How Meditation Works

Summary

Meditation practices are influenced by specific social and cultural contexts, which shape their effects and meanings. Theorizing meditation as a way of being within particular social imaginaries reveals that these practices are deeply embedded in cultural concepts, attitudes, and power relations. This perspective emphasizes the importance of humanistic approaches to studying meditation, challenging the notion that its effects can be fully explained through neurophysiology.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Meditation is often described in terms of internal “states” that presumably arise in anyone who practices them diligently. These practices, however, only “work” in specific social and cultural contexts, and the work they do may be quite different in divergent contexts. McMahan theorizes meditation practices as cultivating ways of being in specific social imaginaries constituted by a cultural repertoire of concepts, attitudes, social practices, ethical dispositions, institutions, power relations, available identities, structures of authority, and conceptions of the cosmos. This theorization extrapolates from recent studies of the historical embeddedness of psychosomatic illnesses that suggest that certain historical eras generate specific “symptom pools.” This recontextualization of meditation as a cultural practice underlines the necessity of humanistic study of meditation and the impossibility of a totalizing neurophysiological “explanation” of how meditation works.