Body awareness and autonomic regulation: Assessment, changes induced by mental training, and future directions

Bodily changes and their perception are implicated in virtually all psychological processes, particularly in emotion. Contemplative traditions have long recognized the connections between bodily and mental processes and have devised practices that involve and cultivate certain types of body awareness. It is thus a straightforward prediction that contemplative practice will yield changes in the ways the body is perceived and regulated. In this presentation, I will describe methods to assess body awareness and regulation of the bodily (autonomic) nervous system. Using recent data from a large-scale longitudinal study, the ReSource Project, as well as previous work, I will illustrate which aspects of body awareness and autonomic regulation are affected by different types of contemplative practice and which are not. I will discuss the methodological challenges of finding appropriate measures to assess body awareness and the role of respiration which can be both an important influence on the autonomic nervous system and a confounding factor in its measurement. Finally, I will critically evaluate the current measurement procedures with regard to their capacity of capturing the transformations in mind-body interactions which contemplative practices may induce and propose directions for future development