I meditate. I don’t know what it is called. I just call it meditation. All the other things, imo, are not meditation. Not to say they are bad - just that to the extent that the word “meditation” means something, these things do not fall under that definition.

To me, meditation means intentionally focusing attention on one particular thing, refocusing whenever you notice attention has drifted, and doing this with the intention of improving your ability to focus your attention.

Box breathing isn’t meditation because you are consciously trying to change your breath.

Any kind of activity where you are highly focused, I suppose, could be used as a kind of meditation-adjacent practice. But unless your overall intention is improving your ability to focus your attention, then it isn’t really meditation. So it someone says, for example, that tennis is how they meditate because they enter a flow state, I would be doubtful - most people playing tennis do it because it is good exercise, it is fun, it is social, they like to win, and they get a tan. These are all fine goals - but if the goal isn’t explicitly and exclusively the improvement of focusing attention, then imo it is not meditation.

I’m split on the specific kinds of “meditation” that I hear about. Eg, loving kindness meditation, transcendental meditation, anything that requires consciously moving the body or controlling the breath, anything that requires repeating a mantra or visualizing a feeling, image, or sensation. Maybe these are just more advanced forms of meditation that I’ll appreciate when I’m better at normal meditation. But intuitively, I tend to think of them as, like, derivative techniques of meditation, rather than meditation itself. I’m also always skeptical when someone who has been meditating for two weeks starts talking about how they are practicing “X” kind of meditation. Assuming that these more specific kinds of meditation could be considered meditation at all, imo, practitioners should focus on basic meditation first until they are able to maintain stable attention before they get all fancy.

For me, meditation is sitting down and focusing on the sensations of the breath as it passes over the tip of my nose, and refocusing my attention there when I notice it has drifted. That’s it.