How does the practice of contemplative prayer contribute to flourishing?
Over the past few decades, extensive clinical research has shown that meditation and mindfulness can offer significant psychological benefits. As a result, these practices are now widely used in clinical and therapeutic settings. In contrast, theistic spiritual practices have received far less rigorous scientific attention.
A TWCF-funded project directed by Michael Ferguson, PhD at the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Brendan W. Case, ThD at Harvard 's Human Flourishing Program is working to change that.
As part of the project, the team is conducting a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of Hesychastic prayer, also known as "the Jesus Prayer," to explore its effects on the wellbeing of a nationally representative group of self-identified Christians. The study is currently in its longitudinal pilot phase, with data collection underway and early community sampling completed.
In parallel, the team has launched a public-facing website, Prayer Science, developed by the Neurospirituality Lab at BWH. The lab, directed by Ferguson, aims to identify and characterize the brain processes that underlie spiritual experience, with the goal of generating insights that can inform both medical practice and the scientific study of spirituality. The Prayer Science platform aims to obtain first-of-its-kind scientific data about varieties of prayer and their impacts on human bodies and behavior.
Via the Christian Contemplative Prayer section of Prayer Science, participants are invited to engage in a self-directed online course built around Hesychastic Prayer featuring guided video instruction, historical and theological background, and practical tools for daily use. As part of the experience, they also complete scientifically designed assessments to track changes in wellbeing, cognition, and spiritual life over time.
In this Q&A, we spoke with Brendan Case to learn more about the RCT, the goals of Prayer Science, and what the team has discovered so far.
Q&A:
Tell us about Hesychastic prayer and what inspired the team to study it. Why do you think it’s important to bring more scientific attention to theistic practices like this one?
Brendan Case: “Hesychastic prayer” (from the Greek, hesuchia, “quiet, rest”) or “the Jesus Prayer” is a repetitive and contemplative mode of prayer in which the practitioner repeats the appeal, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” (cf. Luke 18:13), while coordinating the prayer with one’s breath and stilling mental activity, in an effort to obey St. Paul’s injunction to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:16). The practice had solidified within the Greek-speaking East by the seventh century CE at the latest, in the writings of St. John Climacus.
We think that the scientific study of spiritual practices should take seriously the fact that, for over a thousand years, hesychasm has been the most important form of contemplative prayer in the Orthodox Christian world, and the special province of the spiritual adepts who people the monasteries and hermitages of Mt. Athos. Moreover, it employs many of the same mechanisms – stilling the mind, aligning the thought with the breath – as contemplative or mindfulness practices whose beneficial effects on many aspects of flourishing have been thoroughly studied, even as it incorporates them within a deeply and authentically Christian devotional practice.
Even if we can’t specify ahead of time precisely why this practice is so efficacious, it behooves us to take our cues, at least initially, from the wisdom of the ages, and seek to understand why some of the wisest and holiest figures in the Christian tradition have centered their spiritual lives on Hesychastic prayer.
The RCT is currently in its pilot phase, with the first wave of community sampling and a survey pilot now complete. What were some of the key design elements you focused on in this early phase? What have you learned so far, and how is the full study unfolding?
Brendan Case: We worked early on with several former or current monks or novices from Mount Athos – notably Fr. Maximos Constas and Max Ramseyer – to ensure that our six-part teaching modules offered an authentic yet accessible introduction to the Jesus Prayer. We wanted to ensure that participants in our trial – all self-identified Christians – understood that this was not simply a therapeutic technique, but in the first instance, a means of drawing close to Jesus and becoming more like him. We also worked hard to ensure a high degree of parallelism between the hesychasm course and the six-week mindfulness course which is serving as the active control in the study; each week’s recording covers a broadly similar theme in both courses (e.g., the history of the practice, common challenges, or the deeper religious and spiritual aspirations the practice has historically subserved). Thus far, our pilot and community sampling efforts (the latter described further below) have.
The team has developed a companion course through the Prayer Science platform, and have plans for modules featuring other prayers. Can you tell us more about it and how these public-facing tools relate to the research?
Brendan Case: The full Hesychastic Prayer Course, the intake and exit surveys that we're using in our RCT, is available at prayerscience.org. We use the website to carry out community sampling among Christians from a variety of traditions, assessing reactions to the prayer practice in a less controlled but more ecologically valid setting.
Reactions from participants in the community sample have been overwhelmingly positive, with several sharing that they found the practice to be deeply moving, and one even mentioning that she thought the Jesus Prayer was a much better fit for her personally than were the mindfulness practices she had tried over the years.
The website also hosts a comparable six-part course on Zikr (ذِكْر), an Islamic contemplative prayer practice, and will eventually host courses on other Christian, Islamic, and Hindu prayer practices (these being the world’s three largest religious traditions by adherence). In time, we hope to carry out rigorous experimental research on the effects on flourishing of these prayer traditions as well.
Your February 2025 Neurospirituality Symposium brought together over 300 attendees and featured insights from the Jesus Prayer research. What kinds of reactions did you receive, and how did the event help shape your public engagement strategy?
Brendan Case: Reactions were overwhelmingly positive – almost intimidatingly so. Multiple event participants told Project PI, Michael Ferguson that they feel like they have finally found "their people." Numerous attendees have also proposed collaborations inspired by the symposium, including projects to research the effects of additional, under-studied prayer traditions from the world’s religions.
Your team is also analyzing data on two core spiritual traits: self-knowledge and self-transcendence. What can you tell us about that research?
Brendan Case: A lot of quality science has been done on the psychology of self-directedness and self-transcendence. Much less work, though, has been done to identify the neural contributions to these aspects of character. We are aiming to definitely identify the brain circuits that respectively contribute to variations in these traits.
How do you hope this work will influence the fields of psychology, spirituality, or clinical care, and what’s next for the project?
Brendan Case: We hope that this project will raise awareness among Christians, clinicians, and those who study religion and spirituality about the important ways in which traditional prayer practices can contribute to flourishing. This work should be encouraging to Christians as they consider deepening their own spiritual practices, but we hope that clinicians in particular will also pay attention. As we (hopefully!) accumulate an evidence-base for the effectiveness of prayer practices from a variety of traditions in promoting flourishing, clinicians could begin moving toward something like “personalized spiritual therapeutics,” in which, rather than simply defaulting to a recommendation of a generic mindfulness practice for any and everyone, they instead propose that clients consider adopting a practice that is native to their own spiritual or religious tradition.
Learn more about the TWCF-funded project: Toward evidence-based spiritual therapeutics: a randomized controlled trial of Hesychastic prayer
