One of the major benefits of meditation is that it has been proven by science to increase levels of happiness and compassion in those who practice it. This isn’t just because meditation increases levels of personal calm and serenity—meditation also trains the parts of the brain that are associated with emotional regulation, allowing the brain to default to a calm or happy state more easily. 

There are many different methods that can be used to meditate for increased levels of happiness. Keep reading to learn more about some of the ways you can meditate for more happiness. 

Use Visualization Meditation

Visualization meditation is a form of meditation where the object of the exercise is to visualize a place, person, thing, or experience that made you full of joy and happiness. Through visualizing something that makes you happy, you are capable of invoking the emotional response that is tied to that imagery in your mind’s eye. 

Visualization meditation is a useful form of meditation for cultivating happiness because it allows us to develop a trigger for invoking happy feelings. The human imagination is strong, and the more visualization is focused on in meditation exercise, the more powerful it can potentially become during meditation for emotional regulation. 

Here are some methods for visualization meditation: 

• Color breathing: One way to perform visualization mediation is to imagine yourself breathing in air of a chosen color while simultaneously purging yourself of negative feelings. When you breathe in, imagine yourself breathing in a fog of the color of your choosing, allowing it to saturate your body. On the exhale, visualize exhaling all negative emotions such as stress, worry, and frustration.
  
  
• Object focus: Another way to perform visualization meditation is to focus on an object, person, or place that makes you happy. One good way to work on a progressive visualization is to focus on a single peaceful environment, such as a forest clearing, and try to visualize this same setting each time you sit down to meditate. With practice, you should be able to visualize this setting in vivid detail.
  
  
• Manifestation: To visually manifest, during meditation, you should focus on imagining yourself in a position of success, such as receiving an important award, or some other milestone associated with your long-term life goals. Visual manifestation is often used by athletes and other professionals as a method for focusing their mind on their goals. 

Visualization meditation is helpful in cultivating happiness because it teaches you how to think of things that make you happy, and this, in turn, can be used to emotionally regulate your mood. 

What Should You Do If You Can’t Visualize Things During Meditation?

There are some people who have difficulty visualizing things in their imagination—this medical condition is known as aphantasia, or blindness of the mind’s eye. 

People with aphantasia find it difficult to imagine even familiar imagery such as the face of their own family members or the layout of their own homes. (Source: Scientific American) Roughly 2% of the population is estimated to suffer from the inability to use their mind’s eye. 

If you have aphantasia, performing visualization meditation can be naturally difficult. In this case, it may be easier to meditate via some other method, such as mindfulness meditation, that is focused on your breathing rather than visualizing imagery in your mind’s eye. 

Meditate with a Mantra

Another way to cultivate happiness through meditation is to practice meditating with a mantra. A mantra is a word or phrase that is focused on during meditation in order to conjure the emotions associated with the word. 

Mantras are useful for meditation that is geared towards cultivating happiness because they allow the person meditating to set their intention. Here are a few examples of a mantra that can be used during meditation: 

• A favorite word or phrase
• A prayer
• The line of a poem

For happiness meditation, it’s a good idea to select a mantra that is focused on happiness, such as, “I am happy to live in peace.” During your meditation, this phrase should be repeated over and over again while focusing on the meaning of the words. Like visualization, meditating with a mantra allows the meditation student to set their intentions. This is crucial for cultivating happiness during meditation.  

Meditate on Gratitude to Increase Happiness

Gratitude is an important aspect of happiness and meditating on gratitude can do wonders for cultivating happiness during meditation. In fact, science has proven that showing gratitude leads to higher levels of optimism and even decreases a person’s need for medical attention. (Source: Harvard University) 

When meditating on gratitude, it’s a good idea to choose a single thing that you’re grateful for and focus on that one thing for your meditation session. This allows you to focus on the object of your gratitude in a great level of detail. 

For example, if you’re grateful to have coffee in the morning, you can spend a ten-minute session imagining a cup of delicious, steaming coffee in your mind’s eye, or you can focus on the amount of effort that went into bringing you the privilege of your morning cup.  

Another way to supplement a meditation practice focusing on gratitude is to also keep a gratitude journal. Each day, write at least three things that you are personally grateful for. Not only can this help you foster a general sense of gratitude in your daily life, but it can also provide you with potential topics for your gratitude meditations. 

Calming Meditation Can Help Foster Happiness

Meditation techniques designed to calm the mind can also help cultivate happiness by reducing stress and anxiety. Often the build-up of stress in our daily lives can lead to a constant feeling of being fraught and overwhelmed, and this, in turn, can have a negative impact on our ability to cultivate happiness. 

Mindfulness meditation is one of the best forms of meditation for learning to calm your mind since it teaches you to remain in the present moment and not allow your thoughts to run away wild with you. 

However, you should know that mindfulness meditation is considered to be one of the more difficult forms of meditation since it involves focusing on breathwork rather than visualizations or a mantra, but it is also one of the most effective forms of meditation for increasing focus and emotional regulation. 

As you know, I am extremely introverted and struggle with chronic pain and severe and life-crippling anxiety, and I found that out of all the different types of meditation I’ve tried mindfulness meditation works best for me.  I’ve practiced it daily for over 8 years now. I cannot recommend it enough, what it does to you and your life is truly astonishing!

Mindfulness Meditation Helps to Teach Happiness in Daily Life

Mindfulness meditation, also known as Vipassana or Insight meditation, is a type of meditation that originated in the Theravadan school of Buddhism and is considered one of the oldest forms of meditation. The main goal of mindfulness meditation is to look past the illusions of the world to see the world as it really is, rather than how it is through the distortions of our own perception. In fact, this is the type of meditation that is claimed to have been taught by the Buddha himself. 

Mindfulness meditation is performed by paying painstaking attention to the physical sensations that arise during meditation—this keeps the person’s mind completely chained to their body in space, preventing the mind from wandering. 

Insight meditation is helpful for cultivating happiness in the following ways: 

• It provides detachment from personal problems
• It clears the mind and provides a sense of calm
• It provides a method to potentially develop solutions to problems in daily life

While the object of insight meditation is to focus completely on the body, intrusive thoughts that arise during insight meditation are often indicative of the things our minds are most frustrated or worried about. Identifying these worries and letting them pass without breaking meditation is an important part of learning how to perform insight meditation. By observing our thoughts without becoming emotionally attached to them, we are better able to focus on an objective solution to our problems. 

Body Scanning During Meditation for Happiness

Body scanning or progressive meditation may seem like an odd way to cultivate happiness in meditation, but body scanning can bring our attention to medical problems in the body that can negatively impact a person’s happiness and health. 

In many cases, chronic stress and fatigue can have cumulative negative effects on a person’s mood in their day to day life, and meditation practices can help to negate those effects by providing a way to identify aches in the body so that they can be addressed through deliberate relaxation techniques, stretching, and exercise. 

Body scanning meditation is also a good way to train the mind to “shut down” the body into a meditative state by consciously relaxing the muscles. 

Here is how to perform a body scan during meditation: 

• Close your eyes and focus on your breathing. While either in a comfortable sitting position or a lying position, focus until your breathing is deep and even.
• Slowly relax each part of the body. Starting at the tips of the toes and noting any sensations of discomfort or pain at each location. Work your way up the body from the tips of the toes through the feet, to the ankles, and up the legs, working your way slowly all the way up the body until you make your way to the crown of the head. With each part of your body, make a point to consciously relax the muscles.

When you reach the top of your head, your entire body should be completely relaxed, and you should be aware of any injuries or pain in your body that you might not have been aware of before you started meditating. If stiffness, tension, or pain lingers in a part of the body, be sure to stretch and massage this body part until relaxation sets in. 

If you find yourself uncomfortable while sitting meditation for longer periods, doing a body scan mid-session during meditation can help you locate the source of your discomfort. Sometimes focusing your mind on a leg cramp or other discomfort during meditation can allow you to consciously relax it without having to physically move your body out of a meditative pose. 

Noting Disturbances During Meditation

One problem that can negatively impact your ability to sit in meditation to cultivate happiness is disturbances in your thoughts or intrusive thoughts that disrupt your meditations. Many novice meditation students may be discouraged to find wild thoughts popping up frequently during their meditation sessions, at least at first. This can cause feelings of unhappiness and deep frustration. 

However, it’s important to remember that disturbances of the mind are common in meditation, even for monks who have been practicing meditation for decades. Contrary to popular belief, meditation isn’t about the elimination of rogue thought, but the identification of it. Very few people pay attention to the thought pattern of their mind during their daily activities, while meditation forces us to pay attention to what our mind is doing. 

There’s no reason to become unhappy if you find thoughts coming up for you a lot during meditation, especially at first. Instead, try to acknowledge your thoughts without judgment and let them pass by as if they were floating in a river that you were sitting alongside.

If you note the same thoughts coming up over and over again, this is usually an indicator of a problem or issue you need to address in your daily life once your meditations are over. 

Loving Kindness Meditation for Compassion

Loving kindness meditation, also known as Meta, is a type of meditation that is great for cultivating happiness because it is used to deliberately cultivate compassion in our daily lives. Loving kindness meditation is a type of meditation that is often used by monks to try and foster a kinder mindset towards other sentient creatures in the face of a world full of suffering.  

Meta meditations are not only good for cultivating kindness and love towards other people and creatures—but this meditation form is also useful for helping to cultivate compassion towards yourself. Since lack of self-worth is a personality factor that can significantly decrease happiness and personal satisfaction, loving kindness meditation goes a long way towards counteracting that. (Source: Mindful)

Skillful Compassion Meditation for Forgiveness and Happiness

For individuals who have difficulty feeling or showing compassion towards others, this can have a seriously detrimental effect on their personal satisfaction and happiness. Another thing that can negatively impact happiness is anger that is held at another person, organization, or abstract concept. 

Skillful compassion meditation is a more advanced form of loving kindness meditation that calls on the person meditating to focus their compassion on a single person or object, particularly a person that they may not like or feel empathy towards. 

The deliberate cultivation of empathy and compassion towards those we dislike (or even hate) can make it much easier for us to cultivate happiness and empathy towards the regular people in our lives. Cultivating compassion towards our enemies through skillful compassion meditation can also lead to forgiveness, which has a major effect on happiness too. (Source: Forbes)

Kundalini Yoga as Meditation for Happiness

For those who find sitting meditation boring or exhausting, another form of meditation that can be used to help cultivate happiness is kundalini yoga. 

This active form of meditation involves moving the body through a series of stretches and poses while simultaneously focusing on meditation techniques and breathwork. Kundalini meditation can provide a useful alternative form of meditation for those who are not attracted to sitting meditation. 

Yoga helps increase happiness not only by fostering mindful awareness but also through exercising the body. Even light amounts of exercise have been shown by science to have an outsized effect on our overall levels of happiness. 

Not only does yoga provide an active form of meditation practice, but it also has several other benefits that can accentuate personal happiness, including the following: 

• More muscle tone and flexibility
• Improved cardiovascular health
• Stronger respiration
• Higher levels of energy
• A more balanced metabolism
• Reduced inflammation
• Reduced anxiety and depression
• Reduced chronic pain
• Increased sleep quality

Using a combination of sitting meditation and yoga can be a great way to incorporate some exercise into your meditation practice, and this can help increase your overall feelings of health and happiness. 

Tai Chi as Happiness Meditation

Tai chi is another type of moving meditation like yoga which is a type of internal Chinese martial art that is focused on the movement of chi, or energy that courses through the body. Not only is tai chi a beautiful form of moving meditation, but it also helps meditation students practice their powers of visualization. 

Like yoga, tai chi is considered a gentle form of exercise and is easy enough for even children and the elderly to perform. In fact, tai chi is considered especially useful for the elderly since it can help promote agility and balance that are lost with old age. 

Another way that tai chi can help promote happiness as a form of meditation is by encouraging kinship with other meditation students. There are few things as beautiful as seeing a perfectly synchronized group of tai chi students working through their movements and participating in this display of aesthetic beauty can help foster happiness in daily life. 

Resting Awareness Meditation

Resting awareness meditation is similar to mindfulness meditation or Vipassana meditation and focuses on centering the mind and teaching it to ignore rising thoughts during meditation while maintaining a perfectly calm, present state of mind. 

The term “resting awareness” refers to the practice of meditating and being fully aware of your surroundings during meditation while simultaneously ignoring them. This can result in a sensation of awareness and non-awareness at once. 

Resting awareness can be one of the more difficult meditation techniques to practice since it involves acknowledging awareness and not reacting to it at the same time. This can be akin to trying to hold two opposite concepts as true in the mind at the same time. 

Resting awareness helps to cultivate happiness as a form of meditation because it fosters a sense of calm and tranquility that can extend into a person’s daily life outside of their meditation practice. 

Once a person learns to react to the world with calm rather than agitation, they are much more likely to be able to maintain a sense of happiness and peace even in the face of adversity.

Reflective Meditation

Unlike meditation methods that get you to focus on physical sensation and the present moment, reflective meditation is meant to address a specific topic in the mind and can be used to brainstorm or further explore a concept in a profound way. Reflective meditation can help cultivate happiness because it gives us a way to solve some of the problems in our lives. 

Here’s how to practice reflective meditation: 

• Choose a theme, a question, or a situation to focus on for your reflective meditation.
   
• Find a comfortable place to sit for meditation and relax, concentrating on the theme that you’ve chosen as the focus of your reflective meditation.
  
  
• Throughout your meditation, continue to focus on this one theme or question. If you sense your mind beginning to wander, gently bring it back to the topic at hand.
  
  
• To develop a deeper understanding and insight into a topic, the same question or topic can be meditated on over multiple meditation sessions. This can often give the mind a chance to generate concepts and solutions to a problem that it otherwise wouldn’t have access to in conscious life. 

One famous example of reflective meditation is the use of koans in Zen Buddhism. A koan is a question, a statement, or a story that students of Zen Buddhism are asked to meditate on and study as a test of their progression in the metaphysical understanding of how Buddhism works.

Zen Meditation for Happiness

Zen Buddhists are among the most famous practitioners of meditation in the world, and Zen Buddhism has often been explored as a secular method of pursuing happiness and peace since the principles of meditation can be applied to a person’s spiritual practices regardless of their religious convictions. Much of Zen Buddhism involves ethical and philosophical practices versus religious rituals. 

A Zen priest at Harvard University, Robert Waldinger, has run one of the most long-standing adult studies on human happiness in the world. These are the conclusions that he came to with regards to what scenarios in life have the greatest effect on human happiness:

• Human connection: While Zen meditation may seem like a solitary practice, human connection and community are both huge parts of Zen Buddhism, and the sangha (community of Buddhists) is considered one of the Threefold Blessings of Buddhism. Meditating, as part of a Zen sangha, can bring a great degree of happiness through human connection to a person’s life.
  
  
• The quality of relationships: Waldinger’s study showed that it’s not just important for people to have relationships and human connections—those connections need to be strong ones. Because Zen practitioners develop a deep spiritual relationship with their roshi and the higher monks in their sangha as they progress in their practice, meditating with Zen Buddhists can provide a deep level of spiritual relationship with others.
  
  
• Understanding how finite life is: A major factor in cultivating happiness in life is to understand how precious life is and take advantage of every moment of it. Zen Buddhists practice this by attempting to remain in the present moment in their thoughts as often as possible rather than becoming susceptible to their abstract mind. Keeping in mind how fragile life is can also help us develop greater gratitude for it, and this also generates happiness. 

Falling in with Zen Buddhists to pursue a deeper level of happiness in your life doesn’t necessitate a religious conversion—Zen centers welcome meditation practitioners from all walks of life. If you’re looking to generate more happiness and contentment in your life, you can do a lot worse than checking out a Buddhist sangha.

Transcendental Meditation for Happiness

Transcendental meditation is a type of sitting meditation that utilizes a silent mantra in order to still the mind. While it is similar to mantra meditation, Transcendental meditation is a specific meditation technique that was developed in the mid-1950s by the yogi Maharishi Mahesh. 

In transcendental meditation, the person meditating can use either a word as a mantra or a sound, such as the Vedic Om. The point of transcendental meditation is to “transcend” or rise above the normal level of thinking consciousness instead and come to a place of perfect awareness. 

Like other forms of meditation, transcendental meditation can help people cultivate happiness by helping them rise above their mundane problems and foster a deeper sense of well-being that isn’t connected to their emotional reactions.

Meditation is a Great Method for Seeking Out More Happiness in Life

No matter which kind of meditation technique you go with, there are tons of benefits for the body and mind to recommend meditation as a method for organically generating more happiness and contentment in your life. Just the act of slowing down and developing a deeper sense of relationship between your mind and body can help you significantly reduce negative emotions. 

If you don’t click with the first type of meditation you try, don’t be afraid to experiment. There are plenty of different ways to meditate, so you’re sure to find one that works for you.