Meditation and Positive Psychology

Abstract

Mental health, once defined in terms of absence of illness, has gradually become understood in a more holistic way, which also includes the positive qualities that help people flourish. This evolving definition of mental health has led to an exploration of other traditions and practices, including meditation, which for thousands of years have been devoted to developing an expanded vision of human potential. One result was the introduction of the practice of meditation into Western scientific study. However, the principal original intentions of meditation, to uncover the positive and to catalyze our internal potential for healing and development, have been largely ignored by the scientific community. Yet, a small number of researchers and theorists have explored and continue to explore the positive effects of meditation. The chapter focuses on this pioneering work.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 109 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.