04/04/2015
Cyclic Meditation: a state of wakeful rest with sustained and selective attention
Sarang Patil, Shirley Telles*
*Indian Council of Medical Research, Center for Advanced Research in Yoga and Neurophysiology, SVYASA, Bangalore, India
Abstract
Cyclic meditation (CM) is a ‘moving’ meditation technique devised to address the needs and problems of modern man. Many people find it difficult to relax and get into a meditative state if asked to sit with their eyes closed while others feel drowsy and even fall asleep. Cyclic meditation involves a combination of gentle yogic stretching and relaxation. It is based on the principles culled from classical yogic texts like Mandukya Upanishad and Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. The practice of CM in general appears to bring about a state of low physiological activation, with reduced oxygen consumption and a shift in the sympathovagal balance towards vagal dominance. A period of CM practice significantly reduces oxygen consumption and energy expenditure to a greater degree (32.1%) than a comparable period of supine rest. The CM program has also been shown to decrease occupational stress levels and baseline autonomic arousal. There is also an improved performance in a letter cancellation task which requires selective attention, concentration, visual scanning abilities, and a repetitive motor response following CM. Moreover, a study of the P300 following CM suggested that participants showed a better ability to discriminate auditory stimuli of different pitches in a P300 auditory oddball task. The prolonged latencies of evoked potentials, generated within the cerebral cortex after the practice of CM, supported the idea of cortical inhibition after CM. These results suggest that CM produces a hypo-metabolic physiological state along with an improvement in the ability to show selective and focused attention to target stimuli.
