In the extensive neuroscience research on meditation being done around the world at this time, mental training has demonstrated the following benefits:

• Attentional balance:
  The capacity to have a sustaining, vivid, stable, effortless, and nonjudgmental attention (the base of presence and executive control)
• Emotional balance:
  The cultivation of prosocial mental states, including altruism, empathy, compassion, kindness, joy, equanimity
• Cognitive control:
  The ability to guide thought and behavior in accord with one’s intention
  The ability to override habitual responses and to down-regulate
  The cultivation of mental flexibility, insight, meta-cognition, and reappraisal.
• Health and resilience:
  Stress reduction, relaxation
  Enhanced immune response, decreased inflammation

In exploring compassion meditation, for example, we see that the base of compassion practice includes mindful attention to the present moment. The meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn has defined mindfulness as “… moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a specific way, that is, in the present moment, and as non-reactively, as non-judgmentally, and as openheartedly as possible.”