The sahaja yoga meditator aims to achieve and cultivate the experience of “thoughtless awareness”. As in the notion of “mindful awareness” the meditator aims to sustain that experience even while not formally meditating. Unlike Mindfulness however, the state is not one of introspective, non-judgmental observation of one’s cognitions, but rather…
The mechanisms by which sahaja yoga meditation (SYM), or in fact any meditation technique, exerts its claimed effects are unclear. One very popular view, which has become more or less the default explanation of meditation effects is in terms of the physiological changes that characterise the Relaxation Response — that…
Dr Ramesh Manocha discusses the negative impact of the commercialisation of meditation in this excerpt from his thesis. Another important retarding force impacting on meditation research relates to the fact that meditation has become an important commodity and many of its leading lights have made their fortunes by selling books,…
Dr Ramesh Manocha comments on the historic association of meditation and a sensation of coolnesss: Interestingly, an association between meditation and the subjective sensation of coolness can be found in some traditional Eastern texts. For example, in the Sikh text Guru Granth Sahib the importance and effects of meditation are…
Dr Ramesh Manocha describes the benifits of the parents and children who engaged Sahaja Yoga Meditation as a part of a study carried out by Dr Manocha. The Sahaja Yoga Meditation (SYM) intervention was designed as a family treatment program, which was expected to impact on parents as well as…
Dr Ramesh Manocha explains why strong controls are necessary when researching the real-world relevance of meditation in this excerpt from his thesis: “Some might argue that controlling for non-specific effects is an academic exercise with little real-world relevance. This is supposedly because factors such as the placebo effect, expectancy of…
Dr Ramesh Manocha summarises the findings of his thesis with respect to mental silence. “Despite the fact that scientific assessment of the mental silence approach is much less common than non-mental silence, approaches in the Western scientific literature the data in this thesis provide some compelling evidence to suggest that…
The following is a summary of a study by Dusek et al. published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in 2008. Summary: compares the relaxation response method of meditation against educational classes on a sample with hypertension gathered from the community. The sole outcome measure was physiological blood…
In this excerpt from his thesis, Dr Ramesh Manocha discusses the problem of differentiating meditation from relaxation. “Early uncontrolled or own-control studies of meditation suggested that psycho-physiological parameters such as heart rate could change quite dramatically in a single meditation session and this led to initial enthusiasm for meditation as…
In this excerpt from his thesis, Dr Ramesh Manocha discusses the support his research found for the ‘mental silence’ definition of meditation. “In attempt to begin exploring the physiological features of the mental silence state, an exploratory physiological trial of sahaja yoga meditation’s effect on skin temperature was conducted. Physiological…
