The One-Minute Group Meditation

After 35 years of group work—learning hundreds of interventions, dozens of theories and facilitating thousands of patients—I may have stumbled on the most powerful intervention I’ve seen in group: a one-minute meditation at the end. For the past year, I've been ending my clinical groups with a timed one-minute group meditation. Explaining to the group the extraordinary benefits of meditation and its well-documented effectiveness with anxiety, depression, and stress-related diseases, I suggested we close with a meditation moment.

Meditation is in the science news regularly as an effective intervention. In fact, last month, the American Psychological Association's trade magazine, The Monitor, featured the impact of meditation on depression as its cover story. It appears that meditation directly alters brain structure. Ongoing meditators seem to save more of their neocortex overtime and consequently experience less depression. When I asked my groups if we could close with a one-minute meditation—everyone opted in.

Most people in my groups are looking to function better in their lives because of a recent transition. Divorce, job loss or change, new relationships, new sobriety, and grief are just some of the reasons people seek group therapy to cope.

There was no specific meditation suggested or required. Most people had some sense of what to do, and the range in the group went from a person with no experience—to a daily meditator for 20+ years. A few people explained their method, but for the most part it ranged anywhere from a moment of silence to mindfulness meditation (and everywhere in between,) to a breathing meditation. What people did was less important than participating together as a group.

At first there were few changes, yet our weekly hour and a half group consistently ended this way. Using the popular app Insight Timer, we signaled the beginning and end of meditation with its build-in chimes. Setting our duration at one minute, the chime sounded, and we meditated until we heard them again.

As usual, I keep notes on the group­—and noticed improvement on some basic things over the year. For starters, this private, outpatient group’s attendance was higher, up nearly 18 percent from the year before. No single year in my own little sample over the 35 years had such improvement in attendance rates. Could it be that this simple moment of meditation helped bond the group more intensely? Did this one-minute increase the cohesion and universality? Perhaps a study for future research for sure.

But there were other changes. The group started to work at a deeper level. Did they trust one another more? It seemed so. The group subtly, but steadily, moved to doing more transformational work. Then altruism emerged more readily. Group members speaking of specific needs were offered genuine and spontaneous ideas and concrete suggestions for help. It was nothing pathological about this. It seemed to be a spontaneous desire to want to help without simply giving advice. The more weeks we meditated, the more supportive people became.

Talking more about the work that had been done and making connections—the groups also began lingering after the session. The group continued honoring each other's strengths, validating and demonstrating therapeutic factors, and rebuilding their sociometry based on trust. Their bonding seemed more genuine and the need to continue connecting was noticeable as they were leaving.

Can all of this happen by adding one minute of meditation to group?

The studies on the efficacy of meditation, and particularly with group therapy, emphasize the use of meditation or meditation programs (like mindfulness-based stress reduction) as the primary treatment modality—and the impact on such things as depression or anxiety symptoms specifically. Yet, efficacy studies don’t often look at how a technique might be employed in nuanced ways in actual use. Most practitioners go into their sessions armed with tools derived from efficacy studies, but then have to deviate from protocol to adjust to the demands and needs of the therapeutic situation, the population being served, or the setting. Yet despite these deviations, treatment works more often than not.

As Seligman's Consumer Reports study nearly 20 years ago demonstrated, effectiveness studies of psychotherapy can help us understand how techniques function when they are used outside the lab.

Could it be we could use just a skosh of meditation to enhance our other methods? Could meditation be an enhancer of process? While the evidence-based validation for this may be a while in coming, my hunch is yes. The group that meditates together heals together.