Introduction Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the scientific study of contemplative practices. While seated meditation practices have historically been at the center of inquiry in contemplative sciences, movement-based practices, such as yoga, t'ai chi, qigong, and others, are currently coming to the forefront of this discourse. In her introduction to the present Research Topic, Schmalzl et al. ( 2014 ) introduce movement-based contemplative practices (MBCP) and present their essential qualities: MBCPs are embodied and attentive to kinesthetic and proprioceptive sensations; are structured by intentional movement; and are contemplative, that is, characterized by deliberate observation and non-judgmental awareness. In this opinion paper, I focus on the necessity of studying intentional and experiential aspects of yoga as a MBCP, and on the role of first-person experiential reports in the neurophenomenological investigation of yoga and other MBCPs. I propose that the difference between yoga as a contemplative practice and yoga as a form of physical exercise needs to be assessed through nuanced investigation of subjective experience aimed at illuminating short- and long-term intentions and goals underlying yoga practice as well as dynamic variations within the lived experience of yoga. Embodiment and neurophenomenology Theories of embodiment, such as enaction (Thompson, 2005 , 2007 ; Noe, 2006 ; Stewart et al., 2010 ) stress the irreducible foundational links between the mind, the world and the body as conditions of possibility for consciousness. Rooted in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl ( 1982 ) and Merleau-Ponty many embodied mind theorists see movement not only as a pragmatic function of interacting with the world, but as a dynamic and plastic way of knowing and as a formative root of one's selfhood and subjectivity (Morris, 2004 , 2010 ). The concept of a “lived body,” derived from Merleau-Ponty ( 2012 ), reflects subjectivity conditioned by kinesthetic patterns and bodily habits throughout a lifetime. Yoga practice, in this view, consists of systematic change and of deconditioning of the “lived body” from its earlier habit patterns and creating new patterns and neural connections. Contemporary neurophysiological evidence lends support to the embodied mind approaches, placing sensorimotor “coupling” (Thompson and Varela, 2001 ) between an individual's moving body and the world at the center of research on subjective experience. Recent research on contemplative practices, predominantly focused on sitting meditation, has suggested a role of sustained contemplative training for processes of neuroplasticity (Manna et al., 2010 ), self-awareness (Vago and Silbersweig, 2012 ) attention modulation, (Lutz et al., 2008b ; MacLean et al., 2010 ), and emotion regulation (Lutz et al., 2008a ; Sahdra et al., 2011 ), among others. Studying yoga as a MBCP would highlight specific contributions of intentional and dynamic bodily processes to embodied cognition, including processes associated with intentional movement, attention to bodily states, and brain changes linked to variations in the experiential “lived body” and in underlying nervous system due to sustained physical and mental asana practice. Neurophenomenology (Varela, 1996 ; Lutz and Thompson, 2003 ) is the preferred method of inquiry for contemporary contemplative neurosciences and empirical studies of embodied and enactive cognition. The defining feature of neurophenomenology is the use of sophisticated objective neurophysiological measurements in conjunction with nuanced first-person methodologies. Within this framework, objective, and subjective data are seen as mutually constraining and informing, and dynamic methods of examining conscious experience are preferred. Despite a historical distrust of first-person reports by cognitive neuroscientists (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977 ), recent years have seen an important rise in the use of first-person methodologies both in the form of questionnaires and phenomenologically-informed practices (Chalmers, 1999 ). Cognitive neurosciences have gradually opened to the integration of systematic analysis of first-person reports (Overgaard et al., 2008 ), and a number of rigorous approaches to subjective data are now being developed. One methodology, known as “elicitation interview” (Petitmengin, 2006 ), has been used in a number of studies, including an investigation of epileptic aura (Petitmengin et al., 2006 ) and the generation of scientific insight (Petitmengin, 2007 ). Yoga as contemplative practice While the contemporary form of asana sequences of Hatha Yoga is relatively recent (Gard et al., 2014 ), many schools (such as Ashtanga Yoga and Iyengar Yoga) have referred to the ancient text, Patanjali's Yoga Sutra (Miller, 1995 ; White, 2014 ), as the philosophical source text defining and situating yoga practice on and off the mat. According to the much cited passage from the Yoga Sutra , the definiti
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