Shedding light on changes in subjective experience during an intensive contemplative retreat: the Lyon Assessment of Meditation Phenomenology (LAMP) questionnaire

A new questionnaire, the Lyon Assessment of Meditation Phenomenology (LAMP), captures how meditation experiences change over time across seven domains: context, intention, emotion, body, attention, thought, and self-awareness. Fifty-three experienced meditators completed the LAMP after each session during a 10-day retreat. Over 60% of the measured dimensions changed significantly, with distinct patterns for focused attention versus open monitoring meditation and for meditators of different expertise levels. Three clusters of individual trajectories emerged, linked to prior experience and difficulties during the retreat. The approach also replicated and extended prior findings on pain regulation. The findings suggest that meditation experience is dynamic and multidimensional, and the LAMP may help deepen understanding of meditation's mechanisms.

Study at a glance

Abstract

BACKGROUND: 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.METHODS: 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.RESULTS: 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.CONCLUSIONS: 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.