Not all meditation practices follow the same path. The difference can begin with something as basic as how we handle attention and lead to a very different question: can the mind become quiet without losing alertness?
On August 4, 2026, Harvard Health Publishing published a guide to meditation for stress, sleep, and focus. Harvard describes meditation as a family of mind-body practices. As we know, a family brings together; it does not make everything uniform.
Following the breath, observing thoughts, moving through bodily sensations, concentrating on an image, or using a mantra can all belong to the broad territory we call meditation. Sharing a name does not necessarily mean sharing a mechanism.
Harvard describes practices in which attention is directed toward the breath, a sensation, an image, a sound, or a repeated word. When the mind wanders, the instruction is to notice and return. It also considers a more open form of attention that observes thoughts without following them.
This allows us to ask another question: What is attention actually doing while we meditate?
When attention returns
One common form of meditation is to choose an object of observation, such as the breath. Attention remains there. A thought appears. We move away. We notice and return. The practice occurs, in part, in that return. Scientific literature uses the term focused attention to describe this kind of practice.
In another form of meditation known as open monitoring, attention does not need to remain on a single object of observation. An open observation of thoughts, sensations, and experiences is cultivated as they arise.
The distinction between focused attention and open monitoring was developed as a framework for studying different meditation practices and the cognitive processes they involve.
One practice trains the return to the object of attention. The other cultivates observation. They are different processes, but both maintain a form of mental activity.
What happens if a practice is designed so that even this activity eventually becomes unnecessary?
A third direction
In 2010, Fred Travis and Jonathan Shear proposed expanding the distinction between focused attention and open monitoring with a third category: automatic self-transcending.
They presented it as a proposed classification of forms of meditation.
The difference lies in the process. Automatic self-transcending would include techniques designed to transcend their own activity, without deliberately maintaining a focus or continuously sustaining a monitoring process.
In focused attention, there is something to maintain. In open monitoring, an observational process continues.
In automatic self-transcending, the activity with which the practice began can become progressively subtler until it is no longer needed.
This small technical difference opens another question: if attention requires progressively less deliberate direction, why does the mind not simply drift into ordinary thought, distraction, or sleep?
Becoming quiet without losing alertness
We tend to imagine rest and alertness as moving in opposite directions.
We are awake and active. Then we relax. Later, drowsiness appears. Finally, we sleep.
The earliest physiological research on Transcendental Meditation found a less intuitive pattern.
In 1970, Robert Keith Wallace reported decreases in oxygen consumption and heart rate during the practice, along with other physiological changes associated with rest.
The measurement tools were those available more than half a century ago. The question they opened remains current: can physiological rest increase without wakefulness disappearing?
Later studies compared Transcendental Meditation with eyes-closed rest and found differences in breathing and autonomic activity. Other work examined different moments within the same session and found stronger signs of physiological rest during periods that participants themselves identified as transcending.
This literature gave rise to a term for the phenomenon: restful alertness.
Other physiological reviews described a wakeful hypometabolic state in which changes associated with rest coexist with wakefulness.
Restful alertness names precisely that coexistence: physiological rest and wakefulness.
What is unexpected is not simply that the mind becomes quiet. It is that it can do so naturally and without losing alertness.
Transcending by gravity
This paradox opens another question: if the process requires progressively less deliberate control, what allows it to retain direction?
To understand the process, we need to separate effort from direction.
We can move an object by pushing it. As long as we push, we are directing the movement.
Now imagine that the ground begins to slope. A point comes when the object can continue without requiring the same force.
This analogy brings us closer to how this type of practice describes the process of transcending. As mental activity becomes subtler, the experience itself may favor the continuation of the process. The need to intervene does not increase. It may decrease.
One metaphor for this dynamic might be the gravity of transcending.
We do not know of a neurophysiological force that draws the mind toward subtler states. Nor can we deduce from a measure of coherence why a subjective process continues. The metaphor points to something simpler:
A process can retain direction while the need to direct it decreases.
What physiology can see
In May 2026, the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience published a study of 33 experienced TM practitioners and matched controls performing mental counting. The researchers combined time-linked experience reports with multivariate EEG analysis to study what they called pure awareness: a wakeful experience with minimal phenomenological content.
Practitioners reported greater intensity and temporal variability of that experience. When TM was compared with mental counting, temporal entropy and aperiodic dynamics contributed most to distinguishing the conditions. Phase-coherence-based connectivity contributed relatively less. When TM was compared with practitioners’ own baseline, however, low-frequency connectivity became more important.
These results suggest that the physiology associated with these experiences cannot easily be reduced to a single measure or brain pattern.
The case of Transcendental Meditation
Within the Travis and Shear taxonomy, Transcendental Meditation is placed among automatic self-transcending practices.
The distinction helps us revisit a common association.
A mantra can be used as an object of concentration. Harvard, in fact, includes a mantra among the possible focuses of a meditation practice.
Using a mantra does not, by itself, tell us what is happening with attention.
In the model of Transcendental Meditation examined here, the mantra is not deliberately maintained as an object of concentration. The process is oriented toward allowing its activity to become subtler and eventually to be transcended. A later study of default mode network activity examined whether TM fit better with a focused-attention model or an automatic self-transcending model. Its authors interpreted the results as consistent with minimal voluntary attentional control.
Different meditation practices may not be doing the same thing.
The mechanism matters
For a long time, we asked: Does meditation work?
Today we can ask more discerning questions.
A randomized clinical trial published in JAMA Network Open in 2022 offers a useful example. Eighty health care workers were assigned to three months of TM or usual care. The TM group did not show a statistically significant reduction relative to the control group in the primary outcome: acute psychological distress.
However, participants assigned to Transcendental Meditation had greater reductions in three secondary outcomes: emotional exhaustion, anxiety, and insomnia. The study reported favorable differences in those secondary outcomes, while the primary outcome was not statistically significant.
How we read a result changes according to what we ask and measure.
The same deserves to be applied to the word meditation.
If one technique trains attention to return, another cultivates open observation, and another is designed so that the activity with which it began progressively decreases, we should not assume in advance that their effects are interchangeable.
The question can then change:
Which practice, through which process, supports what kind of change, in which person, and under what conditions?
This distinction does not weaken the subject. It allows us to see it more clearly.
When development does not mean only doing more
So far, we have been speaking about meditation, but transcending opens another conversation.
Much of our culture understands development as acquisition.
Learning more. Concentrating better. Controlling our reactions. Increasing our capacities. Sustaining effort. All of these can have value. Restful alertness introduces another image.
What happens if a system can preserve clarity and organization while needing less activity to do so?
Progress may not always consist of adding.
There may also be a dimension of development that appears when what we must impose in order to preserve organization decreases.
Physiology can measure breathing, metabolism, autonomic activity, electrical oscillations, connectivity, and brain dynamics. Rest, alertness, and organization can coexist.
This exploration of meditation touches a broader idea of health as self-development. Transcending opens a new dimension:
Development does not consist only in learning to exercise our capacities better, but also in discovering levels of functioning in which we need to exercise less in order to preserve more.
Less effort without losing alertness. Greater quiet without unconsciousness. Less deliberate activity without an absence of direction.
Development may not always consist in getting the mind to do something better. It may also consist in discovering what happens when it no longer needs to do so much.
Learning to distinguish meditation practices
Some practices teach attention to return. Others teach observation, and still others explore what happens when the activity with which meditation begins can become progressively subtler and finally be transcended.
The question is then no longer only whether meditation helps with stress, sleep, or concentration. It becomes:
What process are we cultivating when we meditate?
The answer helps us study different practices, understand their effects more clearly, and open an even larger question:
What does our capacity to become quiet without losing alertness teach us about our own capacity for development?
Not all quiet is reached by stopping movement. Some forms of quiet appear when we no longer need to push.
Clinical note
Meditation can be part of a well-being strategy, but it does not replace medical or psychological evaluation, diagnosis, or treatment when these are needed. Harvard Health Publishing explicitly recommends not using it to replace or delay professional care.