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
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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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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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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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 [...]
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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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In order to effectively tease out the effects of mental silence as opposed to the effects of other aspects of Sahaja Yoga meditation it was obviously necessary to use randomised controlled trial methodology. Having refined the practical approach in previous clinics it became possible to develop a standardised, instructional strategy whose structure could also be [...]
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This graph shows the mental health of people sorted by how frequently they meditate with the mental silence based Sahaja Yoga. The graph depicts a correlation between the frequency of meditation for people who meditate and their mental health score. Mental health was measured by the mental health subscale of the Short Form 36 questionnaire.
The [...]
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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 [...]
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