What Do U Get Out Of Meditation?

[joeintra]

I'd like to ask for those who have the experience about meditation. What do you get from it? Is it really help you in daily life? Pls share your experience here... and pls also indicate what method of meditation you are practicing? Thank you very much...

[sabaijai]

joeintra, welcome to the Buddhism branch of ThaiVisa.com. I suggest you start by searching this branch for the word 'meditation', and you should find threads with comment on Buddhist meditation, including personal experiences.

[jumnien]

I started meditating at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California with Jack Kornfield and others in 1995. At the time I was living (for 2 years) at a treatment facility for alcohol and drug abuse (booze, crack, heroin, pills, etc.). The meditation complemented my recovery marvelously as I also suffered from social phobia and panic attacks. These cleared up within 4 - 6 months whereupon I met Ajahn Jumnien of Wat Tham Seua in Krabi at Spirit Rock. His happiness and joy were contagious, might I say addictive! He came the next year to teach as well, as he does every year in May at Spirit Rock.

After 2 years, I moved to Thailand and have been happy, joyous and free ever since. Now married with a baby boy in Huahin (anyone want to start a meditation group).

Daily meditation (basically Vipassana breath-focused meditation) and a spiritual path to follow have given me a new life I never before could have imagined. I am not as disciplined as I was 10 years ago, in that I don't often sit for long, long periods of time or do 10 day retreats. But, I find myself stopping many times during the day and returning to that place within me of calmness and gratitude that meditation provided and continues to provide.

Have a lovely day, Michael

[joeintra]

Thank you Michael. You have answered all my questions. I'm not talking about spiritual meditation.

I'd like to explain more about Meditation. When you practice meditation, you'll experience something within. It's very hard to explain unless u feel it by yourself. and the point is that I'd like to hear all the feeling from people who actually practice meditation. I'd like to hear from people who practice meditation and have a better life. So we all can witness that Meditation can really help. Let's Meditate....

[Oleg_Rus]

You got nothing by sitting like a morron with crap instead of thoughts.

The guru-shmuru got some dough, that's true, and you just got f**d up.

Michael, truly you must be joking - 2 years in treatment facility just to stop gettin high? ***thai-bashing removed*** ? You must be joking :-)

Edited November 3, 2006 by sabaijai

[jumnien]

You got nothing by sitting like a morron with crap instead of thoughts.

The guru-shmuru got some dough, that's true, and you just got f**d up.

Michael, truly you must be joking - 2 years in treatment facility just to stop gettin high? And you came to siam, ***thai-bashing removed***? You must be joking :-)

Mr. Oleg,

I assure you I gave no money to Ajahn Jumnien or other teachers other than a token $5 here and there. Not bad when you consider I had a $300/day habit. I didn't spend 2 years in a treatment center to stop getting "high". I learned how to get high there - truly high, ecstatic and deeply happy on a regular basis, without being a slave to alcohol and drugs.

Thailand is a wonderful place to be clean and sober. Every day is an adventure. I meet great people all over the place. I fly a little plane 500 feet over the rice fields and truly would not live anywhere else. There is a wonderful support fellowship in Thailand for people who want to escape the prison of addiction. The four noble truths provide the basis for a liberated existence. There is filth spawning around everywhere in the world. Today I choose carefully which streams to jump into. Peace, Michael

[tycann]

At the time I was living (for 2 years) at a treatment facility for alcohol and drug abuse (booze, crack, heroin, pills, etc.).

Congratulations on being clean man... I've also had severe drug and alcohol problems in the past (no heroin but everything else you mentioned above). Nobody who hasn't can't possibly understand that it's about so much more than 'learning how not to get high.'

The meditation complemented my recovery marvelously as I also suffered from social phobia and panic attacks.

Me, too. Still do. Meditation is great, but still hasn't taken the place of a hefty daily dose of Zoloft for me.

Edited November 2, 2006 by tycann

[joeintra]

There is filth spawning around everywhere in the world. Today I choose carefully which streams to jump into. Peace, Michael

I agree with you Michael. There are everywhere in the world. It depends on what and where u are searching for. If u search for peace, u start cleaning up your mind by meditating. Meditation is very simple to do.. even small children can do it with ease. Keep the mind stance still, that's the key of all meditation method. For those who cannot get to the point yet. pls don't give up. Be patient... calm then u 'll succeed... Meditation for higer quality of the mind.

[chownah]

Thank you Michael. You have answered all my questions. I'm not talking about spiritual meditation.

I'd like to explain more about Meditation. When you practice meditation, you'll experience something within. It's very hard to explain unless u feel it by yourself. and the point is that I'd like to hear all the feeling from people who actually practice meditation. I'd like to hear from people who practice meditation and have a better life. So we all can witness that Meditation can really help. Let's Meditate....

What do you mean by "spiritual meditation?"....and what is non-spiritual meditation?

Chownah

[sabaijai]

I started meditating at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California with Jack Kornfield and others in 1995. At the time I was living (for 2 years) at a treatment facility for alcohol and drug abuse (booze, crack, heroin, pills, etc.). The meditation complemented my recovery marvelously as I also suffered from social phobia and panic attacks. These cleared up within 4 - 6 months whereupon I met Ajahn Jumnien of Wat Tham Seua in Krabi at Spirit Rock. His happiness and joy were contagious, might I say addictive! He came the next year to teach as well, as he does every year in May at Spirit Rock.

After 2 years, I moved to Thailand and have been happy, joyous and free ever since. Now married with a baby boy in Huahin (anyone want to start a meditation group).

Daily meditation (basically Vipassana breath-focused meditation) and a spiritual path to follow have given me a new life I never before could have imagined. I am not as disciplined as I was 10 years ago, in that I don't often sit for long, long periods of time or do 10 day retreats. But, I find myself stopping many times during the day and returning to that place within me of calmness and gratitude that meditation provided and continues to provide.

Have a lovely day, Michael

Congratulations, Michael. I translated for Aj Jamnian/Jumnien on one of his annual Spirit Rock visits, very inspiring.

[joeintra]

Practitioners understand "meditation," or mental training, to be a process of familiarization with one's own mental life leading to long-lasting changes in cognition and emotion. Little is known about this process and its impact on the brain. Here we find that long-term Buddhist practitioners self-induce sustained electroencephalographic high-amplitude gamma-band oscillations and phase-synchrony during meditation. These electroencephalogram patterns differ from those of controls, in particular over lateral frontoparietal electrodes. In addition, the ratio of gamma-band activity (25-42 Hz) to slow oscillatory activity (4-13 Hz) is initially higher in the resting baseline before meditation for the practitioners than the controls over medial frontoparietal electrodes. This difference increases sharply during meditation over most of the scalp electrodes and remains higher than the initial baseline in the postmeditation baseline. These data suggest that mental training involves temporal integrative mechanisms and may induce short-term and long-term neural changes.

Methods

The subjects were eight long-term Buddhist practitioners (mean age, 49 +/- 15 years) and 10 healthy student volunteers (mean age, 21 +/- 1.5 years). Buddhist practitioners underwent mental training in the same Tibetan Nyingmapa and Kagyupa traditions for 10,000 to 50,000 h over time periods ranging from 15 to 40 years. The length of their training was estimated based on their daily practice and the time they spent in meditative retreats. Eight hours of sitting meditation was counted per day of retreat. Control subjects had no previous meditative experience but had declared an interest in meditation. Controls underwent meditative training for 1 week before the collection of the data.

We first collected an initial electroencephalogram (EEG) baseline consisting of four 60-s blocks of ongoing activity with a balanced random ordering of eyes open or closed for each block. Then, subjects generated three meditative states, only one of which will be described in this report. During each meditative session, a 30-s block of resting activity and a 60-s block of meditation were collected four times sequentially. The subjects were verbally instructed to begin the meditation and meditated at least 20 s before the start of the meditation block. We focus here on the last objectless meditative practice during which both the controls and Buddhist practitioners generated a state of "unconditional loving-kindness and compassion."

Meditative Instruction. The state of unconditional loving-kindness and compassion is described as an "unrestricted readiness and availability to help living beings." This practice does not require concentration on particular objects, memories, or images, although in other meditations that are also part of their long-term training, practitioners focus on particular persons or groups of beings. Because "benevolence and compassion pervades the mind as a way of being," this state is called "pure compassion" or "nonreferential compassion" (dmigs med snying rje in Tibetan). A week before the collection of the data, meditative instructions were given to the control subjects, who were asked to practice daily for 1 h. The quality of their training was verbally assessed before EEG collection. During the training session, the control subjects were asked to think of someone they care about, such as their parents or beloved, and to let their mind be invaded by a feeling of love or compassion (by imagining a sad situation and wishing freedom from suffering and well being for those involved) toward these persons. After some training, the subjects were asked to generate such feeling toward all sentient beings without thinking specifically about anyone in particular. During the EEG data collection period, both controls and long-term practitioners tried to generate this nonreferential state of loving-kindness and compassion. During the neutral states, all of the subjects were asked to be in a nonmeditative, relaxed state.

EEG Recordings and Protocol. EEG data were recorded at standard extended 10/20 positions with a 128-channel Geodesic Sensor Net (Electrical Geodesics, Eugene, OR), sampled at 500 Hz, and referenced to the vertex (Cz) with analog band-pass filtering between 0.1 and 200 Hz. EEG signals showing eye movements or muscular artifacts were manually excluded from the study. A digital notch filter was applied to the data at 60 Hz to remove any artifacts caused by alternating current line noise.

Bad channels were replaced by using spherical spline interpolation (12). Two-second epochs without artifact were extracted after the digital rereferencing to the average reference.

Spectral Analysis. For each electrode and for each 2-s epoch, the power spectral distribution was computed by using Welch's method (13), which averages power values across sliding and overlapping 512-ms time windows. To compute the relative gamma activity, the power spectral distribution was computed on the z-transformed EEG by using the mean and SD of the signal in each 2-s window. This distribution was averaged through all electrodes, and the ratio between gamma and slow rhythms was computed. Intraindividual analyses were run on this measure and a group analysis was run on the average ratio across 2-s windows. The group analysis of the topography was performed by averaging the power spectral distribution for each electrode in each block and then computing the ratio of gamma to slow rhythms before averaging across blocks.

Despite careful visual examination, the electroencephalographic spectral analysis was hampered by the possible contamination of brain signals by muscle activity. Here we assume that the spectral emission between 80 and 120 Hz provided an adequate measure of the muscle activity (14, 15). The muscle EEG signature is characterized by a broad-band spectrum profile (8-150 Hz) peaking at 70-80 Hz (16). Thus, the variation through time of the average spectral power in the 80-120 Hz frequency band provided a way to quantify the variations of the muscle contribution to the EEG gamma activity through time. To estimate the gamma activity, adjusted for the very high frequencies, we performed a covariance analysis for each region of interest (ROI) for each subject. The dependent variable was the average gamma activity (25-42 Hz) in each ROI. The continuous predictor was the electromyogram activity (80-120 Hz power). The categorical predictors were the blocks (initial baseline with eyes open and neutral blocks from 2 to 4) and the mental states (ongoing neutral versus meditation).

For the group analysis, separate repeated ANOVAs were then performed on the relative gamma and adjusted gamma variation between states, with the blocks as the within factor and the group (practitioners versus controls) as the categorical predictor. For the intrasubject analysis, we compared separately the relative gamma and the raw gamma activity averaged within the ROIs in the initial baseline state versus the meditative state.

Phase-Synchrony Detection. Electrodes of interest were referenced to a local average potential defined as the average potential of its six surrounding neighbors. This referencing montage restricted the electrical measurement to local sources only and prevented spurious long-range synchrony from being detected if the muscle activity over one electrode propagated to another distant electrode. The methods used to measure long-range synchronization are described in detail in Supporting Methods, which is published as supporting information on the PNAS web site. In summary, for each epoch and electrode, the instantaneous phase of the signal was extracted at each frequency band between 25 and 42 Hz in 2-Hz steps by using a convolution with Morlet wavelets. The stability through time of their phase difference was quantified in comparison with white-noise signals as independent surrogates. A measure of synchronous activity was defined as the number of electrode pairs among the 294 studied combinations that had higher synchrony density on average across frequencies than would be expected to occur between independent signals. The electrode pairs were taken between the ROIs when we measured the scalp distribution of gamma activity (see Fig. 3a). A repeated-measures ANOVA was performed on the average size of the synchrony pattern across all frequency bands and epochs in each block with the original resting state and the meditative state as the within factors and the group (practitioners versus controls) as the between-groups factor.

Fig. 3. Absolute gamma power and long-distance synchrony during mental training. (a) Scalp distribution of gamma activity during meditation. The color scale indicates the percentage of subjects in each group that had an increase of gamma activity during the mental training. (Left) Controls. (Right) Practitioners. An increase was defined as a change in average gamma activity of >1 SD during the meditative state compared with the neutral state. Black circles indicate the electrodes of interest for the group analysis. ( Adjusted gamma variation between neutral and meditative states over electrodes F3-8, Fc3-6, T7-8, Tp7-10, and P7-10 for controls and long-time practitioners [F(1, 16) = 4.6, P < 0.05; ANOVA]. © Interaction between the group and state variables for the number of electrode pairs between ROIs that exhibited synchrony higher than noise surrogates [F(1, 16) = 6.5, P < 0.05; ANOVA]. The blue line represents the controls; the red line represents the practitioners. (d) Correlation between the length of the long-term practitioners' meditation training and the ratio of relative gamma activity averaged across electrodes in the initial baseline (P < 0.02). Dotted lines represent 95% confidence intervals.

Fig. 1. High-amplitude gamma activity during mental training. (a) Raw electroencephalographic signals. At t = 45 s, practitioner S4 started generating a state of nonreferential compassion, block 1. ( Time course of gamma activity power over the electrodes displayed in a during four blocks computed in a 20-s sliding window every 2 s and then averaged over electrodes. © Time course of subjects' cross-hemisphere synchrony between 25 and 42 Hz. The density of long-distance synchrony above a surrogate threshold was calculated in a 20-s sliding window every 2 s for each cross-hemisphere electrode pair and was then averaged across electrode pairs (see Methods). Colors denote different trial blocks: blue, block 1; red, block 2; green, block 3; black, block 4.

Fig. 2. Relative gamma power during mental training. (a and Intraindividual analysis on the ratio of gamma (25-42 Hz) to slow (4-13 Hz) oscillations averaged through all electrodes. (a) The abscissa represents the subject numbers, the ordinate represents the difference in the mean ratio between the initial state and meditative state, and the black and red stars indicate that this increase is >2- and 3-fold, respectively, the baseline SD. ( Interaction between the subject and the state factors for this ratio [F(2, 48) = 3.5, P < 0.05; ANOVA]. IB, initial baseline; OB, ongoing baseline; MS, meditative state. (c-e) Comparisons of this ratio between controls and practitioners over each electrode [t > 2.6, P < 0.01, scaling (-2.5, 4); t test] during the premeditative initial baseline ©, between the ongoing baseline and the meditative state (d), and between the ongoing baseline and the initial baseline (e).

[sabaijai]

Practitioners understand "meditation," or mental training, to be a process of familiarization with one's own mental life leading to long-lasting changes in cognition and emotion. Little is known about this process and its impact on the brain. Here we find that long-term Buddhist practitioners self-induce sustained electroencephalographic high-amplitude gamma-band oscillations and phase-synchrony during meditation. These electroencephalogram patterns differ from those of controls, in particular over lateral frontoparietal electrodes. In addition, the ratio of gamma-band activity (25-42 Hz) to slow oscillatory activity (4-13 Hz) is initially higher in the resting baseline before meditation for the practitioners than the controls over medial frontoparietal electrodes. This difference increases sharply during meditation over most of the scalp electrodes and remains higher than the initial baseline in the postmeditation baseline. These data suggest that mental training involves temporal integrative mechanisms and may induce short-term and long-term neural changes.

Methods

The subjects were eight long-term Buddhist practitioners (mean age, 49 +/- 15 years) and 10 healthy student volunteers (mean age, 21 +/- 1.5 years). Buddhist practitioners underwent mental training in the same Tibetan Nyingmapa and Kagyupa traditions for 10,000 to 50,000 h over time periods ranging from 15 to 40 years. The length of their training was estimated based on their daily practice and the time they spent in meditative retreats. Eight hours of sitting meditation was counted per day of retreat. Control subjects had no previous meditative experience but had declared an interest in meditation. Controls underwent meditative training for 1 week before the collection of the data.

We first collected an initial electroencephalogram (EEG) baseline consisting of four 60-s blocks of ongoing activity with a balanced random ordering of eyes open or closed for each block. Then, subjects generated three meditative states, only one of which will be described in this report. During each meditative session, a 30-s block of resting activity and a 60-s block of meditation were collected four times sequentially. The subjects were verbally instructed to begin the meditation and meditated at least 20 s before the start of the meditation block. We focus here on the last objectless meditative practice during which both the controls and Buddhist practitioners generated a state of "unconditional loving-kindness and compassion."

Meditative Instruction. The state of unconditional loving-kindness and compassion is described as an "unrestricted readiness and availability to help living beings." This practice does not require concentration on particular objects, memories, or images, although in other meditations that are also part of their long-term training, practitioners focus on particular persons or groups of beings. Because "benevolence and compassion pervades the mind as a way of being," this state is called "pure compassion" or "nonreferential compassion" (dmigs med snying rje in Tibetan). A week before the collection of the data, meditative instructions were given to the control subjects, who were asked to practice daily for 1 h. The quality of their training was verbally assessed before EEG collection. During the training session, the control subjects were asked to think of someone they care about, such as their parents or beloved, and to let their mind be invaded by a feeling of love or compassion (by imagining a sad situation and wishing freedom from suffering and well being for those involved) toward these persons. After some training, the subjects were asked to generate such feeling toward all sentient beings without thinking specifically about anyone in particular. During the EEG data collection period, both controls and long-term practitioners tried to generate this nonreferential state of loving-kindness and compassion. During the neutral states, all of the subjects were asked to be in a nonmeditative, relaxed state.

EEG Recordings and Protocol. EEG data were recorded at standard extended 10/20 positions with a 128-channel Geodesic Sensor Net (Electrical Geodesics, Eugene, OR), sampled at 500 Hz, and referenced to the vertex (Cz) with analog band-pass filtering between 0.1 and 200 Hz. EEG signals showing eye movements or muscular artifacts were manually excluded from the study. A digital notch filter was applied to the data at 60 Hz to remove any artifacts caused by alternating current line noise.

Bad channels were replaced by using spherical spline interpolation (12). Two-second epochs without artifact were extracted after the digital rereferencing to the average reference.

Spectral Analysis. For each electrode and for each 2-s epoch, the power spectral distribution was computed by using Welch's method (13), which averages power values across sliding and overlapping 512-ms time windows. To compute the relative gamma activity, the power spectral distribution was computed on the z-transformed EEG by using the mean and SD of the signal in each 2-s window. This distribution was averaged through all electrodes, and the ratio between gamma and slow rhythms was computed. Intraindividual analyses were run on this measure and a group analysis was run on the average ratio across 2-s windows. The group analysis of the topography was performed by averaging the power spectral distribution for each electrode in each block and then computing the ratio of gamma to slow rhythms before averaging across blocks.

Despite careful visual examination, the electroencephalographic spectral analysis was hampered by the possible contamination of brain signals by muscle activity. Here we assume that the spectral emission between 80 and 120 Hz provided an adequate measure of the muscle activity (14, 15). The muscle EEG signature is characterized by a broad-band spectrum profile (8-150 Hz) peaking at 70-80 Hz (16). Thus, the variation through time of the average spectral power in the 80-120 Hz frequency band provided a way to quantify the variations of the muscle contribution to the EEG gamma activity through time. To estimate the gamma activity, adjusted for the very high frequencies, we performed a covariance analysis for each region of interest (ROI) for each subject. The dependent variable was the average gamma activity (25-42 Hz) in each ROI. The continuous predictor was the electromyogram activity (80-120 Hz power). The categorical predictors were the blocks (initial baseline with eyes open and neutral blocks from 2 to 4) and the mental states (ongoing neutral versus meditation).

For the group analysis, separate repeated ANOVAs were then performed on the relative gamma and adjusted gamma variation between states, with the blocks as the within factor and the group (practitioners versus controls) as the categorical predictor. For the intrasubject analysis, we compared separately the relative gamma and the raw gamma activity averaged within the ROIs in the initial baseline state versus the meditative state.

Phase-Synchrony Detection. Electrodes of interest were referenced to a local average potential defined as the average potential of its six surrounding neighbors. This referencing montage restricted the electrical measurement to local sources only and prevented spurious long-range synchrony from being detected if the muscle activity over one electrode propagated to another distant electrode. The methods used to measure long-range synchronization are described in detail in Supporting Methods, which is published as supporting information on the PNAS web site. In summary, for each epoch and electrode, the instantaneous phase of the signal was extracted at each frequency band between 25 and 42 Hz in 2-Hz steps by using a convolution with Morlet wavelets. The stability through time of their phase difference was quantified in comparison with white-noise signals as independent surrogates. A measure of synchronous activity was defined as the number of electrode pairs among the 294 studied combinations that had higher synchrony density on average across frequencies than would be expected to occur between independent signals. The electrode pairs were taken between the ROIs when we measured the scalp distribution of gamma activity (see Fig. 3a). A repeated-measures ANOVA was performed on the average size of the synchrony pattern across all frequency bands and epochs in each block with the original resting state and the meditative state as the within factors and the group (practitioners versus controls) as the between-groups factor.

Fig. 3. Absolute gamma power and long-distance synchrony during mental training. (a) Scalp distribution of gamma activity during meditation. The color scale indicates the percentage of subjects in each group that had an increase of gamma activity during the mental training. (Left) Controls. (Right) Practitioners. An increase was defined as a change in average gamma activity of >1 SD during the meditative state compared with the neutral state. Black circles indicate the electrodes of interest for the group analysis. ( Adjusted gamma variation between neutral and meditative states over electrodes F3-8, Fc3-6, T7-8, Tp7-10, and P7-10 for controls and long-time practitioners [F(1, 16) = 4.6, P < 0.05; ANOVA]. © Interaction between the group and state variables for the number of electrode pairs between ROIs that exhibited synchrony higher than noise surrogates [F(1, 16) = 6.5, P < 0.05; ANOVA]. The blue line represents the controls; the red line represents the practitioners. (d) Correlation between the length of the long-term practitioners' meditation training and the ratio of relative gamma activity averaged across electrodes in the initial baseline (P < 0.02). Dotted lines represent 95% confidence intervals.

Fig. 1. High-amplitude gamma activity during mental training. (a) Raw electroencephalographic signals. At t = 45 s, practitioner S4 started generating a state of nonreferential compassion, block 1. ( Time course of gamma activity power over the electrodes displayed in a during four blocks computed in a 20-s sliding window every 2 s and then averaged over electrodes. © Time course of subjects' cross-hemisphere synchrony between 25 and 42 Hz. The density of long-distance synchrony above a surrogate threshold was calculated in a 20-s sliding window every 2 s for each cross-hemisphere electrode pair and was then averaged across electrode pairs (see Methods). Colors denote different trial blocks: blue, block 1; red, block 2; green, block 3; black, block 4.

Fig. 2. Relative gamma power during mental training. (a and Intraindividual analysis on the ratio of gamma (25-42 Hz) to slow (4-13 Hz) oscillations averaged through all electrodes. (a) The abscissa represents the subject numbers, the ordinate represents the difference in the mean ratio between the initial state and meditative state, and the black and red stars indicate that this increase is >2- and 3-fold, respectively, the baseline SD. ( Interaction between the subject and the state factors for this ratio [F(2, 48) = 3.5, P < 0.05; ANOVA]. IB, initial baseline; OB, ongoing baseline; MS, meditative state. (c-e) Comparisons of this ratio between controls and practitioners over each electrode [t > 2.6, P < 0.01, scaling (-2.5, 4); t test] during the premeditative initial baseline ©, between the ongoing baseline and the meditative state (d), and between the ongoing baseline and the initial baseline (e).

Source, please?

[chownah]

That stuff appears to have come from:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/101/46/16369

I found it by googling for "The subjects were eight long-term Buddhist practitioners" which was part of the post.

Chownah