Meditation

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Meditation is the practice of training attention and awareness, usually in stillness and silence. It is found in nearly every religious tradition and, since the 20th century, in hospitals, laboratories and offices. The scholar Louis Komjathy prefers the wider term "contemplative practice", because "meditation" is often reduced to seated Buddhist practice, while contemplative methods also include prayer, walking, movement, art and writing.

What meditation has in common

Komjathy argues that there is no single definition, but a family of shared features: attentiveness, awareness, interiority, presence, silence, transformation and a deepened sense of meaning. In his view every religious tradition has "contemplative strains". He sorts practices into many types, including concentrative, devotional, apophatic (emptying the mind of images), visualization, respiratory and therapeutic methods.

Across traditions

Different languages have their own words for meditation, and each carries a slightly different idea:

• Hesychia (Greek, "stillness") is a Greek term.
• Zazen (Japanese, "sitting meditation") is the seated practice of Zen.
• Muraqaba (Arabic, "to watch over") is a Sufi practice of inner watchfulness.
• Dhyana (Sanskrit, "concentration") and bhavana (Pali, "development") are used in Hindu and Buddhist traditions.
• Contemplatio (Latin, "to look at") is the last of the four stages of Catholic monastic prayer: reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation.
• Hitbodedut (Hebrew, "mental seclusion") is used in Judaism, and shouyi (Chinese, "guarding the One") in Daoism.

Komjathy quotes a member of a Seattle mosque who said that Salat, the Islamic ritual prayer, without inner silence "is not true Salat", which shows how close meditation and prayer can be.

The methods vary. Zen practitioners may count the breath from one to ten, or practise shikantaza, "just sitting". Christian Centering Prayer, developed in the 1970s by Trappist monks at St Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, uses a short sacred word such as "God" or "Abba", and draws on the Desert Fathers and the 14th-century Cloud of Unknowing. Classical Hindu Yoga describes eight "limbs", ending in concentration, meditation and absorption.

Body, breath and place

Meditation is a bodily practice. Komjathy notes the importance of posture (sitting, standing, walking or lying down), hand gestures and breathing, which usually becomes deeper, longer and slower as the body relaxes. It is also tied to place: caves, deserts, forests, mountains, monasteries, temples and meditation halls have all served as what he calls "contemplative space", which links meditation to architecture and landscape. He adds that time, money and social position limit who can practise.

Meditation as medicine

In the 20th century meditation was taken into medicine. The American physician Edmund Jacobson developed Progressive Relaxation in the early 1920s, and biofeedback taught patients to regulate their bodies using instruments such as the EEG. The two best-known secular methods, according to Komjathy, are Herbert Benson's Relaxation Response, a medical version of Transcendental Meditation in which any sound or phrase replaces the secret mantra, and Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, a medical version of Theravada Vipassana.

Relaxation methods tend to produce what researchers call a "trophotropic" state: lower heart rate, breathing rate and blood pressure, and less activity in the "fight-or-flight" system. They have been used for anxiety, chronic pain, depression, insomnia and addiction. Komjathy points out that secular forms reframe religious practice in "materialistic, medicalized, and/or psychologized" terms.

Contemplative science

Scientific study of meditation began in the 1930s and grew rapidly from the 1960s; the number of published papers on mindfulness rose dramatically in the 2000s. Komjathy traces the modern field of "contemplative science" to the collaboration between the neuroscientist Francisco Varela and the 14th Dalai Lama, which led to the Mind & Life Institute in 1990; he describes the result as "basically Buddho-neuroscience". Researchers use brain-imaging tools such as EEG and fMRI, which tracks changes in blood flow linked to brain activity. Studies distinguish passing "states" from lasting "traits", and Varela's "neurophenomenology" compares meditators' own reports with brain scans. According to Lutz, Dunne and Davidson, consciousness probably involves "scattered mosaics of functionally specialized brain regions" rather than one location.

Criticism

The evidence is contested. A 2007 review for the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that research on meditation and health was of "poor methodological quality" and that firm conclusions could not be drawn. Early research on Transcendental Meditation was criticised because the movement itself funded and ran many studies. Komjathy reports critics who compare reading brain scans to a "Rorschach test", who warn that popular claims run ahead of the evidence, and who question the idea that Buddhism is uniquely "scientific". He also notes the field's bias towards Asian and Buddhist practices and its neglect of Christian ones.

Meditation and tradition

Louis Komjathy warns that meditation is easily cut loose from the communities that developed it. He describes contemplative practice as embodied and tied to place, often within monastic life, and uses Hobsbawm and Ranger's idea of "invented traditions" for modern forms such as American Yoga, which owes much to European gymnastics. See Contemplative traditions.

See also

• Contemplative traditions
• Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
• Prayer
• Ritual
• Zen
• Sufism
• Neuroscience