A Rishikesh ashram stay meets a new theory: lasting wellbeing is a baseline, not a peak

Singer Diljit Dosanjh shared pictures of an ashram stay in Rishikesh on November 4, 2026, days after opening his Aura India Tour 2026 in Delhi on October 30. The day before, a journal had published a theory of what such retreats can and cannot leave behind: peaks fade, and only the baseline lasts.

Pictures from the Ganga

The Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) described a carousel of photographs. Dosanjh stands before a palace-like building in a white outfit, a turban and a grey shawl. He eats a traditional meal sitting cross-legged on the floor, folds his hands in front of a mural beside a woman, and signs autographs by hand in Punjabi. Another frame shows a musical gathering at an ashram.

IANS adds that he shared glimpses of his time by the Ganga and of moments of meditation. The agency writes that he "seems" to have gone straight to Rishikesh after the Delhi show. It does not say how long he stayed or what the stay consisted of.

The trip follows a public disagreement. Asked on an Instagram Live about a student protest in Delhi, Dosanjh had said he was an artist and not a politician, and activist Abhijeet Dipke voiced disappointment. At the Delhi concert Dosanjh appeared to answer without naming anyone: "I love all of you because I am an artist, bro." IANS draws no line between that exchange and the retreat.

A celebrity at an ashram is a photograph. What a week of meditation does to a person is a research question, and the most recent paper on it is more modest than its subject.

A paper that says the peak is not the point

On November 3, 2026, Frontiers in Psychology published a hypothesis and theory article by Swapan Samanta of the Indoriv Clinical Research Centre in Kolkata, India. Its abstract ends on a short claim: "Durable wellbeing is a baseline phenomenon, not a peak phenomenon." A claim that deflates the very idea of a transformative week is an odd companion to a photograph of a transformative week, and that is the reason to read it alongside the news.

The argument starts from an old finding in the psychology of happiness. Samanta recalls the 1978 comparison by Brickman and colleagues of lottery winners and people newly paralyzed, whose settled happiness turned out far closer than anyone expected. High moments erode, the paper says, so lasting wellbeing cannot be made of them.

The contemplative traditions, the paper adds, describe their most trusted practitioners in the same flat terms. It quotes the Zen formula: "before awakening, one carries water and chops wood; after awakening, one carries water and chops wood." A practice that begins as a series of intense, bounded experiences is meant to end as something unremarkable.

In the paper's own table, "Pilgrimage, retreat" is the first stage of that progression. It is the stage where the practice is far away, lasts days and happens rarely. Daily sitting and mindful activity come later, with the tall spikes of early practice shrinking into a higher, quieter line.

The retreat is where the curve starts.

What the paper is, and is not

The article contains no participants and no measurements. It draws practice as a wave, with amplitude, frequency and duration, and it says plainly that its relations are offered as "heuristics for direction and limit, not as measured laws."

Its own limitations section goes further. The constructs the model leans on, in the author's words, "still lack validated measurement instruments." The author declares no funding and no commercial ties, and the paper is written by one person.

What it does offer is a list of predictions that could fail. One says that gains in durable wellbeing should track a shift in resting baseline and not the rate of self-reported peak or bliss states during practice. Another expects experienced practitioners to show a narrower swing in daily mood around a higher mean, measured by sampling their mood several times a day over months.

There is a dry irony in a theory that calls the peak overrated while drawing it as the most elegant curve on the page. The test it proposes is plainer than the equations: ask people how they feel on an ordinary Tuesday, and keep asking.

One week, 20 adults, and a host with a stake

The closest measured evidence on retreats comes from the University of California San Diego. A study published in Communications Biology, which the university announced on November 6, 2025, followed 20 healthy adults through a seven-day residential program led by Joe Dispenza. It included daily lectures, about 33 hours of guided meditation and group healing practices presented as open-label placebos, meaning participants knew what they were taking part in. Before and after, participants had brain scans and blood tests. The university reports less activity in regions tied to mental chatter, higher blood levels of the body's natural painkillers, and a rise in average scores on a mystical experience questionnaire from 2.37 to 3.02. Senior author Hemal Patel said the work is about "fundamentally changing how the brain engages with reality."

The release also names its limits and its stakes. It describes before-and-after measurements and does not mention a comparison group. The researchers say controlled trials in patient populations are still needed. One co-author, Dispenza, is employed by Encephalon, the company that offers the retreat, and the study was supported by the InnerScience Research Fund.

The team says it will study how long the biological changes last. That is exactly the question the Frontiers paper puts at the centre: a measured spike on day seven says little about the baseline in month seven. Other retreat offers meet the same questions of who hosts and who pays, as with a 14-night retreat at sea.

The hard days

Calm is not the whole story.

The photographs show a calm ashram. The research on the less photogenic side is older. In 2017, PLOS One published a study by Jared Lindahl and colleagues, based on interviews with Western Buddhist meditation practitioners and teachers followed by a survey. They catalogued 59 meditation-related experiences across seven domains, from the cognitive to the social.

The valence of those experiences ranged from very positive to very negative. Distress and functional impairment, the authors write, "ranged from minimal and transient to severe and enduring." The study was funded by the US National Institutes of Health and several foundations, one of them a commercial source, and its funders had no role in the design or the decision to publish.

The Frontiers paper cites Lindahl and does not hide from him. It states that practitioners report "long plateaus, regressions, and frank distress," and that its smooth curve is an idealization of where sustained practice tends, not a description of every interval.

From the cushion to the kitchen table

A second question is whether a quiet baseline reaches the people nearby. On June 2, 2026, Andreas Voldstad, a doctoral candidate in psychiatry at the University of Oxford, summarized the evidence on mindfulness and romantic relationships for Oxford Mindfulness.

His team's systematic review pooled 28 randomised studies, from two-week meditation exercises to eight-week courses taught by teachers. Mindfulness interventions had a small positive effect on relationship satisfaction. The authors also wrote that "the certainty of evidence is still very low." Two daily diary studies by May and colleagues found that on days when participants meditated, both they and a partner who did not meditate reported less negative affect. A secondary analysis, still under review, points to the meditator's non-reactivity as the link. The blog is clear that more research is needed.

One programme in the review stood out. Mindfulness-Based Relationship Enhancement adapted a standard stress-reduction course for couples who were already doing well, taught them how to practise mindfulness with each other, and was led by trained teachers. It showed substantial effects on several relationship outcomes, and Voldstad notes that he knows of no replication and no teacher training on offer today. He also suggests that relationship satisfaction may be the wrong yardstick, since it can lean toward self-interest. Isolating what a shared practice adds is hard for the same reason in other settings, as a brief on couples yoga shows.

For readers in the United States and the United Kingdom, where the studies above were run, the practical reading is narrow. A retreat can be a good week. The evidence for what it leaves behind, for the person and for the people at home, is small, mostly short and sometimes funded by the host.

Voldstad is also running a four-week app-based study of couples. Participants answer a short survey every evening for 31 days, meditate every morning for two of the weeks and do not meditate at all for the other two, so the effect of practice can be compared with the effect of none.

Sources

• From spike to baseline: distance-collapse in Buddhist contemplative practice and durable wellbeing, Swapan Samanta, Frontiers in Psychology, November 3, 2026
• Meditation Retreat Rapidly Reprograms Body and Mind, UC San Diego, November 6, 2025
• The varieties of contemplative experience, Lindahl et al., PLOS One, May 24, 2017