From: "Jan Maslow" (jmaslow@jps.net)
Date: August 2, 2005 4:38:42 PM PDT
To: rjon@vzavenue.net
Subject: Yoga and Research: Quantitative and qualitative
Reply-To: postaum2005@sriaurobindocenter-la.com

I'm
making my way toward a specific response to your question about the
"research methodology" we're using in our book. I'm not sure how many
of the members of this forum are familiar with scientific research, so
I thought I'd share some of my (admittedly minimal) research
experience, and try to connect it with what we're writing about. My
dissertation research was on the use of mindfulness meditation in the
treatment of pain. I'll give a little background on how I developed the
idea for the dissertation then say something about the methodology.

In
1994, the 2nd year of my doctoral program in clinical psychology, I
developed a rather severe toothache on the upper right side of my
mouth. I had to have a tooth extracted, as well as some root canal work
in that area, but the pain continued. At times it was bearable but
occasionally it was quite excruciating. I had long been interested in
mind-body interactions, and I decided on a number of occasions to lie
down and observe the pain sensations without taking any pain reliever.
I found that with extremely focused concentration it was possible to
"see" the pain in a very different way. It wasn't too difficult - when
I was lying down and had spent at least 10 minutes focusing my
awareness - to experience the sensations as neutral rather than as
inherently painful. What I found most interesting is that it was
possible to become aware of both a subtle vital-emotional response to
the physical sensation as well as a previously subconscious mental
appraisal of the sensation. The more I was able to discern the
distinction between these different levels of experience the more the
experience of pain was changed. On a few occasions, the swirling,
ever-changing sensations actually changed from pain to neutral to quite
pleasant sensations.

About a year later, when I had finished my
classwork, I got a job working for a physical therapist and
chiropractor doing psychological approaches to pain management. I was
delighted to do this, because it gave me a chance to explore what I had
learned in my own experience and see to what extent others could learn
it. I had over the years studied a number of different psychological
approaches, but was most interested in the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who
had by that time spent more than 15 years teaching over 5,000 people
the basics of mindfulness meditation. What I found was that almost
everybody responded to some extent to basic relaxation, breathing and
guided imagery practices. Also, almost everyone responded to the
mindfulness meditation as a relaxation/breathing practice. However, it
my rough clinical estimation, it seemed that hardly more than 1/3 of
the patients I worked with really grasped what it meant to "see" the
underlying emotional/cognitive appraisal that make up a great deal of
the pain experience.

When it came time to choose a dissertation
subject, I decided to explore mindfulness meditation and the treatment
of pain. I was surprised to find I was actually deeply curious about
the outcome, as by this time I felt fairly disinterested in mainstream
psychological research. In the course of doing an extensive literature
review (going through about 1500 pages of articles on the psychological
treatment of physical pain in a number of scientific journals) I found
that there had been some very good work done on the cognitive/emotional
appraisal of pain, particularly by Howard Leventhal at Rutgers and by
Delia Cioffi. They both wrote about underlying cognitive "schemas"
which shaped not only the psychological experience of pain but also had
a great deal of impact on the actual physiology of pain ("schemas" -
very roughly speaking - are considered unconscious volitional,
affective and cognitive appraisals which occur all the time, at
pre-conscious as well as deeply subconscious levels; there is much
controversy about the extent to which it is possible to become aware of
the more deeply subconscious schemas; working through dysfunctional
schemas is at the basis of most cognitive -behavioral therapy; some
transpersonal writers [Tara Goleman, for example, Daniel Goleman's
wife] claim that schemas bear some resemblance to samskaras, but I
think that samskaras are a far more profound phenomenon touching on
levels of reality of which modern psychology knows nothing).

Following
the literature review, the next step in the research process was to
develop a hypothesis. Mine was that people's ability to use mindfulness
meditation to alter underlying schemas was correlated with the level of
"cognitive flexibility" they demonstrated in their average day to day
activities. The idea was (based in part on the work of Kabat-Zinn,
Cioffi and Leventhal) that through calm, non-interfering mindfulness of
pain sensations and the accompanying schemas, it was possible to
substantially alter these schemas and thus change the pain experience,
but it required an unusual level of mental flexibility.

Finally,
I set about designing and then carrying out an experiment to test this
hypothesis. Over 2 months, I saw 30 people at a mid-town Manhattan pain
clinic. The results? First, mindfulness meditation was shown to work in
almost all the people to reduce pain (there was no follow-up; this was
simply the pain reduction that occurred within one session). A control
group was used to make sure it was the meditation and not simply a
placebo effect (this often occurs in the initial stage of pain
treatment, simply because of the attention of a caring clinician). What
I was most pleased about is that the statistical results matched almost
exactly my clinical assumptions - namely, that about 1/3 of the
subjects demonstrated a sufficient level of cognitive flexibility so as
to alter the underlying schemas that were associated with the pain.

So what does this have to do with our book?

The phases of psychological research described above are roughly 4:

1: Observation and description of experience (my own experience and those of about 100 patients over a one year period)

2. Literature review: (the review of journal articles on psychological treatment of pain)

3.
The development of a hypothesis (that cognitive flexibility is required
to make use of the more subtle aspects of mindfulness meditation

4. Carrying out an experiment to test the hypothesis.

In
regard to this book, Jan and I have been working on steps one and two
for many years. Through our inner experience (both on the meditation
cushion and in life) we've made a number of observations and are
attempting to some extent to describe that experience in the book,
though not necessarily in terms of our own individual lives.

The
"literature review" consists of the study of the works of Mother and
Sri Aurobindo, along with books, journal articles, and other writings
related to our theme.

We do have a "hypothesis" and a research
methodology, but this book doesn't constitute an experiment (though in
a way, the whole book is proposing a "research methodology", though it
is not one that resembles most of mainstream psychological research).

The
"hypothesis" is not ours - it's Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's vision
of Reality - well, actually, since we try to be careful to say we
probably have many misunderstandings of Their writing, it's simply our
limited understanding of their vision. If you like, rather than calling
it a "hypothesis" it's simply a theme - that consciousness unfolds on
many scales in similar ways - over the course of billions of years of
evolution, over the course of lifetimes, over a life time, and in each
moment.

Finally, the "methodology" we are proposing......

I'm
going to save that for the next letter - it might be described as a
form of phenomenological research. But before I write about it, I want
to describe an earlier experiment I conducted using a particular form
of that kind of research developed by James Burrell, called
"Experiential Research".