a month long event that I thoroughly enjoyed in October.
Clinical Psychologist Elisha Goldstein has an excellent selection on his site (I particularly liked the body scan).
If you enjoy the body scan technique, then I would also highly recommend the Body breathing practice with Reggie Ray - these are really great grounding practices.
Simple, classic, and great instructions from Lodro Rinzler
Author, PhD Neuropsychologist and longtime Buddhist practioner Rick Hanson has a fantastic selection of guided practices.
Finally there are a few more mindfulness meditations from the team at ‘Frantic World’ over here.
If you follow all of these links, you will find over than 50 (maybe more!) guided meditations to use at home. If you are new to meditation, you might like to check out my simple guide to getting started with meditation. With these audio downloads, and a few minutes to spare each day, you have everything you need to start a regular practice. This is one of the beautiful things about meditation - it doesn’t require expensive props or pricey courses, just time, simple instruction and the desire to begin!
Do you have any other sources to recommend?
If so, head to our Facebook page and let me know in the comments, I’m always keen to add to this repository.
Feel free to share this post with anyone you think could benefit from these mindfulness practices.
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