One of our main goals at Mindful is to connect you, our readers, with the experts and researchers in the mindfulness field and serve practices to you from them. We know that practicing mindfulness has the power to make a real difference in your life. Our goal isn’t simply to deliver meditations but to ensure we provide resources that are as authentic and accessible as possible. So that everyone, whether you’re an experienced meditator or someone new to the practice, can find a voice to connect with at Mindful.
We curate this website in order to deliver the heart of what mindfulness is. Because it’s heart work. It’s hard work. It takes practice, and it’s worth it. Whether you’re in need of a better night’s sleep, a chance to practice gratitude, or simply a reminder to take a deep breath, here are our most popular guided meditations from 2018.
The Top 10 Guided Meditations of 2018:
1. A Basic Breathing Meditation. This practice from Susan Kaiser Greenland helps us build the foundation for an enduring mindfulness practice because it brings us back to the fundamentals: settling the mind as you get in touch with your breathing for a few minutes.
11-Minute Breathing Practice for Awareness
Susan Kaiser-Greenland guides us through one of the oldest meditation practices called “Sit and Know You’re Sitting.” Read More 
2. Building Compassion Through Awareness. Kristin Neff, a leading expert on mindful self-compassion, guides us through a practice for weaving kind phrases and intentions into a meditation.
Breathing Compassion In and Out
Kristin Neff guides us through a twenty-minute compassion meditation, first directing kind phrases to ourselves and then to others. Read More
3. Cultivate Mindfulness in Every Moment. Jon Kabat-Zinn, the pioneer of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, offers a 20-minute meditation for to cultivate the ability to let your experience unfold without it having to be a particular way—tapping into the ability to “be awake and aware with no particular agenda,” says Kabat-Zinn.
The Breathscape Practice for Cultivating Mindfulness
A 20-minute meditation from Jon Kabat-Zinn to allow you to tap into your capacity to be in touch with your experience, and be awake and aware with no agenda other than to be awake and aware. Read More
4. A Meditation for Better Sleep. Mark Bertin offers this breath-counting practice to help us get to sleep. We all know we can’t force ourselves to fall asleep, but Bertin suggests the beauty of counting your breaths is that it helps us let go of stubborn thought loops so we can wind down and finally fall asleep.
A 20-Minute Meditation for Easing Into Sleep
The more you try to force sleep, the less likely you are to achieve it. Explore this guided meditation to let go of stubborn thoughts and get a full night’s rest. Read More
5. Tune into the Body. This practice focuses on the body—as a whole, and also pinpointing specific locations—in order to anchor attention in the here and now.
An Inquiring Practice to Notice the Body
This 20-minute guided meditation from Jon Kabat-Zinn explores embracing sensations as they arise in the body in order to ground ourselves in the here and now. Read More
6. A Simple Walking Meditation. Taking our meditation practice outdoors allows us to savor nature and, importantly, weave movement into our contemplative practice. This practice explores practicing mindfulness with every footfall, varying pace and distance.
A Guided Walking Meditation to Savor the Day
This 9-minute guided walking meditation from Jon Kabat-Zinn explores embracing mindfulness with every footfall—varying the practice for speed and distance. Read More
7. Tap into Gratitude. Elaine Smookler takes us through our senses as an exercise to tap into life’s small delights—a simple but steady way to cultivate gratitude and a habit of seeing the good around us that we might miss when we’re in autopilot mode, rushing from one thing to the next.
Gratitude Practice: Savor the Moment by Tapping into Your Senses
Cultivate gratitude for life’s small delights as you move through the senses. Read More
8. Open Your Heart. World-renowned meditation teacher and author Sharon Salzberg offers a compassion practice for offering kindness that we so often would give to friends and loved ones—but not to ourselves.
A Compassion Practice for Opening the Heart
A 15-minute meditation that begins by imagining yourself surrounded by a circle of the most loving beings, making generous offerings of love and goodwill to you. Read More
9. Tame Difficult Emotions. This meditation helps us investigate the thoughts and sensations that surround difficult emotions—the thinking being that we must work with difficult emotions, not push them away.
A 10-Minute Meditation to Work with Difficult Emotions
When we deny what’s difficult by putting our heads in the sand, we create more suffering. Here’s a 10-minute meditation to reverse the tendency to start digging. Read More
10. A Forgiveness Meditation. This guided meditation from Bob Stahl is a three-step practice for offering forgiveness to yourself, those you’ve hurt, and others who have hurt you.
A Reconciliation Meditation
Anxiety engenders feelings of isolation—when we don’t feel at ease, how do we find peace? This meditation explores making amends for the times we’ve hurt ourselves, others, or those who have hurt us. Read More
