Defining meditation has proved a difficult challenge for modern researchers. Conceptual definitions of meditation vary widely but generally lack empirical confirmation. The authoritative National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (a department of the National Institutes of Health) in the United States in 2006 defined meditation as “a conscious mental process that induces a set [...]
A general reading of the total literature makes it obvious that method validity is the major challenge to meditation research. More specifically, the main problems are: first, the use of appropriate control strategies to exclude non-specific effects (more widely known as the “placebo effect”), second, the need for randomization and other strategies to eliminate bias [...]
In his study of 1,599 members of the baby-boomer generation conducted in the US in the early 1990s, the American researcher Roof (1993) demonstrated that there had been major defections from organized religion in the 1960s and 1970s, coupled with an increase in New Age type movements which emphasized the superiority of direct spiritual experience [...]
Psychologically speaking, the objectives of yoga mirror those of conventional methods designed to enhance self-control and self-regulation. For example, yoga-psychology proposes that negative-affect states, even transient ones, are pathological states of mind. Such states include gloominess, doubt, procrastination, sloth, attachment, hallucination, inability to concentrate and instability. Ideas like this delineate an understanding of health that, [...]
The system of yoga is thought to have developed progressively over thousands of years but it nevertheless became mostly strongly associated with a single person, Patanjali, who was both a mystic and physician. In his definitive treatise, the Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, he describes a single, comprehensive integrated system.
At the physical level the aim of [...]
While Western consumers generally perceive yoga as a system of physical exercises, the tradition is quite different. The term is derived from the Sanskrit yoga, meaning “to join” or “union”. Its aim was and is to achieve the perfect union of body, mind and spirit through a system of physical, mental, behavioural and ethical disciplines. [...]
In this excerpt from his thesis, Dr Ramesh Manocha discusses yoga.
While the immediate aim of yoga is positive psychological adjustment and good physical health in everyday life, the ultimate goal is the practical realisation of religious ideals of behaviour and the attainment of a state in which they are expressed spontaneously and effortlessly. This is [...]