Meditation. Meditation is a practice where an individual uses a technique-such as mindfulness, or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought or activity-to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state. Scholars have found meditation difficult to define, as practices vary both between traditions and within them. Meditation has been practiced since antiquity in numerous religious traditions, often as part of the path towards enlightenment and self realization. Some of the earliest written records of meditation, come from the Hindu traditions of Vedantism. Since the 19th century, Asian meditative techniques have spread to other cultures where they have also found application in non-spiritual contexts, such as business and health. Meditation may be used with the aim of reducing stress, anxiety, depression, and pain, and increasing peace, perception, self-concept, and well-being. Meditation is under research to define its possible health and other effects. The English meditation is derived from Old French meditacioun, in turn from Latin meditatio from a verb meditari, meaning to think, contemplate, devise, ponder. The use of the term meditatio as part of a formal, stepwise process of meditation goes back to the 12th century monk Guigo II. The term meditation in English may also refer to practices from Islamic Sufism, or other traditions such as Jewish Kabbalah and Christian Hesychasm. Meditation has proven difficult to define as it covers a wide range of dissimilar practices in different traditions. In popular usage, the word meditation and the phrase meditative practice are often used imprecisely to designate practices found across many cultures. These can include almost anything that is claimed to train the attention or to teach calm or compassion. There remains no definition of necessary and sufficient criteria for meditation that has achieved universal or widespread acceptance within the modern scientific community. In 1971, Claudio Naranjo noted that The word meditation has been used to designate a variety of practices that differ enough from one another so that we may find trouble in defining what meditation is. A 2009 study noted a persistent lack of consensus in the literature and a seeming intractability of defining meditation. Dictionaries give both the original Latin meaning of think deeply about ; as well as the popular usage of to focus one's mind for a period of time, the act of giving your attention to only one thing, either as a religious activity or as a way of becoming calm and relaxed, and to engage in mental exercise for the purpose of reaching a heightened level of spiritual awareness. In modern psychological research, meditation has been defined and characterized in a variety of ways. Many of these emphasize the role of attention. and characterize the practice of meditation as attempts to get beyond the reflexive, discursive thinking or logic mind to achieve a deeper, more devout, or more relaxed state. Bond et al. identified criteria for defining a practice as meditation for use in a comprehensive systematic review of the therapeutic use of meditation, using a 5-round Delphi study with a panel of 7 experts in meditation research who were also trained in diverse but empirically highly studied forms of meditation; three main criteria as essential to any meditation practice: the use of a defined technique, logic relaxation, and a self-induced state/mode. Other criteria deemed important involve a state of psychophysical relaxation, the use of a self-focus skill or anchor, the presence of a state of suspension of logical thought processes, a religious/spiritual/philosophical context, or a state of mental silence. It is plausible that meditation is best thought of as a natural category of techniques best captured by family resemblances or by the related prototype model of concepts.