Sufi Meditation Course Eases Stress in Pharmacy Doctoral Students, Study Finds

Pharmacy students spend years absorbing an enormous volume of technical material while simultaneously preparing for high-stakes licensing examinations and clinical rotations, and the psychological toll of that training has become increasingly difficult to ignore. A new longitudinal study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications suggests that a structured elective combining Sufi psychology and the Tamarkoz meditation method can meaningfully lower perceived stress and strengthen self-awareness in doctoral pharmacy trainees. The research, conducted by Saloumeh DeGood of the Sufi Psychology Association in Davis, California, together with Sundas Azim, Naz Fatah, and Shahrzad Movafagh of Shenandoah University’s School of Pharmacy, offers some of the most detailed evidence yet that contemplative education can be embedded directly into a demanding professional curriculum with measurable results.

The study was designed as a longitudinal investigation, meaning that the researchers tracked changes in the same students across multiple time points rather than comparing them to a separate control group at a single moment. Participants completed validated psychometric instruments before the course began, immediately after its conclusion, and again at a five-week follow-up. This three-wave design allowed the team to distinguish short-lived effects from changes that persisted after the students returned to their ordinary academic routines, a distinction that many meditation studies fail to make. The course itself ran for fifteen weeks and consisted of mandatory weekly didactic sessions on Sufi psychology paired with guided meditation practice sessions.

Tamarkoz, which translates roughly from Persian as concentration, is a meditation method rooted in Sufism, a centuries-old spiritual and philosophical tradition centered on self-knowledge. Unlike secular mindfulness programs that focus primarily on attentional training, the Tamarkoz approach as taught through the M.T.O. Sufi Psychology framework integrates meditation with explicit instruction in self-knowledge, encouraging students to examine their own emotional patterns, motivations, and reactions to stress. The researchers hypothesized that this combination of didactic content and routine practice would outperform what students might achieve through standard stress management techniques, and they grounded that hypothesis in earlier work showing the method to be superior to conventional approaches in reducing stress and improving positive emotions among college students.

To measure the intervention’s effects, the team employed four distinct instruments. The Perceived Stress Scale, a ten-item questionnaire known as the PSS10, captures how unpredictable, uncontrollable, and overloaded respondents find their lives. The Self-Awareness Outcomes Questionnaire, or SAOQ, assesses multiple dimensions of self-awareness, including reflective self-development, acceptance of self and others, proactive awareness at work, and awareness of emotional reactions. The Mindful Attention Awareness Scale, or MAAS, measures the frequency of mindful states in daily life, while a Lifestyle Questionnaire tracked how often and for how long students actually practiced meditation outside of class. Together these tools provided a multidimensional picture of psychological change that no single measure could have delivered.

The results were striking in their pattern. Students showed statistically significant improvements on the PSS10, indicating a genuine reduction in perceived stress, and on three of the SAOQ subscales, reflecting gains in reflective self-development, acceptance of self and others, and proactive awareness at work. Notably, the MAAS scores did not change significantly, a finding the researchers report transparently. This dissociation is scientifically interesting because it suggests that the benefits of the course did not operate through the mechanism most commonly assumed in mindfulness research, namely increased everyday mindful attention. Instead, the improvements in stress and self-awareness may have arisen from the self-knowledge curriculum itself, the supportive group environment, or the structured practice of Tamarkoz concentration techniques, none of which are captured by the MAAS instrument.

The Lifestyle Questionnaire added an important behavioral dimension to the findings. After completing the course, students reported meditating more frequently and for longer durations each week than they had before the elective began. This shift in habitual practice matters because the durability of any contemplative intervention depends on whether students continue practicing once the formal structure is removed. The five-week follow-up data provided reassurance on this front: the improvements in perceived stress and in the three self-awareness subscales persisted after the course ended, confirming what the researchers describe as the longitudinal benefits of the training. Sustained effects at follow-up are the benchmark that separates promising educational interventions from those that produce only a temporary placebo-like lift.

The context for this work is a growing body of literature documenting distress among healthcare trainees. Pharmacy programs in particular report high rates of burnout and stress-related psychological impacts that affect both student well-being and academic performance. Stress in professional education is not merely a matter of comfort; elevated stress is associated with impaired memory consolidation, reduced clinical decision-making quality, and higher attrition. Because pharmacists occupy a critical position in patient safety, the emotional regulation capacities of pharmacy graduates have downstream consequences for the healthcare system as a whole. The authors frame their study as a response to what they identify as an inadequacy of stress reduction and self-awareness skills in the professional development of healthcare students generally.

Methodologically, the study adhered to the Declaration of Helsinki and received approval from the Shenandoah University Internal Review Board under protocol number 1238, approved on March 8, 2023, with all participants providing informed consent during the study period between March 2023 and May 2024. The authors declare no competing interests and note that the study received no dedicated funding declaration. The peer-reviewed article was accepted on September 30, 2026, and published open access on October 14, 2026, making the full dataset of findings freely available to educators, psychologists, and curriculum designers worldwide.

The implications extend well beyond a single pharmacy school. If a fifteen-week elective combining self-knowledge didactics with a culturally rooted meditation practice can produce durable reductions in perceived stress, then professional programs across medicine, nursing, and other health disciplines have a concrete, testable model to evaluate. The Tamarkoz framework differs from the mindfulness-based stress reduction programs that dominate the literature, and the divergence in results on the MAAS versus the SAOQ hints that different contemplative traditions may act through different psychological pathways. Future research with control groups, larger cohorts, and longer follow-up periods will be needed to confirm the mechanism and generalize the findings, but the present study establishes a rigorous longitudinal baseline.

For now, the takeaway for students and educators is straightforward: skills of self-knowledge and concentrated meditation can be taught, learned, and retained within the crushing schedule of doctoral pharmacy training, and the psychological dividends appear to last beyond the final class session. As burnout continues to erode the healthcare workforce, evidence that a structured contemplative elective can shift students’ relationship to stress, and that they will keep practicing on their own once the course ends, is a finding worth serious attention from anyone designing the professional curricula of the coming decade.

Subject of Research: Effects of a Sufi psychology and Tamarkoz meditation elective on stress and self-awareness in pharmacy doctoral students

Article Title: The impact of self-knowledge and tamarkoz® meditation education in pharmacy doctoral training: A longitudinal study

Article References: The impact of self-knowledge and tamarkoz® meditation education in pharmacy doctoral training: A longitudinal study. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41599-026-09428-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41599-026-09428-6

Keywords: Tamarkoz meditation, Sufi psychology, pharmacy education, perceived stress, self-awareness, mindfulness, burnout, longitudinal study, healthcare students, curriculum design, psychometric scales, mental well-being