What meditation is

What it is

"Meditation" is a category, not a practice, and the things inside it have little in common beyond sitting still.

The most useful working distinction, from Antoine Lutz and colleagues, divides practices by what attention is doing:

Focused attention. Attention is placed on a single object — the breath, a candle, a phrase, an image — and returned there whenever it wanders. The skill is stability. Concentration deepens, and in the Buddhist account can develop into the absorption states called jhāna.

Open monitoring. Attention is not directed at any particular object but held open, registering whatever arises without selecting or pursuing. The skill is a kind of receptive alertness. Most insight practice works here.

A third family, proposed by Cortland Dahl, Lutz and Richard Davidson, covers practices that do not fit either:

Constructive. Practices that deliberately cultivate a state or perspective — loving-kindness meditation, compassion practice, deity visualisation in Tibetan Buddhism, Ignatian imaginative prayer. These are not attentional exercises. They are rehearsals.

Deconstructive. Practices that investigate the structure of experience itself — self-inquiry, analytical meditation, the kōan, the vipassanā investigation of what a sensation actually is. These aim to take something apart.

The Buddhist tradition's own division cuts differently again: samatha, calm abiding, against vipassanā, insight — with a long internal argument about whether the first is a prerequisite for the second.

Where it came from

Every one of these developed inside a framework that specified what it was for. That context is the part most often removed.

Concentration practice in Buddhism serves insight, which serves liberation from craving. Loving- kindness practice cultivates a disposition that supports ethical conduct, which is itself a limb of the path. Deity visualisation in Vajrayāna is inseparable from initiation, vow and view. Christian contemplative prayer presupposes a God to be united with. Sufi dhikr presupposes the divine names being remembered.

Modern secular practice extracts the technique and leaves the framework, which is a legitimate thing to do and is examined under modern mindfulness. But it means the practice is no longer aimed where it was pointed.

How it is used

The practical consequence of the taxonomy is that techniques have different effects and different risks, and generic advice is therefore unreliable.

Focused attention practice tends to produce stability, and at length can produce absorption states that are pleasurable and sometimes disorienting. Open monitoring tends to produce insight into how experience is constructed, and is where the destabilising stages of the classical maps mostly appear. Constructive practices reliably shift mood and affiliation. Deconstructive practices are the ones most likely to unsettle a person's sense of being someone.

Someone with a trauma history put into open-monitoring practice on a silent retreat is in a different situation from someone doing ten minutes of loving-kindness on an app, and treating both as "meditation" is how people get hurt.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the category is too broad to support general claims, and that this is now widely acknowledged within the research field itself rather than being an outsider's complaint.

We can say the traditions were more precise than the modern literature. Classical Buddhist Abhidhamma distinguishes states and stages with considerable exactness, names the difficult ones, and specifies what practice suits which temperament. A tradition that lists forty distinct meditation objects and advises different ones for different dispositions is doing something more careful than a study that randomises participants to "meditation".

We can say the goal mismatch is the deepest problem in evaluating any of this. Ask a Theravāda teacher what practice is for and the answer concerns the end of craving and of rebirth. Ask a clinical trial and the answer concerns a depression score at eight weeks. Both may get what they are looking for without either speaking to the other.

We cannot say which practices do what with any precision, because the research has largely not been designed to distinguish them. That is examined in the evidence on meditation, and it is the field's central methodological failure.

Further reading

• Lutz, Slagter, Dunne and Davidson, "Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation" (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2008) — the focused-attention/open-monitoring distinction.
• Dahl, Lutz and Davidson, "Reconstructing and deconstructing the self" (2015) — the three-family model.
• Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga — for how precise a classical taxonomy could be.