Objectives

Meditation is an umbrella term for a vast range of contemplative practices. Former proposals have struggled to do justice to this variety. To our knowledge, there is to date no comprehensive overview of meditation techniques spanning all major traditions. The present studies aimed at providing such a comprehensive list of meditation techniques.

Methods

In a qualitative study, we compiled a collection of 309 meditation techniques through a literature search and interviews with 20 expert meditators. Then, we reduced this collection to 50 basic meditation techniques. In a second, quantitative study, 635 experienced meditators from a wide range of meditative backgrounds indicated how much experience they had with each of these 50 meditation techniques.

Results

Meditators’ responses indicated that our choice of techniques had been adequate and only two techniques had to be added. Our additional statistical and cluster analyses illustrated preferences for specific techniques across and within diverse traditions as well as sets of techniques commonly practiced together. Body-centered techniques stood out in being of exceptional importance to all meditators.

Conclusions

In conclusion, we found an amazing variety of meditation techniques, which considerably surpasses previous collections. Our selection of basic meditation techniques might be of value for future scientific investigations and we encourage researchers to use this set.

中文翻译：

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冥想者在冥想时会做什么？为未来的冥想研究提出新的基础

目标

冥想是广泛的冥想练习的总称。以前的提案一直在努力公平地对待这种多样性。据我们所知，迄今为止还没有涵盖所有主要传统的冥想技巧的全面概述。目前的研究旨在提供如此全面的冥想技巧清单。

方法

在一项定性研究中，我们通过文献搜索和对 20 位专业冥想者的采访，收集了 309 种冥想技巧。然后，我们将这个集合减少到 50 种基本的冥想技巧。在第二项定量研究中，来自不同冥想背景的 635 名经验丰富的冥想者表明他们对这 50 种冥想技巧中的每一种都有多少经验。

结果

禅修者的反应表明我们选择的技巧已经足够了，只需要添加两种技巧。我们额外的统计和聚类分析说明了不同传统之间和内部的特定技术以及通常一起实践的技术集的偏好。以身体为中心的技巧对所有禅修者都特别重要。

结论

总之，我们发现了种类繁多的冥想技巧，大大超过了以前的系列。我们选择的基本冥想技巧可能对未来的科学研究有价值，我们鼓励研究人员使用这套技巧。