The Effect of Anapanasati Meditation on Resilience and Compassion among Regular Meditators

The modern world stresses its people with long-term stressors, which has heightened the academic focus on contemplative practice, said to promote adaptive psychological potential. One of these methods is Anapanasati meditation, which is the breath-regulated marker of mindfulness training; nevertheless, the empirical data about the connection between a long-term practice and resilience and compassion has been limited to a group of experienced meditators. The current investigation was on whether the time spent in Anapanasati can predict resilience and compassion and on the relationship between the constructs. We sampled 200 regular meditators in cross sectional survey. The respondents answered the Brief Resilience Scale and the Santa Clara Brief Compassion Scale. The analysis of relationships with practice duration was done using Pearson correlation analyses and group comparisons. There was a positive correlation between resilience (r =.22) and compassion (r =.23) and longer practice duration. There was moderate correlation between resilience and compassion (r 0.40). The scoring of practitioners with over two years of experience was higher than that of those having less years of experience in the practice, and thus there is relationship of a graded association that is in correspondence with cumulative training effects. These results imply that longer-lasting Anapanasati practice can maintain stress recovery and prosocial orientation at the same time, and in that way, it can be provisioned to be an integrated mechanism to achieve psychological well-being.