How Meditation Works

Meditation is often described as producing internal states that arise from diligent practice, but these practices only function within specific social and cultural contexts, and their effects vary across different settings. McMahan theorizes meditation as cultivating ways of being within particular social imaginaries, which are shaped by cultural repertoires of concepts, attitudes, social practices, ethical dispositions, institutions, power relations, identities, authority structures, and cosmic conceptions. This theory draws on studies of historical psychosomatic illnesses, which show that eras generate specific symptom pools. Recontextualizing meditation as a cultural practice highlights the need for humanistic study and shows that a totalizing neurophysiological explanation of meditation is impossible.

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.