Scientific research across the world's great Meditation Lineages

Pyramid Valley International was founded by Brahmarshi Patriji in 2003, outside Bengaluru. It anchors the wider Pyramid Spiritual Societies Movement, which Patriji founded in 1990, and centers on ānāpānasati, the discipline of sustained breath awareness rooted in early Buddhist teaching. Its campus is built around the Maitreya Buddha Pyramid, the world's largest structure built specifically for meditation, drawing a global community All Here estimates at 15 million practitioners.

All Here's team traveled to Pyramid Valley to record EEG data with 22 experienced Ānāpānasati practitioners. The study compared brain activity during focused-attention meditation on the breath with two other states: quiet rest and deliberate mental imagery. The recordings became the foundation of a peer-reviewed study, "Microstate Dynamics of Focused Attention Meditation," published in Brain Topography and co-authored by Dr. Amit Kanthi and Dr. NK Manjunath of S-VYASA University together with Prof. Christoph Michel and the All Here research team.

The findings showed that breath-focused meditation reduces mind-wandering and self-referential thought, while reshaping the brain's large-scale architecture at the millisecond timescale — translating the pyramid's singular architecture of practice into some of All Here's most rigorously documented science.

Heartfulness traces its roots to 1945 and the teachings of Ram Chandra of Shahjahanpur, known to practitioners as Babuji, refined across successive generations of guides and now led by Kamlesh D. Patel, known as Daaji. Central to the practice is pranahuti, a subtle transmission of energy from a trainer to a meditator, intended to still the heart rather than the mind — a method now practiced in more than 160 countries. The Heartfulness Institute's world headquarters at Kanha Shanti Vanam, on the outskirts of Hyderabad, is home to the largest meditation hall in the world.

In August 2025, All Here's team joined nearly 1,000 practitioners in silent meditation at Heartfulness Headquarters, guided by Daaji himself, conducting EEG-based Quantified Meditation sessions to explore Heartfulness's giving, receiving, and cleaning practices. Months later, Prof. Christoph Michel joined a Heartfulness Switzerland roundtable in Lausanne — called “Why Meditate?” — held in celebration of World Meditation Day, as recognized by the United Nations.

Where practice is life itself — one of Buddhism's most demanding contemplative environments, where walking meditation, monastic rhythm, and inner silence structure every hour. Practice is not added to life here; it is life.

The Thai Forest Tradition traces its modern revival to the beginning of the twentieth century, when the monk Ajahn Sao Kantasilo established this kammaṭṭhāna tradition, and his student Ajahn Mun Bhuridatta carried it forward, returning Thai Theravāda Buddhism to its ascetic roots — wandering, forest-dwelling practice governed by strict monastic discipline.

The lineage later reached the West largely through the students of Ajahn Chah, one of Ajahn Mun's most influential successors.

All Here's Dr. Chuong Ngo stayed with forest monks, immersing in their daily rhythm — long walking meditation through the rainforest, joining the morning alms round through the village, and taking part in the New Year celebration — while recording EEG data in the field. When the team shared the brainwave patterns and signals, the monks immediately related them to their own inner experience and years of training, moving effortlessly between practice language and scientific language.

The Samatha Trust safeguards a lay tradition of Yogāvacara meditation, more widely known as Theravāda jhāna practice — a lineage largely eclipsed in Thailand itself following a wave of reforms in the 1950s, but carried intact to Britain by the monk-turned-teacher Nai Boonman, who has trained practitioners in London and Cambridge since 1964.

All Here joined a Samatha Trust retreat in rural Wales, led by Dr. Paul Dennison, alongside Nai Boonman himself, then 93 years old, recording EEG data through the advanced jhāna states this lineage is built to cultivate. Early findings showed practitioners entering profound states of absorption quickly, marked by increasing infraslow wave power alongside suppression of alpha activity — building on Dennison's own pioneering research into meditation's neural signatures.

High in the Sierra Nevada foothills above Nevada City, California, Ananda Village Ananda Village has sustained the Kriya Yoga lineage of Paramhansa Yogananda since 1968, when his direct disciple Swami Kriyananda founded the community as a place where meditation could be lived, not merely practiced.

For more than 50 years, its residents have kept this technique — a precise method of accelerating spiritual growth through breath and energy control — alive as an unbroken daily discipline rather than a historical curiosity. Today more than 200 residents live, practice, and serve together: a living example of meditation as more than an individual practice, cultivated, supported, and embodied together.

All Here traveled to Ananda Village for the rare privilege of conducting EEG recordings with its most experienced practitioners — an opportunity few scientists ever encounter. Many sessions lasted nearly two hours, offering a continuous window into the evolving dynamics of meditation rarely available to researchers. It was one of the unique instances in which this specific Kriya lineage has opened its practice to neuroscientific study.