Meditation is a practice to increase awareness of the present moment, reduce stress, promote relaxation, and enhance personal and spiritual growth. Meditation practices to increase awareness have many forms. Meditation can be movement based and is commonly a part of yoga, T’ai Chi, and Qi Gong. Meditation can also be internally based, allowing thoughts to arise and pass, focusing on scanning the body feeling the energy and sensations within different places of your body. Meditation can also be concept based, a certain mantra or prayer could be the focal point that facilitates the overall state of mindfulness. Meditation is essentially a way to experience the feeling of centered mindfulness. Mindfulness facilitates observing more clearly and a feeling of connection with a subject of our choosing. With an ability to see more opportunities for mindful kindness, you have a chance to choose a deliberate way of being that brings you and others joy. Meditation is like falling in love. When you cannot help but focus on the object of love, you are experiencing being centered, connected, mindful, and your awareness is growing through observing. Then upon inspiration from observing, you get to choose how to demonstrate your love.

Another study focused on kindness toward others. The researchers wanted to see the relationship between meditation and unprompted acts of kindness. The researchers focused on who would offer a seat to a stranger on crutches. Kindness behavior was not part of the meditation training. Members of the meditation group were almost three times as likely to offer their seat to a stranger on crutches, as were comparison group members who did not receive meditation training. In this study, meditation had the indirect effect of first noticing a person on crutches was standing nearby and then acting with kindness by offering the person a their seat, in other words acting with greater kindness to a stranger.

Andrew Newberg, head of the Nuclear Medicine Department in the University of Pennsylvania, scanned blood flow to measure connectedness in individuals with years of experience in meditation (Tibetan Buddhists) and in prayer (Franciscan nuns). In addition to connectedness, he used blood flow to measure awareness of their physical surroundings in these same individuals. In these monks and nuns, blood flow decreases to the part that makes us aware of where the boundary of our body lies, or ‘where I stop and the rest of the world starts’. At the same time, the flow of blood increases to the part of the brain concerned with awareness. “The combined effect is to lose the distinction between the praying individual and their surroundings at the same time as raising the general level of awareness”  (page 357). Reducing the distinction between the individual and their surroundings may be what creates our feeling of connectedness.

Dr. Willoughby Britton and Dr. Jared Lindahl of Brown University, conduct an ongoing study on contemplative experiences encountered by contemporary practitioners, with a special focus on those being too challenged, or experiencing serious difficulties. Dr. Britton’s clinical research includes sleep, and novel treatment/prevention strategies for emotional disturbances. She recently completed a 3-year NIH-funded clinical trial on the neurophysiological effects of mindfulness meditation in depression, and continues to examine the link between sleep, affective disturbance and emotional regulation strategies.

“One of her team’s preliminary tasks—a sort of archeological literature review—was to pore through the written canons of Theravadin, Tibetan, and Zen Buddhism, as well as texts within Christianity, Judaism, and Sufism. ‘Not every text makes clear reference to a period of difficulty on the contemplative path,’ Britton says, ‘but many did.’

‘There is a sutta,’ a canonical discourse attributed to the Buddha or one of his close disciples, ‘where monks go crazy and commit suicide after doing contemplation on death,’ says Chris Kaplan, a visiting scholar at the Mind & Life Institute who also works with Britton on the Dark Night Project.”

The Dark Knight of The Soul, The Atlantic, by Tomas Rocha, a research associate at the Mind & Life Institute and a doctoral student at Columbia University.