The Top 10 Guided Meditations of 2018:

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.

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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.

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.

woman meditating
Guided Meditations

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 

  • Kristin Neff
  • September 4, 2018

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.

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.

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.

woman meditating on beach. notice the body
Guided Meditations

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 

  • Jon Kabat-Zinn
  • August 30, 2018

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

elderly hand holding a felted heart
Guided Meditations

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 

  • Bob Stahl
  • October 18, 2018