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A Critical Analysis of the Concepts and Measurement of Awareness and Equanimity in Goenka’s Vipassana Meditation

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Abstract

Goenka’s Vipassana meditation (GVM), a widely applied mindfulness training system rooted in Buddhism, is currently widely used. Although the two abilities cultivated in GVM, awareness and equanimity, exhibit certain similarities with the mindfulness cultivated in mindfulness-based psychotherapies (MBTs), they are not major concerns in MBTs. While many mindfulness scales have been created to measure different aspects of mindfulness constructs and certain scales and items can indeed reflect the basic abilities of awareness and equanimity, none of them can adequately capture the way in which those abilities and related ideas are applied in GVM. This paper presents a critical examination of the problems associated with the concepts and measurement of awareness and equanimity and presents potential solutions for achieving better measurement of these concepts in the future.

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Acknowledgments

This paper was completed when Professor Oei was a visiting Professor at Beijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, No. 19, XinJieKouWai St., HaiDian District, Beijing, 100875, People’s Republic of China

    Xianglong Zeng, Yiqing Ye & Xiangping Liu

  2. School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Tian P. S. Oei

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  1. Xianglong Zeng
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  2. Tian P. S. Oei
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  3. Yiqing Ye
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  4. Xiangping Liu
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Correspondence to Xiangping Liu.

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Zeng, X., Oei, T.P.S., Ye, Y. et al. A Critical Analysis of the Concepts and Measurement of Awareness and Equanimity in Goenka’s Vipassana Meditation. J Relig Health 54, 399–412 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-013-9796-9

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