Summary

Various mechanisms of action have been suggested for meditation. Meditation:

• Promotes a calm witnessing of thoughts and hence its practice desensitizes individuals to their anxieties.
  
• Blocks habitual thoughts and reasoning, allowing access to a preverbal form of sense making and freedom from earlier behaviors.
  
• Brings cognitive shifts that promote behavior management and change.
  
• Allows the intuitive, non-ego-centered mode of thought processing to dominate in place of the normally dominant analytic, ego-centered mode.
  
• Retunes the overstimulated nervous system by damping the production of adrenergic catecholamines (which stimulate limbic activity).
  
• Changes the structure and function of the brain to allow people to achieve different levels of awareness.

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