I learned to meditate when I was nine years old, and it has proved to be an invaluable technique for dealing with stress and being at peace with who I am.
One of my favorite memories growing up is meditating with my parents. When I would come home from school, my brother and I would settle in for the afternoon, do our homework, watch some television and usually before dinner spend 15 minutes meditating with my mom. And on other occasions, when my dad (Deepak Chopra) was leading a seminar or speaking to a big group of people, we would meditate with dozens, if not, hundreds of other people.
While meditation is fundamentally about self-exploration, the coherence from meditating with others makes it personally and socially more powerful. While some are skeptical, there have been numerous studies that have shown that a large group of people meditating together has a measurable effect on the greater population.
For me personally, meditating with others helps me feel more connected. The experience of knowing that silence I experience in my meditation is the same silence that the person sitting next to me is tapping into is quite moving.
Meditating together also lets us come together in shared intentions for change. On a global scale, we have witnessed many times how a small handful of people strongly unified by a common intent can profoundly influence a larger group of people. Great global movements for peace, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Gandhi, have always begun with a coming together of people who want peace for the greater good.
How To Start a Group Meditation
The easiest way to start meditating in a group is to simply start a weekly meditation practice with your family or friends. Dedicate at least one day in the week for you to meditate with your spouse, your closest friends or your immediate family members for 10 to 30 minutes. You will be amazed by how much your relationship deepens when you share a meditative practice with your loved ones on a regular basis. 


In addition to group prayer meetings at temples of worship, many group meditation meet-ups are popping up in more cities and neighborhoods. Go to meetup.org and see if you can find a regular meditation group in your neck of the woods. If there aren't any, start one yourself.
Here is a visual guide that may inspire you.
There is power in numbers, and there is no power like a large group of people whose minds are attuned to the same frequency of peace, compassion and joy.
On Saturday June 25, I will be leading a public, group meditation session in San Francisco at Union Square. Click here to register online to reserve your spot at this free public event. For those of you who cannot physically make it to the event, I encourage you to RSVP at our Facebook event page to show your commitment to meditating at that same time wherever you are in the world.
Mallika Chopra is a meditation instructor and the founder of www.intent.com.
Follow Mallika Chopra on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mallikachopra
Gabrielle Bernstein: My Meditative Memoir
Meditation Meetup Groups - Meditation Meetups
Group Meditation Reduces Terrorism - Research Report
In other words- religion.
Right ?
http://www.eckharttolletv.com/free-meditation/
Such sad cynicism. As you very well know, the "large groups of meditators" that you had opportunity to participate with were all TMers, and often numbered in the thousands.
Lately, the TM organization has started teach TM in public schools in large numbers. Over 100,000 students are practicing TM in various schools around the world, in groups. Potentially, the largest project is Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where there is a waiting list of one million kids in the one thousand schools in that one city, all by itself. Should the money be found, eventually all one million kids will be practicing meditation together in their home rooms -in one large, city-wide group.
Your father abandoned his principles when he left the TMO and you blog around with talking about "100's of people" meditating in a group.
Sad.
Having said that, I think an injustice is done when she throws out the concept of creating social coherence through generic group meditation, then cites the research on group TM practice and suggests that all you have to do to create this effect is get any group of people together to pray, chant, do any form of meditation, etc.
The research on TM that she cites specifically states that the requirement for creating widespread social coherence is large groups of people experiencing pure transcendence and heightened EEG coherence. Most other forms of meditation don't emphasize or even discuss transcending, but are about an entirely different and more localized experience (such as watching your thoughts or breathing, visualizing, focusing on an idea, etc.). TM is not the only way to transcend but it's the only practice found to consistently produce transcendence and create EEG coherence, even in new meditators, and it's the only practice shown to affect social indicators. Maybe other practices will be researched and found to have a similar affect, but at this point the sociological studies on TM are it.
To change society through meditation, we need many people consistently diving within and touching that deepest level of life where we're all interconnected. You need a technique specifically designed for transcending.
Here I would like to mention about my meditation blog: http://www.meditationtechniques.co.cc/