Since its inception, Sahaja Yoga has been propagated worldwide by a grassroots movement of volunteer practitioners. Its proponents claim that it is now practised in over 80 countries around the world. Instruction in the technique, in keeping with the founder’s philosophy, has been on a free-of-charge, non-commercial basis. For more…
It is difficult to make conclusions about meditation when the definition of the independent variable itself varies from study to study, if not from person to person. A homogeneous definition of meditation is essential for further progress in this field and yet, after almost 40 years of research the scientific…
The Western scientific and health community of scientists and clinicians has generated in excess of 3,000 peer-reviewed articles on or referring to meditation (as featured in the major bibliographic databases such as MEDLINE and PsycINFO). However, despite this impressive accumulation of publications, the number of randomised controlled trials of meditation…
Kennedy (1976) described 2 cases in which de-personalisation appeared to be triggered by meditation. The first case developed after the subject used breathing and meditation exercises described in a book on self-development. The experience continued for at least 16 months. The second case involved the use of meditation techniques recommended…
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…
Researching meditation poses a unique challenge, since participants receiving the “inert” (or “placebo”) treatment must be involved in a placebo-like activity that nevertheless requires their active, conscious and conscientious involvement. They must also be sufficiently convinced of its authenticity to motivate them to participate at a level necessary to maintain…
The persistent association between the sahaja yoga meditation mental silence experience and health outcomes brings another area of discussion into focus. There is currently debate about how to define the term spirituality and how it might differ from terms such as religion or religiousness. For more discussion of the spirituality…
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,…
Shapiro (1992) observed the effects of vipassana meditation on a small group of meditators and found that while most participants experienced positive results, a small number of meditators experienced distinctly negative states. Glueck (1984) studied 110 participants and reported that the practice of transcendental meditation (TM) appeared to release repressed…
