Meditation

“Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It is a way of entering into the quiet that’s already there.” — Deepak Chopra

The family of contemplative practices that train attention by turning it inward and sitting with whatever arises, rather than acting to change it.

Of all the practices in this field, meditation is the one most people have tried at least once. Roughly eighteen million American adults practice it in some form, according to figures from the National Institutes of Health, and for most newcomers it’s the door through which they first walk into contemplative life. It arrives now stripped of incense and lineage, packaged in an app with a soothing voice and a timer, and that very portability is what has made it the field’s center of gravity. A person who would never call themselves spiritual will still close their eyes for ten minutes and follow their breath. What that person is doing has a two-thousand-year-old pedigree, several rival theories of what it accomplishes, and a research literature larger than that of any other practice covered here.

What the practice is

“Meditation” names a family, not a single technique, and the members of that family want quite different things. They’re usually sorted by what the meditator does with attention.

Concentrative practice fixes attention on a single object and returns to it each time the mind wanders. The object can be the breath, a candle flame, a repeated word, or a felt sensation. This is the form most beginners meet first, and the form the apps teach by default. Samatha, the calm-abiding practice of the Buddhist traditions, is its classical expression.

Mindfulness, or open-monitoring practice, does something subtler. Rather than holding one object, the meditator watches the whole field of experience as it passes (thoughts, sounds, sensations, moods), noting each without following it or pushing it away. The Buddhist vipassana (insight) tradition is its source, and the secular mindfulness movement is its most influential modern descendant.

Loving-kindness, or metta, is a deliberately generative practice. The meditator silently extends goodwill in widening circles, to oneself, to a loved one, to a stranger, to a difficult person, to all beings, usually through repeated phrases such as “may you be safe, may you be well.” It cultivates an attitude rather than calming the mind.

Mantra practice repeats a word or sound, aloud or internally, as the anchor of attention. The Hindu traditions supply most of the modern forms, from the Om of yogic practice to the proprietary mantras of Transcendental Meditation. Visualization holds an image vividly in the mind’s eye: a deity, a light, a color at one of the chakras, a desired outcome. And open awareness, the practice of the Zen and Dzogchen traditions, rests in bare awareness itself with no object at all, a form usually taught only after years of the others.

A single teacher may move among several of these in one sitting, and most experienced practitioners hold more than one in their repertoire.

What the practitioner does

In a guided setting, the practitioner is the teacher, and the teacher’s role is closer to a coach than to a healer working on a client. The teacher gives the instruction (where to put attention, what to do when it strays), demonstrates the posture, and then mostly gets out of the way. In a class or a retreat, the teacher may ring a bell to open and close the sitting, offer a short talk on the territory, and field the questions that come up: I can’t stop thinking, am I doing it wrong? The standard answer, across nearly every tradition, is that noticing the mind has wandered and returning to the object is the practice, not a failure of it.

On a longer retreat the teacher also watches for trouble. Intensive silent practice can surface buried emotional material and, occasionally, states that are hard to bear, and an experienced teacher knows when to advise a student to open their eyes, eat something, take a walk, and stop sitting for a while.

What the participant does

The meditator sits, on a cushion, a chair, or the floor, settles the body into a stable upright posture, and begins the chosen practice. The instruction is almost always simpler to state than to follow: rest attention on the object, and when you notice it has wandered, bring it back, gently and without self-reproach. That return, repeated a thousand times, is the whole exercise. Beginners are routinely surprised by how loud and restless the untrained mind turns out to be once they stop feeding it; the discovery that one isn’t in easy command of one’s own attention is, in most traditions, the first real lesson rather than a sign of failure.

What arises along the way varies. Many sittings are unremarkable: a little calm, a little fidgeting, a sense of time passing slowly. Some bring genuine settling, the body quieting and the gaps between thoughts widening. Others surface restlessness, boredom, grief, or a flood of the very thoughts one sat down to escape. Practitioners are taught to treat all of it as material, neither chasing the pleasant states nor fleeing the difficult ones. The work isn’t to feel a particular way but to keep showing up and keep watching.

Setting, sequence, and materials

The materials are nearly nothing: a place to sit and a way to mark time. A cushion (the zafu of the Zen tradition) or a simple chair, a quiet corner, and a timer are the whole kit. The phone that once destroyed attention now commonly keeps it: the meditation-app era, led by Headspace and Calm, put a guiding voice and a bell into hundreds of millions of pockets and made a solitary, formless practice feel structured and companioned.

The sequence shares a shape across styles. There’s a settling-in, in which the meditator arranges the posture and lets the body grow still; a main period of practice, anywhere from a few minutes for a beginner to an hour or more for the seasoned; and a deliberate closing, often marked by a bell, before returning to ordinary activity. Group practice adds a container, a room of other people sitting in silence, which many find steadies their own attention. Retreat practice extends the whole shape across days or weeks of near-continuous sitting, walking meditation, and silence.

Claimed mechanism

What sets meditation apart from most practices in this field is that part of its mechanism is no longer a matter of pure belief. Decades of study, framed by the clinical-mindfulness lineage that runs from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, have measured what sustained practice does to the body and brain. Regular practice is associated in the research with lowered measured cortisol, reduced markers of stress reactivity, and changes in the activity and even the structure of brain regions tied to attention and emotional regulation. The American Psychological Association’s work on the psychology of religion treats meditation as among the most studied contemplative interventions, and the evidence for modest benefit on stress, anxiety, and rumination is among the sturdier findings in the whole field. These effects are real and measured; what they’re for is where the readings diverge.

The clinical reading stops at regulation: meditation trains the attention the way exercise trains a muscle, and a better-regulated nervous system is the benefit. The Buddhist reading is more ambitious. Concentration steadies the mind so that insight can arise, and insight into the nature of mind and self is the point, with calm a byproduct rather than the goal. The Hindu and yogic readings frame it as the settling of the mind’s fluctuations so that a deeper or higher self can be known, and many practitioners describe the work in the field’s broader vibration and frequency vocabulary, the sitting understood as settling or raising one’s state. A studio teacher may move among all of these in a single talk, and most practitioners hold the clinical and the contemplative accounts together without strain.

Claimed benefits

Practitioners come to meditation for a spread of reasons that sort roughly by tradition. The regulation-focused, secular end is credited with lowering stress and anxiety, sharpening focus, improving sleep, easing chronic pain, and loosening the grip of rumination: the benefits that fill the app descriptions and the workplace programs, and the ones the research most directly supports. Metta practice is credited specifically with increasing warmth toward oneself and others and softening reactivity in relationships.

The contemplative traditions promise more. Sustained practice is held to bring equanimity that survives outside the cushion, a loosening of compulsive identification with one’s own thoughts, and, at depth, the insight experiences and shifts in the sense of self that overlap with what people report from a spiritual awakening. Whether prolonged sitting delivers genuine spiritual insight or a trained and pleasant condition of mind that merely feels like it is the kind of question this encyclopedia leaves to the practitioner. What’s clear is that people across two thousand years and a dozen traditions have reported the deeper experiences, and reported them as among the most significant of their lives.

Training and certification norms

There’s no single license to call oneself a meditation teacher, and the field’s training norms run from rigorous to nonexistent. The most structured sit inside lineages: a Zen teacher receives formal transmission (shiho) after many years under a master; a Theravada teacher is authorized within a monastic or vipassana tradition; a Transcendental Meditation instructor trains through the movement’s own multi-stage certification. The clinical end is structured too: MBSR teachers train through a defined curriculum of practice, supervised teaching, and personal retreat under bodies descended from Kabat-Zinn’s program.

At the loose end, the app era and the wellness market have produced a great many teachers certified in a matter of days through short online courses, and a “certified meditation teacher” credential can mean almost anything. As with the rest of this field, a prospective student has to look past the word “certified” to ask what, specifically, the certification required: how many hours of practice, how much retreat time, what lineage or supervision stands behind it.

Related practices and experiences

Meditation sits at the center of the contemplative and somatic practices of The Ways. It pairs most naturally with breathwork, whose object (the breath) is meditation’s most common anchor, and with the sound bath, which gives attention a single sustained current to rest on. It underwrites the inner work of shadow work and shares its visualization methods with manifestation journaling. Its concentrative and energy-centered forms connect it to the chakras of the subtle-body map and to the kundalini awakening practitioners credit certain practices with provoking. The deeper states it can open connect it to spiritual awakening and to the dark night of the soul, the disorienting passage some contemplative maps regard as part of the path. Because intensive practice can precipitate states that are difficult to integrate, the question of how teachers and practitioners are meant to handle them is treated in Psychosis Misread as Awakening.

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Sources

• Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness (Delacorte, 1990) — the founding text of the clinical-mindfulness (MBSR) lineage that frames much of the modern research.
• Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English (Wisdom Publications, 1991) — the standard plain-language guide to vipassana insight practice in the Theravada tradition.
• Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (Shambhala, 1995) — the influential modern statement of metta practice.
• Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson, Altered Traits: Science and Meditation Reveal How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body (Avery, 2017) — a careful survey of what the research does and does not establish, sorting durable findings from overclaim.
• National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NIH), “Meditation and Mindfulness: What You Need To Know” — the NIH overview of practice prevalence and the state of the clinical evidence.