It's only reasonable to assume that attending a seven-day meditation retreat would have a calming and restorative effect on a person.
After all, guided meditation classes, healing rituals, and sessions on how to achieve transcendental states… it sounds pretty good, right? Sure beats catching the bus to work.
But these kinds of activities could be much more transformative than we realized.
In unison, they appear to have a surprisingly dramatic and deep effect on the body and the mind, scientists say.
A study published in Communications Biology in 2025 found that attending a seven-day meditation retreat was associated with a kind of neural reprogramming in participants, potentially yielding changes that could be positive for our health.
"This isn't about just stress relief or relaxation," said biomedical researcher Hemal Patel from UC San Diego.
"This is about fundamentally changing how the brain engages with reality and quantifying these changes biologically."
While the findings don't demonstrate cause and effect – this was only a small observational study – they suggest the effects of meditation and related activities could be more powerful and wide-ranging than we realized.
Patel and his team studied 20 healthy adults who were randomly selected from more than 500 attendees at a meditation and health retreat in San Diego.
During the seven-day retreat, participants attended daily lectures emphasizing the body's self-healing abilities, the mind's capacity to shape reality, and the healing power of present-centeredness and mystical-type experiences.
They took guided meditation sessions, in which they practiced conscious breathing techniques, and were involved in group healing rituals, where 'healers' would meditate while focusing their attention on one of the group.
Of the 20 participants in the study – 14 female, 6 male, with an average age of about 46 – 11 of the group were advanced meditators (with at least six months' experience with the techniques), while the other 9 were novices.
In addition to attending the retreat activities discussed above, the study participants also undertook several tests before and after the event.
This included having their brains scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), blood plasma tests, and filling out a questionnaire designed to measure people's experience of mystical states and feelings – even in the absence of psychedelic drugs, which were not consumed by the study participants.
After taking part in the meditation retreat, the participants showed significant changes in multiple tests.
While we can't conclude the meditation activities caused these changes – there was no control group to compare against, for example, it's purely observational data – what the researchers found is definitely interesting.
The fMRI data showed that after the meditation, brain activity was reduced in the default mode network, which is associated with self-referential and internally directed thought. Brain activity was also reduced in the salience network, which helps detect both internal and external stimuli.
Meditation appeared to reduce the level of segmented activity in the brain, inducing a whole-brain functional state where information flowed more efficiently, the researchers report.
To test whether the meditation activities may have affected the participants' neuroplasticity, the researchers applied the participants' post-meditation blood plasma to neurons in a dish, observing that the cells grew significantly longer neurites (extensions branching from the cell) than pre-plasma-treated cells.
Other markers of change detected in participants' blood included a shift towards glycolytic metabolism, signals of immune modulation, and increases in endogenous opioids (naturally occurring pain-relief chemicals) in the body.
Post-retreat responses in the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ–30) showed participants with significantly increased scores (from 2.37 to 3.02), which the researchers say is comparable to results seen with psychedelic use.
"We're seeing the same mystical experiences and neural connectivity patterns that typically require psilocybin, now achieved through meditation practice alone," said Patel.
"Seeing both central nervous system changes in brain scans and systemic changes in blood chemistry underscores that these mind-body practices are acting on a whole-body scale."
It's worth noting that one of the co-authors of the study, Joe Dispenza, is the CEO of the company Encephalon, which hosts the meditation retreats described in the study, in addition to selling access to other meditation and healing content.
Other caveats to note include that this is only a small study, and it's not one that can show causality, which the researchers acknowledge, calling for future studies that could implement more rigorous, controlled designs to measure how and if meditation might be triggering these changes.
Related: Meditation Can Reshape Your Brain Activity, Study Reveals
But while we should be cautious about how we interpret these findings, they are certainly not the first to suggest meditation can have powerful effects.
Another recent study captured evidence of meditation reshaping brain activity, and other research shows meditation can help with pain relief, or reduce the burden of stress and aging.
Quite how far these effects may go, we still aren't really sure.
But we're getting closer to understanding.
"We've known for years that practices like meditation can influence health," Patel said.
"But what's striking is that combining multiple mind-body practices into a single retreat produced changes across so many biological systems that we could measure directly in the brain and blood."
The findings are reported in Communications Biology.
This article was fact-checked by Rebecca Dyer and edited by Rebecca Dyer. While we pride ourselves on our process, we are only human. If you spot a mistake, please let us know.