A new questionnaire, the Inventory of Modes of Existential Awareness (IMEA), measures 15 distinct self-transcendent states—positive, negative, and incomplete. In 97 meditators, positive states occurred most often, especially during meditation, and were linked to more meditation hours, retreat experience, decentering, mindfulness, psychological wellbeing, meditation depth, and conscientiousness, while being negatively related to neuroticism. Negative states were more common outside meditation and showed the opposite pattern. Incomplete states had no consistent relationships. The IMEA offers a flexible tool for studying how self-transcendent awareness contributes to meditation's therapeutic effects.
This chapter examines meditations that cultivate existential insight, a category distinct from concentration or mindfulness practices. It categorizes insight practices and reviews neuroscientific evidence in four areas: attentional foundations, default mode network changes, neural correlates of self-construal, and psychophysiological studies of dream yoga. The authors argue that these practices can be integrated into daily life through both daytime and nighttime (dream yoga) routines. The chapter provides a theoretical framework and practical guidance for incorporating existential insight meditation into everyday experience, addressing a gap in the understanding of how such practices affect the mind and brain.
An 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course improved self-reported trait mindfulness and cognitive reappraisal, as well as the ability to use both strategies during a task, compared to a wait-list control group. The training group showed decreased early brain activity (200–280 ms positivity) across all emotion regulation strategies, suggesting MBSR adaptively modulates early attention to emotional stimuli. However, later-stage emotion processing (LPP) did not change, indicating that more extensive training may be needed for later stages. The findings also suggest that employing mindfulness consciously may require less cognitive effort than cognitive reappraisal.