Outcomes that can be attributed to practicing a standardized contemplative practice – including any salient experiences, health benefits, challenges, insights, and character-building – are made possible because a practitioner first endeavored to learn how to practice that method. Yet, with few exceptions, most contemplative research neglects questions of how people learn contemplative practices and what factors influence that learning. Using the framework of 4E cognition, which understands human cognition to be embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive, this study focuses on how processes of learning to meditate are both embedded and enactive. Embedded cognition refers to the inextricable role that social and cultural contexts play in human thought. Enactive cognition describes how knowledge is fundamentally active and instantiated in a person or other organism’ actions.
Meditation novices are neither blank slates nor passive recipients of contemplative instruction. The participants in this study had extensive experience with religious and spiritual practices, which dramatically impacted their subsequent contemplative learning. Drawing on ethnographic data from participant observation and structured, in-depth interviews with hospital chaplains (n=20) in a Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) program, this study describes how chaplains’ knowledge and skills for engaging in devotional practices, such as prayer and worship, constitute a highly relevant part of their social and cultural context. These practices served as essential tools that both facilitated and created contemplative learning experiences. Understanding the how chaplains' knowledge of devotional practices constitutes a social embedding of their learning is further specified using Sperber’s naturalistic description of the transmission of cultural representations. Likewise, this study documents how learners enactively adapted the CBCT protocol when incorporating it into their regular habits of practice. In learning this standardized contemplative intervention, chaplains were not passive recipients but instead actively and creatively tailored and even hybridized CBCT to meet their needs and pursue their goals.
The embedded and enactive aspects of contemplative learning challenge conventional assumptions and suggest that insightful meditation research and effective meditation instruction must respond to novices’ existing knowledge and skills relevant to the practice of meditation. Doing so reveals valuable resources that shape how contemplative practices are adopted and adapted into practitioners’ lives.
Using the framework of 4E cognition, this study focuses on how processes of learning to meditate are both embedded and enactive. Drawing on ethnographic data from participant observation and structured, in-depth interviews with hospital chaplains (n=20) in a Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) program, this study describes how participants' prior knowledge of devotional practices constituted important social and cultural context for learning. Likewise, this study documents how learners enactively adapted the postures, durations, and mental exercises of the CBCT protocol when incorporating it into their regular habits of practice. In learning this standardized contemplative intervention, chaplains were not passive recipients but instead actively and creatively tailored and even hybridized CBCT to meet their needs and pursue their goals. The embedded and enactive aspects of contemplative learning reveal valuable resources that shape how contemplative practices are adopted and adapted into practitioners’ lives.