The study matters because meditation training has exploded far beyond monasteries and meditation centers. It is now embedded in psychotherapy clinics, hospitals, schools, and corporate wellness programs, and surveys suggest tens of millions of adults practice some form of it. Alongside that growth, a serious scientific conversation has emerged about unintended harm. Researchers have documented meditation-related experiences ranging from time-limited anxiety and traumatic re-experiencing to, in rarer cases, lasting problems such as executive dysfunction, delusional beliefs, hallucinations, depression, and insomnia. Just as potent psychological or pharmacological therapies can produce adverse effects, the argument goes, so can meditation, and clinicians need to know who is most at risk.

Until now, the evidence pointing to mental health symptoms as a risk factor came largely from retrospective, cross-sectional surveys. In those studies, meditators with substantial prior experience, often more than one hundred lifetime hours, reported on past symptoms and past distressing experiences, sometimes months or years after the fact. Such designs suffer from well-known recall biases, and, critically, they lack a comparison group of non-meditators. Without knowing the base rate of distressing experiences in daily life, it is impossible to say whether difficult experiences during meditation are caused by the practice or simply reflect what people with elevated symptoms experience anyway. A person prone to anxiety may report intense anxiety during a retreat, but they may also report intense anxiety during an ordinary week at home.

A handful of prospective studies tried to address the recall problem by measuring symptoms before mindfulness-based interventions and tracking outcomes afterward, with mixed results. But those studies typically involved moderate practice doses, from zero to forty-five minutes a day over four to eight weeks, and were designed as treatments tailored to people with mental health difficulties. None included a non-meditation control group. The highest-intensity common format, the residential retreat, with six to eleven hours of daily practice in a secluded setting, remained comparatively underexamined, even though prior work suggests most distressing or impairing meditation-related experiences begin during or shortly after retreats.

The new study, a secondary analysis of a trial preregistered at ClinicalTrials.gov in December 2020, tackled these limitations with a prospective matched-control design. Eighty-nine participants enrolled in one of five six-day residential insight (Vipassana) retreats run by the Tovana Israel Insight Meditation Society, while forty-four controls were drawn from the same meditation community and matched on age and lifetime meditation experience. The retreat schedule was demanding: at least ten roughly forty-five-minute sessions of sitting and walking meditation per day, totaling a minimum of seven and a half hours of formal practice, embedded in silence, alongside loving-kindness sessions, mindful movement, and mindful work periods. Teachers gave daily talks and small-group interviews, and participants progressively shifted from focused-attention practice to broader, deconstructive awareness practices.

Before the retreats began, all participants completed the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 for depression and the Overall Anxiety Severity and Impairment Scale for anxiety. During the retreat, or an equivalent six-day window for controls, they filled out the Peak Meditative Experience Scale, reporting on thirty-two unusual, intense experiences and rating each one’s hedonic tone from extremely unpleasant to extremely pleasant. Nine items, including intense anxiety, flashbacks, and overwhelming sadness, had previously been identified as predominantly unpleasant. Two weeks after the retreat, participants rated both the positive and negative impact of each endorsed unpleasant experience, allowing the researchers to compute a net post-retreat impact score. The sample showed wide variability in symptoms, though most participants fell below clinical screening cutoffs, and roughly two-thirds had more than one hundred lifetime meditation hours.

The statistical strategy centered on bootstrapped moderation models testing whether baseline symptoms interacted with group membership in predicting unpleasant experiences. The hypothesis was straightforward: higher symptoms should predict more distressing experiences among retreat participants relative to controls. Instead, the interaction for depression symptoms was significant in the opposite direction. Retreat participants scoring one standard deviation below the mean on depression endorsed significantly more unpleasant peak experiences than matched controls with similar symptoms, while those at or above the mean did not differ from controls. The anxiety results followed the same pattern, with a marginally significant interaction and the same reversal among low-symptom participants. Sensitivity analyses examining the valence, frequency, and duration of unpleasant experiences found no evidence that elevated symptoms increased risk on any dimension, and the findings held after controlling for lifetime meditation hours, retreat days, and gender.

The two-week follow-up added a further twist. The relationship between pre-retreat anxiety and the net impact of distressing experiences was best described by a quadratic curve: participants with both low and high baseline anxiety reported that their unpleasant retreat experiences had, on balance, a more positive than negative impact two weeks later, while those with moderate anxiety showed a net zero difference. Depression symptoms showed no significant relationship with post-retreat impact at all. The authors suggest several interpretations. Low-symptom participants may have been more resilient to begin with, and resilience is linked to evaluating difficult experiences as opportunities for growth. High-symptom participants, meanwhile, may have benefited most, consistent with evidence that people with greater baseline vulnerability often gain more from mindfulness-based interventions. Intensive practice in a supportive setting, with teachers available and instructions emphasizing non-judgment and acceptance, may even function as a form of stress inoculation, teaching practitioners to approach anxiety rather than flee from it.

Perhaps the most consequential implication concerns causation. The study found that greater depression and anxiety symptoms were associated with more unpleasant experiences in both groups, meditators and controls alike. That means the correlations reported in earlier retrospective studies may be real and replicable, but attributable not to meditation itself. Distressing experiences among people with elevated symptoms may simply be part of the background noise of daily life, and intensive practice neither amplifies nor uniquely generates them, at least in this retreat format. The authors argue this demonstrates the necessity of no-meditation control conditions for anyone hoping to attribute distressing experiences or adverse effects to meditation training, a methodological point with echoes of long-standing debates about distinguishing treatment effects from base-rate phenomena in psychotherapy research.

The study has limits the authors are careful to acknowledge. A fully randomized active-control design would provide stronger causal evidence than matching, the sample was not well powered to detect small interaction effects, and most participants fell below clinical thresholds for depression and anxiety, so the findings may not generalize to severely symptomatic clinical populations. The researchers also call for future work on symptoms beyond depression and anxiety, including posttraumatic stress and psychotic symptoms, on longer and more intensive retreat formats, and on replication across retreat centers, traditions, and cultures. Still, if the results hold up in larger and more diverse samples, the clinical message is striking: depression and anxiety symptoms alone may not constitute contraindications to intensive meditation retreat training, and for some practitioners, the difficult moments on the cushion may ultimately be the ones that help the most.

Subject of Research: Whether pre-existing depression and anxiety symptoms predict distressing experiences during intensive mindfulness meditation retreat training

Article Title: Mental Health Symptoms Do Not Increase Risk for Distressing Experiences During Intensive Mindfulness Meditation Training: Evidence from a Prospective Matched-Control Intervention Study

Article References: Behar, Y. A., Hadash, Y., Dar, O., & Bernstein, A. (2026). Mental Health Symptoms Do Not Increase Risk for Distressing Experiences During Intensive Mindfulness Meditation Training: Evidence from a Prospective Matched-Control Intervention Study. Mindfulness. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-026-02982-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12671-026-02982-9

Keywords: mindfulness, meditation retreats, adverse effects, depression, anxiety, matched-control study, insight meditation, mental health risk factors, Vipassana, clinical psychology, contemplative science, preregistered research

The paper, published on 24 September 2026, makes a technical but consequential argument. The standard paradigm typology descends from a specific tradition, the researcher-defined paradigm model articulated by Egon Guba and Yvonna Lincoln in 1994. Recent work by R. Chafe has shown that this is one paradigm conception among several, not a neutral framework. Kuhn’s discipline paradigms and Burrell and Morgan’s sociological positions perform different functions and rest on different assumptions. The Guba-Lincoln model holds that paradigms are worldviews possessed by individual researchers, declared at the start of every project, and grounded in basic beliefs accepted on faith. Crucially, all of its available positions are organised around a single axis: how the relation between subject and object is configured. Positivism says the subject can access an independent object. Constructivism says the subject builds the object. Poststructuralism, even in Foucault’s sophisticated historicisation of the knower and the known, keeps that relationship at centre stage. None of these options questions whether the two-pole structure itself is fundamental.

That question is precisely what nondualism raises. The position, as the authors define it, is that the subject-object distinction is not a basic feature of reality but a derived, pragmatic structuring within experience. This is easy to mishear. Nondualism is not monism, which answers the question of how many fundamental kinds of things exist with the number one; nondualism declines the question altogether. It is not idealism, which collapses matter into mind, nor eliminative materialism, which collapses mind into matter; both still operate within the two-pole framing. And it is not mysticism. The position requires no special states of consciousness, asserts no hidden unity behind ordinary experience, and does not treat the everyday world as illusory. Its claim is structural: the organisation of experience into a knower in here and a known out there is one way experience gets organised, not the way reality fundamentally is.

The authors are careful about genealogy. There is no generic nondualism, and no single Buddhist nondualism either. The lineage they draw on runs from Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka analysis, which argued that all phenomena, including subject and object, lack intrinsic self-standing existence, through Yogācāra and Chan/Zen, and into the modern Kyoto School founded by Nishida Kitarō. Nishida’s concept of pure experience, a pre-reflective awareness in which subject and object have not yet been distinguished, and his later logic of place and absolute nothingness, gave nondualism a rigorous philosophical articulation that requires no scriptural authority. The authors deliberately avoid Advaita Vedānta, whose nonduality rests on the positive theological claim that Brahman is real. Madhyamaka-derived analysis, by contrast, proceeds by negation and asserts nothing of its own, which is why the authors argue it fits with empirical science, a discipline that likewise asks for no article of faith.

To make this philosophy usable for working researchers, the paper builds on a recent framework called unitlessness, introduced by Krägeloh in 2025. The framework distinguishes three structural levels. The first is units: the level of language, categories, and description, where all standard research methods operate, from quantitative measurement to qualitative coding. The second is unity: pre-discursive experience, what Nishida called pure experience, which is not yet divided into subject and object. The third is unitlessness: the enveloping ground from which both units and unity arise, which cannot be described because description requires units. The levels are connected by bidirectional movement, and the framework is trans-discursive rather than non-discursive: it does not reject language but locates it at one level among others. Nothing in the framework rejects standard methods; it simply recognises the level at which they operate.

The methodological consequences are more modest than one might expect, and the authors are explicit about what does not change. Research methods are left entirely untouched. A researcher adopting a nondual paradigm position uses the same statistical tests, coding procedures, and interview techniques as anyone else. What changes is how findings are worded and what they are taken to show. First-person and third-person methods are located at the same structural level rather than ranked on a hierarchy of fundamentality. The framework does not elevate first-person inquiry, does not privilege practitioners, and does not require researchers to meditate or to have had any nondual experience. The argument is philosophical and structural, not experiential. Nondualism enters paradigm debate on the same terms as any other position, succeeding or failing by whether it generates productive research.

The paper illustrates the difference with a concrete case from neuroscience. A well-replicated finding is that experienced meditators show reduced activity and altered connectivity in the default mode network, a brain system associated with self-referential processing. Framed postpositivistically, such a study measures the neural correlates of a thing called the self, assumed to exist independently of the measurement. Framed nondually, the same data support a different conclusion: the study has correlated two descriptions, both at the units level, one being neural activity parsed into regions and intervals, the other being experience parsed into report categories. What the data show is that the sense of being a bounded self can fade while awareness continues, suggesting that the observer side of experience is something the mind builds and maintains rather than a fixed starting point. The statistics are identical; the interpretation and its scope are not.

The authors also apply a sharp caution to fashionable hybrid methods. Neurophenomenology and micro-phenomenology aim to integrate experiential reports with neural measurement, and the authors accept that reaching pure experience is not their stated aim. But from a unitlessness framing, such methods necessarily parse experience into units: verbal reports become experiential categories, neural activity becomes measurement intervals. The resulting correlations are between two units-level descriptions, not between measurement and experience itself. When this is forgotten, findings can drift into reifying experience as a countable, locatable phenomenon. Similarly, the authors deflate reflexivity: positionality statements are themselves units-level acts that add more units rather than bridging the researcher-researched gap, because that gap is itself a units-level structuring. Reflexive declarations remain useful where methodologically warranted, but they carry no special weight in a nondual framing.

The practical stakes reach beyond philosophy of method. Mindfulness-based programmes are now delivered at scale in health systems, schools, and workplaces, and the research base is vast but uneven, with documented problems of overclaiming when questionnaire scores or neural signatures are quietly taken to be the thing itself. The authors argue that a nondual paradigm supplies principled grounds for methodological honesty: wording results as claims about descriptions of experience rather than experience as such, and stating openly that no method reaches experience before it is put into words. Because first-person and third-person methods sit at the same structural level, qualitative accounts, including reports of adverse experiences that standard scales miss, could enter the evidence base with equal standing. For a field whose findings inform clinical guidelines and public spending, the authors contend, this is a practical contribution rather than an abstract one.

The paper closes with careful boundaries. This is not relativism: empirical adequacy, internal consistency, explanatory scope, and transparency remain in force at the level of scientific discourse. It is not idealism: denying subject-object dualism does not mean reality is all in the mind, and the recognition that phenomena lack inherent existence does not license ignoring their practical reality. Nor does the framework settle disputes between quantitative and qualitative researchers; it locates them. What it offers is a clarification of the paradigm landscape. Researchers whose underlying commitments are nondual, a group the authors suggest may be far larger in mindfulness and consciousness research than the explicit literature admits, can now state those commitments plainly and defend them in methodological terms. Researchers who do not share those commitments lose nothing. What everyone gains is the recognition that the standard typology never exhausted the options.

Subject of Research: Nondualism as a research paradigm for mindfulness and contemplative science methodology

Article Title: Nondualism as a Research Paradigm for Mindfulness Research and Beyond

Article References: Medvedev, O. N., & Krägeloh, C. U. (2026). Nondualism as a Research Paradigm for Mindfulness Research and Beyond. Mindfulness. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-026-02992-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12671-026-02992-7

Keywords: nondualism, mindfulness research, research paradigms, qualitative methods, unitlessness, Kyoto School, Nishida Kitarō, contemplative science, subject-object distinction, neurophenomenology, default mode network, methodological honesty

The commentary responds to a 2025 review by Chems-Maarif and colleagues that sought to refine the definition of mindfulness, a concept most secular clinicians trace to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s formulation of paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally. While the review has been widely praised for clarifying a notoriously slippery construct, Aldbyani and Al-Harbi argue that its framing risks flattening contemplative traditions outside the Buddhist and secular mainstream. In particular, they contend that Islamic forms of mindful awareness, including practices such as dhikr (remembrance of God), muraqaba (spiritual observation or vigilance), and the attentive concentration cultivated in salah (ritual prayer), cannot be adequately understood when stripped of their ethical, theological, and teleological context.

The technical core of the argument concerns what the authors call framing. In their view, a contemplative experience is never merely a bare cognitive event, such as sustained attention to the breath, that can be extracted from one tradition and transplanted into another without residue. Instead, every contemplative act operates within a web of ethical commitments, metaphysical beliefs about the nature of reality and the divine, and a teleology, that is, an account of the ultimate aim of practice. In secular mindfulness, the stated aim is often stress reduction, emotion regulation, or well-being enhancement. In Islamic contemplative life, by contrast, the ultimate aim is relational and devotional: drawing nearer to God, cultivating God-consciousness known as taqwa, and aligning one’s inner states and outward conduct with divine guidance. The commentary insists that these differing ends are not decorative additions but constitutive features that shape what the practitioner is actually doing when the practice unfolds.

This argument has practical consequences for measurement. Much of the empirical mindfulness literature relies on self-report instruments derived from secular conceptualizations, such as scales measuring attention, awareness, and non-judgmental acceptance. Aldbyani and Al-Harbi point to their own earlier narrative theoretical review, which identified five dimensions of Islamic mindfulness and mapped them against the five facets commonly measured in secular mindfulness research. Their mapping suggests meaningful parallels, for instance between attentional presence in secular models and the concentrated presence cultivated in prayer, but also important divergences where Islamic practice incorporates elements, such as devotional intention and relational awareness of God, that have no direct secular analogue. Related constructs from the consciousness sciences, including nondual awareness, which researchers have recently begun to measure with dedicated instruments, offer one possible bridge for comparing across traditions, yet the authors caution that even these frameworks carry implicit metaphysical assumptions drawn from their originating contexts.

The empirical record cited in the commentary underscores why these conceptual debates matter beyond theory. Studies of Muslim prayer have reported associations between mindful engagement in salah and better mental health outcomes, and electroencephalography research on salah has documented changes in alpha activity linked to autonomic nervous system regulation. Quasi-experimental and randomized studies have examined Islamic spiritual mindfulness among nursing students, breathing-based dhikr therapy for insomnia, and Islamic spiritual breathing exercises for anxiety in hypertensive patients, with generally favorable findings on stress, anxiety, and quality-of-life measures. Research on muraqaba within Islamic psychotherapy and surveys of immigrant and refugee Muslim women have further suggested that faith-embedded contemplative practices function as genuine resources for psychological well-being, not merely as cultural curiosities.

At the same time, the literature reveals persistent barriers. Studies from the United Kingdom and the United States have documented obstacles that Muslim clients face when offered conventional mindfulness-based interventions, including concerns about the Buddhist framing of some programs, uncertainty about religious permissibility, and the absence of culturally and religiously adapted content. Facilitators identified in this research include the demonstrated compatibility between contemplative attention and existing Islamic practice, clinician sensitivity to religious concerns, and the availability of adaptations that explicitly root mindfulness in Islamic vocabulary and ritual life. The commentary argues that definitional debates sit at the root of these barriers: when mainstream science defines mindfulness as though only one lineage of contemplative technique existed, members of other traditions are implicitly asked to bracket their own frameworks in order to benefit from the intervention.

The theological dimension of the argument is perhaps its most distinctive contribution. Aldbyani and Al-Harbi emphasize that in Islamic thought, awareness of the present moment is inseparable from awareness of God’s presence and of moral accountability. The Sufi tradition in particular, with its disciplined practices of remembrance, self-examination, and purification of the heart, has long elaborated a systematic psychology of attention that parallels and sometimes anticipates contemporary concerns with metacognition and self-regulation. Classical and contemporary scholarship on dhikr treats repetitive remembrance not as a mere relaxation technique but as a means of transforming the practitioner’s relationship to desire, distraction, and ultimately the divine. Reading such practices through a purely clinical lens, the authors suggest, yields a distorted picture in which the most important variable, the practitioner’s orientation toward God, is subtracted from the analysis.

The teleological point follows directly. If the purpose of a contemplative practice shapes its phenomenology, then comparing Islamic and secular mindfulness solely on outcome measures such as stress reduction risks a category error. A Muslim practitioner engaged in dhikr is not simply attempting to down-regulate physiological arousal; she is performing an act of worship whose success is defined, in part, by fidelity to a devotional ideal rather than by a score on a well-being questionnaire. This does not mean that empirical research on such practices is invalid, as the growing evidence base attests. It means, rather, that researchers and clinicians should be explicit about the limits of their constructs, and should resist the assumption that secular definitions of mindfulness occupy a neutral, view-from-nowhere position from which all other traditions can be adjudicated.

The commentary also carries a message for cultural humility in psychology and psychiatry. With nearly two billion Muslims worldwide, and with mental health services in many countries serving substantial Muslim populations, the question of how contemplative interventions are defined and adapted is a matter of global clinical significance. The authors, whose earlier work has examined mindfulness among college students in Yemen and Egypt, faith-based coping among displaced Muslim women affected by war, and Islamic perspectives on mindfulness in Black American Muslim communities, frame the present piece as part of a sustained effort to bring Islamic contemplative science into dialogue with mainstream mindfulness research on equal terms. Their work has been supported by Umm Al-Qura University in Saudi Arabia.

Ultimately, the commentary issues an invitation rather than a rejection. It does not dispute the value of the definitional refinement project undertaken by Chems-Maarif and colleagues; indeed, it treats that project as an essential step toward scientific clarity. What it demands instead is a definition of mindfulness capacious enough to acknowledge that contemplative experience is always framed, in every tradition, by ethics, theology, and ultimate purpose. For scientists, that means building measures and models that can register these framings rather than averaging them away. For clinicians, it means offering Muslim clients interventions that honor, rather than bypass, the theological architecture within which their practices already live. As mindfulness science matures, the emerging consensus among scholars in this debate appears to be that pluralism in definitions is not a weakness to be engineered away, but a feature of a field finally beginning to see the full landscape of human contemplative life.

Subject of Research: Islamic mindfulness and the ethical, theological, and teleological framing of contemplative experience

Article Title: Islamic Mindfulness and the Ethical, Theological, and Teleological Framing of Contemplative Experience: A Commentary on Chems-Maarif et al. (2025)

Article References: Aldbyani, A., & Al-Harbi, M. F. O. (2026). Islamic Mindfulness and the Ethical, Theological, and Teleological Framing of Contemplative Experience: A Commentary on Chems-Maarif et al. (2025). Mindfulness. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-026-02983-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12671-026-02983-8

Keywords: Islamic mindfulness, mindfulness definition, dhikr, muraqaba, salah prayer, contemplative science, Muslim mental health, mindfulness-based interventions, Sufism, nondual awareness, religious adaptation, teleology

The pattern theory of selflessness, first proposed in 2024 by Aviva Berkovich-Ohana and colleagues in Mindfulness, drew on philosopher Shaun Gallagher’s “pattern theory of self,” which treats the self not as a single entity but as a coordinated pattern of physical, psychological, social, and narrative features. The framework describes six sequential transformations, labeled T1 through T6, that meditation practice may induce in this self-pattern: ethical consolidation, concentration, mindful awareness, self-deconstruction, flexibility, and finally self-liberation, a state said to approximate the Buddhist ideal of awakened selflessness. Until now, these transformations have been framed largely as changes happening within individual practitioners. Rajan’s paper, titled “Worlding the Self: The Ecological Constitution of the Pattern Theory of Selflessness,” flips that assumption on its head.

The core claim of the new work is radical in its simplicity: ecological processes are not merely helpful conditions or background causes of self-transformation—they are constitutive of it. In other words, the environment is not the stage on which the drama of self-change unfolds; it is a co-author of the drama itself. Drawing on the tradition of ecological psychology founded by James J. Gibson, along with enactivism, the view that cognition arises through the dynamic interplay of organism and environment, Rajan argues that every one of the six transformations involves a distinctive mode of participation with the world. Affordances—the possibilities for action that environments offer to organisms—along with affective scaffoldings such as emotionally resonant objects, rituals, and relationships, and broader social ecologies, all actively shape what the self becomes during contemplative practice.

Consider the first transformation, ethical consolidation. In classical Buddhist training, ethical conduct is not a moral checklist but a way of restructuring the practitioner’s world so that certain actions no longer “solicit” or tempt them. Rajan shows that this means changing the landscape of affordances themselves: a person who has internalized non-harm lives in an environment where harmful options genuinely recede from view rather than requiring constant resistance. The second transformation, concentration, similarly depends on what the paper calls the material engineering of ecologies of attention. Silent retreat centers, meditation huts, carefully timed bells, and structured daily schedules are not conveniences; they are deliberately constructed environments that filter the field of relevant affordances down to a single focal object, making sustained absorption possible in the first place.

The middle transformations reveal even deeper ecological entanglement. Mindful awareness, the third transformation, requires what Rajan describes as generalization across diverse contexts—the cultivated ability to maintain open, non-reactive attention whether one sits on a cushion, crosses a busy street, or navigates a difficult conversation. This generalization, the paper argues, can only be achieved through exposure to genuinely varied environments, because the skill itself is defined as a stable reorganization of how affordances are perceived everywhere, not just in the meditation hall. The fourth transformation, self-deconstruction, then depends on strategically withdrawing the ecological scaffolding that sustains ordinary self-boundaries. Ethnographic research on Thai and Burmese practice traditions, which the paper integrates alongside canonical Buddhist sources such as the Satipaṭṭhāna discourses, illustrates how retreat conditions—removal from social roles, familiar objects, and identity-confirming routines—systematically starve the self-pattern of the environmental supports it needs to maintain itself.

The final two transformations carry the argument to its most provocative conclusions. Flexibility, the fifth transformation, involves reconstituting the organism-environment coupling across qualitatively different conditions, so that the practitioner can maintain equanimity whether the field of affordances is rich or impoverished, threatening or welcoming. And self-liberation, the sixth and culminating transformation, is reinterpreted not as a transcendence of ecology—an escape from the world into some worldless state—but as an irreversible reorientation of the organism-environment relationship itself. In this reading, the awakened practitioner does not leave the ecological loop; the loop has been rewired so completely that the world no longer solicits self-centered reactivity. The paper cites canonical texts, including the Migajāla Sutta’s striking image of the liberated person living “solitary” even amid society, to argue that Buddhist awakening has always been describable as a transformed way of dwelling among affordances rather than an exit from them.

Methodologically, the paper is a work of conceptual analysis, and Rajan is careful about what such an argument can and cannot establish. No new experiments were performed, and no datasets were generated. Instead, the study integrates a relational account of affordances—the position that affordances are properties of the animal-environment system rather than of either the organism or the environment alone—with the influential distinction between the landscape of affordances, the total set of possibilities an environment offers, and the field of relevant affordances, the subset that actually solicits a particular agent at a particular moment. This distinction, developed by researchers such as Erik Rietveld, Julian Kiverstein, and Jelle Bruineberg in the context of skilled intentionality, allows Rajan to give each meditative transformation a precise ecological signature: which affordances vanish, which multiply, and how the field itself is reshaped at each stage.

The conceptual move has significant consequences for how meditation science is done. If the ecological reading is correct, then much of the experimental literature on mindfulness—which typically treats meditation as an internal mental intervention measured on individual questionnaires and brain scans—may be systematically underestimating the role of context. The paper points out that mindfulness-based interventions delivered without explicit ethics-based instruction have shown weaker prosocial effects in meta-analyses, a finding that fits naturally with the ecological view: change the ethical affordance structure of the environment and the self-pattern follows; strip the context and the transformation falters. Rajan also engages with ethnographic work, including Julia Cassaniti’s studies of Thai Buddhist “mindlessness” and the contested politics of secular mindfulness in settings such as the British Parliament, to show that different social ecologies constitutionally produce different self-pattern outcomes.

Perhaps the most scientifically exciting feature of the paper is that it does not remain purely philosophical. By taking the organism-environment system, rather than the isolated brain, as the unit of analysis, the ecological version of the pattern theory of selflessness generates testable empirical predictions that could distinguish it from purely causal alternatives. The paper specifies two promising directions. The first is cross-contextual assessment: if transformations like mindful awareness are genuinely ecological generalizations, they should show up as stable changes in affordance perception and action-readiness measured across radically different environments, not just within laboratory settings or retreat centers. Ecological momentary assessment—real-time sampling of experience in daily life—offers a ready-made methodological toolkit for this purpose. The second is neurophenomenological investigation of retreat-to-daily-life transitions: the critical test comes at the moment a practitioner leaves the engineered ecology of a retreat center and re-enters ordinary life, and combining first-person reports with neuroimaging during exactly those transitions could reveal whether the self-pattern has been internally transformed or merely propped up by its environmental scaffolding.

The study, which was conducted without external funding and reports no competing interests, arrived as a research article in Mindfulness on September 8, 2026, after being received in March and accepted in late August of the same year. Its publication marks a notable moment in an ongoing convergence between contemplative science, ecological psychology, and enactive cognitive science—fields that have increasingly found common ground in questioning the internalist assumptions of mainstream cognitive neuroscience. Scholars working on the extended mind, affective scaffolding, and participatory sense-making have long argued that minds leak beyond skulls; the new paper extends that program into territory few have dared to map: the very structure of the meditating self.

Whether the constitutive hypothesis survives empirical scrutiny remains to be seen, and Rajan explicitly frames the paper as specifying the tests rather than passing them. But if the ecological reading holds, the implications ripple well beyond meditation research. Psychotherapy, education, and mental health policy could all take seriously the idea that self-transformation is something worlds do with people, not something people do alone. In reframing selflessness as a property of the organism-environment system, the paper suggests an answer to an ancient question that is also strikingly modern: we do not so much lose ourselves in the world as discover that we were never separate from it in the first place.