danielmingram

For thousands of years, Theravāda Buddhism has described a state known as nirodha samāpatti, which is reported as complete cessation of feeling and perception. In this tradition, it is considered the highest meditative attainment and closely connected to nirvana/enlightenment. Now, modern brain imaging is opening a window into this extraordinary phenomenon, bringing the deepest aspects of ancient contemplative practices into conversation with science. I'm delighted to share our new study, now published in Imaging Neuroscience: "Endogenous suspension of phenomenal consciousness during extended cessation: Regional homogeneity analysis of multi-participant 7T fMRI of an advanced meditative endpoint" This publication presents the first-ever brain imaging study of this unique phenomenon, which we have operationalized and termed “extended cessation” (EC). Practitioners enter and exit EC voluntarily, providing science with a rare, self-generated way to study what happens when awareness disappears. Using 7T fMRI, we intensively scanned advanced meditators across EC sessions, and also during non-meditative control tasks. Retrospectively describing how they experienced EC, the meditators reported a complete absence of thought, bodily sensation, feeling, and experience during the state. On emerging, participants reported feelings of exquisite clarity, sensory vividness, radical openness, and lasting inner peace and joy. Our neuroscience findings included: -- In visual and posterior brain regions, neighboring signals became more synchronized, rising and falling together. -- Synchrony decreased in areas involved in memory, emotion, and self-related processing, including the hippocampus, insula, and orbitofrontal cortex, and in brainstem nuclei. -- Against a database of prior brain imaging studies, the EC pattern resembled brain maps associated with attention and perception, and most strongly diverged from maps associated with fear, stress, and pain. -- EC-related neural changes tracked the distribution of histamine receptors, which are involved in the regulation of arousal and attention. These findings shed light on an important question: how does brain organization relate to inner peace and consciousness? In our study, consciousness ceased without a global shutdown of brain activity. Sleep, anesthesia, and disorders of consciousness are typically associated with broad suppression. EC instead showed selective disengagement of systems that bind perception to feeling, memory, and self-relevance. These findings, although preliminary, converge with practitioners’ reports and offer a starting point for testing theories of inner peace and consciousness against a rare, emotionally and perceptually powerful, voluntary absence of experience. Sharing congratulations and gratitude with our first author Winson Yang (@winsonfzyang), and co-authors Akila Kadambi, Ruby Potash, and Terje Sparby (@terjesparby). I also thank the meditators and our funders who made this work possible. Please like and share if you find this work meaningful, our work depends on the support of our incredible global community. Full article in the comments ⤵️ May this work benefit many 🙏

How might meditation support preparation for, navigation of, and learning from psychedelic experiences? I'm delighted to share our new manuscript, "Exploring the Interface of Meditation and Psychedelics: A Qualitative Analysis of Experienced Practitioners' Perspectives on Psychedelic Preparation," now published in Psychedelics. We analyzed open-ended responses from 82 regular meditators across 18 countries, each with at least one psychedelic experience, such as psilocybin or LSD. Three core themes emerged: 1️⃣ Optimizing Pre-Psychedelic Mindset: Participants described meditation as cultivating a positive mood, openness, cognitive flexibility, and a capacity to surrender before the experience. 2️⃣ Navigating Challenges: Participants felt that meditation made non-dual states and intense emotions feel more familiar, and helped them meet difficult moments with acceptance, equanimity, and an understanding of impermanence. 3️⃣ Facilitating Psychological Development: Participants used meditation to both set intentions before their experience and to integrate insights afterward. They viewed the changes from psychedelic experiences as short-term and opposed treating them as a “magic pill.” These accounts suggest meditation and psychedelics may work synergistically along a continuum of psychological development, with psychedelic experiences embedded in a longer trajectory of meditative development. These findings are based on participants' self-reported experiences. Because participants were recruited for their experience with both meditation and psychedelics, their responses may be biased in favor of meditation-based preparation for psychedelics. Future research is needed to fully understand possible synergies between these practices. Congratulations to our first author Mia C. Riedel, and co-authors Rosalind G. McAlpine (@rosmcalpine) and Terje Sparby (@terjesparby). We are grateful for the practitioners who participated in our research. Do our results resonate with your research, teaching, or practice? Let us know! The full article is included in the comments below ⤵️ May this work benefit many 🙏

Can mental focus become automatic through practice? Noticing mind-wandering and regaining focus are skills that can be trained. Through meditation, these skills can become increasingly automatic and effortless, allowing attention to stay on course with less deliberate steering. I'm delighted to share our new preprint, “Metacognitive Skill Learning as a Mechanism of Advanced Meditation.” In this manuscript, we develop an account of advanced meditation as a specialized form of metacognitive skill. This perspective helps explain how meditators become skilled at noticing and guiding their own mental activity, until these skills run almost automatically and effortlessly. A metacognitive skill perspective may explain several features of advanced meditation: 🧠Concentration: How attention can become more stable and self-sustaining, requiring less deliberate effort to stay focused. 🧠Insight: How insight into the nature of our thoughts and sensations can deepen and stabilize. 🧠Flexible control: How well-practiced skills free up mental resources, allowing practitioners to adapt to new and complex situations. My gratitude to the first author Brendan Conway-Smith and co-author Ruby M. Potash (@rpotash16). Does this account of metacognitive training resonate with you—have you noticed aspects of your meditation becoming more natural and less effortful over time? Full manuscript PDF below ⬇️ May this work benefit many 🙏

Psychedelics can transform experience. Preparation for psychedelics can shape how this transformation unfolds. Could meditation-based preparation support psychedelic transformation? Prior research has found that an individual’s state of mind predicts both the quality of a psychedelic experience and its therapeutic outcomes. Meditation can shift one's mind state, yet it remains largely unexplored as a way to prepare for psychedelic experiences. Our new paper, "Practitioner perspectives on meditation-based preparation for psychedelic experiences," in press at Mindfulness, explores how meditation may support psychedelic preparation. We surveyed 123 individuals from 24 countries, all of whom were regular meditators who had at least one high-dose psychedelic experience (such as from psilocybin or LSD). They rated the benefits they believed meditation training can offer, which specific practices might help most, and how a preparation program could be designed and implemented. Here are the key themes that emerged: ➡️ Meditation was consistently rated as beneficial for psychedelic preparation. Participants perceived meditation as helpful across several dimensions, including post-session integration, increasing the likelihood of positive experiences, gaining helpful insights, and creating lasting benefits. ➡️ Meditation was thought to support psychedelic experiences by enhancing psychological acceptance, present-moment focus, and feelings of boundlessness while reducing anxious ego-dissolution. ➡️ Participants rated loving-kindness meditation as the most helpful practice type for psychedelic preparation, followed, in order, by open monitoring, self-transcendence, and focused attention. ➡️ Among participants with less meditation (1-3 years) and psychedelic (1-20 sessions) experience, those adhering to specific meditation traditions reported significantly higher perceived benefits compared to non-adherents. This pattern was reversed for highly experienced meditators (10+ years) with less psychedelic experience. ➡️ Regarding implementation, participants indicated preferred three weeks of preparation at about 30 minutes daily, with a majority favoring online (86.2%) and asynchronous (84.6%) delivery methods. Because we recruited participants experienced in both meditation and psychedelics, our sample may have favored those who already viewed both positively and were therefore more receptive to combining them. Future trials should test whether meditation-based preparation improves clinical outcomes for psychedelic interventions, while rigorously assessing the safety and adverse events related to this context. Full manuscript PDF: meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/f… My gratitude to first author Rosalind G. McAlpine (@rosmcalpine) and co-authors Merve Utangac, Joanna Kuc (@joanna_kuc), Henok Pankhurst, Amelia Sellers, Doug Kraft, Andrew Litchy, Naina E. Gupta, Christopher Timmermann (@neurodelia), and Sunjeev K. Kamboj (@sunjeevk). I’m grateful to the participants who shared their experiences and perspectives, making this research possible. May this work benefit many 🙏 #contemplativescience #psychiatry #wellbeing #advancedmeditation #mentalhealth

Join us this Wednesday for the 2026 Science of Advanced Meditation Conference! The conference is a free one-day virtual event hosted by our Meditation Research Program in affiliation with Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Join us for the entire conference or attend any sessions that fit your schedule. 2026 Science of Advanced Meditation Conference 📅 Wednesday, September 23, 2026 🕙 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM EDT (2:00 PM - 8:00 PM UTC) 💻 Virtual | Complimentary registration Join us as we explore the latest discoveries in advanced meditation research. We welcome our wonderful speakers: -- Andrés Canales-Johnson, Ph.D. -- Richie Davidson, Ph.D. -- Eric Garland, Ph.D. -- Ruben Laukkonen, Ph.D. -- Antoine Lutz, Ph.D. -- Heleen Slagter, Ph.D. -- Terje Sparby, Ph.D. -- Tawni Tidwell, Ph.D. -- Malcolm Wright, Ph.D. -- Winson Yang, Ph.D. Leading advanced meditation researchers from around the world will come together to discuss where the field stands and where it goes next! Researchers, clinicians, contemplatives, students, and anyone curious about the science of advanced meditation are welcome to attend. Registration is required for attendance. Register for free through the link below ⤵️ We look forward to the possibility of seeing you there 🙏

What does years of meditation practice do to one’s mental health: Are there benefits? Perhaps also risks? What is still unknown? The therapeutic effects of structured mindfulness-based interventions have been studied extensively. What happens to mental health after years of practice, and as expertise develops, is much less clear, especially where practice turns difficult and aspects of meditative development and psychopathology can seemingly look alike. Considering these questions, I’m delighted to share our latest preprint: “A Systematic Review of Effects of Long-Term and Advanced Meditation on Mental Health: Psychiatric Symptoms, Stress, and Challenging Events” led by first author @TerjeSparby, with co-authors Jerron Chan, @OliverHugemark, and Vanessa Naughton. Following PRISMA guidelines, we synthesized 52 articles from 373 screened records. Three core themes emerged: 1️⃣ Reduction of Psychiatric Symptoms: Long-term and advanced meditators report significantly lower anxiety and depression than non-meditators or novices. Lifetime practice duration was a weak predictor of these effects, with some studies reporting no associations between years of practice and levels of symptoms, and some others reporting benefits within just weeks of starting regular practice. Particular cultivated qualities may help explain these outcomes, with bodily awareness and self-compassion linked to lower anxiety, and non-attachment to a modest antidepressant benefit. 2️⃣Stress Reduction and Relaxation: Long-term and advanced meditators reported lower levels of stress and exhibited associated physiological markers including faster cortisol recovery after an acute stressor. Mediation analyses revealed that acceptance-based emotion regulation accounted for some of these physiological changes. 3️⃣Occurrence of Adverse and Challenging Events: While most often linked to positive outcomes, long-term and advanced meditation has been associated with challenging or potentially negative outcomes in some cases. In a cross-sectional survey of 1,232 regular meditators, 25.6% reported at least some unpleasant experiences they believed related to their practice, such as anxiety, fear, and disorientation. What the scientific field still lacks is a method for distinguishing challenging experiences related to meditative development from those of clinical harm. Adverse event monitoring is largely absent, terminology is inconsistent across studies, and no established framework exists for guiding these important distinctions. We call for safety-centered study protocols, clear risk stratification criteria, and evidence-based clinical guidelines governing contraindications and appropriate practitioner support. Full PDF: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/zv… My deepest gratitude to Terje Sparby and our team, and to the practitioners and traditions whose experiences have made this research possible. I welcome reflections from scientists, clinicians, teachers, and practitioners, and others. How should we understand the positive and negative experiences associated with meditation? May this work benefit many 🙏 #contemplativescience #psychiatry #wellbeing #advancedmeditation #mentalhealth

Can a single mathematical principle help explain how advanced meditation changes brain activity, computation, and conscious experience altogether? I'm delighted to share our new preprint, "Neuronal Criticality as a Framework for the Computational Neurophenomenology of Advanced Meditation," now available on PsyArXiv. Computational approaches in the mind and brain sciences already use formal models to bridge brain dynamics and first-person experience. The difficulty is that many mappings between mathematical structures and experience remain possible, with little to constrain the choice. In this paper, we developed neural criticality as a framework that narrows those possibilities. 📐 -- Criticality describes a regime near a transition between distinct phases of brain dynamics. A system's distance from this transition jointly constrains many dynamical and computational properties of global neuronal population dynamics. Thus, many of these properties can not vary independently. 📐-- Formal models of consciousness tie these same, or related, observables to aspects of experience, and so inherit that covariance. Movement toward or away from criticality then predicts systematic experiential changes across whole classes of states. 📐-- We propose that top-down attention is a control parameter for the distance to criticality. This is implemented through neuromodulation, giving a plausible route by which practice shifts the dynamical regime. 📐 -- Different practices sit at different distances from criticality. Focused-attention meditation has been measured farther from criticality than open-monitoring. For advanced meditation, prior research, using three distinct operationalizations converge on a near-critical regime. One of these found a transient movement toward criticality around cessation events, which we previously reported. 📐-- Our criticality framework speaks to experiential richness, a felt sense of profundity, and the sense that certain aspects of the nature of mind have "always already" been the case. Near-critical dynamics might also support a heightened degree of meta-awareness and epistemic depth. 📐 -- Finally we turn to cessation of consciousness, a meditative endpoint in which conscious experience falls away entirely. Using information geometry, we offer a new construct for it. As precision falls toward zero, the intrinsic metric of the statistical manifold ‘collapses’. In this way, advanced meditation may modulate the intrinsic metric of the space of possible beliefs. Why does this matter? The distance to criticality may serve as a shared variable linking attentional control, predictive processing, neurophysiology, and first-person experience, yielding new empirical and theoretical constraints. Few studies address criticality and advanced meditation directly, and practice- and state-specific work is a promising next step. My gratitude to first author Jan Erik Bellingrath @BellingrathJan, and to co-authors Remko van Lutterveld, Michael Lifshitz, and Jonas Mago @JonasHMago. We welcome your thoughts, critiques, and discussion. Full manuscript PDF below ⤵️ May this work benefit many 🙏