Unregulated negative emotion increases the risk of burnout by 67%, which can impair performance and cause physical symptoms. Hypnotic guided imagery (HGI) is a deep relaxation-based intervention designed to shift negative to positive emotion. However, the physiological basis of emotional changes remains unclear. This feasibility study examined the acceptability and effects of HGI on emotional...
BackgroundWomen in rural Lebanon face ongoing war, corruption, pollution, and inequality. Such chronic instability makes their lives challenging.ObjectivesThis study evaluated the effects of a well-researched meditation practice on countering the stressors these women experience.DesignThis was a randomized controlled trial of 114 rural Lebanese women divided into three cohorts, each measured...
Background: Our previous comparison of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from long-term Transcendental Meditation® (TM®) practitioners and matched non-practitioner controls found 200 differentially expressed (DE) genes. Bioinformatics analyses of these DE genes suggested a reduced risk of diseases associated with stress and aging in the TM group. Here we assessed additional signs of...
Objective: This study examined whether studying in a Consciousness-Based Education institution influenced college students' mental and physical health. Participants and methods: Undergraduate college students (n = 321) completed the Duke Health Profile, assessing 11 areas of mental and physical health, both as entering freshmen (2008-2014) and at graduation. The archived data was analyzed from...
Abstract Job burnout is a serious problem in medicine, leading to lost productivity, costly attrition, loss of well-being, and even loss of life through suicide. A major US medical school introduced a 2-credit elective course that featured the Transcendental Meditation® (TM®) technique to try to address this problem. This chapter reports on an 8-year study of medical students’ experiences with...
Psychedelic use is generally considered safe, and their effects are being equated with those of meditation practices. To assess these conclusions, this paper compares psychedelic and meditation experiences in terms of 1) EEG patterns, 2) brain blood-flow patterns, 3) content of experience, 4) mechanism of action, and 5) therapeutic application. On these five factors, psychedelic and...
Three broad organizing strategies have been used to study meditation practices: (1) consider meditation practices as using similar processes and so combine neural images across a wide range of practices to identify the common underlying brain patterns of meditation practice, (2) consider meditation practices as unique and so investigate individual practices, or (3) consider meditation practices...
Early research into meditation, including Transcendental Meditation (TM), relied exclusively on EEG to measure brain activity during meditation practice. Since the advent of neural imaging, MRI, and later fMRI, have dominated this field. Unfortunately, the use of this technology rests on the questionable assumption that lying down in a confining tube while exposed to very loud sounds would not...
OBJECTIVE: This article discusses the importance of decisions made about the temporal and spatial characteristics of EEG during recording and analysis of meditation practices. ISSUE: A recent meta-analysis averaged EEG in the alpha1 and alpha2 bands to characterize mindfulness practices. This ignored known differences in cognitive processing associated with these two bands, and so confounded...
Across cultures and throughout history, transcendent states achieved through meditative practices have been reported. The practices to attain transcendent states vary from transcendental meditation to yoga to contemplative prayer, to other various forms of sitting meditation. While these transcendent states are ascribed many different terms, those who experience them describe a similar unitive,...
Many studies showed positive effects of Yoga Asanas. There is no study on Maharishi Yoga Asanas yet. This research replicated and expanded observed improvements on the profile of mood states (POMS) as a result of 2-week Maharishi Yoga Asanas course. Thirteen college students taking part in a 4-week course on Maharishi Yoga Asanas were matched with 13 students taking other courses at the...
This chapter explores subjective and objective correlates of the state of Yoga during Transcendental Meditation practice. Yoga fits the three criteria of a higher state of consciousness: (1) Yoga has a different subject/object relationship than other states. In Yoga there is no content—only self-awareness. (2) Yoga involves a more expanded sense-of-self. Content analysis of descriptions of Yoga...
Two phases of Transcendental Meditation (TM)-transcending and undirected mentation-were compared to each other and to task-free resting using multichannel EEG recorded from 20 TM practitioners. An EEG microstate analysis identified four classes of microstates which were labeled A, B, C and D, based on their similarity to previously published classes. For each class of microstates, mean...
This study compared subjective experiences and EEG patterns in 37 subjects when listening to live Vedic recitation and when practicing Transcendental Meditation (TM). Content analysis of experiences when listening to Vedic recitation yielded three higher-order code. Experiences during Vedic recitation were: (1) deeper than during TM practice; (2) experienced as an inner process; and (3)...
This study used subjective reports and eLORETA analysis to assess to what extent Transcendental Meditation (TM) might involve focused attention-voluntary control of mental content. Eighty-seven TM subjects with one month to five years TM experience participated in this study. Regression analysis of years TM practice and self-reported transcendental experiences (lack of time, space and body...
This paper draws from three different bodies of research to discuss the hypothesis that age-appropriate experiences enhance brain and cognitive development throughout the life span. These age-appropriate experiences could be considered as the drivers of development at each age, including drivers to foster development beyond adult abstract thinking, as described in Piaget's formal operational...
This article explores transcendental experiences during meditation practice and the integration of transcendental experiences and the unfolding of higher states of consciousness with waking, dreaming, and sleeping. The subject/object relationship during transcendental experiences is characterized by the absence of time, space, and body sense--the framework that gives meaning to waking...
This study compared professional and amateur classical musicians matched for age, gender, and education on reaction times during the Stroop color-word test, brainwaves during an auditory ERP task and during paired reaction-time tasks, responses on the Gibbs Sociomoral Reflection questionnaire, and self-reported frequencies of peak experiences. Professional musicians were characterized by: (1)...
This random-assignment study compared coherence, amplitude, and eLORETA patterns during practice of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) and the TM-Sidhi programs. The TM technique involves systematic transcending of contents of experience to a state of pure consciousness. The TM-Sidhi program involves sanyama-the simultaneous experience of dhārānā (fixity), dhyāna (transcending) and samādhi...
Two studies investigated frontal alpha lateral asymmetry and frontal interhemispheric coherence during eyes-closed rest, Transcendental Meditation (TM) practice, and computerized reaction-time tasks. In the first study, frontal coherence and lateralized asymmetry were higher in 13 TM subjects than in 12 controls. In the second study (N = 14), a one-year longitudinal study, lateral asymmetry did...
This research extends and confirms recent brainwave findings that distinguished an individual's sense-of-self along an Object-referral/Self-referral Continuum of self-awareness. Subjects were interviewed and were given tests measuring inner/outer orientation, moral reasoning, anxiety, and personality. Scores on the psychological tests were factor analyzed. The first unrotated PCA component of...
Burnout is pervasive among physicians and has widespread implications for individuals and institutions. This research study examines, for the first time, the effects of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique on academic physician burnout and depression. A mixed methods randomized controlled trial was conducted with 40 academic physicians representing 15 specialties at a medical school and...