Research
Modern meditation research reviewed with methods and limitations.
Can Meditation Go Wrong? Adverse Events in Meditation (Farias 2020)
The first systematic review of meditation adverse events: 8.3% overall prevalence, anxiety and depression most common — and what it does and does not say about Daoist sitting.
Do Meditation Programs Improve Psychological Stress and Well-being? (Goyal 2014)
The landmark 2014 JAMA Internal Medicine meta-analysis: moderate evidence for mindfulness meditation on anxiety, depression, and pain — and what it does not say about Daoist sitting.
Interoception and Mental Health: The Roadmap (Khalsa 2018)
The consensus definition of interoception — the brain's moment-by-moment mapping of the body's interior — and why it matters for the body-sensation problem pages.
Measuring Meditation's Harms in Mindfulness Programs (Britton 2021)
The study that gave meditation's adverse effects a measurement instrument: 58% of MBSR/MBCT participants reported at least one adverse effect — and what that does and does not say about Daoist sitting.
Schlosser 2019: How Common Are Unpleasant Meditation Experiences?
The largest survey to date of unpleasant meditation-related experiences: roughly one in four regular meditators reports having had one — and the study's predictors map the conditions that make them likelier.
Tang 2015: The Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation
The landmark neuroscience review — attention control, emotion regulation, and self-awareness as the proposed mechanism — read with the authors' own caveats about what remains unknown.
Varieties of Contemplative Experience (Lindahl 2017)
The first taxonomy of meditation-related challenges: interviews with Western Buddhist practitioners and teachers, mapping the phenomena, the influencing factors, and the remedies.
What Slow Breathing Does to Body and Brain (Zaccaro 2018)
The systematic review of slow-breathing techniques: parasympathetic predominance under ten breaths per minute — the physiological cousin of tiaoxi's fine breath, with the boundary stated.
Why Slow Breathing Relaxes: The Pulmonary-Afferent Hypothesis (Noble & Hochman 2019)
The proposed mechanism behind slow-breathing effects: respiratory and baroreceptor afferents cycling at 0.1 Hz entraining central autonomic networks — a hypothesis, stated as a hypothesis.