Data-Driven Well-Being

As we welcome our first cohort of full-time contemplatives to the CCR North America Campus, we are thrilled to continue building on the enormous success of the Shamatha Project, the most thorough scientific study of meditation ever performed. As Drs. Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson state in their book Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body:

[The Shamatha Project] is among the best direct tests of a meditation-induced altered trait in attention we have so far.

Working with numerous colleagues, Dr. B. Alan Wallace and Dr. Clifford Saron co-designed this landmark study, which was conducted at the Shambhala Mountain Center (Colorado, USA) in 2007. The study consisted of two three-month meditation retreats, each with 30 contemplatives. The second retreat acted as a wait-list control group, with the contemplatives matched on age, sex, and years of meditation experience.

Under Dr. Wallace’s instruction, the contemplatives meditated for six hours or more each day, practicing primarily shamatha meditation, which consists of an array of techniques for cultivating the stability and vividness of attention, grounded in relaxation. The shamatha methods were complemented by practice of the four immeasurables — loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and impartiality — which are designed to increase one’s positive aspirations toward greater well-being.

Led by Dr. Saron, a multidisciplinary team of neuroscientists and psychologists collected data from the contemplatives using multiple methods, including computer-based cognitive and perceptual tasks, mental-health questionnaires, and blood samples that were used to track biological markers associated with well-being.

The Shamatha Project and follow-up studies have provided compelling evidence that shamatha meditation can significantly improve one’s attentional faculties, together with other benefits. Specifically, these studies demonstrated the following effects:

• an increase in attentional skills (e.g., perceptual sensitivity) over the course of the retreat, and up to seven years after the retreat;
• an increase in emotional and psychological well-being, with the contemplatives’ behavior also suggesting increased emotional engagement; and
• an increase in the activity of telomerase, an enzyme that is positively correlated with levels of well-being.

The Shamatha Project’s two three-month retreats were among the longest in any scientific studies of meditation, yielding terabytes of data that continue to be analyzed today, 17 years later. The study has led to the publication of over a dozen peer-reviewed research articles, with the latest published in March 2021.

Full-time contemplatives at the CCR will complete retreats of at least three months, with most committing to much longer retreats (i.e., years or even decades). The CCR thus presents unprecedented opportunities for longitudinal studies that build on the groundbreaking work of The Shamatha Project.