Tag: mindfulness

The Role of Refuge in Mindfulness Practice

Refuge – A Buddhist concept missed by meditation scientists

Why the Absence of Refuge Undermines Western Mindfulness

Western psychology has embraced mindfulness as a panacea, an intervention linked to reduced stress, treating clinical depression, and even improving cognitive function. However, despite its popularity, the lack of robust evidence for its clinical benefits has led many practitioners and scientists to speculate on why the presumed effects of traditional meditation have not been translated into clinical practice.

One of the key elements of traditional meditation, often missing from Western mindfulness, is the concept of Refuge. Refuge is a foundational concept in many meditation traditions, orienting the practitioner’s mind within a broader spiritual and relational framework. In Buddhist meditation, mindfulness is not a standalone technique; it arises within the context of the Refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma (the Buddha’s teachings), and the Sangha (the community of practitioners). Taking Refuge in these three elements provides an existential grounding and generates confidence in the meditation practice.

The precise nature of Refuge can vary according to the practitioner’s experience and Buddhist school within which the meditation is practised. However, in almost every case, it provides a mindset that serves as a stable base for meditation. Without Refuge, the act of mindfulness risks becoming an attentional exercise, uncoupled from many of the mental processes present in Buddhist meditation. There is growing unrest among some practitioner-scientists about the decontextualisation of mindfulness from traditional forms of meditation; that is, in Westernising and commodifying meditation, the benefits of traditional practice may have been lost.

Segall (2001) argues that when stripped of its Buddhist theoretical frameworks, Western mindfulness loses its transformative potential, becoming susceptible to institutional agendas and materialist objectives.1 Khong (2012) also highlights the limitations of detaching mindfulness from its Buddhist theoretical frameworks.2

Refuge in mindfulness practice
Refuge – The foundation of mindfulness practice

The absence of Refuge is likely to impact cognitive processes and mechanisms able to mediate wellbeing in several ways:

Firstly, a lack of existential orientation: Refuge provides a holistic and spiritual telos, enabling a sense of direction towards awakening and compassion. Without these processes, Western mindfulness tends to privilege mundane, dualistic awareness, overlooking its transcendent and ethical purposes.

Isolation and individualism: The concept of Sangha offers a broader sense of community and collective purpose. The tendency of mindfulness to focus on individual, solitary needs disrupts the balance between self and other, which is central to most nondual Buddhist meditation.

Cognitive reductionism: Buddhist Refuge engages the whole person in context, emotionally, ethically and spiritually. Western clinical meditation methods typically privilege the extrinsic brain network, overlooking mental processes rooted solely in the intrinsic system.

Commodification: The absence of Refuge enables the reconfiguring of mindfulness as a health product, enabling the technique to be co-opted by corporations and institutions, including the military. This shift reshapes the mental processes used in meditation, reinforcing systemic stressors rather than challenging them.

Refuge and the commidification of meditation
The commodification of meditation may have limited its health benefits

The commodification of meditation may have limited its health benefits compared to both traditional practices and scientifically validated interventions. Taking the bigger picture into account, these concerns are the tip of an iceberg.

There is growing disquiet about the cost of the ‘mindfulness experiment’. Estimates of the global bill for the scientific investigation of mindfulness from the 1970s to date range between £1 bn and £5 bn. Several billion more represent the cost of the proliferation of the technique and the investment in training teachers and providing wider support materials. Most scientists working in this field would agree, practising mindfulness brings a degree of relaxation equivalent to and sometimes slightly greater than hundreds of other mundane human behaviours, like art or gardening.

Refuge is a concept rooted in a dual/nondual tension. An issue that is ignored by almost all meditation scientists. The psychological sciences generally present consciousness as a dualistic enterprise. For psychologists, even a preliminary understanding of Buddhism’s theoretical foundations requires a reimagining of mindfulness to access the health benefits of traditional meditation methods. On the balance of evidence, Western versions of traditional meditation are oversimplified and entirely uncoupled from the original curative network that so attracted Western academics from the 1930s onward.

The results of 90 years of meditation research have demonstrated that focusing solely on technique has been a significant error. Integrating elements of Refuge, even from a secular perspective, is likely to restore depth and direction to meditation methods. For example, a starting point for the reintroduction of Refuge could include: The use of transdisciplinary research to establish the cognitive components present in traditional Refuge and to develop the relevant theoretical framework. Encouraging practitioners to understand the concept of Refuge and apply the theoretical framework to their own conditions. Framing mindfulness within a broader narrative of healing, ethical living and growth. Developing secular practices that can cultivate interdependence, compassion and shared community.

Khong has convincingly argued that the maturation of Western mindfulness requires a return to its roots, not to replicate religious forms, but to realign the Westernised practice with the original mental processes that may hold robust potential rather than the marginal benefits that most reliable, optimistic studies present.

The concept of Refuge reminds us that dualist presence alone is not transformative, not on the spiritual nor the clinical levels.  Its absence from Western practices, even in a secular form, evidences the current limitations in how psychology understands and engages with mindtraining originating in non-scientific domains.

References:

Khong, B. S. L. (2021). Revisiting and Re-Envisoning Mindfulness: Buddhist and Contemporary Perspectives. The Humanistic Psychologist, 49(1), 3 -18.  

Segall, S. Z. (2021). Mindfulness In and Out of Context of Western Buddhist Modernism. The Humanistic Psychologist, 49(1), 40-55.

Can Medicalised Mindfulness Evolve?

Could Mindtraining for Life be the long-awaited new dawn for contemplative science?

Most meditation scientists agree that significant progress is needed if contemplative practices are to meet the claims made for their benefits over the last 70 years. Medicalised mindfulness has established a role as a practice that can reduce stress, anxiety, and, in some instances, cognitive dysfunctions. While its clinical applications, especially in protocols like Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), have gained some traction, a growing body of critique highlights its limitations: conceptual vagueness, inconsistent outcomes, and detachment from its philosophical roots.

Robust correlations between regular spiritual meditation practice and improved happiness and wellbeing continue to be observed in peer-reviewed literature and society more generally. Psychology has been attempting to harness the curative power of spiritual meditation for over 70 years.1 It seems that whenever meditation and mindfulness are converted to mechanistic practices, and subject to empirical evaluation, most of the health and wellbeing benefits simply dissolve. In experiments, we frequently see modest changes used as ‘evidence’ that medicalised meditation and mindfulness work (an estimated 97% of mindfulness experiments lack adequate controls).

What will medicalised mindfulness evovle into
Religion and science remain ontologically incompatible

It’s probably not possible or desirable to prescribe religious practices as health interventions; that’s not how the spiritual path works. However, there is evidence that secular forms of meditation could still play a significant role in tackling the mental health crisis unfolding across many advanced economies. Medicalised meditation has consistently failed to establish the active cognitive components present in traditional meditation training. In my own private practice, Mindtraining for Life (MfL), we use rationales consistent with nondual Buddhism and psychology, and the benefits to clients’ happiness, wellbeing and success are clear.

Of course, MfL is one of several emerging frameworks that appear to offer a more structured, cognitively rigorous alternative to medicalised meditation. Its unique element is its integration of profound nondual knowledge outside of an explicitly Buddhist context.

If the mindfulness project has failed, what will replace it?
Science has failed to understand the relationship between meditation and consciousness.

At its core, MfL reframes mental resilience not as a passive state of “non-reactivity,” but as an active, trainable skillset grounded in attentional control, cognitive flexibility, and strategic self-regulation. Unlike medicalised mindfulness, which often relies on Westernised dualistic meditation, materialistic concepts of self and other, and ambiguous notions of “present moment awareness,” MfL emphasises goal-directed mental rehearsal, cognitive reframing, emotional regulation, and a basic training in nondual compassion. These techniques are not only more objectively measurable than current medicalised equivalents but also more compatible with neuropsychological models of executive function and emotional regulation.

From a scientific standpoint, this shift matters. Medicalised mindfulness has struggled with reproducibility, standardisation, effect size variability across populations and the concept of nonduality. Meta-analyses reveal modest benefits despite the creation of hundreds of mindfulness variants. Moreover, reliance on fragmented understandings of introspective phenomenology makes mindfulness impossible to standardise across clinical trials and other experiments. MfL’s protocols can be broken down into discrete cognitive tasks, such as attentional switching, scenario visualisation, nondual progression, and resilience scripting; these are likely more amenable to both behavioural and neuroimaging studies. By focusing on individual client needs as a starting point, MfL has retained the holistic and curative value of traditional nondual practices, complemented by reliable neuropsychology. From this platform, a degree of standardisation and operationalisation is likely. Another way to think about this, is in terms of a bottom-up model for contemplative science. After more than a decade of research in this field, I’m certain medicalised meditation needs a more reliable theoretical framework. By creating successful secular equivalents of nondual practices on a one-to-one basis, then scaling them up, we may be seeing the science of meditation turned on its head.

Another advantage of MfL lies in its philosophical neutrality. Medicalised mindfulness often inherits Western interpretation of Buddhist metaphysics (e.g., non-self, impermanence) without critical examination. It then seeks to place these concepts within psychology’s dualistic framework, leading to ontological confusion. Mindtraining sidesteps this by focusing on cognitive processes rather than spiritual insight. This makes it more accessible to diverse populations and more adaptable to transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research.

Time to try a new approach to contemplative science

Importantly, mindtraining also addresses a key critique of mindfulness: its tendency to individualise systemic stress. By equipping individuals with tools to observe first and then strategically engage with psychological suffering, thus mind training fosters agency and contextual awareness. This aligns with contemporary models of psychological resilience, which emphasise dynamic interaction between person and environment.

In summary, while mindfulness meditation has opened the door to contemplative science, its medicalised form may have reached a conceptual plateau. Mindtraining, as exemplified by the WfL model, offers a promising evolution, one that is cognitively precise, empirically tractable, and philosophically grounded. For scientists and clinicians seeking robust and scalable interventions to work with, it may be time to shift their focus from passive awareness to active mental agility.

1 Morris, Stephen Gene (2024) The Scientific History of Mindfulness: 1938 to 2020. University of Kent,. (doi:10.22024/UniKent/01.02.106240) (KAR id:106240). https://kar.kent.ac.uk/106240/

Dr Stephen Gene Morris is a Consultant in Applied Neuropsychology and the founder of Mind Training for Life.

What Meditation Should You Choose?

The Most Important and Least Asked Question…

I’ve highlighted 100 of the most widely used forms of meditation below; however, please take a moment to read the explanation and context first.

At the start of my journey with meditation, I thought ‘meditation’ was just one thing, one practice, one method. But while, by definition, there is a general collection of behaviours we think of as ‘meditation’, the differences between practices can be unimaginable. Take the case of mindfulness meditation. In its original Buddhist form, it is a basic traditional practice directly connected to the spiritual path. There are, however, many forms of ‘mindfulness’ in different Buddhist traditions, some suitable for beginners, while others are regarded as advanced practices. Mindfulness meditation was reinvented by Western scientists as a form of medicalised therapy in the 1970s. We now have at least 50 different forms of mindfulness being used in Western clinical settings, each with a slightly different configuration that affects meditators in different ways. For almost all meditators, whether spiritual or secular, young or old, novice or experienced, the key issue when looking for a method is to be clear about your meditation goals and use a practice that can help you reach your objectives.

To learn more about the challenges and opportunities associated with the scientific appropriation of mindfulness, click here. To understand what the secularisation of meditation means to people practising meditation, read this article on the Mindtraining website.

I’ve catalogued over 500 distinct forms of meditation in my own research; the 100 listed below are among the most popular. For each method listed, there are dozens of variants. Some of those included have been scientifically validated, other techniques are unknown to psychology. Take these descriptions as relative and do some research before you commit to any meditation teacher or practice.

Core Meditation Techniques – Defining Practices

  1. Mindfulness Meditation – Split between traditional Buddhist and Western medicalised forms. Observing thoughts and sensations without judgment in the present moment.
  2. Focused Attention Meditation – Concentrating on a single object like breath, a candle, or a mantra.
  3. Open Monitoring Meditation – Maintaining awareness of all aspects of experience without fixation.
  4. Loving-Kindness (Metta) – Generating feelings of love and compassion for self and others.
  5. Vipassana – Insight-oriented observation of bodily sensations to develop self-awareness.
  6. Samatha – Calming the mind through focused attention, often on the breath.
  7. Zazen – Seated meditation from Zen Buddhism emphasising non-thinking and posture.
  8. Kundalini Meditation – Awakening energy at the base of the spine using breath, movement, and mantra.
  9. Transcendental Meditation (TM) – Using a personalised mantra to transcend thought.
  10. Mantra Meditation – Repeating sacred sounds or phrases to quiet the mind.

Yogic & Hindu Meditation Methods

  1. Yoga Nidra – Deep relaxation meditation conducted in a sleep-like state.
  2. Trataka – Gazing at a fixed point (e.g. candle flame) to develop concentration.
  3. Nada Yoga – Meditating on sound, either external or internal auditory experiences.
  4. Chakra Meditation – Focusing attention on energy centers to align body and mind.
  5. Tantra Meditation – Using ritual and visualization to integrate spiritual energy.
  6. Bhakti Meditation – Devotion-based meditation through prayer, chant, and surrender.
  7. Japa Meditation – Repetition of mantras using mala beads for counting.
  8. Raja Yoga Meditation – Combining ethical living, concentration, and absorption.
  9. Atma Vichara (Self-Inquiry) – Asking “Who am I?” to realize true self or consciousness.
  10. Sahaja Meditation – Effortless awareness focusing on spontaneous attention.

Buddhist Meditation Approaches

  1. Tonglen – Taking in suffering and breathing out compassion.
  2. Shamatha-Vipassana – Pairing calm abiding with profound insight.
  3. Walking Meditation – Practising mindfulness while moving slowly and deliberately.
  4. Dzogchen – Resting in the nature of mind, spontaneous presence.
  5. Mahamudra – Recognising awareness itself as the path and goal.
  6. Analytical Meditation – Reflecting intellectually to penetrate Buddhist teachings.
  7. Visualisation of Deities – Mentally constructing divine forms for transformation.
  8. Five Aggregates Meditation – Contemplating the components of personhood to dissolve illusion.
  9. Six Elements Meditation – Reflecting on earth, water, fire, air, space, and consciousness.
  10. Death Meditation (Maranasati) – Contemplating mortality to deepen presence.

Psychotherapeutic Meditation & Modern Adaptations

  1. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) – A Controversial clinical approach to managing stress through mindfulness. The dominant form favoured by health and social policy organisations and businesses.
  2. Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) – Combines mindfulness with CBT to prevent depression relapse in limited cases.
  3. Acceptance and Commitment Meditation – Noticing thoughts while committing to values-led action.
  4. Body Scan Meditation – Progressive awareness of bodily sensations.
  5. Somatic Experiencing Meditation – Tuning into internal body signals to release trauma.
  6. ACT-Based Present Moment Meditation – Grounding in sensory awareness and defusion techniques.
  7. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Mindfulness – Cultivating nonjudgmental present awareness in emotion regulation.
  8. Compassion-Focused Meditation – Generating warmth toward self and others to counter shame.
  9. Interpersonal Mindfulness – Bringing awareness to real-time relational interaction.
  10. Reflective Meditation – Allowing thoughts to arise while exploring emotional resonances.

Esoteric Meditation Methods & Energy Based Practices

  1. Qi Gong Meditation – Coordinating breath, movement, and intention to cultivate life energy.
  2. Taoist Inner Smile – Sending smiling energy to internal organs to promote healing.
  3. Astral Projection Meditation – Guiding consciousness beyond the physical body.
  4. Crystal Meditation – Using crystals to amplify specific energies and intentions.
  5. Light Meditation – Visualising inner or external light for healing or illumination.
  6. Reiki Meditation – Channelling universal energy through hands or mind for self-care.
  7. Kabbalistic Meditation – Contemplating Hebrew letters, names of God, or Tree of Life.
  8. Merkaba Activation Meditation – Awakening geometric energy fields for ascension.
  9. Third Eye Meditation – Focusing between the brows to develop intuitive insight.
  10. Aura Cleansing Meditation – Visualising the purification of personal energy fields.

Technology Enhanced Meditation Techniques

  1. Binaural Beats Meditation – Using audio frequencies to synchronise brainwaves.
  2. Guided Imagery Meditation – Listening to narrated journeys to evoke relaxation or insight.
  3. VR Meditation – Immersing oneself in virtual landscapes to deepen sensory engagement.
  4. App-Based Mindfulness – Practising structured sessions via digital platforms.
  5. Neurofeedback Meditation – Real-time monitoring to enhance brainwave states.
  6. Sound Bath Meditation – Experiencing healing vibrations through instruments like gongs or singing bowls.
  7. AI-Guided Meditation – Interactive sessions with responsive virtual facilitators.
  8. Subliminal Audio Meditation – Listening to layered affirmations below the conscious threshold.
  9. Digital Detox Meditation – Mindfully disengaging from screens and digital noise.
  10. Eye Mask Meditation – Sensory deprivation to intensify inward attention.

Cultural Based & Devotional Meditation

  1. Christian Contemplative Prayer – Meditative silence in God’s presence.
  2. Hesychasm – Repetitive Jesus Prayer to enter inner stillness.
  3. Islamic Dhikr Meditation – Repetitive remembrance of divine names.
  4. Sufi Whirling Meditation – Physical rotation to induce spiritual ecstasy.
  5. Jewish Hitbodedut – Speaking spontaneously with God for inner clarity.
  6. Native American Vision Quest – Solitary reflection in nature to seek guidance.
  7. Shamanic Drumming Meditation – Entering altered states through rhythmic beat.
  8. African Ubuntu Meditation – Reflecting on interconnectedness and community spirit.
  9. Hawaiian Ho‘oponopono – Repeating forgiveness phrases for reconciliation.
  10. Vedic Fire Ritual Meditation – Meditating on the flame as a transformation symbol.

Specialized Meditation & Hybrid Techniques

  1. Sleep Meditation – Relaxation practices to support restful sleep.
  2. Gratitude Meditation – Focusing on positive experiences and appreciation.
  3. Goal Visualization Meditation – Envisioning desired outcomes to prime action.
  4. Stoic Reflection Meditation – Contemplating virtue, mortality, and control.
  5. Emotional Release Meditation – Allowing feelings to arise and dissolve mindfully.
  6. Productivity Meditation – Grounding and setting intentions before focused work.
  7. Decision-Making Meditation – Clarifying values and options through reflection.
  8. Micro-Meditation – Quick resets throughout the day for clarity.
  9. Habit Formation Meditation – Embedding new routines through intentional repetition.
  10. Creative Flow Meditation – Tapping intuition to support artistic expression.

Nature Based Meditation – Connected

  1. Forest Bathing (Shinrin-Yoku) – Immersing attention in natural environments.
  2. Sun Gazing Meditation – Safely gazing near sunrise/sunset for energy absorption.
  3. Ocean Meditation – Synchronising breath with wave rhythms.
  4. Mountain Meditation – Visualising grounded presence and strength.
  5. Rain Meditation – Listening to or imagining rainfall to induce calm.
  6. Earth Element Meditation – Connecting with soil and grounded energy.
  7. Sky Meditation – Embracing expansive awareness through open sky imagery.
  8. Animal Observation Meditation – Mindfully watching animal behaviour to mirror presence.
  9. Campfire Contemplation – Reflecting in silence near flickering flames.
  10. Seasons Meditation – Noting changes in internal and external cycles.

Meditation for Cognitive Enhancement

  1. Meta-Cognition Meditation – Observing one’s thinking patterns consciously.
  2. Neurosculpting Meditation – Rewiring thought through mindfulness and neuroplasticity.
  3. Synesthesia Meditation – Exploring cross-sensory imaginative states.
  4. Reverse Engineering Meditation – Analysing actions to understand their motivations.
  5. Memory Palace Meditation – Visualising spatial locations to encode information.
  6. Intuition Calibration Meditation – Fine-tuning inner signals for decision-making.
  7. Language Awareness Meditation – Observing mental language formation.
  8. Time Perception Meditation – Altering awareness.
  9. Mind Training Meditation – Changing brain function and structure.
  10. Emotional Regulation Practice – Mediating emotions with the Executive Function.

How Psychology Misunderstood Mindfulness and What We Do Now

Part 2: Evolution, not Revolution

This is part 2; part 1 can be found here.

Part 1 describes the processes through which mindfulness has been converted from a religious to a scientifically validated practice. On this page, I outline the implications of treating religious and scientific knowledge as congruent. This ‘congruence’ is an ‘imaginary’, an illusion created where scientific communities abandon rational thinking in favour of other motivations. Once the imagined form of mindfulness is created, it can be absorbed into psychology. The evidence suggests that the psychological sciences may need to reevaluate their underlying theoretical frameworks and reconsider how non-scientific knowledge is treated, particularly concepts and techniques originating in religious traditions.

If science and religion, in general, have incompatible theoretical frameworks, how was Buddhist mindfulness ‘transformed’ into a Western medicalised practice? The reality is that a few scientists and clinicians simply claimed that religious meditation and psychology were complementary. They provided no evidence or scientific explanation to support this position. They also appeared to lack the knowledge and experience necessary to make reliable generalisations about religious thought and practice. By focusing on meditation methods, not the underlying cognitive processes, psychologists could not evaluate the innate value of the traditional approaches for health benefits. In this way, psychology appropriated and relocated meditation techniques they never understood.

Western psychologists avoided meaningful, rational investigation of traditional meditation, preferring to ‘imagine ‘ what the techniques were from Western dualistic perspectives.

Why is this important? Science can measure the physiological effects of meditation, such as how it affects heart rate and blood pressure. However, because of the uncertainty regarding the boundaries between belief and science, early meditation and mindfulness experiments rarely progressed beyond a preliminary stage. Further, some psychologists overreached themselves by claiming they understood the essence of Buddhist meditation. These errors were compounded because the wider scientific community accepted unevidenced claims about the congruence between belief and science. These problems mean that much of the £5bn invested in researching meditation and mindfulness added little meaningful scientific value. Secondly, the actual curative potential of traditional meditation has been ignored. Primarily because researchers focused on meditation methods rather than the underlying mental processes engaged with by traditional meditators.

Before 2000, many scientists believed that they ‘instinctively’ understood traditional meditation without needing any meaningful training or research. Perhaps being part of elite academic institutions allowed them to feel they had the right or ability to subordinate religious thought and practice to dualistic scientific understanding. In relocating mindfulness, they stripped it of its most important cognitive components. Still today, many Western forms of meditation lack mental processes such as compassion, intention, and other concepts central to traditional meditations. Even where scientists attempted to ‘evolve’ mindfulness into a more compassionate or focused practice, the meditation nearly always remained dualistic and, therefore, distant from its original form.

Compassion for oneself and others is central to most Buddhist practices.

The fate of Western mindfulness, to have become a stripped-down dualistic version of a traditional practice, is not unusual. We have seen such approaches in relocating acupuncture, yoga and other traditional healing technologies. A subtle but observable pattern is documented in the History of Science of scientists reconfiguring nondual knowledge to sit within dualistic frameworks. As with mindfulness, this approach can lead to the original technique being misunderstood, mistranslated or distorted.

The problems evidenced in the ‘mindfulness revolution’ have complex causes, not least of which are decades of low-quality and often unreplicated research. However, the failure of scientists to recognise the presence of nondual thought and practice is also a significant concern. As a case study, mindfulness reveals a profound limitation in the psychological sciences and our understanding of the human mind. We experience life through a number of different mental states, including dual and nondual awareness. Science tends to privilege duality, which is adequate for most scientific disciplines but fails to fully explain human consciousness and experience. Duality became the default theoretical model for descriptions of human mental states, the ‘lingua franca’ of the psychological sciences. As such, non-dual concepts and practices are abstract to most psychologists and often considered superstitious or childlike. This worldview relies on evaluating nondual phenomena with dualistic instruments.

The presumption that dualistic approaches deliver ‘truth’ while nondual insights are irrelevant or inferior is possibly a continuation of the colonial mindset. Western ways of knowing are frequently assumed to be the ‘gold standard’ against which non-scientific thought and practice can be measured. There is little evidence that scientists thought Buddhist meditation methods were worth studying in their own right. Analysis indicates that the psychological sciences reduced Buddhist meditation to the terms they understood and could measure. In this way, the opportunity for scientists to identify different forms of consciousness, mental processes and health treatments in meditation was lost.

I’m sure many meditation scientists acted in good faith, but their inability to realise they were encountering different rather than inferior knowledge systems has been a costly mistake. This limitation was only possible because of a phenomenon called incommensurability. Incommensurability is the belief that one’s perspective of the world is an objective reality. The scientists first encountering Buddhist meditation may have been entirely unaware of nonduality. Presuming that their dualistic outsider view of Eastern religious practices was complete and informed. This is not simply an issue rooted in cultural misunderstandings; incommensurability likely limits encounters between science and Western spiritual practices. For example, the value of early esoteric Christian teachings was judged against the dualistic values of science and evaluated accordingly. Today, dualistic science is held to be the dominant knowledge system, and many alternative ways of understanding and experiencing the world have been subordinated without any systematic study or rational evaluation. There are almost no signs that the scientific community are aware of the potential value of non-scientific knowledge being lost.

This is part two of a six-part series. The Introduction is here.

Why the ‘Mindfulness Revolution’ Failed: Understanding the Boundaries Between Science and Religion

Part 1: Going Back to Basics: Dual and Nondual

Perhaps as much as $5 bn has been spent by scientists investigating the benefits of meditation and mindfulness over the last 50 years. Over 30,000 scholarly studies, primarily scientific, have been published in the peer-reviewed literature. In 2010, mindfulness enthusiasts and entrepreneurs announced the arrival of a new age of understanding through the ‘mindfulness revolution’. However, credible reviews of meditation research demonstrate that Western scientific understanding of mindfulness practices is, at best, preliminary. Further, almost no progress has been made in understanding what traditional Buddhist forms of meditation are, let alone how they work on the psychological level.

Scientists and clinicians initially appropriated religious meditation methods because of evidence that, in their original forms, they could provide profound health benefits. In the 1950s, long before the ‘Mindfulness Revolution’, psychologists were using Buddhist meditation to treat intractable mental health conditions. Since the early 1980s, Western scientists and clinicians developed hundreds of new versions of mindfulness. The best of these diverse forms can provide a degree of relaxation, often equivalent to or slightly more significant than a placebo effect. Unfortunately, the hope that mindfulness could be a powerful technique to treat and cure problematic mental health has evaporated.

Scientists gambling on a mindfulness miracle
Has the £5 bn mindfulness gamble paid off?

Today, the scientific understanding of mindfulness is fragmented, with growing scepticism about its benefits from many sections of society. Mindfulness is most frequently seen as a ‘welbeing’ intervention and is often taught by trained volunteers rather than psychologists or therapists. However, hyped claims of mindfulness’s benefits, supported by big business, politicians, and social policy, have ensured mindfulness’s popularity and longevity. Mindfulness has even been earmarked as a tool to keep people working and consuming when their material conditions are being eroded, a dramatic departure from the original purpose of Buddhist meditation.

The scientific history of mindfulness raises many problems. The most crucial issue is to consider how scientific engagement with religious meditation led to less rather than more understanding of the practices. By researching this question, we have started to gain much more insight into the fundamental nature of Buddhist thought and practice and the problems that arise when the boundaries between religion and science are altered.

No one factor can explain why thousands of scientists, spending a vast fortune in research funding, have made so little progress. Many studies have been critical of the scientific investigation of meditation. However, they often see the solution to the ‘mindfulness crisis’ as producing more, better-quality experiments. Fortunately, several academics have begun to question the nature of the relationship between science and religion, especially Buddhism.

In essence, the scientific method is part of a dualistic knowledge system based on certain principles, such as empiricism (all ‘true’ knowledge comes from sensory experience and empirical evidence) and reductionism (complex behaviours can be understood by isolating and understanding individual elements of the behaviours). Buddhism is divided into very different knowledge systems, most of which are explicitly and implicitly nondual. For example, Mahayana Buddhism is set in a theoretical framework where emptiness (all things are empty of intrinsic nature or existence) is held to be the underlying nature of reality. So, in any meaningful way, experimental psychology cannot understand Buddhism because they do not share the same frames of reference (ontology and epistemology). Psychology can see the effect of meditation but is unable to understand what it is.

Just to be clear, psychological science can measure the psychological and physiological effects of meditation. But it cannot currently understand what spiritual meditators do, the underlying cognitive processes, or what their spiritual goals are. Similarly a spiritual practice is unable to calculate the speed of light or the atomic weight of an element. By definition, different knowledge systems are incompatible because they address different human needs in different ways.

Dr Stephen Gene Morris

The second part of this article can be found here.

What is the Nondual View, and Why is it Important in Meditation?

A startling finding emerging from the groundbreaking Scientific History of Mindfulness is the failure of Western science to recognise the nondual nature of traditional forms of meditation. Experienced meditation practitioners may have been taught about the nondual view or nondual meditation methods, which are pivotal to many meditation traditions. However, most Westerners’ consciousness is dominated by explicitly dualistic frameworks. The ability of people rooted in a dualistic awareness, including scientists, to understand a nondual worldview is problematic, even if they have received instruction and training. One possible explanation for this problem is the concept of incommensurability found in Thomas Kuhn’s writings. A controversial term, incommensurability, describes how changing to alternative ways of knowing is problematic once we have been trained in a particular understanding of the world. Further, someone who is schooled in a specific understanding may not even know that they have been cognitively conditioned to see the world from one particular dualistic perspective.

A characteristic of the dualistic mind is that it believes its conscious experience is an objective reality. This misunderstanding is experienced by Western meditation scholars and scientists, even today. Many highly intelligent and well-intentioned academics make claims about the nature of traditional forms of meditation from a dualistic perspective without ever having recognised the role of nonduality in meditation methods. This problem is not restricted to modern materialistic societies but is present wherever people foster a ‘belief in self’ as an objective reality. Thus, many traditional meditation students train for years, or even decades, to appreciate that their consciousness can be either dual, nondual, or even an integration of the two.

Typically, humans flit between dual and nondual forms of consciousness without knowing or detecting the difference.  In this brief introduction, the critical thing to remember is that we all have access to dual and nondual ways of knowing; both are integral to the human experience. However, it is highly problematic to recognise and then cultivate a consistent nondual view without training and guidance. It is not possible to provide a comprehensive explanation of dual or nondual consciousness in this article, but I have written about these issues elsewhere.  So here, I will attempt to use simplified approximations to introduce this subject.

In a typical Western materialistic society like the UK today, most people spend significant time in dualistic consciousness.  We could characterise the dualistic state in many ways; as a starting point, let us simply regard it as the point of view where one believes, as truth, the conscious and subconscious impulses generated by our brain.  

We can all find examples of our irrational thoughts and baseless concerns that we recognise as meaningless. However, many of us accept unfounded opinions and erroneous perceptions as ‘reality’. While our thoughts and ideas often seem meaningful, the views of others can seem meaningless or even ridiculous. Without nondual awareness, our identity is partly made up of fabricated constructs with no reality other than what we attribute to them; I’d suggest this is the dominance of emotion over reasoning, although it is obviously an oversimplification. So, for example, thinking that others are responsible for your mental state (you make me angry) is usually an expression of dualism, as is the default belief that our wishes and goals are somehow more important than the wishes and goals of others. 

By contrast, a nondual view distinguishes between reliable mental phenomena and transient, unreliable thoughts and feelings. Once a stable and systematic nondual view is achieved, we can establish relative freedom in thinking, speaking and acting. This freedom is often associated with the happiness and stability observed in nondual practitioners. So, from a nondual perspective, we make the presumption that the thoughts and feelings of others may be just as important and meaningful as ours. A note of caution; the nondual view is typically achieved by abandoning limiting concepts, an exercise that usually requires a significant amount of time, effort and training. I will stop the preliminary definitions here for now and briefly discuss what these concepts mean for meditation practice.

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In traditional meditation, people often begin at the beginning; if they have a reliable teacher and methods and are diligent, they can progress.  However, until a practitioner realises which mental phenomena arising in their consciousness are transient and meaningless, all meditation can be seen as relative. That means your practice is relative to your mental state and other causes and conditions.  A practitioner with some modest experience of the nondual should be able to transcend belief in mundane phenomena, knowing their relative unimportance.  That is not to say that a nondual practitioner may have arrived at a transcendent mental state; it is simply that they understand the limitations of their own worldview.  That, in a nutshell, is my view of why the nondual is essential to progress beyond a preliminary stage in meditation practice.  Without nondual awareness, the inner world of our consciousness remains uncertain. While much Buddhist meditation is not explicitly nondual, it all, by its very nature, increases the ability of the student to understand nonduality. Nonduality is a central pillar in many spiritual and philosophical traditions, but it is mainly invisible to the psychological sciences; I wonder why…?

The Legacy of Mindfulness: Has Science Failed to Understand Buddhist Meditation?

Western forms of mindfulness were based on ‘imaginaries’ of Buddhist thought and practice. This problem has increased uncertainty over the mindfulness concept. However, by translating and reducing nondual religious practices to dualistic scientific ideas, the actual healing potential of traditional meditation may have been misunderstood or overlooked.

The Missed Opportunity of Mindfulness: How Science Failed to Understand Buddhist Meditation

Has science missed the point of meditation?

Credible challenges to the reliability of mindfulness research have led to many attempts to explain how Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) developed. In particular, how mindfulness was adopted by health and social policy in the UK ahead of robust evidence for its benefits. Originally, MBSR was promoted as a fusion or bridge between Buddhist and scientific knowledge. Although few scientific studies repeated this trope, it has been influential in giving MBSR spiritual authority to support preliminary scientific claims. One of the most important reviews of the ‘bridging hypothesis’ was published in 2006. Mechanisms of Mindfulness was a paper by Shauna Shapiro and others for the Journal of Clinical Psychology and illustrates major problems in how science understands and treats religion.1

MBSR was a paradigmatic concept that set the trajectory for many of the 30,000 peer-reviewed mindfulness studies published since 1981.2 Psychology can easily measure the empirical effects of meditation, changes to heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen consumption, for example. However, research has illustrated that rather than ‘bridge’ science and Buddhism, mindfulness researchers failed to establish a coherent theoretical framework from either perspective. The idea that MBSR did not reflect Buddhist thought and practice is not new; dozens of academic papers have sought to explain what is missing from the mindfulness paradigm. Of these Mechanisms of Mindfulness may illustrate the profound limitations in how science understands Buddhist thought and practice.

Meditate without intention or compassion.

The first point to make is that Mechanisms of Mindfulness took a favourable view of mindfulness’s potential health benefits; it was not a ‘critical’ challenge.

Over the past 20 years, the majority of research has focused on clinical intervention studies to evaluate the efficacy of mindfulness-based interventions such as the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. This line of research has primarily addressed the first order question “Are mindfulness-based interventions effective?” These studies have led to promising data suggesting that MBSR is an effective intervention for treatment of both psychological and physical symptoms. p. 374

However, the main issue the paper raised is that MBSR created a conceptual vacuum in which treatment was delivered. That is, in the previous quarter of a century, mindfulness was being used without a clear scientific understanding of what it was or how it worked.

However, an equally important direction for future research is to address the second order question“How do mindfulness-based interventions actually work?” p.374

This uncertainty confirms that MBSR was not established using scientific or Buddhist rationales. However, Shapiro and her co-authors went further, claiming that key elements of Buddhist mindfulness (intention and compassion) were removed in the creation of the Western versions of the practice:

When Western psychology attempted to extract the essence of mindfulness practice from its original religious/cultural roots, we lost, to some extent, the aspect of intention, which for Buddhism was enlightenment and compassion for all beings. p. 375

Surprisingly, MBSR lacked the foundational elements, concepts, and methods of the Buddhist traditions it claimed to have had congruence with. When researchers pointed out these limitations, some mindfulness advocates, such as Jon Kabat-Zinn, doubled down on the unevidenced claims that MBSR reflected Buddhist values. Ignoring the criticisms of Buddhist scholars, Kabat-Zinn suggested his writings had synthesized, to some extent, the Buddha’s wisdom:

My intention and hope was that the book might embody to whatever degree possible the dharma essence of the Buddha’s teachings put into action and made accessible to mainstream Americans facing stress, pain, and illness. p. 282. 3

Despite the controversial nature of such a statement, the idea that MBSR and MBIs reflected Buddhist practices persisted. The failure of the scientific community to push back against unevidenced claims of Buddhist congruence was a major contribution to the crisis in mindfulness research. Lacking a stable theoretical framework, mindfulness was neither ‘scientific’ nor ‘Buddhist’. It was used pragmatically to demonstrate correlations between meditation and health rather than explain how it worked.4 Criticisms of the scientific quality of mindfulness research are widespread. The main issue raised here is the freedom with which religious thought and practice is presented in peer-reviewed literature.

By making unevidenced claims about Buddhist mindfulness, MBSR and MBIs were built on theoretical uncertainty. Perhaps even more problematic is the ease with which Buddhist thought and practice were adapted and misrepresented in the search for new health interventions. There are important issues here about the subordination of religion by science, which can lead to misunderstanding in the wider society. However, the great loss is that by manufacturing an imaginary of mindfulness rather than developing a comprehensive understanding, we know very little about the benefits of traditional forms of meditation. Most Buddhist meditation methods tend to a nondual view, while science is essentially dualistic. In reinventing meditation through a dualistic lens, the richness and potential benefits of nondual meditation have been removed from contemporary practices.

References

  1. Shapiro, Shauna L., Linda E. Carlson, John A. Astin, and Benedict Freedman. “Mechanisms of mindfulness.” Journal of clinical psychology 62, no. 3 (2006): 373-386.
  2. Morris, Stephen Gene. “The Scientific History of Mindfulness: 1938 to 2020.” PhD diss., University of Kent,, 2024. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/106240/
  3. Kabat-Zinn, Jon. “Some reflections on the origins of MBSR, skillful means, and the trouble with maps.” In Mindfulness, pp. 281-306. Routledge, 2013.
  4. Van Dam, Nicholas T., Marieke K. Van Vugt, David R. Vago, Laura Schmalzl, Clifford D. Saron, Andrew Olendzki, Ted Meissner et al. “Mind the hype: A critical evaluation and prescriptive agenda for research on mindfulness and meditation.” Perspectives on psychological science 13, no. 1 (2018): 36-61.

The Scientific History of Mindfulness: Unveiling the Paradox

The findings of a new four-year investigation provide comprehensive insights into how mindfulness developed and its current status. Despite significant scientific concerns, the research illustrates how mindfulness was promoted as an influential health and well-being intervention. The least known but most controversial aspect of the ‘mindfulness revolution’ is the reconfiguring of spiritual practices as tools for social and economic control.

The latest in-depth research explains why scientists and clinicians are rethinking the idea that mindfulness is a universal mental health treatment.

The most comprehensive scientific review of the popular Western form of mindfulness meditation, medicalised mindfulness, has just been completed. The Scientific History of Mindfulness (SHoM) describes the creation of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in the late 1970s and charts the development of hundreds of Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) in the following decades. MBSR was part of a movement that sought to capture the health benefits of spiritual practices. Uniquely, MBSR was presented as a health intervention that ‘bridged’ scientific and religious knowledge. In 2004, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) was endorsed for clinical use in the UK, increasing public and scientific confidence in medicalised meditation. By 2010, mindfulness stakeholders declared that a ‘mindfulness revolution’, which would profoundly impact society, was taking place.

Politicians and health policy agents enthusiastically promoted the benefits of mindfulness, particularly in the UK. The hype also bled into social policy, where in 2014, mindfulness was presented as a tool for social control and improved economic performance. Under the concept of ‘mental capital,’ the rollout of mindfulness in UK schools was made a priority.

“The idea that mindfulness training could help to boost workplace productivity, even if employee working conditions were eroded requires much more research and discussion. Using mindfulness to pacify workers to benefit employers or the wider economy challenges the trope that medicalised mindfulness was Buddhist.”

Dr Stephen Gene Morris

By 2018, many meditation scientists were criticising the experimental findings on which mindfulness’s success had been built. Over the decades, reviews of meditation experiments have frequently highlighted limitations in mindfulness research. However, a tendency among some scientists and policymakers to ignore negative scientific evidence established misunderstandings about mindfulness and the benefits it could bring to practitioners and consumers.

“This SHoM goes some way to explaining why, despite over forty years of clinical and scientific activity, costing billions of pounds, we have little certainity about what mindfulness is and how it mediates health and wellbeing.”

Dr Stephen Gene Morris

The SHoM describes how reducing Buddhist meditation methods to Western psychological interventions created ontological conflicts. These conflicts helped sustain paradoxical positions where experimental studies were regarded as both reliable and unreliable. This permitted mindfulness stakeholders to pick and choose the ‘science’ supporting the use and deployment of MBIs. Mindfulness became widely accepted after 2000 despite its known weaknesses, which is a significant concern for scientific and clinical communities and their funders. As a case study, the history of mindfulness offers evidence of substantial problems in how knowledge is created and disseminated in the psychological sciences. Further, the review highlights how overstating scientific findings based on preliminary research can lead to problems in other domains, such as health care and social policy.

A clear understanding of the mindfulness paradox and research crisis offers new perspectives on the Western understanding of meditation. There is a pressing need to reevaluate and rationalise mindfulness research, a problem that SHoM addresses directly. This careful transdisciplinary investigation has also highlighted systemic issues in the areas where scientific and non-scientific knowledge intersect. In particular, scientists and scholars have often explained religious thought and practice empirically, subordinating their actual nature and obscuring their curative potential.

“As a case study, medicalised mindfulness has evidenced a sometimes corrosive relationship between religion and science that reduces knowledge to a very narrow scientific perspective. Recent scholarship supports the need for a major review of the scientific treatment of non-scientific knowledge.

Dr Stephen Gene Morris

One obvious conclusion from the SHoM is that a failure to establish reliable scientific foundations has been very costly. Thousands of peer-reviewed papers repeated the same experimental limitations, and unreliable ‘scientific’ narratives about religion and meditation have entered popular discourses. Today, a significant effort by the contemplative science community is needed to restore the reputation of meditation research and establish meaningful boundaries between scientific and religious knowledge systems.

(If you’re looking to understand why science has failed to understand religion, click here. The Legacy of Mindfulness: Has Science Failed to Understand Buddhist Meditation?)

Notes:

1 The Scientific History of Mindfulness: 1938 to 2020

Morris, Stephen Gene (2024) The Scientific History of Mindfulness: 1938 to 2020. University of Kent,. (doi:10.22024/UniKent/01.02.106240) (KAR id:106240). https://kar.kent.ac.uk/106240/

2. Dr Stephen Gene Morris is a Consultant in Applied Neuropsychology and has spent over 25 years understanding knowledge at the intersections of science and belief. In June 2024, he completed this PhD thesis, funded by a Scholarship from the University of Kent.

3. The SHoM will be officially launched on the 30th of September 2024. Press releases and summaries of findings will be distributed to relevant media outlets. To register for an electronic copy of the press pack, complete the contact form here with ‘Press Pack’. To contact Stephen directly on matters linked to

Meditation and negative side effects: the latest research

A 2020 review of mindfulness research highlights a reluctance to acknowledge potential adverse effects.

contrasting emotions
The effects of meditation based brain training are neither uniform nor universal

Scientists and clinicians, generally speaking, attempt to make the world a better place. Many of us working with mindfulness have confidence that this human technology has significant curative potential. But a health and wellbeing intervention cannot be built on my confidence or compassionate aspiration. It requires objective results produced through reliable scientific methods. Such results should offer a comprehensive understanding, including indications of problematic side effects. This summer, perhaps for the first time, a journal article has summarised adverse events linked to meditation practice (MAE).1

In a recent review of Richard Layard’s manifesto for happiness, I highlighted the tension between wanting mindfulness to be an effective panacea and making the scientific case for its widespread use. This dilemma is well known to psychologists. We direct our research towards a desired outcome, a plausible hypothesis, reliant on the scientific method to ensure our work remains objective and unbiased. Methodologically robust results of experiments and clinical trials should deliver a balanced and replicable set of data. If the data is not objective or if a later investigation cannot repeat the results, the scientific reliability may be open to question. Within the psychological sciences, these conflicting forces have long been a major source of concern.

Psychology has been locked into a so called replication crisis for several decades.2 Meditation research shares characteristics of this malaise, but scientists working in this field have highlighted several additional concerns. Meditation based mind training ultimately mediates brain function and structure; none of our higher (cortical) brain functions work in isolation. When activity in one area attenuates, we may see a correlated augmentation in an anatomically separate region. Put simply: brain training can simultaneously have different effects, these effects can vary from person to person. This truism of neuroscience should ensure that when meditation based health interventions are studied, both beneficial and adverse potentials are considered.

In August of this year, a research team (Farias, Maraldi, Wallenkampf and Lucchetti) published a strategic review of meditation studies in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. ‘Adverse events in meditation practices’ investigated almost half a century of meditation research, a total of 6,742 citations. Of those papers, only 83 met the project’s inclusion criteria. Across this sample, the study found MAEs in 8.3% of cases. That meditation practice has been scientifically correlated with problems in some practitioners is a significant finding in its own right. But a second issue, the tendency of meditation and mindfulness research to focus on positive outcomes to the exclusion of other considerations also needs to be taken very seriously. When the science of meditation is explored from a historical perspective, this lack of objectivity has been a recurrent problem for a long time, at least fourty years. Its root causes go back to early engagements between non-positivist knowledge systems and psychology.

The Farias et al. paper signposts a potential new trajectory for the science of meditation. It doesn’t, however, offer any explanation of why adverse side effects receive a low research priority. Given the codes of ethics and conduct underpinning experimental and clinical psychology, future research will need to take the question of MAEs more seriously. However, two overarching consideration require urgent attention. Firstly, on the theoretical and operational level what happened to spiritual meditation when it relocated to psychology? And why, despite thousands of experiments over at least eighty years, is our scientific knowledge of meditation still described as ‘preliminary’?

Notes

1 Farias, M., Maraldi, E., Wallenkampf, K. C., & Lucchetti, G. (2020). Adverse events in meditation practices and meditation‐based therapies: a systematic review. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica.

2 Maxwell, S. E., Lau, M. Y., & Howard, G. S. (2015). Is psychology suffering from a replication crisis? What does “failure to replicate” really mean?. American Psychologist, 70(6), 487.

How far can we trust meditation research?

Strategic reviews are challenging the popular perception of the beneficial effects of mindfulness

How far can we trust meditation research?
Looking for answers from meditation?

How far can we trust meditation research?

No matter how I tried to write the headline it came out as provocative. My intention wasn’t to be controversial, rather I wanted to articulate concerns that have been rumbling around the science of meditation and mindfulness for decades. At the heart of this story are two important yet unresolved issues. Firstly how does psychology and neuroscience understand meditation and what do the results of meditation research really mean?

The limited prosocial effects of meditation is a recent systematic review of research undertaken by Ute Kreplin, Miguel Farias and Inti Brazil. The study has been discussed in the meditation community at some length so I’m not going to review it here. But to summarize, the positive effects of meditation on prosocial behaviours (compassion, empathy, aggression, connectedness and prejudice) in healthy adults were only observed in compassion and empathy scores. However, increases to compassion were just seen when the meditation teacher was one of the co-authors of the research paper or when the study used a ‘passive’ control group (this means the control group were on a waiting list). These findings are suggestive of flaws and possibly ‘bias’ in some of those studies that demonstrated significant results. In an interview with Ute Kreplin published in the international Buddhist journal Tricycle, a number of broader issues have been highlighted, it’s those that I’d like to push around a little now. Leaving to one side the methodological flaws which are the main focus of the Tricycle interview, let me draw attention to the potential causes of the ongoing limitations in our attempts to evidence the effects of meditation.

woman meditating

It should be stressed that the Kreplin, Farias and Brazil paper is one of a number of reviews that came to similar conclusions, that many (possibly most) of the published studies reporting significant effects in non-clinical populations had methodological and/or theoretical flaws. And as Kreplin hinted, published research tends only to be the tip of the iceberg, studies that fail to show measurable changes in meditators rarely see the light of day. So the examples analyzed in strategic reviews are not the full picture of meditation research, they offer a very selective (positive) account of the scientific landscape. And yet the common perception grows that meditation is a panacea able to deliver a range of desirable outcomes to almost anyone willing to practice a method.

“At this moment in time the science generally isn’t helping us to understand the benefits of meditation…”

Stephen Gene Morris

By way of transparency, I should make it clear that I’m an experienced meditator and confident of the great benefits of the practice. My interest in contemplative science comes from the perspectives of both a trained cognitive psychologist and a practising Buddhist. From my experience of teaching traditional meditation systems, it is unrealistic to claim that a few weeks of meditation practice automatically leads to ‘significant’ change. Some practitioners do progress rapidly, embracing the transformative potential of meditation, but others fall away after only a few weeks, sometimes disillusioned and unfulfilled. This is a difficult subject to address coming from a traditional meditation perspective because judging or criticizing the progress of another practitioner is something of a taboo. But to enhance the wider understanding of meditation this point needs to be stressed. There is no reason to assume that the meditation method alone leads to change, the method is an integral part of a firmly established theoretical framework. The effects of meditation tend to be meditated by several factors such as individual capacity, participant motivation and qualitative differences between the teacher or teaching systems.

The contemporary scientific investigation of meditation typically takes the reductionist approach, stripping out components that might confound the results of an experiment, such as variability in the method or differences in the environment. But isolating the cause (meditation method) and the effect (empirical change in the participant) is difficult, and in complex aspects of human behaviour such as empathy or compassion, it may be beyond the scope of many experiments. Consider that large numbers of the participants in meditation studies are likely to be undergraduates ‘pressed’ into research projects, obliged to participate in return for course credits. If meditation doesn’t always work for the people who choose to attend classes in the wider community why should things be any different in an experimental setting?

ancient architecture art asia

The ‘expectation’ that a meditation method in itself leads to change is not supported by human history. This idea may eventually be confirmed by science but the data gathered so far is inconclusive. We know that a number of meditation scientists are committed practitioners, so perhaps they have first-hand experience of the benefits of meditation or mindfulness. Is this as Kreplin suggests, part of the problem? Could the experiential knowledge of the results of meditating introduce subconscious bias into research methodology? I’m a meditator I know about the benefits of regular practice but I can see dangers to the credibility of meditation systems if claims based on poor science are over-hyped. The lack of long term studies for secular forms of meditation should also be a serious concern.

The failure to establish robust findings in meditation research begs a further question, without reliable replicated science how does the delivery of meditation technologies continue to grow in society? If scientists are raising questions about the claims made in individual studies why isn’t this filtering down more into health care, public policy and the media? If meditation and mindfulness interventions cannot be shown to work, or deliver predictable results, confidence in meditation generally may decline. It might also lead to an erosion in the status of experimental psychology as a provider of independent and reliable data.

These few paragraphs are simply an introduction to the subject, the start of a very long road. It can be argued that the contemporary western scientific investigation of meditation began in the 1970s, since when perhaps as many as 10,000 studies have been published. But based on the findings from recent strategic reviews our scientific understanding of meditation is at a surprisingly preliminary stage.

Notes

The Kreplin, Farias and Brazil study can be found here.