State of the art of academic work on meditation in France[État de l’art des travaux académiques sur la méditation en France]

In France, as in many other European countries, in Canada and in the United States, meditation is an academic discipline. A state of the art of the work of the French research teams that we presented to the Ministry of Higher Education and Research on May 3, 2023, reports 610 scientific publications, 216 theses or university memories and 61 clinical trials bearing on meditation and/or mindfulness. The number of works grow exponentially. More than 100 publications in journals with a reading committee and 30 university theses on meditation now appear each year, in the fields of the life and health Sciences or in human and social Sciences. We observe that the authors of this work are affiliated with universities, health establishments, research organizations (CNRS, Inserm in particular), higher schools and institutes, distributed throughout the national territory. Among the clinical trials conducted to date, it has been noted that more than half are randomized controlled trials at high level of scientific evidence which now require to be deployed in the form of multicenter studies to validate the indications of the various standardized programs developed by French teachers and researchers working on meditation.