Meditation these days tend to be thrown around very loosely, with many so called “teachers” and hobbyists making various claims about it that are not scientifically reproducible. Yet, this does not take away many of the benefits of meditations. One of such benefit is its mediation abilities on the immune system.

A study participants of an 8-day meditation retreat at the Isha Institute of Inner Sciences in Tennessee, with pre- and post- blood analysis. Blood was drawn four times: 6 weeks before the retreat, day before the retreat, immediately after the retreat, and 3 months after the retreat.

Researchers found that the post-retreat blood work results showed that responses to oxidative stress, detoxification, and cell-cycle regulation pathways were down-regulated.

Most saliently, 220 genes directly associated with immune response, including 68 genes related to interferon signaling, were upregulated without changes in inflammatory genes. In other words, the interferon system is an important immune system property in response to viral infections and cancer protection which seemed to be improved with meditation without an inflammatory response.

However, the study was done with an intense silent meditation retreat where there was 10 hours a day of meditation, all vegan diet, and a regular sleep schedule for 8 days. Participants were also required to do a vegan diet before the retreat. Unfortunately, for many American men, they can’t handle 8 days of silence because that’s too intense for them, as a matter of fact, even a slight temperature increase in the summer got them jumping to air condition, because they’re that mentally weak.

V Chandran et al. Large-scale genomic study reveals robust activation of the immune system following advanced Inner Engineering meditation retreat. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2021. 118(51) e2110455118