Shiva's ancient iconography, paintings and carvings almost always depict him in meditative poses. He is referred to as Dhyaneshwara, the Lord of Dhyana. Dhyana is loosely translated as meditation.

And our beloved Dhyaneshwara is also associated with cannabis. This deep connection between meditation, marijuana and Shiva dates back to time immemorial, but recent scientific studies have explored another layer to this connection, asking questions that bridge the dimensions of spirituality and scientific inquiry.

Chapter One: The Hero Before the Laboratory

Before there were microscopes, journals or receptors, there was Cannabis sativa, growing wildly and beside human settlements. It is one of the oldest plants people have grown, valued for its strong fibre, its seeds and its medicine. There's extensive information about the plant's medicinal uses in many scriptures that are still available in India. It was never just a crop. It was held sacred, and it became part of everyday devotion. Bhang, a drink made from the leaves, especially during Mahashivratri; ganja, from the flowering tops; and charas, the resin. Sadhus used it mainly before meditation, and it is still offered to Shiva.

Stories about how the plant was associated with Shiva differ from place to place, and no one claims they are historical accounts, but the association is widely accepted. For thousands of years, people looked at this plant and understood that it was connected to stillness and bliss.

Science would take centuries to ask the question: what is in this plant that does this, and how?

Chapter Two: A Factory of Chemistry

To see why this plant became the hero of a scientific detective story, we need to look at what it makes.

Cannabis usually grows as separate male and female plants, and it is the female flowers that grow thick with sticky resin. That resin is made in trichomes, tiny glands that cover the flowers like frost and make them glisten. Inside those glands, the plant builds a remarkable chemical library:

Cannabinoids. These are compounds found notably in this plant, and more than a hundred have been identified. The best known are THC, the main psychoactive ingredient, and CBD, which does not cause a high. The plant first makes them in an acidic form (THCA and CBDA), and heat from smoking, vaping or cooking turns them into THC and CBD.

Aromatic oils. These fragrant compounds, called terpenes, give the plant its earthy, piney or citrusy smell. Many other plants make them too.

Fibre and seeds. The tall stalk gives strong fibre, and the seeds are rich in oil and nourishment.

Then there is the plant within the plant. Hemp is cannabis grown for its fibre and seed, with very little THC. It has been used for rope, cloth and paper for thousands of years. One species has clothed, fed, healed and inspired people for as long as we have records.

Of all these compounds, THC was the one that would soon move to the centre of the story. The question sustained: why would one plant's chemistry reach so deep into the human mind?

Chapter Three: 1964, The Molecule Is Found

The scientific chapter opens in 1964, an important year, when the chemists Yechiel Gaoni and Raphael Mechoulam isolated THC and worked out its structure. For the first time, the plant's most famous effect had a face: a single molecule that could be held, measured and studied. Soon it could even be made in the laboratory, and many studies followed.

Yet a strange silence followed. Scientists had the molecule, but they still did not know how it worked. THC dissolves in fat so readily that, for years, the best guess was that it simply slipped into nerve cell membranes and disturbed them in a vague, non-specific way. It was the best explanation science could offer at the time, and it made the plant sound as if it was merely smudging the brain.

But a quiet idea was gathering force in pharmacology. When a plant molecule produces a precise effect in the body, there is usually a precise place where it acts: a receptor. Morphine, from the poppy, had its receptors, and the body had its own natural painkillers. If THC could shape mood, memory and perception so precisely, it was hard to believe it was only smudging. There ought to be a lock for it.

Finding that lock would take twenty-four years!

Chapter Four: The Lock Is Found

The plant had given science a mysterious key to wonder about. Researchers set out to find the lock.

In 1988, the cannabinoid receptor was identified, and in the early 1990s it was cloned from rat brain and later from human and mouse brain. It was named CB1. The finding changed the picture completely. THC was not smudging cell membranes. It was fitting into a specific receptor.

And what a receptor it was. Although it arrived years after most other known brain receptors, CB1 turned out to be the most abundant receptor of its kind in the brain. It sits at extremely high density in regions tied to memory, thought, movement and coordination: the hippocampus, the frontal cortex, the cerebellum and the basal ganglia. It is also found in regions linked to emotion, pain and appetite. Its reach goes beyond the brain, to nerve endings in the body and the gut. A second receptor, CB2, was first found in immune cells and is now known to appear in the brain too, in the support cells called microglia.

Think about how strange that is. Nobody evolves a receptor for a plant. A system this widespread cannot exist so that one species can get people high. The plant knocked on a door that evolution had already built, waiting inside every one of us. The receptors even carry the plant's name: cannabi-noid.

It was a pattern science had seen before. The poppy gave us morphine, and morphine led to the body's own opioid system. Now another plant was leading to a second hidden system.

It raised the most beautiful question in the whole story. If there is a lock, what is the body's own, original key?

Chapter Five: 1992, The Key Within

In 1992, William Devane and colleagues, working with Mechoulam, isolated from pig brain amolecule that fit the cannabinoid receptor. It was the body's own cannabis-like compound, the first endocannabinoid ever found. They named it anandamide, from the Sanskrit ananda, meaning bliss.

That is a phenomenal moment in science: a modern laboratory, searching for what happens inside the human brain, reached into Sanskrit to name what it found. A second endocannabinoid, 2-AG, was soon discovered. Together with their receptors and the enzymes that make and break them, they form what is now called the endocannabinoid system.

The more scientists learned, the more profound it became.

It is ancient. The system evolved before vertebrates and is preserved across species. It is not a quirk of human biology. It is old, deep and shared with much of the animal world.

It is everywhere and it matters. It helps regulate mood, pain, inflammation, appetite, memory and development. It works on demand. Unlike most neurotransmitters, endocannabinoids are not stored in vesicles. There are no "cannabinoid neurons". They are built from fats in the cellmembrane at the moment they are needed, and released backwards across thesynapse (called retrograde signalling) to quiet down the signal of the neuron that triggered them. In a sense, it is the nervous system's way of gently saying, enough, settle down.

It is brief. Anandamide is broken down within minutes by an enzyme called FAAH.

This is where the plant and the body probably part ways. THC and anandamide both bind to CB1. But anandamide is made locally, in tiny amounts, in the right place and then swiftly erased. THC arrives from outside, spreads everywhere and lingers for hours. The body's key turns the lock gently, precisely and for a moment. The plant's key flings every door open at once. CBD, meanwhile, behaves differently again. It binds weakly to CB1 itself, but is thought to slow down the breakdown of anandamide, which is one reason researchers find it so interesting.

Without the plant, science might have taken longer to discover this system. It was a plant that led us to a part of ourselves!

Chapter Six: The Bliss We Make Ourselves

Once the body's own system was known, the next question was natural. If we make our own anandamide, when does the body make it?

The first answer came from running. A runner's high is a wave of four things: euphoria, calm, reduced pain and a pleasant heaviness afterwards. For decades it was credited mainly to endorphins. In 2015, a German team led by Johannes Fuss tested this in mice and published their findings in PNAS ("A runner's high depends on cannabinoid receptors in mice"). The mice ran about 6.5 km on their wheels in five hours, then faced tests of anxiety and pain.

Their findings were striking:

Running raised endocannabinoids, including anandamide, in the blood.

The mice were visibly calmer. They spent more time in a bright, exposed area that mice normally avoid. That calm disappeared when CB1 receptors were blocked, or when CB1 was removed from a specific set of forebrain neurons. Blocking the opioid system with naloxone did not eliminate this effect.

The runners also tolerated heat better, and this pain relief too depended on cannabinoid receptors, both CB1 and CB2 in the body's periphery.

The authors also made a neat point. Endorphins from the body cannot cross the blood-brain barrier, but anandamide, being a fat-loving molecule, can. That makes it a plausible messenger from a working body to a calmer mind.

An honest note is needed here, and it makes the science more trustworthy, not less. This was a study in mice, and euphoria, the very feeling people call a high, cannot be studied in a mouse yet. The researchers also saw no clear rise in endocannabinoids inside the brain after a single run, which they put down partly to how fast these molecules come and go and how hard they are to catch. The tired, sleepy feeling after running did not depend on cannabinoids at all, and may simply be exhaustion. So the finding is that the system is crucial for the calming and pain-relieving parts of a runner's high, not that anandamide alone explains the bliss.

But it showed something important. The body can switch on its own cannabis-like system through movement. And if movement can, perhaps stillness can too?

Chapter Seven: When the Seeker Sits Still

If running can switch this system on, what about the stillness of the meditator?

In 2020, a team led by Senthilkumar Sadhasivam at Indiana University School of Medicine published what they described as the first study to look at endocannabinoids as biomarkers of meditation. They studied people attending the Bhava Spandana Program, a four-day residential retreat run by Isha in Tennessee. The same Isha Foundation founded by Sadhguru, whose Isha Yoga Center in Coimbatore is home to the Dhyanalinga, a space consecrated purely for meditation.

Bhava means sensation, and Spandana means resonance, loosely "resonance with life." Everyone had already learned a yogic practice called Shambhavi Mahamudra, and about 70% of the participants were of Indian origin. Nearly 350 people filled out surveys before the retreat, and 142 of them volunteered blood samples before and after.

The results, in plain terms:

Change in the mind. Depression and anxiety scores fell by roughly a quarter. Mindfulness and well-being rose, and happiness climbed from about 6.2 to 8.2 out of 10. A month later, the gains were still there, and the sense of personal autonomy had grown even further.

The blood changed. All the endocannabinoids they measured went up. Anandamide rose from about 0.58 to 0.75 ng/mL on average, and 59% of people had a rise of at least 20%. A related compound, 2-AG, roughly doubled. BDNF, a growth factor linked to the survival and renewal of neurons, rose too. Some people saw two- to three-fold increases, and the responses varied widely from person to person.

It rivalled the reported effects of exercise. The authors say the rises were larger than those reported in studies of moderate aerobic exercise and orgasm, though comparing across different studies is only a rough guide.

Two details in the methods are lovely. First, anandamide vanishes so quickly that the blood was spun and frozen immediately to catch it. Second, the blood samples were taken only after the whole four days, so the authors think the true peak, during the meditations themselves, was probably missed.

There is also a quiet clue that this was the body's own doing. Anyone who reported active marijuana or other drug use, or who was taking antidepressants, was excluded from the blood part of the study. The plant was not in the room.

And there was a fascinating idea in the discussion. The authors point out that THC can raise BDNF, but that this effect is blunted by even light chronic cannabis use. Stimulating CB1 receptors through the body's own pathways, such as meditation, they suggested, may be a more lasting way to do so.

Chapter Eight: The Current Reality

This is the part of a story where it is tempting to declare victory. A careful storyteller does the opposite, because the truth here is more interesting than the slogan.

What we can say: Anandamide and its fellow endocannabinoids are real, ancient and central to mood, stress and pain. Exercise switches them on. And in one large observational study, a meditation retreat was followed by higher blood levels of them and by lasting gains in well-being.

What we have to notice:

Every body answered differently. Some people's levels barely moved while others' tripled, and the authors suggest genes and personal makeup may explain why. Blood levels are not exactly brain levels. Anandamide in a blood tube is only a distant signal of what is happening in the brain.

The retreat was run by Isha, which the authors thank for its support, though they also declare no conflicts of interest. It would be good to see the finding repeated by other teams, in other traditions.

The field is young, and the scientists know it. A registered clinical trial of an 8-day advanced meditation called Samyama lists anandamide as a primary outcome, and its protocol notes that no study had yet explored how yoga and meditation change anandamide in humans. Another registered trial is comparing hypnosis, mindfulness and placebo for their effects on endocannabinoids and endorphins. Answers are still being collected.

One more reminder from the paper is worth keeping. The authors suggest that, in future, drugs that block the enzyme FAAH might copy the effect by keeping anandamide around longer. But the body's bliss chemistry is delicate. It is not something to be casually outsmarted. By contrast, they describe meditation as a simple and safe option!

And the plant itself deserves the same honesty. THC is powerful, and it is not the same as meditation. It overwhelms the system where the body's own key would gently turn it. It can cause anxiety, impair memory and judgement, and carry real risks for some people, especially the young and those with certain mental health conditions. Respecting the plant includes respecting how powerful it is.

Perhaps that is the most fitting thing about this stage of the story. Science has opened the door only a crack, and what it has seen inside is not an answer but a beautiful question. The ancient greats never claimed to explain bliss fully. They asked people to sit down and find out. The laboratory, it turns out, is learning to do the same: to wait, to measure patiently, and to let the mystery stay a mystery a little longer.

The Final Chapter: Where Everything Meets — The Summary

So how does it all connect?

In the Indian understanding of the human being, there are layers, or koshas, and the innermost is the anandamaya kosha, the sheath of bliss. The yogic traditions have always said that ananda is not something to be gained from outside. It is the natural state of consciousness. Patanjali places dhyana, meditation, as the seventh limb of yoga, leading to samadhi!

Now look at what the laboratory has found, taking care not to claim more than it has proven. There is a molecule our bodies make, named by scientists for bliss. It rises when we meditate. And the receptor it fits was discovered because of a plant that human beings had carried into their tombs, temples and brought into their medication and meditation practices for thousands of years: Cannabis sativa, as we call it.

The connection goes beyond how the word Shiva resembles the word sativa; it is something far more sublime which we did not understand fully, even criminalising the plant because of the stigma surrounding it. Now, through the small but growing body of laboratory research, we have begun to understand the scientific dimension to it.

Inside us is something older than our species, tuned to a plant's chemistry and waiting for a bliss that we can make ourselves!

Ironically, the isolation of the plant's compounds opened the door. It may offer a glimpse into what happened before written records. The ancient traditions of our culture passed down a vast body of wisdom and a way of life waiting to be explored.

The connection between marijuana and meditation was special and deep, but now it has a scientific angle too. All glory to our beloved Dhyanalingeshwara!

Sources

Sadhasivam S, et al. (2020). Inner Engineering Practices and Advanced 4-day Isha YogaRetreat Are Associated with Cannabimimetic Effects with IncreasedEndocannabinoids and Short-Term and Sustained Improvement in Mental Health.Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Article 8438272. https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/8438272

Fuss J, et al. (2015). A runner's high depends on cannabinoid receptors in mice. PNAS,112(42), 13105-13108. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1514996112

Scherma M, et al. (2019). Brain activity of anandamide: a rewarding bliss? ActaPharmacologica Sinica, 40, 309-323. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41401-018-0075-x

ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT04366544 (Samyama meditation) and NCT03407937 (hypnosis,meditation and endocannabinoids).

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Basava Nilaya, near Muneshwara temple, Bangalore - 560 061, Karnataka - India.

Phenomenal Fact

Bhanga/Vijaya has been crowned as a sacred plant among other five, immortalized in Ātharvaṇa Veda, chapter 11, one of the oldest sciptures, where it is invoked to free us from aṃhas.

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