Pete Gamlen for Vox
We’re laying out the latest science of what meditation does to your mind. The better we understand the common mechanisms across how different meditation practices affect the mind, the more meditation science can contribute to broader understandings of human psychology. More relevant for us non-scientists, we’ll get better at developing and fine-tuning styles of practice that can help us get the most out of whatever we’re looking for in taking up meditation….Continue reading….
By: Oshan Jarow
Source: Vox
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Critics:
Meditation has proven difficult to define as it covers a wide range of dissimilar practices in different traditions and cultures. In popular usage, the word “meditation” and the phrase “meditative practice” are often used imprecisely to designate practices found across many cultures. These can include almost anything that is claimed to train the attention of mind or to teach calmness or compassion.
There remains no definition of necessary and sufficient criteria for meditation that has achieved widespread acceptance within the modern scientific community. Some of the difficulty in precisely defining meditation has been in recognizing the particularities of the many various traditions; and theories and practice can differ within a tradition. Taylor noted that even within a faith such as “Hindu” or “Buddhist”, schools and individual teachers may teach distinct types of meditation.
Ornstein noted that “Most techniques of meditation do not exist as solitary practices but are only artificially separable from an entire system of practice and belief.” For instance, while monks meditate as part of their everyday lives, they also engage in the codified rules and live together in monasteries in specific cultural settings that go along with their meditative practices.
In the West, meditation techniques have often been classified in two broad categories, which in actual practice are often combined: focused (or concentrative) meditation and open monitoring (or mindfulness) meditation: Direction of mental attention… A practitioner can focus intensively on one particular object (so-called concentrative meditation), on all mental events that enter the field of awareness (so-called mindfulness meditation), or both specific focal points and the field of awareness.
Focused methods include paying attention to the breath, to an idea or feeling (such as mettā – loving-kindness), to a kōan, or to a mantra (such as in transcendental meditation), and single point meditation. Open monitoring methods include mindfulness, shikantaza and other awareness states. Another typology divides meditation approaches into concentrative, generative, receptive and reflective practices:
concentrative: focused attention, including breath meditation, TM, and visualizations;generative: developing qualities like loving kindness and compassion;receptive: open monitoring; reflective: systematic investigation, contemplation.
The Buddhist tradition often divides meditative practice into samatha, or calm abiding, and vipassana, insight. Mindfulness of breathing, a form of focused attention, calms down the mind; this calmed mind can then investigate the nature of reality, by monitoring the fleeting and ever-changing constituents of experience, by reflective investigation, or by “turning back the radiance,” focusing awareness on awareness itself and discerning the true nature of mind as awareness itself.
Matko and Sedlmeier “call into question the common division into ‘focused attention’ and ‘open-monitoring’ practices.” They argue for “two orthogonal dimensions along which meditation techniques could be classified,” namely “activation” and “amount of body orientation,” proposing seven clusters of techniques: “mindful observation, body-centered meditation, visual concentration, contemplation, affect-centered meditation, mantra meditation, and meditation with movement.”
Jonathan Shear argues that transcendental meditation is an “automatic self-transcending” technique, different from focused attention and open monitoring. In this kind of practice, “there is no attempt to sustain any particular condition at all. Practices of this kind, once started, are reported to automatically ‘transcend’ their own activity and disappear, to be started up again later if appropriate.”
Yet, Shear also states that “automatic self-transcending” also applies to the way other techniques such as from Zen and Qigong are practiced by experienced meditators “once they had become effortless and automatic through years of practice.
Asanas or body postures such as padmasana (full-lotus, half-lotus), cross-legged sitting, seiza, and kneeling positions are popular meditative postures in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism,although other postures such as sitting, supine (lying), and standing are also used. Meditation is also sometimes done while walking, known as kinhin, while doing a simple task mindfully, known as samu, or while lying down, known as shavasana.
The Transcendental Meditation technique recommends practice of 20 minutes twice per day. Some techniques suggest less time, especially when starting meditation, and Richard Davidson has quoted research saying benefits can be achieved with a practice of only 8 minutes per day. Research shows improvement in meditation time with simple oral and video training.Some meditators practice for much longer, particularly when on a course or retreat.Some meditators find practice best in the hours before dawn.
Some religions have traditions of using prayer beads as tools in devotional meditation. Most prayer beads and Christian rosaries consist of pearls or beads linked together by a thread. The Roman Catholic rosary is a string of beads containing five sets with ten small beads. Eastern and Oriental Orthodox have traditions of using prayer ropes called Comboschini or Meqetaria as an aid to prayerful meditation.
The Hindu japa mala has 108 beads. The figure 108 in itself having spiritual significance as the energy of the sounds equivalates to Om, as well as those used in Gaudiya Vaishnavism, the Hare Krishna tradition, and Jainism. Buddhist prayer beads also have 108 beads, but hold a different meaning. In Buddhism, there are 108 human passions that impede enlightenment. Each bead is counted once as a person recites a mantra until the person has gone all the way around the mala.
The Muslim misbaha has 99 beads. There is also quite a variance when it comes to materials used for beads. Beads made from seeds of rudraksha trees are considered sacred by devotees of Shiva, while followers of Vishnu revere the wood that comes from the Tulsi plant, also known as Holy Basil. The Buddhist literature has many stories of Enlightenment being attained through disciples being struck by their masters. T. Griffith Foulk recounts how the encouragement stick was an integral part of the Zen practice when he trained:
In the Rinzai monastery where I trained in the mid-1970s, according to an unspoken etiquette, monks who were sitting earnestly and well were shown respect by being hit vigorously and often; those known as laggards were ignored by the hall monitor or given little taps if they requested to be hit. Nobody asked about the ‘meaning’ of the stick, nobody explained, and nobody ever complained about its use.
Neuroscientist and long-time meditator Richard Davidson has expressed the view that having a narrative can help the maintenance of daily practice. For instance, he himself prostrates to the teachings, and meditates “not primarily for my benefit, but for the benefit of others”.
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