The Difference in Traditional and Contemporary Meditative Pathways (original) (raw)

Meditation as an Intervention for Health: A Framework for Understanding Meditation Research

We propose a framework for understanding meditation that can support greater scientific rigor in reporting meditation research, and selecting meditation health interventions. There is no consistent and thorough framework for describing meditation research interventions. This impedes rigor of meditation research design and interpretation of findings. This also limits meaningful comparisons across research studies. The audience for this article includes researchers, meditation experts, healthcare professionals, and those with interest in meditation. The framework describes the key components of a meditation intervention. We also discuss how meditation can effect individuals differently, and provide suggestions for describing the qualifications of the expert who designed the meditations in an intervention. The meditation framework supports (1) comparing different meditation interventions, and (2) understanding how meditation interventions lead to outcomes. We provide examples from a Yoga Therapy perspective of meditation (our domain of expertise), and from published research on meditation to illustrate applications of the meditation framework. The meditation framework provides a way of characterizing meditation interventions by distinguishing seven essential components. The first four components describe the meditation session (individual, object, experience, and immediate effects). Approach describes the foundation and source of a meditation practice. The outcome component represents both intended goals or reasons for prescribing the meditation intervention and other longer term effects that may occur. The engagement component refers to duration, spacing and frequency of doing the practice and quality of attention. These seven components can be applied to any type of meditation intervention. We explain the components of the framework and then offer examples. Our goal is to express the importance of having a framework for describing components of meditation across systems of knowledge and methods of application. We hope this article begins a dialogue with experts in other forms of meditation interventions, as they apply, adapt and respond to the proposed framework.

Issues and Methods in Meditation Research

Most research has been seen the growing interest in the neurobiological correlates of meditation. They omitted the philosophical aspects of meditation on human being and its wider implications on human. Hence the following issues like definition, study design, and its outcomes need to be study. In meditation research the effects of meditation practice need to examine and also how meditation works is need to study and examine. Some meditation techniques reduce pain, but how meditation affects the brain " s response to pain is not been studied. The brain structural differences between a well-matched sample of long-term meditators and controls using whole-brain cortical thickness also need to analysze. This paper describes the issues related to meditation and their effects on the study of meditation with some explanation of methods in meditation research.

Meditation Meets Behavioural Medicine: The Story of Experimental Research on Meditation

Imprint Academic, 2000

In book: Cognitive Models and Spiritual Maps: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Religious Experience. This paper juxtaposes Asian spiritual narratives on meditation alongside medical and scientific narratives that emphasize meditation's efficacy in mitigating distress and increasing well-being. After proposing a working definition of meditation that enables it usefully to be distinguished from categories of similar practices such as prayer, I examine meditation's role in Mind/Body medicine in the West. Here, I survey a number of scientific studies of meditation, including the work of Dr. Herbert Benson and his colleagues who examine a meditational variant they call the ‘Relaxation Response', to examine the breadth of efficacy claims made on behalf of the complex and multidimensional grouping of diverse practices we have come to as ‘meditation'. Among other positive outcomes, meditation has been credited with reducing blood pressure, anxiety, addiction, and stress, while Relaxation Response has been shown to decrease sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity, metabolism, pain, anxiety, depression, hostility, and stress. I conclude the paper by suggesting that findings from cognitive neuroscience on the subject of visual imagery can be used to elucidate genres of meditative practice that focus on internal visualization sequences, and I use practices from the Rnying ma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism to illustrate why certain integral aspects of meditation forever will remain beyond scientific grasp.

Meditation practices for health: state of the research

Evidence report/technology assessment, 2007

To review and synthesize the state of research on a variety of meditation practices, including: the specific meditation practices examined; the research designs employed and the conditions and outcomes examined; the efficacy and effectiveness of different meditation practices for the three most studied conditions; the role of effect modifiers on outcomes; and the effects of meditation on physiological and neuropsychological outcomes. Comprehensive searches were conducted in 17 electronic databases of medical and psychological literature up to September 2005. Other sources of potentially relevant studies included hand searches, reference tracking, contact with experts, and gray literature searches. A Delphi method was used to develop a set of parameters to describe meditation practices. Included studies were comparative, on any meditation practice, had more than 10 adult participants, provided quantitative data on health-related outcomes, and published in English. Two independent rev...