In order to effectively tease out the effects of mental silence as opposed to the effects of other aspects of Sahaja Yoga meditation it was obviously necessary to use randomised controlled trial methodology. Having refined the practical approach in previous clinics it became possible to develop a standardised, instructional strategy…
A national survey of Sahaja Yoga meditation practitioners using standardised measures revealed that meditators experienced significantly better levels of quality of life and mental health as compared to population data drawn from national health surveys using the same instruments. Similar surveys of populations practising Western forms of religiosity also reported…
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…
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…
Meditation 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…
In some ways the fact that specific effects appear to be associated with the mental silence experience poses a challenge to the philosophical underpinnings of Western culture by not only describing a state of non-thought, but also demonstrating that this state is accessible and of practical importance to the general…
Of great interest is that the yoga tradition does not just describe philosophical, moral, metaphysical associations between mind, behaviour and health but actually describes the mechanism by which they are interconnected. This is the system of chakras (energy plexuses) and nadis (energy channels). Described since ancient times, the physical body…
The popularity of meditation in the West has grown in parallel with the mainstreaming of alternative health and the New Age movement and is now fuelled by a potent combination of traditional anecdote, selective misreadings of the scientific database and marketing hyperbole. Popularity with consumers may well be encouraged by…
Dr Ramesh Manocha carried out a randomised controlled trial to assess the impact Sahaja Yoga meditation (SYM) has on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms. The results of this trial program indicate that SYM has potential as an adjunctive therapy for children with ADHD when offered via a family treatment…
I propose that one of the main reasons for the paucity of convincing evidence with regard to meditation is because Western scientists have failed to apprehend the key idea that underlies the meditation tradition: meditation is traditionally defined in Eastern cultures as the experience of mental silence. Modern Western understandings…
