Welcome to the Meditation Research site. This site aims to share with you some of the scientifically studied phenomena associated with the state of consciousness called thoughtless awareness, an experiential phenomenon particularly associated with the practice of Sahaja Yoga meditation.

Contents

Blog Categories:

Meditation Research is frequently updated with articles on many topics featuring the most recent research and articles.

• General: News relating to the site and events.
• Meditation: Articles discussing the history of meditation, proposed mechanisms for meditation, studies exploring the effects of meditation, articles looking at documented adverse effects of meditation, articles discussing the cross cultural aspect of meditation and more.
• Sahaja Yoga Meditation: Articles describing Sahaja Yoga meditation (SYM), studies exploring the potential benefits of and mechanisms behind SYM, articles on the mental silence state central to SYM and more.
• Research: Here you’ll find summaries of studies, future research projects, articles describing the theories behind the methodology used when researching meditation and more.
• Alternative paradigms: Articles discussing the underlying Eastern philosophies of meditation including the kundalini and chakra.

Pages:

Meditation Research also hosts a collection of interesting articles and links:

• Summary of Research: Here you’ll find a series of articles describing the research that the creators of Meditation Research have carried out. This includes research on the origins of meditation, epilepsy, asthma, hot flushes, how meditation works, brain waves of a meditator, vibrational energy, eastern views of stress and living in the moment.
• Bibliography: A number of unsorted studies exploring meditation.
• Interesting articles: Interesting articles about meditation.
• Meditation Exercises: MP3s featuring guided meditation exercises.

Studies:

Meditation Research links to a number of interesting studies on a variety of topics:

• Asthma: Studies exploring the use of meditation to treat asthma.
• ADHD: Studies exploring the use of meditation to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
• Anxiety: Studies exploring the use of meditation to reduce anxiety.
• EEG: Studies discussing the analysis of a meditator’s brain with EEG.
• Epilepsy: Studies exploring the use of meditation to treat epilepsy.

This site was created by Dr Ramesh Manocha, is administered by Tristan Boyd, and features a number of  contributing authors. We hope to bring the outcomes of our research to you as it becomes available, and hope to share with you both our pilot research as well as published and peer-reviewed research. Please contact Dr Manocha if you have further queries.

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Latest posts from Meditation Research

Dr Ramesh Manocha investigates meditation as a stress management invervention
Dr Ramesh Manocha recently had a paper published titled “Using meditation for less stress and better wellbeing; A seminar for GPs”. The paper detailed a study in which 293 doctors were taught meditation in order to reduce stress and increase wellbeing. The abstract and full paper can be found here. Using meditation for less stress and better wellbeing

Mental silence as a taxonomy of meditation
Mental silence and its associated yogic philosophy may provide a basis for taxonomy of meditation that is practically useful in the delivery of healthcare. An intervention with a specific effect such as Sahaja Yoga meditation has a wide range of applications in medicine, psychology and neuroscience. It is particularly relevant to the growing field of [...]

Compliance with treatment
Like any other evaluation of therapeutics, the detectable effect of the intervention will be determined by the degree to which the participant complies with the treatment. This is particularly important in meditation research because meditation requires considerable active involvement and commitment. There are several ways to assess compliance, including attendance rates at supervised treatment sessions, [...]

The literature on meditation
An extensive search of the scientific literature identified 3,500 peer-reviewed publications that featured “meditation” as a key word. Yet, of these, only 135 (approximately 4%) fulfilled the very basic requirements of experimental evaluation, i.e. they were prospective trials using control groups and random allocation. Importantly, even within this subset of more rigorous studies, there is [...]

5 groups of meditation techniques
For my systematic analysis of meditation studies, because of the relatively small number of studies available for analysis, the many different meditation techniques were grouped into 5 thematically related categories. These were: Relaxation Response and studies describing the intervention as based on it. The MBSR and studies describing the intervention as based [...]