Meditation

• 1. Introduction

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  Meditation is a practice in which a person trains attention and awareness, working to detach from reflexive, discursive thinking and reach a mentally clear, emotionally calm state. The unusual rule built into many definitions is that the practitioner does not judge the meditation process itself. That single idea, of watching without grading, sits at the center of a practice that has no single agreed definition.

  The earliest records of meditation, called dhyana, appear in the Upanishads of India. From there the thread runs through Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism, and reaches into Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the form of prayer, remembrance and devotion to God. The same word now describes a monk in a monastery and an office worker reducing stress at a desk.

  How can one term cover practices so unlike each other that researchers cannot agree on what counts? Why do Buddhist prayer beads carry exactly 108 beads while a Muslim misbaha carries 99? What happens inside the body when breathing slows to three or four breaths per minute? And why does a practice marketed for calm sometimes produce hallucinations, or make people more selfish? The answers stretch across thousands of years and several continents.

• 2. The Definition Problem

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  Bond and colleagues, in 2009, ran a five-round Delphi study with a panel of seven experts trained in meditation research to settle what meditation actually is. They named three essential criteria for any meditation practice: the use of a defined technique, logic relaxation, and a self-induced state or mode. Other features mattered but were not essential, including psychophysical relaxation, a self-focus anchor, and a religious or philosophical context.

  No definition of necessary and sufficient criteria for meditation has won widespread acceptance within the modern scientific community. The trouble is that the word covers dissimilar practices across many cultures. In popular usage, almost anything claimed to train attention or teach calmness or compassion gets called meditation.

  Ornstein noted that most techniques of meditation are only artificially separable from an entire system of practice and belief. Monks meditate, but they also follow codified rules, live in monasteries, and take part in local rites and rituals as one unified set of practices. Taylor observed that even within a faith such as Hindu or Buddhist, individual schools and teachers may teach distinct types of meditation.

• 3. Focused Versus Open

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  In the West, meditation techniques have often been sorted into two broad categories that in practice are frequently combined: focused or concentrative meditation, and open monitoring or mindfulness meditation. A practitioner can focus intensively on one object, or attend to all mental events entering the field of awareness, or both at once.

  Focused methods include attention to the breath, to a feeling such as metta or loving-kindness, to a koan, or to a mantra as in transcendental meditation. Open monitoring methods include mindfulness, shikantaza, and other awareness states. Another typology splits meditation four ways: concentrative, generative, receptive, and reflective. The generative branch develops qualities like compassion, while the reflective branch involves systematic investigation.

  Matko and Sedlmeier, in 2019, called the common focused-versus-open division into question. They argued for two orthogonal dimensions, activation and amount of body orientation, and proposed seven clusters including mindful observation, body-centered meditation, mantra meditation, and meditation with movement. Jonathan Shear added a third option entirely, describing transcendental meditation as automatic self-transcending, where there is no attempt to sustain any particular condition at all. In that practice, once started, the technique is reported to transcend its own activity and disappear.

  The Buddhist tradition draws the line differently, between samatha, or calm abiding, and vipassana, insight. Mindfulness of breathing calms the mind, and that calmed mind can then investigate the nature of reality. A similar pairing appears in the Inchagiri Sampradaya, where mantra-recitation quiets the mind before self-inquiry asks what the source is of the I that is aware.

• 4. Postures And Beads

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  Padmasana, the full-lotus posture, along with the half-lotus, cross-legged sitting, seiza, and kneeling, are popular meditative postures across Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Jainism. Meditation is also done while walking, known as kinhin, while performing a simple task mindfully, known as samu, or while lying down in shavasana. A 2018 pilot study compared three common supports and found the zafu cushion gave the most stability against side-to-side sway, while recommending chairs for people with back pain.

  The Hindu japa mala carries 108 beads, a figure with spiritual significance tied to the energy of the sounds equating to Om. Buddhist prayer beads also have 108 beads, but for a different reason: Buddhism counts 108 human passions that impede enlightenment, and each bead is counted once as a person recites a mantra around the mala. The Muslim misbaha carries 99 beads. The Roman Catholic rosary holds five sets of ten small beads.

  Materials carry their own devotion. Beads made from the seeds of rudraksha trees are considered sacred by devotees of Shiva, while followers of Vishnu revere the wood of the Tulsi plant, also known as Holy Basil. The frequency of practice varies as widely as the tools. The Transcendental Meditation technique recommends twenty minutes twice per day, while Richard Davidson has cited research saying benefits can come from only eight minutes daily.

  One tradition trades the soft cushion for a stick. T. Griffith Foulk recounted that in the Rinzai monastery where he trained in the mid-1970s, monks sitting earnestly and well were shown respect by being hit vigorously and often, while laggards were ignored or given little taps. Nobody asked about the meaning of the stick, nobody explained, and nobody ever complained about its use.

• 5. Eastern Roots

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  According to Gavin Flood, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad describes meditation when it states that, having become calm and concentrated, one perceives the self within oneself. Wynne points to the middle Upanishads and the Mahabharata, including the Bhagavad Gita, as the earliest clear references. Rossano even suggested that the emergence of focused attention may have contributed to the latest phases of human biological evolution.

  Patanjali's Yoga sutras, dated around 400 CE, outline eight limbs leading to kaivalya, or aloneness. The outer four cover ethical discipline, rules, physical postures, and breath control. The inner limbs begin with withdrawal from the senses and move through one-pointedness of mind and meditation to the final state of samadhi. In Advaita Vedanta the individual self is recognized as illusory and identical with the non-dual Atman-Brahman, while in the dualistic Samkhya school the Self is called Purusha, a pure consciousness undisturbed by Prakriti, or nature.

  Jainism holds three jewels, the Ratnatraya: right perception and faith, right knowledge, and right conduct. Its meditation aims to reach and remain in the pure state of soul, where the practitioner strives to be just a knower-seer, the gyata-drashta. In sansathan vichaya, one of its contemplation techniques, a person thinks about the vastness of the universe and the loneliness of the soul.

  Buddhists pursue meditation along the path toward awakening and nirvana, with bhavana, meaning development, as the closest word in their classical languages. The Theravada tradition postulates over fifty methods for developing mindfulness based on the Satipatthana Sutta, and forty for concentration based on the Visuddhimagga. The Silk Road transmission carried these practices to China in the 2nd century CE and to Japan in the 6th century CE.

• 6. Taoist And Abrahamic Paths

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  Livia Kohn distinguishes three basic types of Taoist meditation: concentrative, insight, and visualization. The Guanzi essay Neiye, or Inward Training, from the late 4th century BCE, is the oldest received writing on qi cultivation and breath-control meditation. It advises that when you enlarge your mind and let go of it, and your body is calm and unmoving, you can maintain the One and discard the myriad disturbances. The Zhuangzi, around the 3rd century BCE, records zuowang, or sitting forgetting, in which Yan Hui sloughs off his limbs and trunk and becomes identical with the Transformational Thoroughfare.

  Judaism has used meditative practices for thousands of years. In Genesis 24:63 the patriarch Isaac goes lasuach in the field, a term all commentators read as some type of meditation. The Old Testament gives two Hebrew words for it: haga, to sigh or murmur, and siha, to muse. One of the best-known forms in early Jewish mysticism was the work of the Merkabah, from a root meaning chariot of God. In modern practice, hitbodedut, explained especially in the method of Rabbi Nachman of Breslav, derives from the word for being alone.

  Christian meditation is a structured attempt to reflect upon the revelations of God. The monk Guigo II, in the 12th century, defined four formal steps as a ladder: lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio, meaning read, ponder, pray, contemplate. Western Christian meditation grew from Lectio Divina, the 6th-century Benedictine practice of Bible reading, and was developed further by Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Avila in the 16th century. On the 28th of April 2021, Pope Francis told a General Audience that the ancients used to say the organ of prayer is the heart.

  In Islam, dhikr means remembering and mentioning God through repetition of the 99 Names of God, a practice traced to the 8th or 9th century. It is juxtaposed with fikr, thinking, which leads to knowledge. By the 12th century, Sufi followers practiced breathing controls and the repetition of holy words. Dervishes of certain Sufi orders practice whirling, a form of physically active meditation. In the Bahai Faith, which Bahaullah founded without specifying any particular form, each person is free to choose their own.

• 7. Coming West

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  The World Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893, was the landmark event that increased Western awareness of meditation. It was the first time Western audiences on American soil received Asian spiritual teachings from Asians themselves. Swami Vivekananda founded Vedanta ashrams afterward, Anagarika Dharmapala lectured at Harvard on Theravada Buddhist meditation in 1904, and Soyen Shaku toured in 1907 teaching Zen.

  Ideas about Eastern meditation had been seeping into American popular culture even before the American Revolution, then poured in during the era of the transcendentalists, especially between the 1840s and the 1880s. In the 1960s a new surge began, as the rise of communist political power in Asia led many spiritual teachers to take refuge in Western countries, often as refugees. Alongside the spiritual forms, secular meditation took root, emphasizing stress reduction and self-improvement rather than spiritual growth.

  The 2012 US National Health Interview Survey of 34,525 subjects found that 8 percent of US adults used meditation. Among workers the figure was 10 percent, up from 8 percent in 2002. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School tested meditators from various disciplines and, in 1975, published The Relaxation Response, outlining his own version of meditation for relaxation. The American psychologist Patricia Carrington developed a similar technique called Clinically Standardized Meditation in the 1970s.

  Workplaces followed. As of 2016 around a quarter of US employers were using stress reduction initiatives. Google has offered more than a dozen meditation courses, with Search Inside Yourself running since 2007, while General Mills offers a Mindful Leadership Program Series combining meditation, yoga and dialogue.

• 8. What The Body Does

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  During meditation, oxygen consumption falls by an average of 10 to 20 percent over the first three minutes. By comparison, during sleep oxygen consumption decreases around 8 percent over four or five hours. For meditators who have practiced for years, breath rate can drop to three or four breaths per minute, and brain waves slow from the usual beta or alpha of waking and relaxation to much slower delta and theta waves.

  Meditation lowers heart rate, breathing frequency, stress hormones, lactate levels, and sympathetic nervous system activity, along with a modest decline in blood pressure. Those who had meditated for two or three years were already found to have low blood pressure. Studies show a moderate effect to reduce pain, but there is insufficient evidence for any effect on positive mood, attention, eating habits, sleep, or body weight. A 2014 review found that two to six months of mindfulness practice could produce moderate improvements in pain management, anxiety and depression.

  The research is not uniformly flattering. A meta-review in Scientific Reports found the evidence on compassion very weak, noting that effects were only significant against passive control groups, so watching a nature video might produce similar outcomes. Hafenbrack and colleagues, in a 2022 study of 1,400 participants, found focused-breathing meditation can dampen the desire to make amends after transgressions. Poulin and colleagues, in 2021, found mindfulness can increase the trait of selfishness, with 691 participants showing decreased prosocial behavior after a mindfulness induction.

  The harm can run deeper. Farias and colleagues, in 2020, reported a prevalence of 8.3 percent adverse effects, similar to those reported for psychotherapy in general, most common in people with a history of anxiety and depression. Schlosser and colleagues, in 2019, found that of 1,232 regular meditators, about a quarter reported particularly unpleasant meditation-related experiences. These detrimental effects are well documented across East Asia, where many traditional treatments have long been prescribed for what is diagnosed as zouhuorumo.