Shedding Light on Changes in Subjective Experience During an Intensive Contemplative Retreat: The Lyon Assessment of Meditation Phenomenology Questionnaire

A significant share of meditation research relies on trait psychometric measures of mindfulness, which neglect the complex and dynamic unfolding of experiential processes entailed by meditation over time. However, there have been a few attempts to capture ongoing changes in experience during meditation. In this study, we integrated and expanded on 3 of these previous approaches to create a novel instrument, which we called the Lyon Assessment of Meditation Phenomenology (LAMP). This questionnaire encompasses contextual, conative, affective, somatic, attentional, cognitive, and metacognitive domains. Fifty-three experienced meditators completed the LAMP after each meditation session during an intensive 10-day retreat. We modeled the time courses of the individual answers to each question using generalized additive modeling and automatically clustered participants using group-based trajectory modeling. Over 60% of the dimensions assessed by LAMP exhibited significant change during the retreat across the group, following distinct temporal trajectories. These trajectories reflected differences between meditation types (chiefly, focused attention and open monitoring) and individual expertise, supporting a previously proposed multidimensional phenomenological model of mindfulness-related practices. We also identified 3 clusters of individual temporal trajectories associated with prior meditative experience and difficulties experienced during the retreat. Finally, we replicated and extended core findings from mindfulness research on pain regulation. The proposed multidimensional experience-sampling approach provides a rich characterization of the dynamic aspects of meditative experience and may be used to deepen our knowledge of the phenomenology and mechanisms of meditation and meditation-based interventions. We developed a new, comprehensive questionnaire called the Lyon Assessment of Meditation Phenomenology (LAMP), to better track how meditation experience changes over time and with practice. Fifty-three meditators completed the LAMP after each meditation session during an intensive 10-day retreat, reporting on more than thirty mental and physical aspects of their practice. Two thirds of these dimensions shifted significantly throughout the retreat, following distinct temporal patterns of both day-to-day and within-day changes. Mean scores on core dimensions and their temporal trajectories were influenced by the style of practice and prior meditation experience, confirming a prior phenomenological model of mindfulness meditations. Our results also extended previous findings about how meditation helps regulate pain. This study demonstrates that a fine-grained description of contemplative experience can provide new insights into how meditation works and benefits psychological health.