The diversity, and apparent impotence, of many meditative practices makes the construction of sham meditation quite feasible since researchers can develop rationales to justify almost any method that approximates the expectations of trial participants.

For instance, Smith’s (1995) RCT compared TM to an imitation exercise designed to closely mimic the entire technique, except for the proprietary mantra. Forty four participants practiced one of the 2 techniques for 24 weeks, with the same instructions for frequency and duration only to find that no difference between the 2 methods was detectable. This study used well validated self-reporting measures shown in other studies to be quite sensitive to the effects of meditative practices.

Similarly Dua (1992) compared a form of meditation that he developed to a “negative thought reduction” method as well as to a “negative thought enhancement placebo” for the management of anger in a small RCT and found no differences between the practices in any of the outcome measures at the end of the treatment period.

On the other hand, Wolf (2003) compared a meditation based on a traditional Sanskrit mantra (the maha mantra) with a pseudo mantra and observed substantial differences in post treatment outcomes.

In smaller trials, Rai (1988, 1993) observed a number of significant differences when he compared Sahaja Yoga meditation to “mimicking exercises” in the treatment of asthma, hypertension and stress.

Dr Ramesh Manocha

It may not be practically possible to devise and implement an ideal control method for meditation trials, nevertheless it is important to select a strategy that approximates that ideal. The bare minimum criteria for a control process in meditation research should therefore be:

• First, high face validity as a therapeutic/stress management intervention in its own right. It should actually appear to be a credible meditation technique if that is the expectation of participants.
• Second, a process that involves relaxation and reduction of somatic arousal since this is the nearest conventionally understood phenomenon that meditation resembles and from which it needs to be distinguished.

Given these considerations there are two ideal strategies: sham meditation and the head-to-head comparison.

This graph shows a comparison of the health of a group of experienced mental silence (Sahaja Yoga) meditators and three other groups including a group of Presbyterian clergy from America, a group of non-mental silence meditators, and the general Australian population. Health was measured using the Short Form 36 survey. The mental silence meditators’ health profile is generally better then the other groups. These results demonstrate an association between the mental silence experience and positive health.

From Manocha R and German E. Meditation, Health and Quality of Life: A Census of a Meditating Population.

Dr Ramesh Manocha

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 as a result of being allocated to the control group (e.g. waiting list, no treatment, self-directed reading, or referral to community resources). This kind of comparator controls for minor non-specific effects, such as regression to the mean, the natural history of disease states and environmental factors common to all participants. It does not however, control for any non-specific effects that may be elicited by behaviour therapies.

The moderate face-validity controls use strategies:
• Passive and structured. These involved some sort of regular and structured interaction with personnel associated with the experiment (e.g. regular lectures, specific reading, structured educational sessions on unrelated topics, regular blood pressure checks). This controls for the same confounders as Category 1 in addition to the effects of therapeutic contact and sense of active involvement.
• That were active in nature and generated some expectation of benefit but did not have effects or credibility as either a method of relaxation or meditation e.g. support groups, education about health factors measured in the study, or lectures on stress and lifestyle management. This controls for the same as Categories 2 and 3 in addition to the effects of social support, improved lifestyle, etc. Social support has been repeatedly demonstrated to be effective in improving mood and quality of life and reducing the severity of disease symptoms. “Standard treatment” was included in this category.

High face-validity controls use strategies that were:
• That were active in nature but not designed to generate significant expectation of therapeutic benefit (e.g. exercise). This controls for the same as Category 2 in addition to the effects of regular physical activity. Regular physical exercise has been shown to improve mood.
• Active in nature, generated some expectation of benefit and elicited the simple physiological effects on rest but did not have specific credibility as a meditative method (e.g. progressive muscle relaxation, other relaxation methods, hypnosis, biofeedback, psychotherapy).
• The same as above but also had credibility as a meditative method (e.g. meditation techniques, strategies designed to convincingly mimic meditation) or constituted a legitimate form of psychotherapy (e.g. desensitisation, cognitive behaviour therapy, counselling).

Dr Ramesh Manocha

The graph represents the results of a survey conducted on long term Sahaja Yoga meditators. They were asked the question “how often do you achieve thoughtless awareness/ mental silence for a few minutes or more?” Almost half of those surveyed responded that they achieved mental silence “several times per day or more”.

Dr Ramesh Manocha

Sahaja is one of a number of terms that have been used to describe the trans-mind condition. Sahaja is derived from the Sanskrit saha, meaning “together” and ja, meaning “born” and can be translated to mean “innate”. It is a term that has long been associated with Indian mystical thought and practice, although its popularity has fluctuated as different Indian spiritual movements encouraged, revised or ignored it. Davidson provides seven contexts in which sahaja has been used over the recorded history of Indian, especially Buddhist, spiritual thought. The most pertinent to this discussion include the assertion that sahaja is:

“[A] fundamental, irreducible condition, decidedly a noun. It is roughly equivalent to svabh¯ava or svar ¯upa, and is used to described the inherent and inalienable attributes that exist irrespective of accidental circumstances.”

And,

“The present moment when one thing occurs with another, a temporal value differentiated from the prior and subsequent moments, when the two items were not associated.” (Davidson, 2002)

Synonymous terms and ideas include jivan mukta, “Buddha state” and “liberation”. Modern Western equivalent descriptions might include, but are not restricted to, “unitive state”, “self-realisation”, “self-actualisation”, “peak experience”, “sainthood” and “state of grace”.

Sahaja signifies one’s natural or spontaneous self, divested of all external influences and the mental conditioning produced by them. This natural state is demonstrated by young children, for example, who are free of the complex adult mind and its attendant pretences, “hang-ups” and neuroses. The sahaja state flows naturally to the one who has attained the depths of meditation and is therefore a logical consequence of the mental silence or “trans-mind” principle — a kind of renascent freedom. It can be described as the optimal state in which the body, the psyche and the soul find a synergistic integration to realise the potentiality that exists within each human being.

Dr Ramesh Manocha

Meditation is widely perceived in the West as an effective method of reducing stress, and enhancing wellbeing. In Australia, a survey conducted by Kaldor (2002) of a randomly selected but representative sample drawn from the state of Western Australia (n=1,033) found that 11% of respondents had practiced meditation at least once. The Australian Community Survey (ACS), conducted by the National Church Life Survey (2004) found that 1.5 million Australians had tried meditation within 12 months of the time of the survey and that while 29% of those surveyed found prayer to be a source of peace and wellbeing, 24% had used meditation to achieve the same effect! Only 21% reported church attendance as a source of peace or wellbeing. In fact the ACS reports that although only about 20% of Australians attend church monthly or more often “around 33% of Australians pray or meditate at least weekly”.

This situation in Australia reflects trends in other Western countries. In 2002 a National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), undertaken by the Centers [sic] for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States administered to 31,000 representative adults, demonstrated that 8% of respondents had practiced meditation at some time. That biomedically trained physicians in Australia were also advising patients about the therapeutic effects of meditation, was demonstrated when Pirrotta conducted a survey of Australian GPs in 2000.

Dr Ramesh Manocha

Sample size is obviously a key factor in determining the validity and generality of trial outcomes. It needs to be determined carefully to ensure that the research time, effort and support costs invested in any clinical trial are not wasted. Ideally, clinical trials should be large enough to detect reliably the smallest possible differences in the primary outcome with treatment that are considered clinically worthwhile. My review found that it was common for studies to be “underpowered”, failing to detect even large treatment effects because of inadequate sample size suggesting that resources may have been wasted for want of a slightly larger sample. Some ethics committees may object to recruiting patients into a study that does not have a large enough sample size for the trial to deliver meaningful information. Despite the importance of appropriate sample size, only 12 studies reported the use of a sample size calculation.
It is a widely accepted rule of thumb that trials with 30 or less participants per treatment arm are unsuited to conventional statistical analysis. In fact trials with less than 15 participants per treatment arm, while useful for generating hypotheses for further research, are not at all reliable for making conclusive statements. In my review, 78 studies used 30 participants or less per treatment arm . In fact 17 studies used 10 or less participants per treatment arm, making any kind of analysis futile (although this did not stop the investigators from conducting statistical analyses), whereas only 42 studies used more than 30 participants per treatment arm.

Dr Ramesh Manocha

Meditation and its underlying ideas are increasingly popular in Western society but the practice itself has been subjected to little high quality scientific scrutiny.

This website describes the outcomes of the Meditation Research Programme, a serious scientific endeavour aimed at addressing this deficiency.

Some of our key projects, and their implications for meditation research include:

A comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis of the entire English-speaking database of randomised controlled trials clearly demonstrates that the extant data is characterised by a number of methodological and conceptual flaws. As a result there is currently no consistent evidence of a specific effect associated with meditation. The most fundamentally important of these flaws, we propose, is the lack of a consistent and meaningful definition of meditation.

To explore the salience of the mental silence concept we conducted a survey of 348 meditators who used a single homogenous form of meditation called Sahaja Yoga which focuses on the experience of mental silence as its defining feature, to assess their functional health and its relationship with their meditative practices. This survey demonstrated that these meditators had not only better mental and physical health but also that a consistent relationship between health, especially mental health, and self-reported experience of mental silence existed.

To investigate the possibility of whether or not this relationship was causal, a series of increasingly rigorous clinical studies were implemented. Two separate observational and case control studies of participants suffering from 1)menopausal symptoms, and 2) attention deficit hyperactivity disorder demonstrated promising outcomes. These were followed by a small but well-designed RCT of meditation for asthma, then the largest RCT of meditation for occupational stress currently in the literature. The latter two studies were specifically designed to exclude non-specific “placebo” effects. The outcomes of these studies provided strong evidence that mental silence is associated with a specific, therapeutic effect.

Finally, in a heuristic physiological study mental silence meditators manifested reductions in skin temperature during meditation thereby contradicting the “reduced physiological arousal” conceptualisation of meditation. This and other data are discussed and the possibility that the mental silence experience is associated with a unique pattern of physiological activity is proposed.

In conclusion, there is credible evidence to support the idea that Sahaja Yoga meditation, and hence the mental silence experience that typifies it, is associated with unique effects.

Future studies that focus on further examination of the mental silence state and potential mechanisms by which its specific effects may occur with emphasis on immunogenetic markers and neuroimaging are now under consideration.

Dr Ramesh Manocha

Of great interest is that the yoga tradition does not just describe philosophical, moral, metaphysical associations between mind, behaviour and health but actually describes the mechanism by which they are interconnected. This is the system of chakras (energy plexuses) and nadis (energy channels). Described since ancient times, the physical body is said to be energized via a complex network of 72,000 nadis and their associated chakras, not unlike the ancient Western understandings of the four “humors”—blood, bile, phlegm and pneuma. Yogic exercises and disciplines are directed at manipulating the subtle energetic system in order to bring about shifts in energy flux which not only impact on physical function, but also on cognitive style, mood and consciousness.

States of enlightened consciousness, whether they be described as self-realization, moksha or sahaja can be characterized by the awakening of an energy called kundalini. This energy is said to lie dormant at or near the base of the spine. At the time of awakening it rises through the spine to enter the brain and then exit via the crown of the head. The kundalini has been described variously and has been compared to many other psycho-cultural and archetypal symbols. For a useful diagramme, see Subbarayappa, 1997.

The ancient subtle-energetic mechanics of the chakra system may offer important clues in the quest to comprehensively describe and integrate the otherwise rather disparate psycho-physiological pathways that are coming to be recognized in modern science.

Dr Ramesh Manocha