Case Study - What is Meditation? How can we measure it?

This article is based on a true experience. A person insisted on meeting both me and Riri G Trivedi. We met. He gave us a strong message that we must meditate. He also liked what we were doing and after few months, he requested that I help him measure the depth of his meditation. I was overwhelmed. Not only he kept giving us the messages (whenever he met) which were very important for our life stages, now he is going to test what we do. Nonetheless, I agreed humbly and told him that we will use what we have and see if that helps him.

For background:

I use Polar H7 HRV device (EliteHRV App) and also Heartmath Emwave Pro. The results below are for Emwave Pro since they provided sufficient insights. This device plots variations in HRV (live) and also provides a nice visual (color coded that breaks the experience into R/G/B, see % below). It also provides accumulated score of coherence (in other words, how is our breath, heart and as a result brain/mind is in sync).

What happened:

He came and instantly he sat down to meditate. He is an experienced meditator and has learnt from many experts. What we observed clearly showed lack of coherence throughout the session. (Please see the increasing and decreasing accumulated score throughout the session below). In fact, thanks to this visual, I could provide where the person lost the focus and he confirmed ! We also modified chanting and breathing (especially the loudness and the duration of the breath and requested the person to meditate again !).

Meditation session #1 (before the intervention): There were enough moments when the physiology (as measured by HRV/coherence) was less than idea.

During the subsequent meditation, the experience (as described by the person was much better, with the modifications suggested !). However, there was a point when the coherence was lost. Based on the approximate timing, the person accepted there was a thought pattern which disrupted meditation ! As you can see below, the % of green also increased (in fact green and blue consisted of about 76% of the session compared to 46% during the previous session !).

Meditation session #2 (after the interventions): There was only moment (for a few minutes) when the physiology was not idea. For the rest of the session, the meditation was much better compared to session #1. Lessons learnt were noted and worked on.

Two weeks later:

I got a call (unsolicited) that the meditation experience improved significantly, based on the interventions he made after the learnings form the session.