Paper Short Abstract:

Meditation as a spiritual practice mediates numerous seemingly paradoxical states. Developing a grounded awareness of the body, time, and place, opens a door to a parallel world of inner space and experience. A phenomenological study of meditation requires a broad, flexible, and eclectic toolkit.

Paper Abstract:

Meditation as a spiritual practice mediates numerous seemingly paradoxical states. It teaches awareness of the body, time, and place though techniques such as controlled breathing. This heightened awareness is not an end in itself but a means of expanding one’s consciousness to a place of non-duality, where time, space and separation no longer exist. The journey beyond the body starts with a heightened perception of that body and of the world around it. An ethnography of meditation can prove challenging. For the individual practitioner the experience is often wordless, defying first-hand description and objectification. Viewed from outside the practice does not easily reveal the energetic connections and subjective inner journeys taking place, and there may be little cultural expectation that these will be subsequently narrated or elaborated. For the ethnographer, given this potentially unpromising scenario, a broad, eclectic, and flexible methodological toolkit is useful (Zeitlyn, 2022). It can include reflexive autoethnography, what Zeitlyn calls ‘exemplars’ and ‘vignettes’, theoretical, historical, and phenomenological accounts, and scientific studies of the phenomenon. I also draw on Lang’s (2000) notion of human embodiment as inhabiting. Lang focuses on ways in which the body learns to inhabit external space, but the body can also be seen as the fulcrum between this external space and inner space. In both instances there is a transformation of space into place. The paper draws on many decades of experience of meditation from a variety of traditions, drawing on Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Sufi and Western esoteric, ‘New Age’ teachings and techniques.