meditation

plural meditations

1. countableuncountableA devotional exercise of, or leading to, contemplation.
2. countableuncountableAny of various types of achieving more or less altered states of consciousness, such as vacancy of mind or prolonged contemplation on a single sensation or thought, through relaxed or focused mental and physical activity generally of a nonstrenuous and non–substance-induced nature.

   Seasoned runners speak wistfully of getting in the zone, of running as meditation or going into autopilot, powering through the miles.

   2013 October 7, Tory Frost, “Going the distance: breaking through the boredom barrier”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 29 Mar 2016

   1 more example

   Free-associating on paper is valuable—letting loose, as I described in the last chapter, and writing whatever you feel like writing, any way you want. It’s valuable when you’re learning to write to help you deal with fear, and it continues to be a useful technique for starting a piece of writing or moving beyond a point where you’re stuck. It’s a good way to develop characters and story by drawing on unconscious associations, free-associating about something (a process that used to be called meditation before meditation came to mean emptying your mind). […] Writing to communicate is a different matter. Professional writers, without exception so far as I know, consider unstructured, unedited free association to be at best only the first stage of writing. Not even Jack Kerouac wrote that way, although he tried to make it look as if he did.

   2007 [1995], Richard Rhodes, How to Write: Advice and Reflections, e-book edition, HarperCollins, pages 18-19

3. countableuncountableA contemplative discourse, often on a religious or philosophical subject.

   Her book is less a cookbook than a meditation on the craft of cookery.

4. countableuncountableA musical theme treated in a meditative manner.
5. countableuncountableCareful and thorough thought.

   in meditation

   2 more examples

   deep meditation

   He was lost in careful meditation on how best to proceed when a sudden phone call forced him to decide.

   Synonyms: cogitation, contemplation, deliberation, mulling, musing, pondering, reflection, rethinking