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…
Within the yoga tradition, meditation is defined as an experiential state of awareness specifically involving control over all aspects of mental activity. Feuerstein (2006) explains that “the initial purpose of meditation is to intercept the flux of ordinary mental activity.” He translates Patanjali’s explanation from the Yoga Sutras (aphorism 1.2)…
Explanatory factors for the observed effects of meditation and their particular importance in behaviour therapy research include the following 3 categories: Category 1. Factors which are common to all strategies such as social support or therapeutic contact. Many clinical researchers have observed that controls with high face validity seem more…
Sample size is obviously a key factor in determining the validity and generality of trial outcomes. It needs to be determined carefully to ensure that the research time, effort and support costs invested in any clinical trial are not wasted. Ideally, clinical trials should be large enough to detect reliably…
The Jadad scoring system is a widely used method of rating RCTs for basic methodological rigour. However it seems to be inadequately structured to meaningfully discern the methodological standard of meditation trials. For instance, while all trials might be randomised, only a minority described randomisation methods and few use the…
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 Australia, a survey of a randomly selected but representative sample drawn from the state of Western Australia (n = 1,033) found that 11% of respondents had practiced meditation at least once. This reflects trends in other countries. In the United States for instance, a survey administered to 31,000 representative…
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…
In light of the number of studies reporting adverse effects from meditation broad based surveys need to be conducted, and given that studies such as Kaldor’s (2002) suggest that up to 10% of the population may have tried meditation at some time, a direct-to-public cross sectional survey may be sufficiently…
