Online meditation classes are an amazing new addition on the spiritual path.  It used to be that if you wanted to learn meditation you would have to travel, possibly the other side of the world, and spend weeks or months or years hanging out with someone who didn't even speak your language, learning a technique that was, you were told, thousands of years of old.

In the last 40 years, we've had the benefit of getting meditation instruction thanks to many of the Western meditation teachers who took that journey and then came back and decided to share what they've learned about meditation.

But even with local meditation teachers, to learn meditation was still a difficult task.  Most teachers used a shorter version of what they had already done.  That is, rather than having a month-long retreat in India, you can have a week-long meditation retreat in New York or Massachusetts or California.  Some teachers would have weekend workshops, but they would encourage you to come back for numerous workshops, year after year, as a substitute for traveling around the planet and spending months in a ashram.

But in just the last few years thanks to the magic of the Internet, you can find meditation classes online.  You don't need to leave your home or even your favorite comfortable chair to learn meditation.  Sometimes the online meditation classes are simply recorded instructions.  Other times, they are live, interactive sessions with the meditation teacher.

You can also find online meditation instruction in the form of tele-classes where people from all around the world gather at the same time to practice as if they're all sitting in the same meditation center.  But they're simply sitting in their homes, just like you are.

On the one hand, online meditation classes are a tremendous advantage because it makes meditation instruction available to more people in more convenient  ways. On the other hand, it removes the value that came with the challenge of going through all of that effort to change our daily schedule, or take weeks or months out our life to go on a spiritual retreat. After a big trek, we knew that the meditation retreat was a rare event, and that spending time with the teacher was an unusual occurrence.  So, we'd often put a little more effort, a little more energy, a little more attention into our practice.

With classes meditation online, we don't need to put out that effort and so we may not take it as seriously as we would had we spent a week on a rickety Indian train.

In the same way we may not take the practice as seriously if it's a free meditation course, rather than some meditation classes which were a bit of a strain on our pocketbooks (the travel, if not the course itself).

Ultimately, it's still too early to tell if learning meditation online is better or worse are simply different than going on a Vipassana course or Zen meditation retreat or yoga retreat.  But the amazing opportunity is that with so many people learning meditation techniques online, it won't be very long until we possibly have some answers.

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