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 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…
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…
