Heartfulness meditation cultivates gratitude: Study

Heartfulness meditation can contribute to cultivating gratitude among practitioners, a study said.

The study published in the International Journal of Recent Scientific Research has confirmed that Heartfulness meditation, the popular meditation practice around the world, helped to create a sense of gratitude among its practitioners.

World Gratitude Day is celebrated on September 21 annually. The celebration started in 1965 in Hawaii to formally express gratitude and appreciation for all the wonderful things in life.

The awareness of the benefits of gratitude on the general well being of a person is increasingly becoming apparent and numerous studies have supported the same, Heartfulness Institute said.

Authored by Raja Amarnath G., Prabhakar Akurathi, Chitra Rajan, Aiswarya Ravichandran, Ravindra Deshpande, Varalakshmi A., Ved Prakash Vyas and Rani Vijayan, the study compared the gratitude levels of Heartfulness meditators with non-meditators following a comprehensive survey.

The researchers were from Sree Balaji Medical College and Hospital and Apollo Hospital, Chennai; NRI Medical College, Chinakakani, Andhra Pradesh; CIPACA Institute of Research, Chennai; Wake Forest School of Medicine, North Carolina, US; and Government Dhanwantri Ayurvedic Medical College, Ujjain.

"The best attitude is one of love and gratitude, which develops over time as a result of our ever-deepening contact with the source within. Heartfulness meditation with yogic transmission brings this about very quickly," said Kamlesh Patel, the guide of Heartfulness.

The study involved a cross-sectional survey conducted online in November 2018. Participants consisted 1,746 Heartfulness meditators and 1,159 non-meditators, who responded to a questionnaire using a 7-point Likert scale rated from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).

The data were grouped according to the demographic, social and health information reported, such as gender, age, marital status, occupation, nature of work, health, place of residence and family system.