Picture 13.
Alan Wallace teaching during the second 3-month retreat. Most evenings there was a short talk and an
opportunity to discuss questions regarding the meditation practices and training taught by Dr. Wallace. Photo by
Adeline Van Waning.
We took a very comprehensive approach in our investigation. We obtained self-report
questionnaire data, physiological measures, and had participants perform laboratory-based
emotion-related tasks, attention/emotion interaction tasks and attention-related tasks. We built two
side-by-side state-of-the-art EEG and psychophysiology laboratories below the meditation hall and
a blood lab (
. All told, we conducted 15 computer-based experiments, took blood
and saliva samples, conducted onsite interviews and shipped laptops and digital recorders to
people’s homes after the retreats were over so we could follow up the meaning of the training in
terms of measureable cognitive effects as well as more subjectively in terms most meaningful to
the participants.
So what did we find?
We looked at psychological improvements from a battery of questionnaires and we combined
many traits into a term we call
adaptive functioning
and found that the retreat group showed a
significant increase in this measure between the beginning and the end of the retreat, while the
control group did not change in this measure at all – at least not until they themselves entered into
their own retreat (
. An increase in adaptive functioning means there was an increase in
well-being, mindfulness, empathy, ego resiliency, and a decrease in depression, anxiety,
neuroticism and difficulties in emotion regulation. Notably, this change was sustained five months
later (for both groups that underwent retreat). These finding are described in detail in a paper lead
authored by Baljinder Sahdra, a Postdoctoral Scholar on the project and now a Lecturer in
Psychology at the University of Western Sydney in Australia
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