2 Ways Meditation Heals

The Oxford Handbook of Meditation is the most comprehensive volume on meditation today, written by leading world experts. It is planned for publication on December 21, 2021. In the chapter Meditation and the Brain in Health and Disease (Fox and Cahn, 2021, p 433), meditation is defined as:

“… a family of mental training practices aimed at monitoring and regulating attention, perception, emotion and physiology.”

To find some orientation points in this vast domain, I start with two themes that are central in many scientific studies of meditation.

A variety of meditation as mental training has been part of all world cultures for at least 2,500 years. Meditation can be found in many variations as part of religious, spiritual, philosophical and mystical traditions.

The science of meditation, on the other hand, is remarkably young. The first scientific studies date from about 50 years ago. The last decade has seen an unprecedented acceleration in meditation research.

William James was one of the first who took a psychological perspective on meditation. In his ground-breaking work The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901) he wrote about meditation as the cultivation of extraordinary states of consciousness.

Much of what we know today about meditation comes from Asian traditions: Daoist, Buddhist ,and yoga. It is important to realize that their central concepts are often written in the old languages of Pali and Sanskrit. Those languages are open to multiple interpretations.

Fusing their meanings with modern psychological concepts is not an easy task, in part because many of the central psychological concepts—such as emotion and consciousness—do not have standard definitions on which all of science agrees. The result is that we are often mixing complex ideas with popular interpretations.

Our modern ideas about mindfulness and yoga are often examples of this fusing. Both are very much in fashion as psychological aids. Sometimes comforting New Age jargon is used to promote mindfulness and yoga, which confuses the timeless and deeply valuable practices and its marketing.

A First Theme in the Science of Meditation

A first, millennia-old theme of meditation reveals itself in the Introduction: Understanding and Studying Meditation (Farias, Brazier & Lalljee, p 5). Here we can find that meditation:

“involves actions of attention-sustained concentration with the aim of moving away from the usual flux of thoughts, sensations and feelings.”

This theme goes back to the classical Daoist meditations (400-100 BC), as “the inner cultivations” from the book Zhuangzi. It also goes back to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (300 BCE -300 CE) as the cessation of our mental fluctuations.

The theme of relaxation and calming the mind plays a significant role in Buddhist meditations. One of its foundational trainings is called shamata, as learning the technique of resting the mind in its natural state. The time-tested methods offered by those rich wisdom traditions are still hyper-relevant and among the most-used foundational practices in meditation today.

An increasing number of scientific studies on biophysical changes can be found that support the self-healing qualities of meditation. Dozens of scientific articles with innovative research on meditation-based strategies to cultivate well-being are published by Richard Davidson’s Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience and his Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

An increasing number of scientific research supports the claim that meditation as a mental training can deeply pacify our mental activity, which improves our thoughts and emotion regulation and can change our personal traits and even our genome for the better (Goleman & Davidson, 2017).

A Second Theme in the Science of Meditation

A second theme that can be found in many meditative traditions (Farias, Brazier & Lalljee, p 5) is a transformed conscious mind:

“aim to arrive at a transformed state of consciousness categorically different from the everyday self.”

In this transformed conscious mind, we can discover a new perspective on our perceptions, thoughts and emotions and the way their dynamics shape our everyday self.

The discovery of our most valued self, as I described in my previous post, is one of these transformational experiences. Our valued self is defined as “the integrative knowing that emerges from becoming a whole person trying to express the values of being: truth, goodness, beauty, and love.” Meditation is the lifelong training and cultivation of a much-valued conscious mind that is categorically different from our everyday conscious mind.

After decades of studying, teaching, and practicing mental training, I could observe how the meaning of meditation has shifted from New Age vagueness to strange and unusual, and more recently toward a scientifically validated cure for our current mental crises: the epidemics of depressions, burnout and sleeping disorders; the confusion, intolerance, violence, polarisation and the fear that accompany the current Covid pandemic.

So Why Meditate?

The science of meditation is growing fast but is still young. Most of its research today is focusing on psychobiological health effects. More unexplored fields are the possibilities of meditation in learning and education, emotion regulation, relational intelligence, creativity, and, most of all, meditation as a peace-making tool.

The relevance of meditation as a much-needed mental training will only grow in a world where 9 to 10 billion precious human minds must learn to live together this century on a breathtakingly beautiful but extremely fragile planet, slowly warming and making life more unpredictable than ever.