Meditation

 Meditation is a practice where an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness,

or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity – attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.Scholars have found meditation elusive to define, as practices vary both between traditions and within them.

Various depictions of meditation (clockwise): the Hindu Hindu suwami vivekananda  the Buddhist monk  husain bus Baduanjin Qigong, the Christian St Francis Muslim Sufis in Dhkir and social reformer Narayanan guru

Meditation is practiced in numerous religious traditions. The earliest records of meditation (dhyana) are found in the ancient Hindu texts known as the Vedas, and meditation plays a salient role in the contemplative repertoire of Hinduism and Buddhism, Since the 19th century, Asian meditative techniques have spread to other cultures where they have also found application in non-spiritual contexts, such as business and health.

Meditation may significantly reduce stress anxiety depression and pain and enhance peace, perception, self-concept and well-being Research is ongoing to better understand the effects of meditation on health (psychological neurological, and cardiovascular) and other areas.

Definition 

Meditation has proven difficult to define as it covers a wide range of dissimilar practices in different traditions. In popular usage, the word "meditation" and the phrase "meditative practice" are often used imprecisely to designate practices found across many cultures. These can include almost anything that is claimed to train the attention of mind or to teach calm or compassion. There remains no definition of necessary and sufficient criteria for meditation that has achieved universal or widespread acceptance within the modern scientific community. In 1971, Claudio Naranjo noted that "The word 'meditation' has been used to designate a variety of practices that differ enough from one another so that we may find trouble in defining what meditation is. A 2009 study noted a "persistent lack of consensus in the literature" and a "seeming intractability of defining meditation".

Effect of meditation 

Research on the processes and effects of meditation is a subfield of neurological research. Modern scientific techniques, such as fMRI and EEG, were used to observe neurological responses during meditation. Concerns have been raised on the quality of meditation research, including the particular characteristics of individuals who tend to participate.

Meditation lowers heart rate, oxygen consumption, breathing frequency, stress hormones, lactate levels, and sympathetic nervous system activity (associated with the fight-or-flight response), along with a modest decline in blood pressure.However, those who have meditated for two or three years were found to already have low blood pressure. During meditation, the oxygen consumption decrease averages 10 to 20 percent over the first three minutes. During sleep for example, oxygen consumption decreases around 8 percent over four or five hours. For meditators who have practiced for years, breath rate can drop to three or four breaths per minute and brain waves slow from alpha waves seen in normal relaxation to much slower delta and theta waves.

Since the 1970s, clinical psychology and psychiatry have developed meditation techniques for numerous psychological conditions. Mindfulness practice is employed in psychology to alleviate mental and physical conditions, such as reducing depression, stress, and anxiety. Mindfulness is also used in the treatment of drug addiction, although the quality of research has been poor. Studies demonstrate that meditation has a moderate effect to reduce pain. There is insufficient evidence for any effect of meditation on positive mood, attention, eating habits, sleep, or body weight. Moreover, a 2015 study, including subjective and objective reports and brain scans, has shown that meditation can improve controlling attention, as well as self-awareness.

A 2017 systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of meditation on empathy, compassion, and prosocial behaviors found that meditation practices had small to medium effects on self-reported and observable outcomes, concluding that such practices can "improve positive prosocial emotions and behaviors".^{[unreliable medical source?]} However, a meta-review published on Nature showed that the evidence is very weak and "that the effects of meditation on compassion were only significant when compared to passive control groups suggests that other forms of active interventions (like watching a nature video) might produce similar outcomes to meditation"