Meditation is popularly known for its healing and spiritual aspects and is derived from ancient traditions of India and the martial arts of China [1]. Recognized branches of meditation today are mantra (Transcendental Meditation and Benson’s Relaxation Response) and Mindfulness Meditation [2], Yoga [3], and the practices of Tai Chi & Qi Gong [2]. These forms of meditation are increasingly used ...

BACKGROUND Although mindfulness meditation interventions have recently shown benefits for reducing stress in various populations, little is known about their relative efficacy compared with relaxation interventions. PURPOSE This randomized controlled trial examines the effects of a 1-month mindfulness meditation versus somatic relaxation training as compared to a control group in 83 students ...

Meditation practices may impact physiological pathways that are modulated by stress and relevant to disease. While much attention has been paid to meditation practices that emphasize calming the mind, improving focused attention, or developing mindfulness, less is known about meditation practices that foster compassion. Accordingly, the current study examined the effect of compassion meditation...

BACKGROUND Previous studies suggested that mindfulness meditation effectively reduced stress-related anxiety and depression symptoms, but no research has evaluated the efficacy of mindfulness meditation in nurses and nursing students in China. OBJECTIVES To evaluate the effects of brief mindfulness meditation on the anxiety and depression symptoms and autonomic nervous system activity in Chin...

Meditation experiences evolve along a spectrum, ranging from an effortful struggle with the technique to deep transpersonal states where all dualities dissolve. The present study investigated to what extent the depth of meditation is influenced by the amount of meditation practice and the personality trait of absorption, and whether deep experiences influence the mindfulness of meditators in ev...

In recent psychological literature on meditation, the terms "phenomenology" and "phenomenological" are sometimes used rather loosely to refer to introspective reports given by experimental subjects about their experiences during meditation. I Some psychologists have even developed questionnaires and procedures, characterized as ways of operationalizing phenomenology, so that subjects' introspec...

9 Abstract In addition to longer-term engagement in medita10 tion, the past years have seen an increasing interest in the 11 impact of single bouts of meditation on cognition. In this 12 hypothesis and theory article, we adopt the distinction be13 tween focused-attention meditation (FAM) and open14 monitoring meditation (OMM) and argue that these different 15 types of meditation have different,...

In this paper the main objective is to quantify and compare the instantaneous value of heart rate for normal breathing patterns during Meditation and Non Meditation conditions. This paper involves Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) technique for the analysis of the heart rate variability patterns during the meditative and non meditative states. The analysis is divided into three stages i.e. data acqu...

Autonomic and electroencephalographic (EEG) correlates of Tantric Yoga meditation were studied in three groups of subjects as they progressed from normal consciousness into meditation. Groups differed in their level of meditation proficiency. Measures of skin resistance, heart rate, respiration, autonomic orienting responses, resting EEG, EEG alpha and theta frequencies, sleep-scored EEG, avera...

Over the last few decades, an increasing number of functional neuroimaging studies have been performed with respect to hypnosis and meditation. The objective of this article is to review a number of these studies to compare the neural substrates related to different components of hypnosis and meditation. We examine neuroimaging studies conducted to explore the impact of hypnosis on the brain re...