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 🙏

Can advanced meditation transform human suffering? We address this question in our new paper, now published in #Mindfulness, titled: “Mental Health, Well-Being, and Meditative Development: A Phenomenological Study of Advanced Meditators” 🧠 We analyzed 55 in-depth phenomenological interviews with 28 advanced meditators, who had from 1,100 to 120,000 lifetime practice hours, analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. 🧠 Participants reported six core themes related to meditative transformation: (1) increased baseline well-being; (2) non-attachment and a more flexible sense of self; (3) increased emotion regulation and compassion, reduced craving and aversion; (4) increased mental and perceptual clarity; (5) positive shifts in values and relationships; (6) reported transformations in psychiatric conditions. 🧠 In addition to the six core themes, two secondary themes emerged: how advanced meditation supports psychotherapy and how advanced meditation is similar to psychedelic experiences. 🧠 Participants attributed these changes to the types of #meditation techniques and insights specifically gained through these practices. One described “greater ease when there's less self." Another reported addictions falling away without conscious effort. 🧠 The trajectory was not simply positive. Participants often moved through intense psychological and existential difficulty. Many participants, however, viewed these difficult periods as necessary steps toward improved wellbeing. The participants described changes in both functional well-being (purpose and capability) and experiential well-being (felt states and the absence of distress). Many also described reductions in self-identity that they believed lessened the amount that they suffered. Said more plainly, they described both feeling better and, when challenges did arise, being less impacted by them. Our findings provide new evidence that meditative development is a multidimensional process impacting distinct domains of well-being, and that meditative development can lead to radical human flourishing and deep peace. Congratulations to Sebastian Ehmann, our first author, and to @TerjeSparby and Vanessa Naughton, our collaborators. I thank the practitioners for their generosity of time and openness that made this study possible. May this work benefit many 🙏 Full PDF: drive.google.com/file/d/17Rd… #contemplativescience #psychiatry #wellbeing #advancedmeditation #mentalhealth

Delighted and honored to announce our speakers for the 2026 Science of Advanced Meditation Conference! The conference features talks from leaders in the growing subfield of advanced meditation, including from fields of neuroscience, contemplative science, psychology, philosophy and consciousness science. The presentations will highlight recent discoveries and emerging research across these fields, while considering important directions for future scientific inquiry. We welcome the speakers: -- Andres Canales-Johnson, Ph.D. @canalesjohnson -- Richard Davidson, Ph.D. @RichieJDavidson -- Eric Garland, Ph.D. @DrEricGarland -- Ruben Laukkonen, Ph.D. @RubenLaukkonen -- Antoine Lutz, Ph.D. @Antoine_Lutz -- Heleen Slagter, Ph.D. -- Terje Sparby, Ph.D. @terjesparby -- Tawni Tidwell, Ph.D. -- Malcolm Wright, Ph.D. -- Winson Yang, Ph.D. @winsonfzyang The 2026 Science of Advanced Meditation Conference is a free, one-day virtual conference hosted by our Meditation Research Program in affiliation with Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Registration for this conference is now open. We invite you to join for the entire conference or simply to attend the sessions that best 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 May this conference inspire the development of the science of advanced meditation. We hope to see you there 🙏 Register now through the link below ⤵️

Can nonlinear dynamical-systems and complexity science help us understand the radical potential of the human mind, and perhaps even enlightenment? Here I announce our new publication “Brain Criticality and Advanced Meditation ‘Cessation’ Events: An Intensively Sampled Electroencephalography Case Study” now out in IBRO Neuroscience Reports A cessation event is an endpoint of advanced meditation that may occur after mastery of practice. Related to nirodha and enlightenment in Theravada Buddhism, it is marked by a brief loss of consciousness followed by reports of mental reset, deep clarity, and bliss. In this study, we intensively sampled a single extraordinary meditator who could repeatedly access these advanced states. Using EEG neuroelectrophysiology, we recorded brain activity surrounding approximately 37 cessation events. We investigated these events using the mathematical concept of brain criticality. Brain criticality is the idea that the brain operates near a transition between highly ordered and highly disordered, or chaotic, activity, enabling both stability and flexibility. Criticality analysis has previously been used to characterize states such as psychedelic experiences and anesthesia-induced unconsciousness, and deviations from criticality have been associated with neurological and psychiatric disorders. To map changes in criticality surrounding cessation events, we applied detrended fluctuation analysis, or DFA, to the EEG recordings. DFA measures long-range temporal correlations and the long-term memory of a signal. As the DFA exponent approaches 1, these correlations strengthen and brain activity approaches criticality; values above 1 indicate nonstationary, supercritical dynamics. By combining intensive neuroelectrophysiological measurement with criticality analysis, we examined how brain dynamics change as consciousness approaches, enters, and emerges from cessation. We found, with some technical detail: –-A spike in the whole-brain average DFA exponent leading up to cessation with a post-cessation elevation, suggesting a strengthening of long-range temporal correlations and movement towards the critical point surrounding cessations (Figure 2) –-More pronounced linear DFA exponent changepoint effects in central, posterior, and right frontal EEG channels (Figures 3 and 4) –-Exploratory analysis of the cessation itself after additional data cleaning suggests near-critical and supercritical dynamics during the cessation event Said more plainly, our results indicate that brain activity moved toward a more balanced state between order and disorder as cessation approached, continued through the event, and remained altered afterward. These results inform a growing understanding of the brain in advanced meditation and the potential of human consciousness. Congratulations to my incredible colleagues: Remko van Lutterveld, Tom Cahaly, Lukas van Herk, and Daniel Ingram Full manuscript PDF below ⤵️ May this work benefit many 🙏

Advanced meditation is increasingly a critical test case for neuroscience, psychology, phenomenology, philosophy and computational modeling of the mind. In doing so, advanced meditation is pushing us to rethink how we both study and understand our own subjective experience and the processes through which our minds can deeply transform. I’m therefore delighted to share that our new review and synthesis, “Active Inference, Computational Phenomenology, and Advanced Meditation: Toward the Formalization of the Experience of Meditation,” is now officially published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews As the scientific study of advanced meditation continues to mature, a central challenge for our team at the Meditation Research Program is this: How can subjectively rich, conceptually elusive, and highly refined first-person meditative experiences integrate into fruitful dialogue with formal, testable computational models of the mind? In this paper, we critically synthesize a rapidly growing, but until now largely scattered, literature that uses Active Inference and related computational frameworks to model the states, stages, and endpoints of advanced meditation. We ask where current models succeed, where they fall short, and what rigorous and meaningful progress will require next. Importantly, this work goes well beyond basic mindfulness by engaging radical experiential territories including defabrication (the loosening of mental habits that shape experience), Minimal Phenomenal Experience (MPE; the barest awareness without thought, affect, or sense of self), and cessation (a complete, temporary absence of conscious experience altogether). So why does this matter for contemplative science and meditation more broadly? Because carefully developed formal models can help clarify and illuminate how deep psychological transformation actually happens. When pursued rigorously and respectfully, we believe such models can bridge difficult-to-articulate first-person phenomenology with precision tools of third-person science, guiding future empirical work and potentially even informing mental health. My deepest gratitude to first author Hagar Tal, and our collaborators Malcolm Wright @punk_utopian, Shawn Prest, and Lars Sandved Smith @lars_sandved ! As always, my colleagues and I warmly welcome your reflections and deeper conversations, and we’re especially keen to hear from those around the world thinking deeply about advanced practice, phenomenology, and the contemplative and computational science of consciousness in transformation. The full manuscript PDF is included below ⤵️

Can meditation be understood as systematic mental training? Despite the obvious appeal of thinking of meditation training like a workout for the mind, as the gym is for muscles, and its wide usage across communities practicing and researching meditation, virtually no real dialogue has yet occurred between contemplative science and training and exercise science. While meditative attainments are clearly more than just feats of self-centered inner endurance—and some meditative endpoints involve profound epistemological or ontological shifts that have no clear counterpart in athletic or performance-based disciplines—training science has long been dedicated to uncovering the principles and mechanisms that underlie training and its adaption. It thus potentially has a great deal to offer the emerging science of advanced meditation. In our latest paper, led by the brilliant Sebastian Ehmann together with Terje Sparby @terjesparby and Daniel M. Ingram @danielmingram, we address the need for an alternative framework to evaluate meditation as systematic training that shapes meditative development. We first survey foundational principles of training science, such as programming and periodization, and then show how core training variables—volume, frequency, duration, density, and intensity—can be meaningfully adapted to contemplative training. Among these, we propose a novel definition of training intensity: the graded phenomenal presence of specific meditative qualities, coupled with the minimization of counteractive qualities. Benchmarked against a normative standard, this construct opens a promising path between structured training metrics and subjective markers of skill-based meditative proficiency. This work is a step toward a future in which advanced meditation is not confined to spiritual or religious systems of meditative training, but can also be understood as this-worldly—a systematic method of engaging with mental training that cultivates profound states of well-being. We believe it can be both theoretically and practically useful to think of the most effective ways that these practices can be used to profoundly transform the mind. In this way, perhaps one day meditators will debate the finer points of training variables as well as the interaction with meditative skills, with the same vigor as athletes and training scientists do now. Our hope is to give more people an opportunity to choose which particular goals they want to achieve in meditation, while potentially drawing from cultural heritages in a way that feels authentic and comfortable. So, are we ready to embrace interdisciplinary, science-based and more culturally appropriate frameworks that make these practices more inclusive and accessible—while also enabling the systematization and conceptual clarity needed to safeguard and advance the field of contemplative science? May this work benefit many 🙏

Powerful scientific clues to the mystery of consciousness are emerging from its very absence. Advanced meditation research seeks to scientifically understand profound and powerful shifts in consciousness that can arise from contemplative mastery. One such shift, which we call extended cessation (EC), refers to a rare and temporary suspension of consciousness in its entirety. That is, after specific and especially deep meditation, all perception and mental activity cease entirely for an extended period. In this first-ever electrophysiological study of EC, in which five meditators underwent concurrent electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording, we asked ourselves: What is the neuroelectrophysiology of EC—and does EC affect the brain differently than deep sleep, anesthesia, and disorders of consciousness? Here’s what we found: —A reduction in alpha power in EC, especially in the visual cortex, suggesting a significant shift away from normal sensory processing. —During EC, most participants showed increases in neural complexity (e.g., Lempel-Ziv complexity, permutation, entropy and integrated information). —Global coherence showed no consistent, group-wide change during EC, with some participants increasing at certain frequencies, others decreasing, and in two it remained unchanged. —Functional connectivity between brain networks was highly individual with some participants having EC strengthen communication across networks, while in others it produced little change. These results have several radical implications for how we currently understand consciousness, flourishing, and the brain itself. Unlike deep sleep, anesthesia, or coma, EC doesn’t simply switch consciousness off. Instead, it seems to leave the brain in a state of surprising complexity. That puzzling paradox of no consciousness with high neural complexity is the opposite of what several leading theories predict, and therefore challenges some of the most established scientific models of what consciousness is thought to require. It also raises the possibility that EC is not a collapse of consciousness, but a content-free baseline from which it can re-emerge with renewed intense clarity, vividness of perception, and deep sense of joy and inner peace. What’s perhaps most promising and exciting is that EC may provide a unique experimental window into what philosophers have called “pure consciousness” or “minimal phenomenal experience” — and the awe-inspiring afterglow of this strange yet scientifically observable state could have far-reaching implications for well-being, resilience, and farthest reaches of human flourishing. A big congratulations to Kenneth Shinozuka @kfshinozuka, Winson F.Z. Yang @winsonfzyang, Ruby M. Potash, and Terje Sparby @terjesparby for bringing such rigor and pioneering vision to the farthest frontiers of modern mind and brain science. If you find this work exciting, we would be deeply grateful for reposts and comments to reach more people who may be interested~