meditation is mental exercise — such as concentration on one's breathing or repetition of a mantra — undertaken to reach a heightened level of spiritual awareness, and more broadly any sustained reflection on a subject or a written discourse expressing it.
The word appears in English around 1200, from Old French meditacion and Latin meditationem, from meditari, "to think over, reflect, consider" — a verb that also stretched to "plan, practice, rehearse, study." Its earliest English sense was devotional: contemplation, private prayer. By the early fourteenth century it could name a meditative discourse on a subject, the sense that survives in the Stoic notebooks of 📝Marcus Aurelius known as 📝Meditations; by the late fourteenth century it meant continuous, calm thought upon something.
Contemporary practice spans many forms — sitting meditation, walking or 📝Moving Meditation, mantra, visualization, and the guided sessions popularized by apps such as 📝Headspace — a range 📝Alan Watts takes up in his lecture series 📝Out of Your Mind. Some teachers locate meditation in the quality of attention rather than the posture:
"Meditation is not a sit-down-close-your-eyes-activity. Meditation is watching your own thoughts as you would watch anything in the outside world." 📝Naval Ravikant[source]
Meditation is not 📝mindfulness, though the two are routinely conflated: meditation is the formal practice, mindfulness the quality of attention it trains. It differs from contemplation, which dwells on a particular subject, and from prayer, which is addressed to someone. Used to avoid unresolved emotional work rather than meet it, it becomes what psychologists call 📝Spiritual Bypassing.
As of July 28th, 2018, I'd been using Headspace daily for a year; its "10 minutes for 10 days" challenge was my on-ramp, and at its peak I meditated 20 minutes a day for 301 consecutive days. I track the practice in 📝My Meditation.