Meditation in essence is about helping you to develop inner peace, calmness and a sense of tranquillity but it is also about helping you to grow as a person. Too often people perceive meditation as a hippy thing, or something for those marijuana smoking duds to do but really what meditation is about is helping you with your mind and the way your mind influences your life.

Guided meditation really involves someone guiding you through the process of meditation and helping you to achieve an outcome of some description. Most people associate meditation with simply sitting on the floor with your eyes closed going Ummm. Ummm. Which I can certainly say is not the outcome we are looking for and would in essence be totally useless.

Meditation just like anything you do must have a purpose. For example, what is the purpose of getting a job? Well essentially the purpose of getting a job is to help you gain money so that you can buy a house or car, get food to eat or go on a holiday. If you did not have a purpose for a job, why would you work? You would not!

Meditation is exactly the same. You need to have a purpose when you meditate. The purpose for meditation can be varied for example you could meditate to

#1. Find Inner Peace

#2. To Bring About Focus

#3. To Relax

#4. To Help You Change Your State of Mind

#5. Improve Creativity and Learning

#6. Help Build Your Confidence and Self-Esteem

#7. To Focus on Self-Healing

#8. To Help Control Internal and External Pain

#9. Meditate to Overcome Your Fears

There really are unlimited reasons for why you would want to meditate. The objective of guided meditation is to help you take the right meditation path to achieve those objectives.

Choosing a Meditation Guide is really an important step you need to make. For example different meditation experts and practitioners will have different techniques and will guide you through different paths depending on what you are trying to achieve.

The majority of meditation practitioners will teach you deep breathing meditations when you first start because if you do not know how to relax and maintain focus, then the other meditation paths will certainly not work. Remember one thing, every meditation guide will be different and I recommend that before paying a meditation guide to help you, try to see if they will give you a free lesson.

What I have found in the past is that every meditation practitioner is different and I have even found the meditation practitioners from the one meditation centre can vary dramatically in the guiding process, so you need to find the guide who best works for you. Let me give an example of what I mean. I am always on the lookout for new ideas and thoughts when it comes to meditation and I recently purchased a Chakra meditation cd which included a guided meditation program. I put the cdrom into my computer and within the first five minutes of listening to it, I burst out laughing simply because the voice was digitally altered and was totally unreal. For me this guided meditation tool was never going to work as I could not take it seriously. Now for some people this particular meditation cd may have worked and they may think totally differently about the meditation cd. For me it did not work.

There are many different styles of guided meditation. If you goto your local bookstore or check out the internet you will find an abundance of guided meditation cds, dvds and videos. Before you rush out and buy them, I strongly encourage you to see if there is sample of what they offer just to see if their guided meditation is what you are after. Any good quality meditation programs, will offer you some sort of limited look at their products so that you can see if they will work for you. If you are going to a health retreat or meditation centre for a guided meditation experience, find out if they offer a Free Introductory CDROM of their program. Always try these out first because there is nothing worse to go to a meditation retreat only to find out it does not suit you.

One thing I recommend to everyone is to try out meditation before you go to any of these retreats even if you just try out the Deep Breathing Meditation exercises. Meditation does take practice and the more practice you do the better you will get at it. Some people when they first go to guided meditation programs do not get the outcomes they expect, not because the programs do not work, but simply because they do not realise it does take practice to master meditation.