Hello! This study seems very interesting. I am not familiar with visual and audial modalities as an object, but know something about working with breath as an object. There are some meditation frameworks that strongly connected to the breath-say 9 stages Shamatha practise. On later stages some special breath-related technics used there in order to achieve the higher «resolution» and attention «volume». (I mean breath following and body breathing technics). I can’t imaging how it’s possible (and is it possible) to use it with different modalities within this framework. So, in my opinion, though choosing the «right» modality could be helpful in earlier stages to help to stabilize attention, it could the obstacle in later stages (at least in some types of meditation). What do you think?
Hello!
Great question. I think it's a question of the individual's goals for meditation. Why practice late-stage breath-work? Does it serve some greater purpose for the practitioner? Are there comparable late-stage practices using other domains? Do they serve different goals?
Consider exercising as an analogy. If my short-term goal is to exercise, and I enjoy pull-ups, that seems like as good as any place for me to start. If my long-term goal is to run a marathon then pull-ups do not serve that long-term goal, so I will probably want to switch routines at some point to involve more leg-based exercises. If my long-term goal is to become a better rock-climber, pull-ups actually do serve my goal, so there is no problem.
Right now, contemplative science does not have fine-grained enough evaluations of individual goals nor fine-grained understanding of the effects of different practices to make matching goals with practices possible. This study supports the need to do such future research.
Yes, you are definitely right. I meant behind the scenes that the goal is traditional for Buddhist practices: to achieve different levels of non-dual awareness.
My personal experience is that meditation for some "secular" things (stress reduction, general well-being etc) is not more helpful than say sport-and some studies support this view (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-016-0561-5). But of course, further investigation is needed.
Thanks for your points. I'm not a Buddhist so I don't really have traditional Buddhist goals. For more traditional goals, I'm not sure what the effects might be of different anchors. There are many schools of Buddhism and they have many different goals and many different practices, some breath-based, others phrase-based, and still others image-based. If we include Buddhism's roots in Hinduism then the potential goals and practices increase even more. I'll leave that to religious scholars, though.
The meditation anchors in this study were explicitly designed to be secular and most of our population is non-Buddhist. You are right, secular meditation is likely not the right practice for every goal or for everyone. One type of sport will serve certain goals better than another type of sport just as one type of meditation may serve one or another goal differently. I think it really depends on the goals at hand, and doing the research to ask what helps with a particular goal.
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