Unified Consciousness and the Effect of Body Scan Meditation on Happiness: Alteration of Inner-Body Experience and Feeling of Harmony as Central Processes

Embodied time and the out-of-body experience of the self

“…Therefore, our results suggest that the judgment of time is modulated by self-awareness and the associated experiences. This is consistent with the results of recent studies reported in our introduction suggesting the critical role of the self in the explicit judgment of duration and the judgment of the passage of time (e.g., Droit-Volet & Dambrun, 2019;Wittmann, 2018). This also allows us to better understand difficulties in judging duration and temporal order in patients with schizophrenia suffering from a disorder of body-self awareness (e.g., Giersch, Lalanne & Isope, 2016).…”

“…Their low sensitivity to short temporal asynchrony, which alters the perception of the continuity of the self in time, would explain the disturbance of the minimal self in schizophrenia (Lalanne, Van Assche & Giersch, 2012). Some studies have shown that the practice of mindfulness meditation, which focuses attention on the body (e.g., body scan meditation), modifies not only the awareness of body-self and of the present moment but also the judgment of durations (e.g., Dambrun, 2016;Dambrun et al, 2019;Droit-Volet et al, 2019;Droit-Volet & Dambrun, 2019;Wittmann, 2015;Wittmann, 2018). Other studies have highlighted the critical role of sensory-motor experience (embodied simulation) in the time judgment of emotional facial expressions (Droit-Volet, Brunot & Niedenthal, 2004;Effron et al, 2006;Fernandez & Garcia-Marques, 2019;Mondillon et al, 2007) or bodily expressions (e.g., Nather & Bueno, 2012;Nather et al, 2011;Vatakis et al, 2014;Droit-Volet & Gil, 2016).…”

Understanding the Nature of Oneness Experience in Meditators Using Collective Intelligence Methods

“…While the models require further development and testing, MEMAE posits different neural underpinnings associated with experiences of oneness and non-dual awareness, making it different from most other models that describe oneness and nondual awareness as cognates. Finally, whereas meditation-induced changes in oneness in SSHM predicted to lead to equanimity and well-being were supported in Dambrun et al (2019), CCS predictions that contemplative practices should result in lower negative and positive affect trait valences were not fully supported in Berkovich-Ohana and Glicksohn (2017). MEMAE makes no direct predictions about well-being.…”

“…Decentering is often considered to be one of the main aims of mindfulness and related practices (e.g., ACT; cf. Moran et al, 2018), but Hanley et al (2018) and Dambrun et al (2019) have also provided empirical evidence that decentering is distinct from oneness. Emerging models of contemplative development (Dorjee, 2016;Schoenberg and Vago, 2019) also suggest that decentering is often a precursor to oneness experiences.…”

“…For example, the Nondual Embodiment Thematic Inventory measure has been shown to be a mediator of the effect of meditation practice on anxiety and depression (Mills et al, 2018), and the Metapersonal Self-construal Scale (DeCicco and Stroink, 2007) has been shown to mediate the effect of dispositional mindfulness on well-being (Hanley et al, 2017). Finally, Dambrun et al (2019) showed that unified consciousness (which included components of self-loss and oneness) mediated the effect of (body scan) meditation on happiness.…”