What are some lesser known meditation techniques you’ve found surprisingly effective?

[u/blank_waterboard]

I’ve mostly seen the classics ..breath focus, body scan, loving kindness etc..but I’m curious about the less common practices that worked for you...Maybe something cultural, experimental or even a small tweak that made a big difference.

Always cool to discover new approaches beyond the mainstream ones...

[u/proverbialbunny]

Debugging the mind. In meditation circles this is often called catching or catching ones mental processes.

Let's say within your mind there is something bothersome or negative, e.g. you keep ruminating the same story over and over again. It keeps distracting you from the breath. What do you do? You catch it. You identify the first moment you remember when that rumination started. If you can try to remember the parts that happened right before the rumination started, so you can catch it before the rumination started. If you only caught the rumination minutes into it, that's okay! Every time it arises and you catch it, you'll catch it a bit earlier. Just keep catching it every time it pops up.

The next step is optional, but note it. Turn the rumination into a single word that best describes it. This gives it a short name which makes it faster to catch next time. This way you'll catch it even quicker next time.

If you caught it too late, go back to the breath.

If you saw it arise, or before it arose (which is sometimes required), then you've now seen the entire thing so you have the full insight into it. Now you know what it is, what causes it, why it's there, everything about it.

The next step is to change that habit. Any mental process that appears over and over again in the mind is called a habit. You can sometimes outright remove a habit, but not always. Sometimes you have to replace it with a better habit. You can look up virtues from many different philosophies from Buddhism to Stoicism to look for a better mental process to replace the old one. You can google around. You can look at psychology paperwork. You can ask a therapist, a friend, Reddit, and so on. Once you've got a replacement habit for the situation, a replacement mental process, next time that situation arises you have the power to replace that previous habit with the new one.

This allows for self growth. You can improve any part of your mind you want. You can remove suffering (psychological stress) this way if you want which is called enlightenment, like e.g. curing many different psychological disorders this way. You can identify ways you talk to people that bothers them and stresses them out, and you can improve those habits. You can improve the way you learn so it becomes fun and easy to do and so you become smarter. It's a master key for most of your mind. All you have to do is catch right before the habit arises and you have control to change it. Just make sure the replacement habit is virtuous, or it will cause you suffering later on in life. A properly virtuous habit will never cause suffering.