Enhanced happiness and stress alleviation upon insight meditation retreat: mindfulness, a part of traditional Buddhist meditation

ABSTRACT

This research aims to examine how traditional insight meditation in Thailand is trained and to investigate the impact of this practice on happiness and perceived stress. The fuller meaning of mindfulness and how to interweave mindfulness in daily practice is discussed. The intervention was a seven-day traditional insight meditation retreat in Thailand. The final sample included 656 participants, n = 330 and 326 in experimental group and control group, respectively. Validated versions of happiness and perceived stress scales for Thai people were used. The magnitude of happiness and stress changes following the intervention, determined by effect sizes were used as a benchmark for interpreting the health status change between baseline and post-test. The effect sizes for happiness and perceived stress were .379 and −.428 in the meditation group, which is much greater, compared to the effect sizes of −.045 and −.003, respectively, in the control group.

KEYWORDS:

• Components of traditional insight Buddhist meditation
• daily practice
• Vipassana
• happiness
• perceived stress
• fuller meaning of mindfulness
• Thailand

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Higher Education Research Promotion and National Research University Project of Thailand, Office of the Higher Education Commission [AS633A].