The best part is that one specific meditation can be done while watching television or listening to music, the radio, or podcasts, and done in a group while chatting and still gain benefits for mental clarity and grant some health benefits. Want to watch NetFlix and meditate? Yes, you can do it at the same time. And it makes other meditations much easier when you get good at it.

Meditation is often seen as something difficult and unattainable with the intimidating lotus posture and unpronounceable mantras, or packaged as something that can be easily practiced with a mobile app. For the most part, this is slightly inaccurate: meditation is a term used for many practices that involve different techniques and yield different results.

Daoist meditations that we teach do inspire a state of mindfulness and awareness, but those are only steps along the way rather than the goal. Emptiness and cultivation, the energetic balance and different states of development emotionally, mentally, and physically are part of the roadmap that bring one to Dao, or in other cases, bring Dao into one’s life, and eventually, the cultivation of virtue, or De, from experiencing through practice and dialogue rather than texts and conjecture.

From standing meditation, or Zhan Zhuang, which can be done while listening to music or watching television or done in nature in an empty state, one also detoxes the body and organs, increases bone density and develops both lean muscle and the fascia. The seated meditations are also some of the simplest practices that not only bring meditators into an empty state, but also have an energetic component where very interesting things happen for people both starting out and with years of experience that have been described by some as “trippier than LSD or DMT”.

If you are interested in trying something easy to learn but difficult to master and is the foundation for all things Dao while eliminating false dichotomies that separate the sacred and the mundane, this might be a good place for you to start your inner exploration.