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I find it difficult to meditate without guidance. I wish to use guided meditations for my practice.
How effective are guided meditation sessions in achieving the benefits of meditation? What is the best way to use guided meditations to maximise their benefits?
For the purposes of relaxation, they are very effective. If your goal is simply to de-stress, then by all means use what works. Even the Buddha taught a gradual path and tailored his teaching to the station and goals of his audience. Guided meditation is one shade on a spectrum ranging all the way to enlightenment.
However. While guided meditation is an excellent way of slowing down mental chatter and decompressing, that's about as far as it will take you. If you are really interested in Buddhism and wish to meditate for the purposes of developing insight and penetrating into the four noble truths, you have to go past the relaxed state of mind engendered by guided meditation. You need to develop concentration.
Concentration can only be developed by you. It is a choice that you make every moment - a choice to return to the breath when your mind starts to wander. It's no different than physical exercise. The more often you make the choice to maintain your concentration, the stronger your meditation becomes. It also gets much easier with time. Concentration is also subtle. While you can use props like a candle or another person's voice, objects like the breath, kasinas, the body, etc. require much more focus and delicate handling. Too much effort and they dissolve. If you don't apply enough, they slip away.
I hope this doesn't come across as me saying that there is anything necessarily wrong with meditating simply to calm your mind. Destressing certainly has value. Just be sure to ask yourself what your goals are. Your answer will determine how to make the most of your time on the cushion.
If it helps you center your mind then it is a good start.
Eventually though after you have become familiar with this state of peace, it can help you to to reach actual states of jhana (not just a general calming of mind) but you must have a meditation object that you can choose to enter and leave at your own decision--not at the will of the guide.
I do binaural beats and I find it very helpful prior to meditation, although some of the beats influence my brainwaves too much. Which is another topic entirely but goes with the principle that I mentioned in the previous paragraph: concentration states are traditionally advised to be achieved with kasinas and breathing.
Also, Right Meditation leading to Right Concentration (the last stage) is cultivated in a quiet isolated environment not one with some guided meditation.
"Someone asked why sitting along with a guided meditation got much better results than sitting there meditating on your own — even in a group, in the presence of the teacher. My answer was basically that the person giving the guided meditation is doing a lot of your work for you. In other words, the instructions are doing what your mindfulness should be doing. That’s why although it may be useful to have a couple of guided meditations every now and then, there comes a point where you have to do the work yourself. Nobody else can make you mindful. No one can make you awakened."
~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Inner Refuge Through Inner Strength" (Meditations8) https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/Meditations8/Section0033.html
A guide is useful in the sense you don’t want to argue with the guru. But if you are of that disposition of authority then you will find condition to fight. Thus be wary, and remember you yourself, your own discerning thought as a guide (for better or worse) just use the common idea, what is best is best, the Buddha is a background to the operation of enlightenment
