Some days ask more than they give back. Tabs open, notifications piling up, and everything feels a little too switched on… And the idea of steady sounds good right about now.
We meditate to get good at life, not to get good at meditation.
— Emily Fletcher, trainer of Mindvalley’s The M Word
So slip into your comfy clothes and get out your yoga mat. It’s time to scroll through the list of best guided meditations and press play. Headphones, optional.
Best guided meditations for beginners
If you’re familiar with Eat, Pray, Love, you’ll remember that Elizabeth Gilbert struggles with meditation when she arrives at an ashram in India.
“We are meant to sit for an hour in silence, but I log the minutes as if they are miles—sixty brutal miles that I have to endure,” she says, describing her first session. “By mile/minute fourteen, my nerves have started to go, my knees are breaking down and I’m overcome with exasperation.”
That’s the thing most beginners run into. They assume meditation means long stretches of silence, total stillness, and a calm mind that behaves on command.
But according to meditation expert Emily Fletcher, that’s one of the main reasons so many beginners quit before they even truly begin.
“The mind thinks involuntarily just like the heart beats involuntarily,” she says in her Mindvalley program, The M Word. Plus, she starts beginners with short, manageable sessions and gradually builds the practice over time, so the habit forms before frustration sets in.
That structure is exactly why guided meditations work so well for beginners. It helps you build consistency without making it feel hard. Here are three you can start with:
1. 10-Minute Self-Love Meditation | Emily Fletcher
There’s a lot of talk about self-love, and with good reason. It’s how you treat yourself with basic respect, especially when you feel tired, critical, or overwhelmed.
Research shows that people who practice this kind of self-compassion experience lower stress levels, less anxiety, and greater emotional resilience. And when that compassion shows up as care instead of criticism, you get better mental health, stronger motivation, and healthier relationships over time.
So take this 10-minute self-love meditation. Emily guides you into gratitude for your body and your life, using spoken affirmations you can listen to anywhere, even while brushing your teeth or lying in bed.
The goal here isn’t to fix yourself. Rather, it’s to help your nervous system soften so appreciation and self-trust start to feel natural again.
Try it now:
2. 15-Minute Guided Meditation for Beginners—Release Your Biggest Blocks | Jeffrey Allen
Everything is energy. You’ve probably heard the phrase before, but it’s one Jeffrey Allen returns to again and again in his work.
In this 15-minute guided meditation, the energy healing expert helps you notice where stress and emotional buildup live in your body. Then he guides you through clearing it without overthinking the process.
From there, the focus shifts to sharpen your intuition, so you can sense which direction feels right before your mind jumps in to debate it.
Play it in the morning to set the tone for your day, or at night when you want to unwind without effort. You can even do both, since 15 minutes of feeling clear and centered fits anywhere.
Try it now:
3. 5-Minute Guided Meditation to Find Your Inner Peace | Agapi Stassinopoulos
Elizabeth may have had to sit through 60 minutes of those ashram meditation classes. But renowned spiritual teacher Agapi Stassinopoulos asks for something far more realistic: five minutes of your time. That’s all it takes to slow your breathing, steady your thoughts, and remember what calm actually feels like.
She starts by helping you let go of whatever’s been weighing on you. As the meditation continues, the focus moves toward feeling supported, grounded, and connected to something steadier within you.
What makes this session work is its simplicity. You’re not asked to analyze your thoughts or fix anything. Instead, you’re guided to rest in a feeling of trust and quiet, even if life around you stays busy.
If you’re short on time, feeling anxious, or simply need a quick reset, this is one of the best guided meditations to play.
Try it now:
Best guided meditations for sleep
Oh sleep, you elusive nightly reset that always seems to slip through our fingers. Yet recent data from the CDC shows that one in three adults still isn’t getting enough of it.
Seven hours? Psssh, for so many, it falls short by one to two hours.
That may not seem like much of a difference, but you best believe it adds up. A study on sleep deprivation and decision-making showed that exhausted soldiers hit a fixed target just fine. Yet their accuracy dropped to below 10% once targets appeared at random.
What does that mean for you? You’re still able to show up and answer emails, but if the smallest curveball knocks your focus sideways, mistakes are likely to pile up fast.
Getting your zzz’s in is incredibly important. So try these three Mindvalley meditations—they can help slow things down, settle your body, and let rest actually happen.
4. Surrender to Deep Sleep: A Guided Meditation for Relaxation
Many of us are in a constant state of stress. Deadlines, financial pressure, and always being reachable don’t give you much of a break. Emily, too, has talked about how stress during her Broadway years led to 18 months of insomnia.
Now, sleep is important, sure. But deep sleep helps your brain and body reset. It supports memory, focus, immune health, and physical repair, while also regulating mood and stress.
So, if you need to slow your mind, this eight-minute meditation will help you focus on your breath, safety, and trust so your body can relax and fall asleep.
Try it now:
5. 5-Minute Guided Meditation to Say Goodbye to Sleepless Nights | Dina Proctor
Let’s face it: tossing and turning sucks. And after a long, overstimulated day, a gentle shutdown sequence can change how the rest of the night unfolds.
And this one’s it. You’re guided by Dina Proctor, a certified life coach, whose soft, soothing voice leads you to let your body go first, muscle by muscle, breath by breath.
The great thing is, it doesn’t require you to sit up or do anything extra. In fact, you can simply meditate in bed with this one, under the covers and in full prep for your night’s rest.
Try it now:
6. Powerful Guided Meditation for Deeper Sleep and Healing | Niraj Naik
If you keep waking up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back asleep, that’s often a sign that stress or tension hasn’t fully let go.
Niraj Naik can help you with that. In this 12-minute meditation, the pharmacist-turned-breathwork expert guides you through slow breathing, gentle rhythm, and visualization to move your body into deep rest.
The key to his meditation practice is the breath. According to research, slow, controlled breathing can help regulate stress, improve focus, and calm the nervous system.
And you don’t have to take it on faith. One of Niraj’s students, Vivienne Keytel from South Africa, shares with Mindvalley that she had been waking up in the early hours and struggling to fall back asleep. After using Niraj’s sleep meditations in his Mindvalley program, Breathwork for Life, consistently, she found that her nights settled and her days flowed with more ease.
It’s a great testament to how small shifts in the body can lead to deeper rest.
Try it now:
Best guided meditations for anxiety
Elizabeth knows all about anxiety. In Eat, Pray, Love, she shares about a stretch of nights where sleep disappeared, and fear took over.
“I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and—just as during all those nights before—I was sobbing,” she writes. “Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and confusion and grief.”
That’s the consequence of anxiety. Left unchecked, your mind can spiral, your body can lock up, and even the quiet hours offer no relief.
How can meditation help? Well, research shows that mindfulness-based meditation significantly reduces anxiety and improves emotional stability over time.
And these three can offer a steady way to calm your mind when everything feels like it’s coming at you all at once.
7. Conquering Anxiety with Sound Wave Frequencies | The Monroe Institute
Sometimes your mind won’t stop buzzing. Silence doesn’t help. In fact, it can make everything louder.
This meditation, guided by The Monroe Institute, takes a different route. Instead of asking you to focus or visualize, it uses sound wave frequencies to do the heavy lifting.
Research suggests that certain sound interventions can reduce stress and promote calmer physiological states. So let the sounds wash over you, your body softens, and the mental noise finally loses the microphone.
Available on the Mindvalley app:
8. 3-Minute Meditation to Reduce Anxiety and Be Present
Have you ever had one of those moments where your thoughts jump ahead, your body tightens, and suddenly everything feels loud? Technically, you’re fine, but your mind is already ten steps away.
This is one of the best guided meditations for anxiety to pull you back to now, fast. It guides your attention through your body, feet on the floor, shoulders dropping, and breath slowing. Then it does something simple and effective: it reminds you that nothing urgent is happening right now.
Three minutes later, you’re still in the same place, just calmer, steadier, and a little less wound up.
Try it now:
9. A Guided Meditation to Heal From Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma | Sonia Choquette
Not all stress sits in your head. Some parks itself in your jaw, your chest, or your gut and refuses to move. Even when you try to relax, your body stays on guard, like it missed the memo.
This meditation works by grounding you in your body and your surroundings first. From there, Sonia Choquette, a spiritual teacher and intuitive guide, helps you breathe through your heart and belly, soften tension, and feel supported. As the session unfolds, the focus shifts to releasing what no longer belongs to you, so your body can finally stand down.
That release can feel immediate, as it did for meditation coach Mark Pelter. As he shares in the comments, “I’m so grateful for this. This meditation brought me immediate relief from my anxiety. Thank you.”
Because sometimes that’s all you’re looking for: a moment where the weight lifts and you can breathe without bracing for what comes next.
Try it now:
Best guided meditations for healing
“Healing” is often associated with something miraculous. But break it down, and it’s simply your body and mind finding their way back to balance after stress, injury, or emotional strain.
Sure, there are tons of tools that can help you heal. Guided meditations being one of them.
It shifts your focus just enough for healing to get a foothold. Research shows it can reduce stress hormones and improve emotional regulation, both of which support the body’s natural healing processes. Plus, practicing meditation regularly has been linked to a stronger immune response and better recovery from stress over time.
As Emily says in her Mindvalley program, “We meditate to get good at life, not to get good at meditation.” And sometimes, that shift is all the miracle you need.
So, put whatever you’ve got going on aside, and take a few minutes with some of the best free guided meditations out there.
10. Deep Healing and Repair | Summer McStravick
Old stress, emotional residue, mental patterns that keep looping even when the situation is over… It can be a lot. But what this meditation does is help you process all these things that haven’t fully cleared yet.
Summer McStravick, a personal growth coach, uses her Flowdreaming method, which focuses on how the mind and body reorganize after pressure. You may notice later that certain thoughts don’t pull as hard, reactions soften faster, and situations that used to linger don’t hang around as long.
The ultimate goal here is to help things move forward instead of feeling stuck in life.
Available on the Mindvalley app:
11. 6-Minute Guided Meditation to Achieve Peace and Awareness | Peter M. Lucas
If you’ve got six minutes to spare, take it to do this meditation. Guided by one of the former marines in Mindvalley, Peter M. Lucas, it centers the practice on a single breath and a short story about purpose.
From there, the meditation invites you to notice what’s already here without trying to label or fix it. Peter’s guidance stays simple and uncluttered, which makes it easy to follow without getting stuck in your head.
Try it now:
12. Group Immersion Session: Cultivating Inner Peace | Elena Bensonoff
Meditating alone can be daunting for some. If it is for you, grab a friend or a group of people. Because the thing is, there’s something grounding about knowing others are doing the same practice at the same time. Instead of trying to force calm, you simply step into it.
In this particular healing meditation, Elena Bensonoff, an award-winning holistic practitioner and the founder of Wholistic, Inc., guides a group session that focuses on connection, intention, and the feeling of being supported, even when you’re sitting alone with your eyes closed.
As the session unfolds, you’re led through imagery, breath, and gentle visualization to release emotional buildup and soften areas that tend to hold tension. The focus moves from the body to the heart, then outward.
As a result, calm feels shared and natural, not something you have to work at.
Try it now:
Best guided meditations for manifesting
Manifestation often gets a bad reputation. Too mystical for some, too vague for others.
But the thing is, people misunderstand the true nature of it. They think it’s about wishing harder, visualizing nonstop, or waiting for something to magically show up.
Vishen, the founder and CEO of Mindvalley, says it isn’t about getting more things at all. “Manifesting,” he explains at the Mindvalley Manifesting Summit 2025, “is about becoming the person you are destined to be.”
At its core, it’s simply about where your focus goes and what you reinforce over time. And these are some of the best guided meditations to get you there.
13. Manifesting Financial Abundance | Regan Hillyer
So if manifesting, as Vishen says, is about being the person you’re destined to be, then this meditation is about rehearsing that identity until it stops feeling foreign.
Regan Hillyer, a manifestation and mindset coach, guides you through seeing yourself after the outcome is already done, not hoped for. She calls it “a movie of you from your future having already received the financial abundance that you desire.”
What tends to change later isn’t so much your mood as it is your behavior. Choices feel cleaner, hesitation drops, and you stop negotiating with yourself over small moves.
Available on the Mindvalley app:
14. Guided Abundance Meditation | Bob Proctor
What can you do in 20 minutes? Watch an episode of Friends (sans commercials)? Go for a walk? Make a breakfast-for-dinner plate?
… Or you can do a 20-minute guided meditation. And if there’s one to experience out of all the Mindvalley meditations, it’s this one from Bob Proctor.
It came together in 2014 when the author of You Were Born Rich visited the Mindvalley office in Malaysia. Just before leaving, he offered to record a meditation, so Vishen pulled out his then-iPhone (5, by the way), found a quiet corner, and hit record. That raw audio went on to become one of Mindvalley’s most loved meditations, with over 4.2 million listens over the years.
The core idea of it is that abundance already exists everywhere and that the real limit sits in how a person thinks and imagines. The meditation uses visualization and repetition to shift how you identify with possibility, worth, and expansion so abundance feels normal, accessible, and expected rather than distant or reserved for others.
Try it now:
15. The 6 Phase Guided Meditation | Vishen
The 6 Phase Meditation is a transcendent practice. What that means, according to Vishen, is “any practice that helps you step back from the physical world and go within, and go within your own mind.”
And there are six he’s studied that create the biggest uplifts in human well-being:
- Love and compassion
- Happiness and gratitude
- Peace and forgiveness
- Vision for your future
- Mastering your day
- Support and blessing
Together, these make up the six phases of the 6 Phase Meditation. Its point is to train how you think and respond so your emotions, focus, and actions work together instead of against each other.
And it’s one of the reasons so many high performers swear by it, including Bianca Andreescu. Before winning the US Open at 19, she practiced the 6 Phase consistently, visualizing her success and training her emotional state long before the match ever happened. When reporters asked how she stayed so mentally strong, she pointed straight back to this practice.
Expand your consciousness
You don’t need to Eat, Pray, Love yourself to reset your inner world. Just 20 minutes with the 6 Phase Meditation program and a willingness to show up.
Sure, you can head to YouTube and follow the meditation. That’s great, too. But in the program, you’ll gain so much more:
- Understand what each phase is doing and why it matters
- Learn how to guide your thoughts instead of wrestling with them
- Practice directing your emotions before the day directs you
- Build clarity around what you want without forcing motivation
- Create a short daily habit that fits real life and actually lasts
Bianca Andreescu wasn’t the only one who’s experienced the might of the 6 Phase Meditation. Former NFL player Tony Gonzalez, Grammy award-winning musician Miguel, and DJ Matthew Russell of Cheat Codes have all credited this powerful practice with helping them train their mindset long before performance moments mattered.
And publicist April Love experienced a similar shift. She shares with Mindvalley:
Through meditation, I was able to see what truly mattered and set new goals with true intention.
Twenty minutes a day for seven days is all you need to learn how to work with your mind instead of fighting it—and it’s for free. And by the end, you have a practice you can use anytime, anywhere.
Welcome in.
