TY  - JOUR
AU  - Heeter, Carrie
AU  - Allbritton, Marcel
PY  - 2018
DA  - 2018/10/09
TI  - Meditation as an Intervention for Health: A Framework for Understanding Meditation Research
JO  - OBM Integrative and Complementary Medicine
SP  - 025
VL  - 03
IS  - 04
AB  - We propose a framework for understanding meditation that can support greater scientific rigor in conducting meditation research, and selecting meditation health interventions. There are no consistent and rigorous standards for describing meditation research interventions. This impedes rigor of meditation research design and interpretation of findings. This also limits meaningful comparisons across research studies. The audience for the article includes researchers, meditation experts, healthcare professionals, and those with interest in meditation. The framework describes the key components of any given meditation intervention. We also discuss how meditation can effect individuals differently, and provide suggestions for describing the expertise of the expert who designed the meditations in an intervention. The meditation framework supports (1) comparing different types of meditation, (2) understanding how a meditation session directly effects the human system, and (3) understanding how meditation interventions lead to outcomes. We provide examples from a Yoga Therapy perspective of meditation (our domain of expertise), and from published research on meditation to illustrate applications of the meditation framework. The meditation framework provides a way of understanding meditation by distinguishing eight essential components. The first four components describe the meditation session (individual, object, experience, and direct effects). The outcome component represents the desired reason for engaging in the meditation practice as well as actual outcomes. The repetition component refers to duration, spacing and frequency of doing the practice. The final two components, delivery and approach, describe the context and source of a meditation practice. These eight components can be applied to any type of meditation. We explain the components of the framework and then offer examples. Our goal is not to argue for one form of meditation over another, but rather to express the importance of having a neutral framework for describing meditation across systems of knowledge and methods of application.
SN  - 2573-4393
UR  - https://doi.org/10.21926/obm.icm.1804025
DO  - 10.21926/obm.icm.1804025
ID  - Heeter2018
ER  -