Unlike modern Western therapeutic thinking however, meditation was not originally designed to be used as a course of treatment so much as to be part of an ongoing lifestyle thus implying that the benefits of meditation are likely to persist in the follow-up phase only so long as the person chooses to meditate regularly.
Meditation instructional programs are usually relatively intense and it is therefore worthwhile determining whether changes brought on by the instructional program can be maintained when participants are left to continue unsupervised with whatever skills they have acquired in the more formal phase of their training. Given that consistent evidence for a specific effect is lacking even within the intervention phase of the studies, it is even more unlikely that evidence for an effect will be detectable in the follow-up phases.
Like any other evaluation of therapeutics, the detectable effect of the intervention will be determined by the degree to which the participant complies with the treatment. This is particularly important in meditation research because meditation requires considerable active involvement and commitment. There are several ways to assess compliance, including attendance rates at supervised treatment sessions, home-practice diaries and subjective experience reports.