A micro-phenomenological study of the mechanisms and processes of mindfulness

Abstract

Mindfulness is increasingly applied within health care and educational settings, with encouraging effects shown on wellbeing and attainment. However most mindfulness research focuses on either the effects or the neuroscience of mindfulness while the phenomenology of mindfulness practice itself seems to be overlooked. This PhD research explored how mindfulness unfolds experientially at a micro-level, to gain a detailed understanding of the processes and mechanisms at work in mindfulness practice. An in-depth understanding of such processes and mechanisms might on the one hand help tailor mindfulness better to specific audiences, establish possible further applications of mindfulness and understand potential adverse effects better; on another level, it might yield new insights into cognitive, affective and embodied processes generally, which could have important implications for learning and therapeutic processes, for example. The micro-phenomenology interview method (previously called the 'elicitation interview') developed by Vermersch (1994) and Petitmengin (2006) was used to interview three intermediately experienced, adult mindfulness (Vipassana) meditators 3-5 times for one hour about the unfolding of their just completed 30-minute meditations. The micro-phenomenology interview involves re-evoking a past experience, by which passively stored details about the experience which are not usually spontaneously accessible, can be explored in rich detail to establish micro-gestures and inner acts taking place in the experience. The researcher was also interviewed in this way herself, about her own meditation. In total this yielded 12 in-depth interviews which were analysed via the micro-phenomenology data analysis process developed by Petitmengin (1999) as well as thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). This presentation will report on the findings of this small-scale, in-depth research project, and propose some key processes and mechanisms of mindfulness which seemed to be at work in the participants of this study. Implications of these proposed processes and mechanisms for our understanding of mindfulness, its applications, and processes of mind generally will also be discussed.

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