Science still has no agreed definition of meditation, despite decades of study
Meditation runs from counting breaths to Zen koans to loving-kindness practice, and researchers have never pinned down what all of them share. One expert panel settled on three essentials: a defined technique, letting go of analysis, and a state you bring about yourself. Others say the only constant is retraining attention.
Broadly, meditation means using one or more techniques to train attention and awareness and step back from ruminating thought, reaching a clear, calm, steady state without judging how it is going. Its oldest records, under the name dhyana, appear in the Upanishads, and it is central to the contemplative practice of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Comparable techniques exist in Judaism, Christianity and Islam as forms of prayer and remembrance of God, including Sufism, Kabbalah and Christian Hesychasm.
The English word descends through Old French from Latin meditari, to ponder or devise. In Catholic practice, a formal step-by-step meditatio goes back at least to the 12th-century monk Guigo II; before that the Greek theoria filled the role. Dhyana comes from the Sanskrit root dhyai, to contemplate, which the Greek word shares.
Definitions keep slipping because the practices are so varied, and because, as Ornstein observed, most techniques are only artificially separable from the whole way of life around them, such as a monastery's rules and rites. Bond and colleagues ran a five-round Delphi study with seven experts to fix criteria. Walsh and Shapiro called it a family of self-regulation practices; Goleman argued retraining attention is the one ingredient every system has. Some researchers suggest treating meditation as a family-resemblance category rather than something with strict boundaries.
Western classifications usually split methods into focused ones, attending to the breath, a mantra as in transcendental meditation, or a koan, and open-monitoring ones such as mindfulness and shikantaza, which take in whatever arises. Another scheme adds generative practices that cultivate compassion and reflective ones built on investigation. Asian techniques have spread into business and health settings. Early research was criticised for weak methods, but studies now more often use randomised controlled trials with active control groups, and several meta-analyses report mental and physical benefits from mindfulness.
Source: Meditation
