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 correlation was analysed and found to have a correlation coefficient of +0.36 with p<0.001.
oneMeditation 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
While the strong metaphysical linkage between Eastern religiosity, its psycho-spiritual practices, and health may offer important new perspectives on the relationship between religiosity and health, there are a number of practical difficulties associated with studying the epidemiology of non-Western forms of spirituality. These include:
Given these considerable limitations, the study of a Western sub-population that has adopted a well-defined aspect of Eastern religiosity may be particularly useful as it allows comparison with well-developed, validated databases and commentary while avoiding a number of the confounders mentioned above. Studies such as this may provide important conceptual bridges by which researchers can extend their understandings of the relationship between religiosity and health in non-Western groups using a common set of empirical scientific tools.
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This graph shows a comparison between a group of Sahaja Yoga meditators and a sample of the general population of Australia on a number of health outcomes. The meditator group performed significantly better on a number of key health outcomes including general health and mental health.
From 
Manocha R and German E. Meditation, Health and Quality of Life: A Census of a Meditating Population.
Within the yoga tradition, meditation is defined as an experiential state of awareness specifically involving control over all aspects of mental activity. Feuerstein (2006) explains that “the initial purpose of meditation is to intercept the flux of ordinary mental activity.” He translates Patanjali’s explanation from the Yoga Sutras (aphorism 1.2) as follows: “Yoga is the control of the fluctuations of the mind” (p98).
In this paradigm the highly developed meditator is not only less stressed and more relaxed but also experiences beneficial effects on health and psyche, having activated a previously latent potential for positive psychology and optimized wellbeing.
The mental complexities with which one gradually becomes encumbered as one progresses through life can be loosely termed as “mind” and they increase in strength as one becomes more involved in the mundane. Yogic systems in fact identify the mind as not only the source of “illusion” that prevents perception of reality, but also as the ultimate source of disease. According to the yogic tradition the true aim of life is to resolve these complexities and therefore progress toward a more profound understanding of one’s self. Feuerstein translates the passage of the Yoga Bhishya (1.1) in which the five fundamental behaviour patterns of the mind are described as follows:
The order in which these states are cited is important; indicating a hierarchy in which the controlled mind is the most preferable. The Guru is traditionally seen as someone who, having mastered his own mind and soul, sets out to help others do the same.
noneExplanatory factors for the observed effects of meditation and their particular importance in behaviour therapy research include the following 3 categories:
Category 1. Factors which are common to all strategies such as social support or therapeutic contact. Many clinical researchers have observed that controls with high face validity seem more likely to generate effects of similar magnitude to the intervention. Expectancy alone has also been shown in a number of studies positively to influence the apparent effect of meditation. An important factor which relates to the plausibility of the control interventions is the participant’s expectation that they will experience a benefit (or detriment)45. Despite this, only 24 studies took specific steps to gauge either the participants’ expectation of benefit or the perceived credibility of the various interventions.
Category 2. The possibility that strategies that draw volunteers from the community without using a predetermined threshold of dysfunction end up recruiting samples containing significant proportions of participants with sub-clinical scores. These “worried well”46 have little scope to improve, exerting a ceiling effect on the chosen measures and thus dilute any apparent effect of the intervention. In other words, behaviour therapy trials, especially trials that recruit from the general community, and even more especially those community-recruited trials seeking to demonstrate behavioural changes in normal participants (i.e. those with no diagnosed psychopathology) are fundamentally prone to type 2 errors in study design47. Since meditation was developed as a practice for everyday use by normal people rather than those with psychopathology, researchers have frequently recruited from the community. This issue is therefore of particular relevance to the work presented in this thesis.
Category 3. Other factors include regression to the mean. This is a phenomenon that most commonly occurs in studies in which participants are selected because they have extreme values on a certain variable, such as in clinical trials for which specific eligibility criteria are set. In this case, the participants will manifest an improvement simply because of the natural tendency for variables to approach the population mean over time, regardless of any effect (or lack thereof) from the intervention being studied48,and poor choice of outcome measures which are not specific and sensitive enough to detect change.
noneSample 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.
The Jadad scoring system is a widely used method of rating RCTs for basic methodological rigour. However it seems to be inadequately structured to meaningfully discern the methodological standard of meditation trials. For instance, while all trials might be randomised, only a minority described randomisation methods and few use the term “double blind”.
The blinding process in meditation trials is complex since it involves blinding of participants, raters, instructors, statisticians and other investigators.
It also demands that the comparator intervention is properly able to control for non-specific effects. Many trials feature some of these steps and others actually feature them all. And yet the Jadad score only applies one point for this crucial but complex and multifaceted factor. Similarly, very few trials described drop-outs.
The Jadad score of the studies in my review mostly ranged between 0 and 2. Trials with high scores did not seem to be much better designed than trials with lower scores. Thus the Jadad system does not usefully differentiate between trials with a methodology of a sufficient standard to discern effects specific to meditation, and those that do not have such a methodology. Despite evaluating other methodological rating systems none were appropriately orientated to be useful in discerning meditation research.
noneMeditation 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.
noneIn Australia, a survey 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. This reflects trends in other countries. In the United States for instance, a survey administered to 31,000 representative adults, conducted in 2002 as part of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), showed that 8% of respondents had practiced meditation at some time.
Dr Ramesh Manocha
by Dr Ramesh Manocha
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