As probably most meditation-newbies have, I spent way too much time with finding out the "perfect" technique and too little time actually meditating in the beginning, but the question was never really resolved and I thought it would be nice to get your input on this. The glimpse of a solution was offered by Daniel in MCTB, where he hints that the Visuddhimagga has a section on how to choose a meditation object, but after reading it, I realised it was not really what I was hoping for.
Partially inspired by something Shinzen Young said, I then developed another framework that helped me decide:
One categorises oneself into the dominant sense by either doing skeletal noting with see/hear/feel (I guess one could add the other senses but it could be more difficult to meditate on a taste, but hey to each their own) for a while or using any other way to distinguish one’s most appropriate sense (this is also a big topic in NLP and some people just know which one to choose, so whatever works).
For me this was huge because initially from reading books and blogs I got the impression that even though it is often said that the object does not matter in the end, still feeling the breath was somehow the default option and in some way superior. Also every book explains the subtleties of breath work, which is another factor that pushed me at least to focus on that. But in my practise the distractions that kept pulling me away (another way to choose the sense) were verbal stories or just random words that would come up. Since I switched to Mantra practise this has gotten much better and similar effects could happen with very visual people who switch to Visualisation or Kasina meditation.
As for the object, there is not so much I could find anywhere and also nothing I could come up with, so if anyone has thoughts on that, I’d be thrilled to hear them.
The last point is something I already mentioned: The subtleties of the practises. Breath meditation is explained in nearly every Dharma book and every Feel-based concentration practise (feeling the hands, sensations of sitting etc.) can be modelled after this. For Visual-based practise, there are the Kasina practises described in the Visuddhimagga, the Fire Kasina book by Daniel Ingram and Shannon Stein and also quite a few threads in this forum. For Mantra or other Hear-based meditation (playing a consistent sound and focusing on that, listening to silence) it’s actually hard to find anything. There are a few words on it here and there, but I had to figure much out on my own, so again if anyone knows of a resource that goes into the details here, I’d be thrilled to read it.
I’m really still at the beginning of my practise and this is why feedback from more mature practitioners on this would be amazing. Radically different opinions, additions, disagreement with details or just random thoughts, please share. I feel this is one of the most neglected areas for advice and such a framework, maybe even turned into an algorithm, could be very valuable for a beginning meditator, if just to minimize the uncertainty about what to do. If someone is interested it would be a nice idea to collect the information from the answers to this thread and other resources and create something like this, a short article for example, which could become a standard reference for this.
