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 [...]
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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, [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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It seems obvious that the non-specific effect of any intervention is closely related to its credibility and plausibility as a therapeutic intervention i.e. its “face validity”. Now, some of the effects associated with meditation must be non-specific, i.e. comprising a mixture of placebo, therapeutic contact, spontaneous improvement, and so on, whereas some, hopefully, are specific [...]
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Methodological validity is therefore the major challenge to meditation research, and the chief problems within this broad category are first, the use of appropriate control strategies, second, the need for randomisation and other strategies to exclude bias and third, a definition of meditation that allows inter-trial comparability and remains consistent with the traditional ideas of [...]
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Examining randomised controlled trials exploring meditation in my review, control methods were presumptively categorized according to their face-validity into low, moderate or high face validity categories.
The low face-validity controls used strategies that were:
• Passive and unstructured: Participants were involved in minimal or no activity relating to the trial and had no interaction with researchers [...]
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In view of the seriousness of some of the reactions described above it is questionable whether all forms of meditation can be viewed as “generally safe for general consumption”. Moreover, given that recent reviews of meditation have clearly demonstrated a lack of convincing evidence for a specific effect, the importance of developing a comprehensive understanding [...]
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Follow-up data, data obtained some time after the trial, is important as it gives an indication of how durable the effects of meditation might be. Unlike modern Western therapeutic thinking however, meditation was not originally designed to be used as a course of treatment so much as to be part of an ongoing lifestyle thus [...]
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