In our society where interest in meditation is expanding enormously, numerous scientific studies are now conducted on the neurophysiological effects and correlates of meditation practices, and have notably shown the therapeutic effectiveness of mindfulness based interventions (MBI).
However, very few studies have been devoted to the lived experience of meditation, and the inner processes that explain its positive effects. What it is like to meditate – from instant to instant, at different stages of the practice – remains almost invisible in contemporary contemplative science. A careful micro-phenomenological investigation could provide a refined awareness of the attentional "micro-gestures" involved in the different stages of meditative practice. This awareness could help meditation practitioners to refine these gestures, meditation teachers to elicit them more accurately in their students, researchers in consciousness to sharpen their understanding of the processes of emergence and vanishing of thoughts, emotions, perceptions and sense of "self", and therapists to understand the liberating effect of meditative practice.