I used to believe that meditation meant sitting cross-legged on a cushion, emptying your mind completely, and feeling at peace within minutes. I tried that. My mind had other plans…
For a long time, I assumed I was simply bad at meditation. I’d sit down, close my eyes, and within thirty seconds be mentally reorganizing my calendar or replaying a conversation from three days ago. What I’ve learned since then is that meditation is less a single practice and more a family of techniques, each one approaching the same question from a different angle: how do you find stillness in a mind that doesn’t want to stop?
I built Ma because I found breathwork, my way into meditation. Apparently I wasn’t the only one, as we rarely are when we discover something personally groundbreaking. Practices like this have existed for thousands of years, across cultures.
The apps name: Ma, comes from the Japanese concept of ma, 間. The meaningful pause between things. Not emptiness, but intentional space. That distinction took me a long time to understand, and it’s the reason this app exists.
Here’s what I’ve learned about meditation techniques along the way, what they actually do, and how I found my way into each of them.
Breathwork Became my Gateway
Before I could sit in silence, I needed something to hold onto. Breathwork gave me that.
The Ancient Tummo Breathwork was my entry point to being able to sit in meditation. I can´t even count the number of times I´ve sat with Breath and Flows video on the ancient breathing technique. They don’t really get into the mental aspects that raise body temperature, so maybe more Wim Hof breathing than Tummo. But even without the mental parts, it’s intense and deeply grounding.
You breathe in a specific pattern, deeply and rhythmically, until your body chemistry shifts in a way that’s hard to describe. Some people feel almost high, some become very introspective, and others feel energized. For people whose minds won’t slow down on command, this is often the technique that finally works. You don’t ease into stillness. You arrive there through the body.
Box breathing is quieter, but work really well when you´re stressed or full of anxiety. Four counts in, four counts hold, four counts out, four counts hold. It was originally developed for high-stress situations, and it shows. This technique doesn’t ask you to feel peaceful. It asks your nervous system to regulate itself, and then peace follows as a side effect.
Coherent breathing, sometimes called resonance breathing, works at around five to six breaths per minute. At that pace, your heart rate variability increases in a way that researchers have connected to reduced anxiety and improved emotional regulation. It sounds clinical when you describe it, but the experience is surprisingly soft.
Meditation following breathwork
The best meditation technique is the one you’ll actually use. Most people benefit from starting with something concrete, a breath pattern, a body scan, a timed mindfulness session, before moving toward less structured forms.
What I’ve built Ma around is exactly this: a path that meets you where you are, whether that’s three minutes of box breathing before a meeting or a longer open awareness practice on a slow Sunday. The techniques are different. The destination tends to be the same.
Mindfulness Meditation
So what to do when you get to the meditation part? Mindfulness meditation is a great place to start. It doesn’t ask you to stop thinking. It asks you to notice that you’re thinking. You sit, follow your breath, and when your mind wanders, which it will, you bring your attention back to the breath. That moment of coming back is the practice. It happens hundreds of times in a single session and that’s not failure, that’s exactly the point. It will get easier over time. Trust me!
Over time, mindfulness builds a kind of observational distance from your own thoughts. You start to catch the moment before a reaction, which is a small thing that changes everything. Studies on mindfulness-based stress reduction have shown meaningful effects on anxiety, chronic pain, and depression, and it’s now used in clinical settings worldwide.
The honest part: it’s slow. You may not notice anything for weeks. Then one day something shifts and you realize it already has been shifting for a while.
Body Scan Meditation
This technique moves attention through the body, region by region, from feet to the crown of the head. The purpose isn’t relaxation, though that often happens. The purpose is to make contact with physical sensations that you’ve been ignoring. Grounding.
Most of us carry tension we’re completely unaware of. A body scan brings it into focus, not to fix it, but to feel it. That alone does something. Therapists working with trauma often use body scan as a foundation, because it teaches the mind to be present with sensation without being overwhelmed by it.
Open Awareness Meditation
This is the practice I find hardest and most interesting.
In open awareness, you don’t focus on anything in particular. You let sounds, sensations, and thoughts arise and fall without following them. There’s no anchor. You don´t judge or use stereotypes. The instruction sounds simple: be aware of awareness itself.
What tends to happen is that the sense of being a fixed, separate self gets quieter. The boundary between me and everything else becomes less defined. Researchers studying the default mode network, the part of the brain associated with self-referential thinking, have found that experienced meditators show significantly reduced activity in this network during open awareness states. That lines up with what practitioners describe.
It’s not a beginner technique. But it’s where a lot of people find what they were looking for.
