Non-Pharmacological Interventions
MBSR, meditation, breath, with full lineage
15 interventions. 2 rest on strong human evidence. Ordered with the best evidenced first.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression Relapse
One of the strongest evidence entries in the library: a structured eight-week program that prevents depression relapse about as well as staying on antidepressants in people with recurrent episodes.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and the Lineage It Set Aside
The program that brought Buddhist mindfulness into Western medicine by stripping its religious context, a move that made the research possible and set aside 2,500 years of teachers in the same gesture.
Body Scan Meditation
A slow, guided sweep of attention from feet to head that the early Buddhist discourses called contemplation of the body, repackaged into a clinical relaxation and interoception tool.
Compassion Cultivation Training
A Tibetan mind-training lineage rooted in 11th-century India, repackaged at Stanford into an eight-week secular course that asks you to practice caring on purpose.
A 2,000-year-old Buddhist concentration practice of silently wishing wellbeing onto oneself and ever-widening circles of others, now studied as a way to lift positive emotion and social connection.
Mindful Self-Compassion
A secular eight-week course that teaches people to turn the warmth of loving-kindness meditation toward themselves, rebuilt from centuries-old Buddhist compassion practice into a manualized curriculum.
Mindfulness Meditation
A roughly 2,500-year-old Buddhist attention practice, stripped of its religious frame in the 1970s and now one of the better-studied mind-body interventions, with honest, moderate, condition-dependent effects.
A Vedic Mantra Practice, a Real Signal, and a Conflicted Evidence Base
An ancient Indian mantra practice delivered through a modern paid organization, with genuine signals for blood pressure and stress entangled in a research base that the organization itself largely produces.
Vipassana Meditation (Traditional / Goenka Lineage)
A roughly 2,500-year-old Indian insight practice, revived in Burma and now taught for free on every continent, that asks you to observe bodily sensation without reacting, with reported benefits for stress and documented risks for trauma survivors.
Christian Contemplative Prayer (Centering Prayer, Hesychasm, the Jesus Prayer, the Prayer of Quiet)
A silent, word-free Christian prayer of resting attention, born in the Egyptian desert eighteen centuries ago and now studied as a stress practice that may calm the body without outperforming secular meditation.
Mantra Meditation (japa, sound-based meditation; underlying technique of Transcendental Meditation)
An ancient Indian practice of repeating a sound or phrase to settle the mind, now sold in trademarked packages but freely available in its traditional forms. [mindfulness; disputed-mechanism; caution]
Dhikr (Islamic Mystical Remembrance)
A rhythmic Islamic remembrance practice in which divine names are repeated, often with breath and movement, to quiet the heart and turn it toward God.
Walking Meditation (Kinhin / Caṅkama)
A 2,500-year-old Buddhist practice of walking slowly with full attention, offered today as an accessible mindfulness option for people who find sitting still difficult.
Yoga Nidra (Yogic Sleep)
A lie-down, guided practice from Indian tantra that walks the mind to the edge of sleep while keeping a thread of awareness intact.
A spartan, posture-and-breath seated practice carried from Indian dhyana through Chinese Chan into Japanese Zen, where "just sitting" became an end in itself rather than a means to anything.