Meditation and Spiritual Practice

Dear Colleagues,

The research on meditation and spiritual practice has been growing over the recent years. A central research focus remains the potential benefits to psychological and physical health, but the research topics are also expanding to include for example pro-social effects and challenging meditation experiences. This research is mainly taking place within a context removed from the ones within which meditation was originally conceived and practiced. Common to the traditional approaches to meditation is that they were in some way or another “spiritual”, i.e., connected to personal experience and meaning, transcendence, contemplative insight, liberation/moksha, the sacred, God, gods, etc. This dimension of meditation and spiritual practice has received little attention in research. This Special Issue invites contributions that broaden the scope of research on meditation and related practices to address their spiritual aspect, broadly defined.

This Special Issue is open to all the methods and forms of analysis that are generally included within the scope of Religions, e.g., theology, comparative studies, theoretical/methodological discussions, philosophy/psychology of religion, sociology of religion, religious ethics, etc. (see full list here: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/about). Furthermore, we wish to specifically encourage submissions based on first-person methods, including phenomenology, micro-phenomenology, phenomenological psychology and similar approaches. Such methods are generally underrepresented within the field and can be conceived of as inherently spiritual in that they rely on direct experience.

Examples of topics include

• Meditation experiences;
• Meditation techniques and other techniques of spiritual practice;
• Hindrances in meditation practice;
• The concept of awakening;
• The concept of spirituality in relation to meditation or prayer;
• The notion of stages of progress in meditation/spiritual practice;
• The relationship between community and practice;
• Embodied practices such as Qigong or Neigong.

Dr. Terje Sparby
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.