Sedlmeier The Psychology of Meditation

Varieties, Effects, Theories, and Perspectives
2022
ISBN: 978-1-61334-576-4
Verlag: Hogrefe Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 294 Seiten

What is meditation? What do people hope to get from practicing it and what do they really get? How can the effects of meditation be explained? And what are the best approaches to researching the psychology of meditation so we can understand more? This volume provides state-of-the-art answers to these questions. Contrary to commonly accepted wisdom, meditation comes in huge varieties and the reasons why people begin to meditate (and stay with it) are also numerous and diverse. Even mindfulness, which is often (wrongly) used as a synonym for meditation, comes in many forms.

This book first describes the varieties of meditation in detail and then succinctly summarizes the beneficial effects found in the avalanche of studies available, especially in clinical contexts, and also explores recently emerging topics such as negative effects and the impact of ethics and spirituality. The author expertly provides theories of four main traditional meditation approaches, which has never been done before in this form, and gives a critical overview of Western approaches to explain the effects of meditation. In conclusion, he makes recommendations on how to improve future meditation research. This book is of interest to meditation researchers, mental health practitioners, students interested in meditation and mindfulness, and to everybody who seriously wants to know more about the topic.

Zielgruppe

Psychologists, counselors, coaches, psychiatrists, as well as students and anyone interested in understanding more about meditation.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sedlmeier, Peter

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Biologische Psychologie, Neuropsychologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Bewusstseinszustände

Leseproben

|3|Chapter 1
What Do People Do When They Say They Meditate?

Meditation grows your brain, enhances empathy, reduces blood pressure, boosts the immune system, reduces anxiety and depression, is the ultimate pain killer, increases positive emotions, and makes you more intelligent. This is just a small sample of the effects of meditation you can read about on the Internet (e.g., Chowdhury, 2019; Dimitrov, 2019; Miller, 2021; Rana, 2021). So, it might indeed be a good idea to meditate, and I will come back to the evidence for these claims in later chapters of the book. But what should you actually do to achieve all these benefits? Such advice sounds like you just have to know what meditation is and then practice it. This uniform view of meditation is also what researchers in the West have mostly adhered to, so far, although some early work already made clear that meditation is far from being a uniform practice (Goleman, 1977; Naranjo & Ornstein, 1972; see also Oman, 2021).

When you ask meditators what they do when they say they meditate, their answers are, however, quite diverse. For instance, when we asked experienced meditators from various traditions and looked into the literature, we eventually obtained a list of 309 different meditation techniques (Matko et al., 2021a). These many techniques are of course not totally different, and Chapter 4 presents a classification system based on these 309 techniques, along with the results of other researchers’ attempts to classify meditation techniques. In Chapter 3, we will also have a look at traditional classifications. However, before a summary of the many techniques of meditation, some selected examples should help convey an impression of the huge variety to be found in the meditation landscape. We will see that basically anything can be an object of meditation, but that meditation focuses mostly on bodily or mental processes. We will see that meditating often means observing something or being aware of some process, but it can also mean mentally influencing the body or mind, generating emotions, performing some action repeatedly, moving in a specific way, or combining several of these.

|4|Watching the Breath

The most commonly used object of meditation is the breath. It accompanies us through our whole life, and we can easily observe it. A basic practice is to just place all one’s attention on the coming and going of the breath. Hereby, one can focus on the sensation the air creates when passing the nostrils. One may explore where exactly in the nostrils (opening, further inside, or higher up the sinuses) this sensation is perceived most accurately. Usually, between the end of the out-breath and the following in-breath, and also between the end of the in-breath and the following out-breath, breathing is suspended for a moment. This halt should also be noted. The aim is to be clear and calm and not tense while being aware of the breath, but also to do so without relaxing too much, i.e., to the point of falling into a sluggish state (see, for example, Ricard, 2011, p. 76).

Watching the breath at first sounds easy, but when you try it, you will probably notice that your mind wanders very quickly. For instance, if you want to stay with perceiving the sensation of the breath at the opening of the nostrils, it may be difficult to do that for an extended period of time because the sensation is so faint. This will improve with practice, but to strengthen the feeling it may help to watch the feeling in cold weather – for instance, when you leave your home on an icy winter day. You might also want to watch the feeling when your breath is very short as, for instance, when you run or work out.

Over time, meditation teachers have devised innumerable specific ways to watch the breath. For an illustration, one can again have a look at some of the variations proposed by Matthieu Ricard, a very experienced monk and scholar who was mainly trained in one of the Tibetan Buddhist traditions (Ricard, 2011, pp. 70?–?81). An easy way of watching the breath is to count it (please note that counting itself comes in many variations – you can, for instance, vary the number up to which you count, whether you count at the end of the out-breath or the beginning of the in-breath, or both). Then you could “fill” the in- and out-breath by mentally repeating 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, … during the course of an in-breath (the number of repetitions depending on the length of the breath), and 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, … during the course of the next out-breath, and do that until you arrive, say, at 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, … and then begin again. Another variation consists of filling the breath with mentally expressed wishes such as “May all beings be happy,” while breathing out, and “May all their suffering be dispelled,” when breathing in. Breathing can also be “filled” with mantras, see the section Repeating Words or Sentences, in this chapter).

For some, it might be easier to watch the effect of breathing instead of the breath itself – the place to look at for that could be your abdomen, which |5|rises with the in-breath and falls with the out-breath. Here is an instruction from the tradition of Vipassana advocated by Mahasi Sayadaw (Mahasi, 1991, p. 5. Please note that “Sayadaw” is not a name but a title – literally “royal teacher” – commonly used in the Burmese Theravada monk tradition, referring to a senior monk or an abbot of a monastery):

Try to keep your mind (but not your eyes) on the abdomen. You will thereby come to know the movements of rising and falling of it. If these movements are not clear to you in the beginning, then place both hands on the abdomen to feel these rising and falling movements. After a short time the upward movement of exhalation will become clear. (Mahasi, 1991, p. 5. Reprinted here with permission from the Buddhist Publication Society.)

The two examples from Ricard and Mahasi already illustrate that basic meditation techniques may be hard to separate into totally distinct categories: The breath can be used to better concentrate on thoughts or wishes (“May all beings be happy”), or the concentration on body movements (rising and falling of the abdomen) can be used to better attend to the breath. This mixture of techniques is also evident in practices in which the breath is not only watched, but also partly influenced. These and similar ways of observing the breath can be found in all major traditional approaches to meditation, as well as in newly developed ones.

Watching Body, Thoughts, and Emotions

Breathing is, of course, also a bodily process, but because of its central role in all traditions of meditation, it has received an opening section here of its own. If you have tried such an approach to staying with the breath and could not, you may feel some negativity. This would be a good opportunity to switch to a different object of meditation: observing your negativity. Maybe you notice that there is some pressure in your stomach– you could then observe this pressure. You might think “I have not had such a pressure before”: Observe this thought. Just to sit and observe whatever comes up and let it go again is a basic exercise. It can be found in most Buddhist forms of meditation, but also in many other contemplative traditions as well as in secular approaches. Staying open to all that happens, sometimes termed open awareness is, at least for most beginners, much more difficult than to watch the breath. This is probably why some meditation teachers recommend restricting open awareness to bodily processes (e.g., Sheng-Yen, 2002).

|6|Body Scan

Some variants of what is currently known as Vipassana meditation (for some variations, see Chapter 3), as well as newly created secular approaches such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), recommend moving the awareness of bodily processes systematically through the whole body (e.g., Hart, 1987; Kabat-Zinn, 1990; Mahasi, 1991), a technique often called a body scan. The exact ways a body scan is...