Kids Meditation

The term meditation refers to a broad variety of practices (much like the term sports), which range from techniques designed to promote relaxation, contacting spiritual guides, building internal energy (chi, ki, prana, etc.), receiving psychic visions, getting closer to God, seeing past lives, taking astral journeys, and so forth, to more technical exercises targeted at developing compassion, while engaging in any and all of life’s activities. Thus, it is essential to be specific about the type of meditation practice under investigation.

Failure to make such distinctions would be akin to the use of the word ‘sport’ to refer to all sports as if they were essentially the same. For example, the overly generic description of meditation as a mere relaxation technique becomes problematic when one attends to the details of many practices. In contrast, we should think about the term “Meditation” as referring to several neighborhoods of New Age practices, shamanistic lucid dreaming and astral journeying, theistic-concentration meditations (

Meditation often involves an internal effort to self-regulate the mind in some way. It may be done the word meditation may carry different meanings in different contexts. Meditation has been practiced since antiquity as a component of numerous religious traditions and beliefs.

Contents

[] Etymology

The English meditation is derived from the , from a verb , meaning “to think, contemplate, devise, ponder”.

In the

The Tibetan word for meditation “Gom” means “to become familiar with ones self” and has the strong implication of training the mind to be familiar with states that are beneficial: concentration, compassion, correct understanding, patience, humility, perseverance, etc.

Apart from its historical usage, the term meditation was introduced as a translation for Eastern spiritual practices, referred to as dhyāna

[] History

The history of meditation is intimately bound up with the religious context within which it was practiced.

In the west, by 20 BCE had written on some form of “spiritual exercises” involving attention (prosoche) and concentration and by the 3rd century had developed meditative techniques.

The

The

By the 18th century, the study of

Secular forms of meditation were introduced in India in the 1950s as a Westernized form of Hindu meditative techniques and arrived in the United States and Europe in the 1960s. Rather than focusing on spiritual growth, secular meditation emphasizes stress reduction, relaxation and self-improvement.

[] Modern definitions and Western models

[] Definitions and scope

Definitions or Characterizations of Meditation: Examples from Prominent Reviews* Definition / Characterization Review •”[M]editation refers to a family of self-regulation practices that focus on training attention and awareness in order to bring mental processes under greater voluntary control and thereby foster general mental well-being and development and/or specific capacities such as calm, clarity, and concentration”:228-9 Walsh & Shapiro (2006) •”[M]editation is used to describe practices that self-regulate the body and mind, thereby affecting mental events by engaging a specific attentional set…. regulation of attention is the central commonality across the many divergent methods”:180 Cahn & Polich (2006) •”We define meditation… as a stylized mental technique… repetitively practiced for the purpose of attaining a subjective experience that is frequently described as very restful, silent, and of heightened alertness, often characterized as blissful”:415 Jevning et al. (1992) •”theneed for the meditator to retrain his attention, whether through concentration or mindfulness, is the single invariant ingredient in… every meditation system”:107 Goleman (1988) *Influential reviews (cited >50 times in ), encompassing multiple methods of meditation.

As early as 1971, :135

In popular usage, the word “meditation” and the phrase “meditative practice” are often used imprecisely to designate broadly similar practices, or sets of practices, that are found across many cultures and traditions.

Some of the difficulty in precisely defining meditation has been the need to recognize the particularities of the many various traditions.:499 Taylor noted that to refer only to meditation from a particular faith (e.g., “Hindu” or “Buddhist”)

is not enough, since the cultural traditions from which a particular kind of meditation comes are quite different and even within a single tradition differ in complex ways. The specific name of a school of thought or a teacher or the title of a specific text is often quite important for identifying a particular type of meditation. :2

The table shows several definitions of meditation that have been used by influential modern reviews of research on meditation across multiple traditions. Within a specific context, more precise meanings are not uncommonly given the word “meditation.” and may also refer to the practice of that state.

This article mainly focuses on meditation in the broad sense of a type of discipline, found in various forms in many cultures, by which the practitioner attempts to get beyond the reflexive, “thinking” mind) into a deeper, more devout, or more relaxed state. The terms “meditative practice” and “meditation” are mostly used here in this broad sense. However, usage may vary somewhat by context — readers should be aware that in quotations, or in discussions of particular traditions, more specialized meanings of “meditation” may sometimes be used (with meanings made clear by context whenever possible).

[] Western typologies

Ornstein noted that “most techniques of meditation do not exist as solitary practices but are only artificially separable from an entire system of practice and belief”.:143 This means that, for instance, while monks engage in meditation as a part of their everyday lives, they also engage the codified rules and live together in monasteries in specific cultural settings, that go along with their meditative practices. These meditative practices sometimes have similarities (often noticed by Westerners), for instance concentration on the breath is practiced in both Zen, Tibetan and Theravadan contexts, and these similarities or ‘typologies’ are noted here.

Progress on the “intractable” problem of defining meditation was attempted by a recent study of views common to seven experts trained in diverse but empirically highly studied (clinical or Eastern-derived) forms of meditation.

In modern psychological research, meditation has been defined and characterized in a variety of ways; many of these emphasize the role of

In the West, meditation is sometimes thought of in two broad categories: concentrative meditation and meditation. These two categories are discussed in the following two paragraphs, with concentrative meditation being used interchangeably with focused attention and mindfulness meditation being used interchangeably with open monitoring,

direction of mental attention… A practitioner can focus intensively on one particular object (so-called concentrative meditation), on all mental events that enter the field of awareness (so-called mindfulness meditation), or both specific focal points and the field of awareness.

“One style, Focused Attention (FA) meditation, entails the voluntary focusing of attention on a chosen object. The other style, Open Monitoring (OM) meditation, involves non-reactive monitoring of the content of experience from moment to moment.”

Other typologies have also been proposed,

Evidence from neuroimaging studies suggests that the categories of meditation, defined by how they direct attention, appear to generate different brainwave patterns.

[] Religious and spiritual meditation

[] Bahá'í Faith

In the teachings of the

The

[] Buddhism

refers to the meditative practices associated with the religion and philosophy of Buddhism. Core meditation techniques have been preserved in ancient and have proliferated and diversified through teacher-student transmissions. pursue meditation as part of the path toward and . The closest words for meditation in the classical languages of Buddhism are and jhāna/. According to Manmatha Nath Dutt, there is hardly any difference between mainstream Hinduism’s Dhyana, Dharana and Samadhi with the Buddhist Dhyana, Bhavana, Samadhi, especially as both require following the precepts (nayas and niyamas.)

Buddhist meditation techniques have become increasingly popular in the wider world, with many non-Buddhists taking them up for a variety of reasons. There is considerable homogeneity across meditative practices — such as

The Buddha is said to have identified two paramount mental qualities that arise from wholesome meditative practice:

“serenity” or “tranquillity” (Pali: samatha) which steadies, composes, unifies and concentrates the mind; “insight” (Pali: vipassana) which enables one to see, explore and discern “formations” (conditioned phenomena based on the five ).

Through the meditative development of serenity, one is able to suppress obscuring ; and, with the suppression of the hindrances, it is through the meditative development of insight that one gains liberating .

[] Christianity

only conjures up positive emotions in oneself which are portrayed through our actions. The first Guru of the Sikhs, Guru Nanak Dev Ji preached the equality of all humankind and stressed the importance of living a householder’s life instead of wandering around jungles meditating, the latter of which being a popular practice at the time. The Guru preached that we can obtain liberation from life and death by living a totally normal family life and by spreading love amongst every human being regardless of religion. In the Sikh religion, , otherwise known as singing the hymns of God is seen as one of the most beneficial ways of aiding meditation, and it too in some ways is believed to be a meditation of one kind. [] Taoism Main article: “Gathering the Light”, Taoist meditation from Taoism includes a number of meditative and contemplative traditions, said to have their principles described in the (T’ai Chi T’u), and is often referred to as “meditation in motion”. “The essay ‘Neiye’ 內業(Inward training) is the oldest received writing on the subject of the cultivation of and meditation techniques. The essay was probably composed at the Jixia Academy in Qi in the late fourth century B.C.” The (c. 3rd century BCE) Daoist records or “sitting forgetting” meditation. asked his disciple to explain what he means by “sit and forget”: “I slough off my limbs and trunk, dim my intelligence, depart from my form, leave knowledge behind, and become identical with the Transformational Thoroughfare.” Often are thought of as moving meditation. A common phrase being, “movement in stillness” referring to energetic movement in passive Qigong and seated Taoist meditation; with the converse being “stillness in movement”, a state of mental calm and meditation in the tai chi form. In a form of meditation using visualization, such as Chinese , the practitioner concentrates on flows of energy (Qi) in the body, starting in the abdomen and then circulating through the body, until dispersed. []Prayer beads Most of the ancient religions of the world have a tradition of using some type of has 99 beads. Specific meditations of each religion may be different. [] Secular meditation in the West A collective meditation in As stated by the , a U.S. government entity within the National Institutes of Health that advocates various forms of , “Meditation may be practiced for many reasons, such as to increase calmness and physical relaxation, to improve psychological balance, to cope with illness, or to enhance overall health and well-being.” of conducted a series of clinical tests on meditators from various disciplines, including the and . In 1975, Benson published a book titled where he outlined his own version of meditation for relaxation. has been used by many researchers since the 1950s in an effort to enter deeper states of mind.[] [] Mindfulness Main article: Over the past 20 years, was developed by American physician in the early 1920s. In this practice one tenses and thenrelaxes muscle groups in a sequential pattern whilst concentrating on how they feel. The method has been seen to help people with many conditions especially extreme anxiety. [] Modern cross-cultural dissemination Methods of meditation have been cross-culturally disseminated at various times throughout history, such as Buddhism going to East Asia, and Ideas about Eastern meditation had begun “seeping into American popular culture even before the American Revolution through the various sects of European occult Christianity,”:3 But The , held in Chicago in 1893, was the landmark event that increased Western awareness of meditation. This was the first time that Western audiences on American soil received Asian spiritual teachings from Asians themselves. Thereafter, … [founded] various ashrams… lectured at Harvard on Theravada Buddhist meditation in 1904; … [toured] the US teaching the principles of Bahai, and toured in 1907 teaching Zen…:4 More recently, in the 1960s, another surge inWestern interest in meditative practices began. Observers have suggested many types of explanations for this interest in Eastern meditation and revived Western contemplation. :xxiv Another suggested contributing factor is the rise of communist political power in Asia, which, “set the stage for an influx of Asian spiritual teachers to the West,” [] Western context Meditating in In the late 19th century] Meditation may be for a religious purpose, but even before being brought to the West it was used in secular contexts.[] Beginning with the Theosophists meditation has been employed in the West by a number of religious and spiritual movements, such as , and the movement. Meditation techniques have also been used by Western theories of counseling and psychotherapy. Relaxation training works toward achieving mental and muscle relaxation to reduce daily stresses. Jacobson is credited with developing the initial progressive relaxation procedure. These techniques are used in conjunction withother behavioral techniques. Originally used with , relaxation techniques are now used with other clinical problems. Meditation, hypnosis and biofeedback-induced relaxation are a few of the techniques used with relaxation training. One of the eight essential phases of (developed by Francine Shapiro), bringing adequate closure to the end of each session, also entails the use of relaxation techniques, including meditation. Multimodal therapy, a technically eclectic approach to behavioral therapy, also employs the use of meditation as a technique used in individual therapy. From the point of view of [] Meditation, religion, and drugs Main articles: Many traditions in which meditation is practiced, such as , while others, such as the Rastafarian movements and Native American Church, view drugs as integral to their religious lifestyle. The fifth of the five precepts of the traditions, states that adherents must not ingest, “intoxicating drinks and drugs causing heedlessness.” On the otherhand, the ingestion of psychoactives has been a central feature in the rituals of many religions, in order to produce . In several traditional ceremonies, drugs are used as agents of ritual. In the , is believed to be a gift from and a to be used regularly, while alcohol is considered to debase man. meditated daily on his long hammock in a corridor-like room with wooden floor and shutters.[] Native Americans use , as part of religious ceremony, continuing today. In India, the drink has a long history of use alongside prayer and sacrifice, and is mentioned in the . During the 1960s, both eastern meditation traditions and psychedelics, such as . [] Physical postures Main article: For bodily positions applied during yoga, see . Various postures are taken up in meditation. Sitting, supine, and standing postures are used. Popular in Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism are the , half-lotus, , and positions. Meditation is sometimes done while walking, known as , or while doing a simple taskmindfully, known as . [] Scientific studies Main article: Meditation has been linked to a variety of health benefits. A study of college students by Oman et al. (2008) found that meditation may produce physiological benefits by changing neurological processes. This finding was supported by an expert panel at the National Institutes of Health. The practice of meditation has also been linked with various favourable outcomes that include: “effective functioning, including academic performance, concentration, perceptual sensitivity, reaction time, memory, self control, empathy, and self esteem.”(Oman et al., 2008, pg. 570) In their evaluation of the effects of two meditation-based programs they were able to conclude that meditating had stress reducing effects and cogitation, and also increased forgiveness. (Oman et al., 2008) In a cross-sectional survey research design study lead by Li Chuan Chu (2009), Chu demonstrated that benefits to the psychological state of the participants in thestudy arose from practicing meditation. Meditation enhances overall psychological health and preserves a positive attitude towards stress. (Chu, 2009) Mindfulness Meditation has now entered the health care domain because of evidence suggesting a positive correlation between the practice and emotional and physical health. Examples of such benefits include: reduction in stress, anxiety, depression, headaches, pain, elevated blood pressure, etc. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts found that those who meditated approximately half an hour per day during an eight week period reported that at the end of the period, they were better able to act in a state of awareness and observation. Respondents also said they felt non-judgmental. (Harvard’s Women’s Health Watch, 2011) “Meditation as Medicine” (American Academy of Neurology) cites scientific evidence from various studies which claim that meditation can increase attention span, sharpen focus, improve memory, and dull the perceptionof pain. The article lists as common types of meditation: Attention Meditation, Mindfulness Meditation, and Benevolent Meditation. Over 1,000 publications on meditation have appeared to date.[. A review of scientific studies identified relaxation, concentration, an altered state of awareness, a suspension of logical thought and the maintenance of a self-observing attitude as the behavioral components of meditation; is still not well understood. In June, 2007 the United States :v More recent research suggests that meditation may increase attention spans. A recent study published in reported that practicing meditation led to doing better on a task related to sustained attention. A 2007 study by the U.S. government found that nearly 9.4% of U.S. adults (over 20 million) had practiced meditation within the past 12 months, up from 7.6% (more than 15 million people) in 2002. Since the 1960s, meditation has been the focus of increasing Meditation and intelligence Recent investigations ofmediation have linked it to increased intelligence through physical growth of the brain. Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and MIT conducted brain scans that reveal an increased thickness in the parts of the brain that deal with attention and sensory input processing. Using , they visualized variations in the thickness of the cerebral cortex of experienced practitioners. The data show that regular practice of meditation is associated with increased thickness in a subset of cortical regions related to somatosensory, auditory, visual and interoceptive processing. Further, regular meditation practice may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex, leading to longer lasting executive functioning. Another study investigated the effects of on and Hick’s reaction time, which are both correlated with general intelligence. In the study 100 men and women who meditated showed significant improvement on the tests compared to the control group of non-meditators, which showed no improvement. Theresults indicated that participation in meditation results in improvements to intelligence. A study by Keith Wallace, David Johnson, and Paul Mills investigated the relationship between the paired H-reflex and the academic success of students practicing Transcendental Meditation. The paired H-reflex correlated significantly with GPA, but not with sat scores or any of three IQ measurements. The results suggest that meditation may be a useful indicator of academic achievement by “improving awareness and wakefullness”. Self-discipline, a trait linked to the practice of meditation has also been linked to increases in IQ scores. In a behavioral delay-of-gratification task with 8th graders, self-discipline accounted for more than twice as much variance as IQ in final grades, high school selection, school attendance, hours spent doing homework, hours spent watching television and the hour of the day students began their homework. The effect of self-discipline on final grades stayed even whencontrolling for grades, achievement-test scores, and measured IQ. [] Popular culture Main article: Various forms of meditation have been described in popular culture sources. In particular, . [] See also [] References . //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2693206/. Watts, Alan. “11 _10-4-1 Meditation.” Eastern Wisdom: Zen in the West & Meditations. The Alan Watts Foundation. 2009. MP3 CD. @4:45 University of Wisconsin-Madison (2008, March 27). Compassion Meditation Changes The Brain. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 1, 2012, from Gen. Lamrimpa (author); “Calming the Mind.” Snow Lion Publications. 1995. Book on Buddhist methods for developing single pointed concentration. Gen.Lamrimpa (author); “Calming the Mind.” Snow Lion Publications. 1995. Includes basic instructions for analysis of reality. “MacMillan Reference Encyclopedia of Buddhism”, the article entitled, “Meditation” ^ , both listed in this article’s bibliography. ^ Moksha Journal. Issue 1. 2006. ISSN 1051-127X, OCLC21878732 An universal etymological English dictionary 1773, London, by Nathan Bailey . Note: from the 1773 edition on Google books, not earlier editions.[] Christian spirituality: themes from the tradition by Lawrence S. Cunningham, Keith J. Egan 1996 page 88 The Oblate Life by Gervase Holdaway, 2008 page 115 The verb root “dhyai” is listed as referring to “contemplate, meditate on” and “dhyāna” is listed as referring to “meditation; religious contemplation” on page 134 of (1929 (1971 reprint)). A practical Sanskrit dictionary with transliteration, accentuation and etymological analysis throughout. London: . . ^ . . Joel Stein (2003). . 162 (5): 48–56. . In the print edition (pp. 54-55), the “Through the Ages” box describes “Christian Meditation”, “Cabalistic (Jewish) Meditation”, “Muslim Meditation”, and others. .. Page 161 states “In Christianity, the term ‘contemplation’ is parallel to the term ‘meditation’ as it has entered contemporary usage” ^ page 199 Joseph, M. 1998, The effectof strong religious beliefs on coping with stress Stress Medicine. Vol 14(4), Oct 1998, 219-224.[] . Matt J. Rossano (2007). “Did meditating make us human?”. Cambridge Archaeological Journal (Cambridge University Press) 17 (1): 47–58. :. This paper draws on various lines of evidence to argue that “Campfire rituals of focused attention created for enhanced working memory among our Homo sapiens ancestors…. this emergence was [in part] caused by a fortuitous genetic mutation that enhanced working memory capacity [and] a where genetic adaptation follows somatic adaptation was the mechanism for this emergence” (p. 47). Hadot, Pierre; Arnold I. Davidson (1995) Philosophy as a way of life pages 83-84 pages 15 pages 50 page 5 Soto Zen in Medieval Japan by William Bodiford 2008 page 39 The Cambridge History of Japan: Medieval Japan by Kōzō Yamamura, John Whitney Hall 1990 ISBN 0521223547646 ^ page 147-149 ^ page 63 ^ page 109 An introduction to the Christian Orthodox churches by John Binns 2002Benson, Herbert and Miriam Z. Klipper. (2000 [1972]). The Relaxation Response. Expanded Updated edition. Harper. Bond, Kenneth; Maria B. Ospina, Nicola Hooton, Liza Bialy, Donna M. Dryden, Nina Buscemi, David Shannahoff-Khalsa, Jeffrey Dusek & Linda E. Carlson (2009). “Defining a complex intervention: The development of demarcation criteria for “meditation””. . (NB: Bond, Ospina et al., 2009, has substantial overlap with the full report by Ospina, Bond et al., 2007, listed below. Overlap includes the first 6 authors of this paper, and the equivalence of Table 3 on p. 134 in this paper with Table B1 on p. 281 in the full report) Craven JL (October 1989). “Meditation and psychotherapy”. Can J Psychiatry 34 (7): 648–53.  . (1988). The meditative mind: The varieties of meditative experience. New York: Tarcher.  . Hayes SC, Strosahl KD, Wilson KG. (1999) Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. New York: Guilford Press. Kutz I, Borysenko JZ, Benson H (January 1985). “Meditation and psychotherapy:a rationale for the integration of dynamic psychotherapy, the relaxation response, and mindfulness meditation”. Am J Psychiatry 142 (1): 1–8.  . Lutz, Antoine; . Metzner R. (2005) Psychedelic, Psychoactive and Addictive Drugs and States of Consciousness. In Mind-Altering Drugs: The Science of Subjective Experience, Chap. 2. Mitch Earlywine, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MirAhmadi, As Sayed Nurjan Healing Power of Sufi Meditation The Healing Power of Sufi Meditation Paperback: 180 pages Publisher: Islamic Supreme Council of America (June 30, 2005) Language: English Nirmalananda Giri, Swami (2007) In-depth study of the classical meditation method of the Bhagavad Gita, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and the Upanishads. Ospina Maria B., Kenneth Bond, Mohammad Karkhaneh, Lisa Tjosvold, Ben Vandermeer, Yuanyuan Liang, Liza Bialy, Nicola Hooton, Nina Buscemi, Donna M. Dryden & Terry P. Klassen (June 2007). (pdf). Evidence Report / Technology Assessment (Full Report), prepared by theUniversity of Alberta Evidence-based Practice Center under Contract No. 290-02-0023) () (155): 1–263.  . . Perez-De-Albeniz, Alberto & Holmes, Jeremy (2000) Meditation: Concepts, Effects And Uses In Therapy. International Journal of Psychotherapy, March 2000, Vol. 5 Issue 1, p49, 10p Shalif, Ilan et al. (1989) (Tel-Aviv: Etext Archives, 2008) Shapiro, Deane H. (1982). . American Journal of Psychiatry (American Psychiatric Association) 139 (3): 267–274. ) Shapiro DH (1992). “Adverse effects of meditation: a preliminary investigation of long-term meditators”. Int J Psychosom 39 (1–4): 62–7.  . Shear, Jonathan, ed. (2006). . St. Paul, MN: Paragon House.  . . Smith, Fritz Frederick (1986): Inner Bridges: A Guide to Energy Movement and Body Structure, Humanics Ltd. Partners, . (1973) Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Shambhala South Asia Editions, Boston, Massachusetts. (1984) Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, , Boston, Massachusetts. Erhard Vogel. (2001) Journey Into YourCenter, Nataraja Publications, Wenner, Melinda. “Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works.” LiveScience.com. 30 June 2007. [] Further reading (1995). . : Sheriar Foundation.  . . Cooper, David. A. The Art of Meditation: A Complete Guide. Glickman, Marshall (2002) Beyond the Breath: Extraordinary Mindfulness Through Whole-Body Vipassana. Hart, William. Art of Living, Vipassana Meditation, Meiche, Michele. Meditation for Everyday Living. Monaghan, Patricia and Eleanor G. Viereck. Meditation: The Complete Guide. Oldstone-Moore, Jennifer. , Duncan Baird, 2003. . . Yoga for Modern life. . . [] External links Find more about Meditation on Wikipedia’s : from Wiktionary from Commons from Wikiversity from Wikinews from Wikiquote from Wikisource from Wikibooks at the Aspects Meditation and Source: