Strictly speaking from my own personal experience, I found that guided meditations are much more effective and helpful in building a daily habit of mindfulness. A couple reasons:
1) I love learning new techniques every day and this really motivates me to meditate daily. For instance - This morning, I meditated to Simon Moyes' new year meditation on Simple Habit and I learned how to associate a happy moment with an unhappy moment in my day and that was super interesting. I can't laern new techniques from unguided meditations.
2) When I meditate to a guided meditation, I build a personal relationship with certain meditation teachers (even though it is just through recordings) and this helps me to look forward to meditating daily. Perhaps I feel more accountable for meditating.
Guided meditations are substitutes for traditional group practice. Distributed group practice, if you will. The goal is to think of them as training and lessons for your own excursions into non-guided practice, just like taking swim lessons or spanish lessons may help you improve your practice on your own.
And like both of those examples, the real work is in the solo practice, venturing into your own struggle with your noisy brain, instead of relying on the soothing, centering, encouraging words of others, relying on yourself and training your own abilities.
and i have so far to go myself, but even then, i can tell you, guided is just a reminder of what i'm really supposed to be working on.
1) I love learning new techniques every day and this really motivates me to meditate daily. For instance - This morning, I meditated to Simon Moyes' new year meditation on Simple Habit and I learned how to associate a happy moment with an unhappy moment in my day and that was super interesting. I can't laern new techniques from unguided meditations.
2) When I meditate to a guided meditation, I build a personal relationship with certain meditation teachers (even though it is just through recordings) and this helps me to look forward to meditating daily. Perhaps I feel more accountable for meditating.