A reduction of autonomic arousal leads to diversion of blood flow to the viscera and away from the skeletal muscle of the body. Accordingly this leads to increased blood flow to the surface of glabrous skin and thereby an increase in palmar skin temperature. Sahaja Yoga meditation practitioners appear to…
Xu (1994) described and discussed the adverse effects of Qigong, which has been described as both a therapeutic practice as well as the “Chinese equivalent of Indian meditation”. The clinical consequences of inappropriate use of this technique has been described as the “Qigong deviation syndrome”, which has become a diagnostic…
Goleman (1996) proposed that meditative styles might be classified into two types, Mindfulness and concentrative, depending on how attention is directed during meditation. Andresen (2000) meanwhile suggested that these two categories might be better understood as two poles on a continuum upon which most other meditative techniques can be positioned.…
As far as mindfulness meditation itself is concerned, the Sahaja Yoga Meditation (SYM) approach has some important similarities to mindfulness, in that it also emphasises awareness of the present moment and the idea of disengaging attentional processes from the flow of internal and external events (rather than reduction of physiological…
The ideas of yoga, sahaja, self-realization and meditation orbit around another central theme in the spiritual culture of the East which, simply put, relates to the idea that one’s perception of true reality is obscured by one’s own mental complexities (preconceptions, emotions, opinion and intellect). Meditation represents the opposite condition…
In order to contrast the traditional Eastern ideas of meditation with ideas that are currently prevalent in Western culture, it is useful to examine popular, broadly consensual definitions of meditation as an insight into how the modern Western consumer has come to conceptualise it. Both basic and advanced Google searches…
Practitioners of sahaja yoga meditaiton (SYM) consistently report that the state of mental silence is characteristically associated with other subjective phenomena such as a natural focusing of attention and a sense of wellbeing which somehow leads to improved physical health. A number of SYM practitioners do describe occasional transcendent experiences,…
Aftanas et al. (2001) conducted a well designed study of EEG on novice and advanced sahaja yoga meditation practitioners. During meditation substantial changes in midline alpha-theta power, rather than gamma power, distributed more or less symmetrically in the fronto-parietal parts of the brain, occurred in a pattern that was significantly…
Findings suggest that the mental silence experience may be associated with a specific pattern of activity in both the central nervous system and autonomic nervous system which is more complex than simple reduction of arousal and yet different from the cognitive changes seen in association with mindfulness meditaton. Thus, although…
The mechanism of action provoked by meditation is thought primarily to involve its ability to reduce stress. There are two main theories about how this happens. First, that it reduces somatic-arousal thereby reducing the reactivity of the individual to environmental stressors and, second, that it alters the individual’s cognitive appraisal…
