A substantial number of people practise meditation, contemplation or reflection without holding religious beliefs. That's a coherent position and it raises an interesting question about what transfers and what doesn't.
What transfers cleanly
Techniques with observable mechanisms and no metaphysical commitments.
Attention training. Repeatedly returning attention to a chosen object develops a capacity that can be described entirely in cognitive terms. No belief required.
Observing thoughts as events. The recognition that a thought is something occurring rather than a fact about the world. This is also a central move in cognitive therapy, arrived at independently, which suggests it's robust.
Deliberate cultivation of states. Practices developing compassion or equanimity work through repetition and attention, and can be understood as training in the same sense any skill is.
Reflection on mortality. Present in many traditions and available to anyone. Stoic practitioners did it without any religious framing, and the effect on priorities doesn't depend on believing anything specific.
Ritual and repetition. The behavioural effects of doing something regularly in a consistent way are available regardless of what the ritual means.
What's harder to separate
Several elements turn out to be more entangled than a technique-extraction model suggests.
Ethical grounding. Traditions treat conduct as a precondition rather than a consequence. The reasoning is practical — a mind agitated by its own behaviour won't settle — rather than doctrinal.
Secular practice frequently omits this entirely, which leaves an odd gap. You can train attention while behaving badly, and the traditions would say you'll find the training doesn't go far.
A view of what you're doing. Traditions offer an account of what suffering is, why it arises and what practice does about it. That account gives practice direction and provides a reason to continue when it's unpleasant.
Replacing it with "studies show benefits" is thinner motivation, and it may explain why secular practice is so frequently abandoned.
Community and lineage. Practising within a group over years, with people who've done it longer, provides correction and continuity. Secular versions have struggled to reproduce this, and where they have — through sanghas, secular meditation groups and similar — practice tends to be more sustained.
The far end. Traditions describe states and insights available through sustained practice that are difficult to describe in secular terms without either dismissing them or importing metaphysics.
Secular framing tends to stop short of this territory, which is defensible and does mean the practice is being used for a fraction of what it was developed for.
The appropriation question
Worth addressing directly since it's frequently raised.
Contemplative techniques have moved between cultures for millennia, generally through people who found them valuable. That's not new and it isn't inherently problematic.
What draws reasonable criticism is a specific pattern: extracting techniques, removing attribution, commercialising them, and then presenting the result as a discovery. Particularly where the originating traditions are treated as superstition while their methods are marketed as science.
The straightforward remedy is acknowledgement. Knowing where something came from, saying so, and engaging with the source material rather than only with its adaptation.
That costs nothing and it changes the relationship from extraction to learning.
Building a secular practice with some depth
Elements that can be included without believing anything.
Read the sources. Critically, without obligation to accept them. Traditional texts contain a great deal of precise psychological observation, and reading them is different from reading a modern summary.
Include an ethical dimension. Not as rules but as attention to the relationship between how you behave and how settled your mind is. That's an empirical claim you can check.
Practise with others. Secular groups exist. So do traditional ones that welcome non-believing participants, and many are entirely comfortable with that.
Include outward-facing practices. Compassion and loving-kindness practices are underrepresented in secular programmes, which focus heavily on one's own experience. The traditions considered these central.
Accept that it's slow. Traditional framings assume a lifetime. That expectation makes a difficult period look like part of the process rather than evidence it isn't working.
The honest limit
Some things probably don't transfer, and it's more useful to say so than to pretend otherwise.
Practices premised on specific claims about the nature of reality don't obviously work without the premise. Devotional practices directed at something you don't believe exists are difficult to undertake sincerely.
And the sense of participating in something larger, which many practitioners describe as central, is not straightforwardly available to somebody who thinks the framework is mistaken.
That's a real limitation rather than a fatal one. A great deal remains, and it's enough to occupy a practice for a very long time.
The vocabulary problem
A practical difficulty for secular practitioners: the available language is either religious or clinical, and neither fits particularly well.
Traditional terms carry metaphysical commitments. Clinical terms — attention regulation, emotion regulation, decentring — are accurate and lifeless, and describing a practice in the vocabulary of a research protocol does something to how it feels to do it.
Most sustained practitioners end up borrowing selectively and holding the terms loosely, which is probably the right answer and is worth knowing in advance so the awkwardness does not read as a sign that something is wrong.