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
Read Full Post »
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 [...]
Read Full Post »
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, [...]
Read Full Post »
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 [...]
Read Full Post »
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 [...]
Read Full Post »
With regard to the physiology of meditation, research designs can be divided into 3 categories:
1) Case studies of meditation featuring small numbers of participants in which there is no attempt to control for confounding variables. While these are useful for generating hypotheses, they do not provide scientifically valid insights into meditation’s purportedly unique effects.
2) Own-control [...]
Read Full Post »
Sahaja Yoga meditation (SYM) may be helpful in mitigating the experience of hot flushes (HFs) in menopause via a number of possible pathways. First, like many other forms of meditation, SYM has been shown to reduce arousal in laboratory experiments. An interesting study on stress-induced HFs however, suggests that simple reduction of arousal may not [...]
Read Full Post »
The observed relationship between Sahaja Yoga meditation (SYM) practices and mental health are not similarly as strong for measures of physical health. In many ways this might be expected since the intervention is primarily focused on a mental experience with the specific aim of reducing negative affect, thinking patterns and related behaviours. Mood, thoughts and [...]
Read Full Post »
Neki (1975) describes the sahaja state as a mental health ideal in more detail, asserting that it combines the elements of illumination (the direct experience of reality, devoid of the filtering effect of the mind), equipoise (the absence of emotional turbulence) and its replacement with a sense of underlying joy and spontaneity. It creates a [...]
Read Full Post »
The Jadad scoring system is a widely used method of rating randomised controlled trials for basic methodological rigour. The Jadad system is inadequately structured to meaningfully discern the methodological standards of meditation trials. This is because the unique issues associated with controlling for non-specific effects and sources of bias are not adequately represented in this [...]
Read Full Post »
