While meditation is frequently perceived and portrayed in the West as a secular lifestyle or therapeutic practice, its origins are distinctly spiritual. The most comprehensive systems of meditation were derived from Hindu and Buddhist religious traditions.

While many studies have assessed the relationship between health and religiosity in populations practicing conventional Western religious lifestyles, few have assessed that associated with Eastern religiosity.

There is a growing body of evidence that points to a significant association between religiosity (a term under which both “spirituality” and “religion” will be subsumed for the purposes of this discussion) and health.

It emerged from this survey’s findings that long term meditators who use a mental silence orientated form of meditation, do experience better mental and physical health than the general population and that the “meditative lifestyle” appears to be specifically associated with better health scores.

Importantly, the strongest and most consistent relationship between the health advantages experienced by this sample was with the experience of mental silence.

Interestingly, those who participated in a convenience sample of meditators using meditation techniques not focused on mental silence, did not appear to experience the same health advantage.

This finding strengthens the notion that mental silence and its associated yogic philosophy, may provide a basis for a typology of meditation that has practical salience. Furthermore, the empirical data here suggests a meaningful link between a specific state of consciousness and health and wellbeing benefits thereby providing a new perspective for scholars interested in the relationship between religiosity and health.

Sahaja Yoga Meditation (SYM) was used because it utilizes a mental silence orientated understanding of meditation, which is a clearly defined meditative technique based on ancient traditional descriptions of the meditative state as a “trans-mind” experience.

By implementing this methodological strategy I was able to propose a different, more scientifically verified understanding of meditation which is more closely aligned with traditional ideas and seems more capable of generating a specific effect than the conventional Western definition of meditation as a method of relaxation.

A reduction of autonomic arousal leads to diversion of blood flow to viscera and away from skeletal muscle of the body. Accordingly this leads to increased blood flow to the surface of glabrous skin and thereby an increase in palmar skin temperature.

Sahaja Yoga Meditation (SYM) practitioners appear to perform exactly the same overt task since, like conventional meditators, they appear to sit quietly. If however the physiological changes that occur are different then it would suggest that despite overt similarities, the biological events are quite different.

This would suggest that SYM (and hence presumably the mental silence experience) is physiologically atypical. The mental silence experience may be associated with a unique spectrum of physiological activity.

It was important to determine whether the state of mental silence is physiologically different from that of relaxation (one of the most prevalent definitions of meditation in the West literature).

Participants in the meditating trials in fact reported that during mental silence meditation, they experienced cool sensations on their glabrous skin.

This perception seems paradoxical, since it directly contradicts the Western understanding of meditation as a typical state of reduced autonomic arousal (i.e. para-sympathetic activation and sympathetic deactivation).

The group was taught the Sahaja Yoga Meditation (SYM) mental silence technique which seeks to cultivate “oneness with the present moment”, to distinguish “the space between two thoughts”and thus achieve “thoughtless awareness” i.e. mental silence, as described by N Srivastava in their book “Meta Modern Era”.

During this state the meditator remains fully alert, aware and in control of their cognitive faculties but remains free of unnecessary mental activity.

Looking at the range of clinical conditions that might be best suited to the intervention, it became obvious that work stress was well suited to the apparent effects of meditation observed in the previous trial.

Work stress is a pervasive, increasingly important issue in Western society, so recruitment for such a trial would be relatively easy and development of a simple strategy such as meditation as a method for dealing with the experience of work stress, was likely be welcomed by the community.

This study again aimed to explore the hypothesis that mental silence was the key factor in the clinical response.

There are a number of methodological difficulties in constructing a strict placebo intervention that has no clinical effect. The control intervention must be sufficiently convincing in order to motivate participants to maintain compliance but must not itself have a significant specific clinical effect.

Yet, participants who do not experience clinical improvement will tend to drop out of the study or begin to suspect that they have been allocated to the placebo group, thus confounding the significance of the results. In this a comparison group was employed that was likely to elicit some clinical effect, most likely non-specific in nature. This would both ensure subject compliance as well as help differentiate between non-specific effects and any specific effects that may be associated with the SYM method.

Since the SYM method focuses primarily on the experience of mental silence any significant differences in outcome between the two groups could be reasonably attributed to the mental silence construct.

The key experience of SYM, “thoughtless awareness”, is a state in which the meditator is fully alert and aware but is free of any unnecessary mental activity. The proponents of SYM claim that attainment of this state is crucial for its beneficial effects on physical and psychological health to be experienced. All instructional sessions and the advice given in those sessions was directed at facilitating and enhancing that experience.