ABSTRACT
The term meditation refers to a family of mental exercises that generally involve calmly limiting thought and attention. Since 1936 at least 100 scholarly books and journal articles have argued that meditation does have psychotherapeutic potential. Studies using mail-in questionnaires consistently yielded results that appeared to speak favorably for meditation. T. V. Lesh selected 16 counseling graduate students interested in learning meditation and 23 other graduate students, half of whom were interested in and half "definitely against" learning meditation. One way around the ambiguities present in testimonial data is to test a sample of meditators before learning meditation and then after practicing meditation for a period of weeks or months. The most rigorous studies on the therapeutic effects of meditation have controlled for the problem of initial group differences by randomly assigning subjects to meditation and alternative treatment conditions and testing before and after several weeks of treatment.
