My research explores the work of six psychotherapists who meditate. Vipassana meditation focuses on developing sensitivity to body sensations, which are understood to accompany all emotion experiences; experienced meditators can feel in their own bodies physical sensations that reflect the experience of a person in close proximity. An aim of the research was to discover whether their meditation practice had enabled the participants to use this ability in their work with patients. The study focuses on psychotherapists' lived experience during clinical hours, and enquires about how they direct their attention to their body sensations, and to the relationship with patients. The study explores links between the practice of Buddhist meditation and the evenly-suspended attention recommended by Freud, and further developed by Bion in his psychoanalysis without memory or desire. Because I was interested in many aspects of therapists' lived experience, I chose the methodology of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, 2003) as a framework for analysing the data. I drew on philosophical underpinnings offered by Heidegger and van Manen. The study showed that the participating psychotherapists were helped by their meditative training to develop a sensitive receptivity to their own physical sensations and emotion experience, predisposing them to be aware of limbic resonance with their patients' emotional and physical experiences. Some participants focused their meditative awareness on the ebb and flow of closeness and distance between themselves and their patients, in an orientation to psychotherapy that can be described as relational mindfulness.

Given increasing interest in the therapeutic benefits of mindfulness, limitations of its treatment utility are frequently questioned. As such, the purpose of the study was to examine the effects of mindfulness on a subsequent self-control task in a sample of college students. A total of 67 participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a control condition, an experimental mindfulness-only condition or a comparison expectancy-plus-mindfulness condition to investigate the utility of mindfulness practice when motivated by an outcome of increased self-control. Results did not indicate a difference in persistence on a difficult task between conditions, regardless of the manipulation. Conceptual and experimental limitations of current study’s findings, as well as future directions, are discussed.

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Psychological stress is common and contributes to many physical and mental health problems. Its effects are mediated by a complex neurobiological system centering in the brain with effectors including autonomic nervous system, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, inflammatory system, and gene expression. A stressor pushes the human physiological system away from its baseline state towards a lower utility state. The physiological system may return towards the original state but may be shifted to a lower utility state. While some physiological changes induced by stressors may benefit health, chronic stressors usually have negative effects on health. In contrast to this stressor effect is the system's resilience which influences its ability to return to the high utility attractor basin following a perturbation by increasing the likelihood and/or speed of returning to the baseline state following a stressor. Age-related cognitive decline is a major public health issue with few preventative options. Stress contributes to this cognitive decline, and mindfulness meditation (MM) is a behavioral intervention that reduces stress and stress reactivity in many health conditions. A randomized clinical trial was performed to determine if MM in older adults would improve measures of cognitive function, as well as psychology and physiology, and to determine what factors might predict who would improve. 134 at least mildly stressed 50-85 year olds were randomized to a MM intervention or a wait-list control. Outcome measures included a broad cognitive function battery with emphasis on attention and executive function, self-rated psychological measures of affect and stress, and physiological measures of stress. Self-rated measures related to negative affect and stress were all significantly improved as a result of the MM intervention compared to wait-list control. There were no changes in cognition, salivary cortisol, and heart rate variability. Potential explanations for the discrepancy between the beneficial mental health outcomes and lack of impact on cognitive and physiological outcomes are discussed. To determine which factors predict MM responsiveness, a responder was defined by determining if there was a minimum clinically important improvement in mental health. Predictors included demographic information and selected self-rated baseline measures related to stress and affect. Classification was performed using decision tree analysis. There were 61 responders and 60 non-responders. Univariate statistical analysis of the baseline measures demonstrated significant differences between the responder and non-responders in several self-rated mental health measures. However, decision tree was unable to achieve a reliable classification rate better than 65%. A number of future research directions were suggested by this study, including to optimize the MM intervention itself, to better select participants who would benefit from MM, and to improve the outcome measures perhaps by focusing on decreased reactivity to stressful events. Finally, a less well-defined but always present future research direction is the development of better models and better quantitative analysis approaches to the multivariate but dynamically limited human empirical data that can be practically collected.

This study aims to explore the extent to which participating in a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme may result in shifts in people’s relationship with time, notably whether they become more present-focussed. The eight week MBSR programme advocates mindfulness, which is defined as paying attention on purpose in the present moment without judgement, as a way of reducing stress. The programme has been available in East London since 2009. A case study of eight MBSR programme participants’ experiences using narrative analysis was conducted. Narrative psychology and social constructionism provided the theoretical basis in which our storied lives are located in culturally inscribed narratives, with specific discourses around time and stress. Time discourses tend to pressurise people to believe that it is better to go about daily life at a fast pace, which requires significant hurrying and rushing with pervasive senses of time urgency. Stress discourse locates stress management within individuals. One-on-one semi structured interviews were held so that participants could reflect on their experience of time and the present moment orientation of the programme. Participants’ perceived a shift in how they experienced time with greater awareness of being present-focussed and they identified stress reduction benefits, which included feeling calmer, less panicked and more self-accepting. However, some of the participants maintaining the formal mindfulness practices like the body scan, meditation and mindful movement after the programme often proved difficult, as they were drawn back into their dominant narratives around time which were characterised by busyness, productivity and time scarcity.

The regular practice of meditation has been shown to reduce stress and increase well-being. However, there is limited information on how meditation feels or is subjectively experienced by the meditator. This naturalistic inquiry uses a phenomenological approach to explore the phenomenon of meditation as lived experience with a group of novice meditators taking part in a 4-week mindfulness meditation program. Nineteen college students were divided into 4 groups. Each group met once a week for a 30-minute guided meditation session followed by a 30-minute focus group during which participants shared their experiences. Individual interviews were conducted at the end of the study. The focus groups and individual interviews were audio recorded. Analysis of the transcribed data revealed 12 key constituents of the experience of meditation occurring at different stages of the meditation process. The key constituents were then placed along a timeline of a typical 30-minute session. A diagrammatic representation was created to illustrate the general "shape" of a meditation session. The variable nature of the meditation experience was also revealed: no two meditation sessions were experienced in the same way by the same meditator, and no two meditators had identical meditation experiences, although there were inherent similarities. A sample of the language novice meditators use to describe their experiences was also documented. The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-14) was administered pre-study and post-study to measure changes in perceived stress over the course of the study. Reductions in perceived stress were measured in 76.5% of the participant group, or 13 of the 17 students who completed the study. These results were significant, t (16)=3.49, p=0.003. The findings in this study show meditation to have the distinctive characteristics of an altered state of consciousness. Meditation may be regarded as a self-induced, adaptive, altered state of consciousness that enables the meditator to relax and effectively reduce levels of perceived stress. These findings provide a new perspective of meditation, particularly with regard to how meditation is subjectively experienced by novice meditators. This information may help to demystify meditation and encourage those considering this healthful practice. / Psychology / D. Litt. et Phil. (Psychology)