A Short Guide to Jhana Meditation
A Short Guide to Jhana Meditation
How anyone can access an endless supply of joy and peace, any time they want
When I was eighteen years old, I spent my summer doing odd jobs for a local monastery. I would cook in the morning, clean for an hour or two after the midday meal was served, and then spend most of the time left over meditating - at the time, I was a zealous new convert to Buddhism, so it was pretty much the perfect arrangement. One afternoon, as I sat alone in the meditation hall, an indescribable sense of joy and peace infinitely stronger than anything I had ever experienced in my life overcame me. I spent ten precious minutes basking in overpowering waves of pleasure and contentment, totally absorbed in a transcendent sense of peace, before I eventually came back to earth as an overwhelmed but euphoric mess. Only after speaking with the monks did I learn I’d experienced something called jhana, and that other meditators had been pursuing and enjoying the same exact state for thousands of years. I was baffled, of course, and a little freaked out. But I immediately knew it was something I had to keep exploring, and fifteen years later, jhana meditation is still one of the most precious things I have in my life.
There’s been a noticeable resurgence of interest in jhana meditation lately, with plenty of new books and articles on the subject coming out and even organizations like Jhourney starting to hold real-life retreats. But even so, most easily accessible resources in print and online are still either very dense, requiring a fairly hefty bit of background knowledge, or else so stripped down and simplified that they can leave inexperienced meditators with more questions than answers. My goal with this guide is to fill that missing middle: Providing an approachable, non-ideological introduction to jhana meditation that’s still detailed enough to provide complete newcomers with a solid foundation for putting together a serious practice. I don’t have any esoteric hidden knowledge to share, or even many novel insights of my own, but my hope is that this guide can take a bunch of different strategies for beginning and strengthening a meditation practice and put them all in one place, to be accessed by as many people as possible. I appreciate so much that you’re taking the time to read it and I wish you the best in your efforts!
(A quick note on structure: This guide is set up like a classic FAQ, so anyone who’s already got the basics down should feel free to just jump around and check out whatever seems like it might be helpful. On the other hand, if you’re coming in completely blind, you’ll hopefully be able to get a good overview of the whole subject by starting at the top and working through each question one by one. You’re more than welcome to read the entire thing all at once, but it might also be a good idea to just work through the introductory sections and then come back to go deeper once your practice has developed.)
Part 1: Introducing the Jhanas
What are the jhanas?
In Theravada Buddhism, the jhanas are eight distinct conscious states of intense mental clarity and stillness that are achieved through meditation. You don’t hear much about these states in modern American Buddhism, where a different sort of meditation - sometimes called “mindfulness meditation” or vipassana - is much more popular. But in the oldest Buddhist scriptures we have available today, you see the jhanas emphasized over and over again as the primary mechanism by which devoted practitioners reach enlightenment. Pretty much any time the Buddha gives any sort of spiritual advice at all, he ends with encouraging his followers to pursue the jhanas, and whole sections of the Pali suttas1 are dedicated to categorizing all the different jhana states and explaining how best to reach them. There’s also good historical reason to think jhana meditation stretches back to the earliest eras of Buddhist thought, and predates many other ritual and devotional practices that are more prominent today.
I should note before I move on that a fairly prominent split currently exists in the Buddhist world when it comes to exactly what qualifies as a jhana state anyway. Many teachers and scholars believe that the early jhanas are relatively easy to access, while others insist that even the first jhana requires intense devotion and personal effort. I tend to think the suttas themselves frame things somewhere in the middle, but it doesn’t really matter when you’re just starting out - unless you’re diligently practicing in a monastic setting, the purpose of jhana meditation shouldn’t necessarily be to achieve any particular jhana state anyway. Of course, if you do happen to achieve them, all the better! But for most people who are considering jhana meditation recreationally, you should really just focus on cultivating a deeply pleasant sense of mental stillness, regardless of whether you actually enter “real” jhana states or not.
How do you enter the jhanas?
Entering the jhanas requires developing a particular mental quality that the Pali suttas refer to as samadhi. Nowadays, samadhi is usually translated into English as ‘concentration,’ but that can be a little misleading. A better translation would be ‘absorption,’ or ‘undistractedness’ - an unbroken, unified awareness of some experience or sensation. Samadhi isn’t the kind of constant mental effort you have to exert when you’re working through a tough math problem or trying to read a complex piece of technical writing. Instead, it’s more like what comes over you when you’re struck by a beautiful piece of music, or when you watch a particularly exciting action movie; you’re completely absorbed in the object of your attention, not because you’re forcing your mind to stay on it every moment, but because you’re so enraptured that your mind doesn’t want to drift away.
When we meditate, we’re working to cultivate and sustain this kind of effortless awareness of whatever it is we choose to focus on. There are all sorts of options available for this “meditative object,” but by far the most common is the breath. We call meditation focused on breathing anapanasati, which is just a Pali term that literally means “mindfulness of inhaling and exhaling.” The central goal of anapanasati is to become completely and totally absorbed in the sensation of your breath as it enters and exits the body. Throughout the rest of this guide, I’ll be covering a bunch of tips and tricks that can help you get to that point, but in terms of the basic approach, you really can’t do better than the instructions given by the Buddha more than twenty-five hundred years ago:
There is the case where a monk, having gone to the wilderness, to the shade of a tree, or to an empty building, sits down folding his legs crosswise, holding his body erect, and setting mindfulness to the fore. Always mindful, he breathes in; mindful he breathes out.
Breathing in long, he discerns, 'I am breathing in long'; or breathing out long, he discerns, 'I am breathing out long.' Or breathing in short, he discerns, 'I am breathing in short'; or breathing out short, he discerns, 'I am breathing out short.' He trains himself, 'I will breathe in sensitive to the entire body.' He trains himself, 'I will breathe out sensitive to the entire body.' He trains himself, 'I will breathe in calming bodily fabrications.'2 He trains himself, 'I will breathe out calming bodily fabrications.'
— from the Anapanasati Sutta, MN 118, translated by Thanisarro Bhikkhu
That’s really all there is to it! You just need to sit down, relax, and direct your attention towards your breathing as your mind and body both become still. Develop deep enough samadhi this way, and jhana comes naturally, without you having to “do” anything at all.
Why should I start doing jhana meditation?
Simple: Because it feels really good! During meditation, as your mind and body grow increasingly still, you’ll start to experience a distinct pleasant feeling that the Buddhist scriptures call piti. Piti isn’t just a general sense of relaxation or calmness, like what you might feel when you watch a pretty sunset or curl up with your favorite book. Instead, it’s an immediately pleasurable sensation that’s located throughout the body in a very physical, tangible way. The exact feeling is hard to describe, but Rob Burbea gets close when he calls it a “body buzz.” Other meditators have described it like a low-level electric shock, or a pleasant version of the tingling you get when your foot falls asleep, but it’s probably a waste of time to think up a bunch of metaphors that will never be quite right. What matters is that, once the piti you’re feeling becomes truly overwhelming, the joy and peace that pervades your body will take you effortlessly into jhana - an even more otherworldly, indescribably joyful experience that can’t possibly be put into words.
Of course, there are other reasons to practice jhana meditation beyond just pure pleasure. For some meditators, reaching these states for the first time is a profound spiritual experience that radically changes how they relate to themselves and others - and even those who aren’t quite so moved still benefit from a chance to explore and examine their own patterns of thought with newfound clarity and control. Plus, the general feeling of peace and goodwill you’ll feel during meditation stays with you even after you get up off your cushion and go about your day. So while it sells jhana a little short to say it’s nothing more than a way to feel good, I still want to stick up for the idea that a reliable source of well-being and joy is more than enough on its own terms, and that we shouldn’t rush to turn meditation into just another therapeutic tool or load it up with self-conscious spiritual depth. Most of us spend (at least) an hour a day doing worthless little tasks that bring us nothing good at all anyway, so why not replace those time sinks with an hour spent enjoying your own mind instead?
Do I need to be a Buddhist to do jhana meditation?
Not at all! There’s nothing about jhana meditation that requires any specific belief in or devotion to Buddhism as a religious tradition. I myself am a stone-cold secular naturalist, and while I’ve been very influenced by Buddhist philosophy over the course of my life, I wouldn’t call myself one today. So there’s certainly no problem if you want to develop a practice with no larger spiritual framework in mind. With that said, many of the big ideas that come up in jhana meditation - things like impermanence, or the importance of non-clinging - might be hard to intuitively understand unless you have a handle on the basics of Buddhist thought. I’ll try my best throughout this guide to clarify any terms or concepts that might be unfamiliar, but I would highly recommend taking a second to just browse through a basic resource like this one beforehand. You don’t need to buy into any of the deeper metaphysical or religious commitments of Theravada Buddhism for jhana meditation to work, but understanding the general worldview context in which the practice developed can really help keep you motivated and secure in your practice.
Part 2: Getting Ready
What do I need to start meditating?
If you type meditation supplies into Google or Amazon, you’ll immediately find a million different products that are supposed to help you in your practice: Special chairs and cushions for sitting, incense sticks to burn and decorative bells to ring, even heart rate monitors with built-in phone apps to measure how relaxed you are. But all these accessories are completely optional, and most will just be a distraction when you’re first trying to set up your practice. The only actual essentials for meditation are a working set of lungs and a comfortable place to sit.
If you don’t have that first part down, you should probably stop reading this guide and go talk to your doctor! But assuming you can breathe consistently without discomfort or pain, your next step is to go looking for a quiet place that’s free from any major distractions, like a spare room or an office. (My house doesn’t have a lot of empty space, so I just unroll a blanket at the foot of my bed and post up there.) The space you’re meditating in doesn’t need to be pitch black, or even particularly dark, but make sure there aren’t moving sources of light that can draw your attention away. If you’re inclined to the more spiritual side of things, you might want to set up a little altar or hang up some inspiring images that help you feel a sense of peace and calm. But these decorations aren’t necessary at all, and you shouldn’t feel pressure to use them if you don’t have the urge to.
How should I sit?
Traditionally, jhana meditation is done in something called the lotus (or half-lotus) position, which is the cross-legged posture most of us think of when we try to picture the stereotypical enlightened monk meditating in the wilderness somewhere. But there’s nothing magical about this particular way of sitting, and for some of us it can be more trouble than it’s worth. That’s why, for most of my practice, I’ve used a small folding bench to meditate in a kneeling position instead. I still highly recommend this method if you’re just starting out; it’s very accessible for those of us who aren’t particularly flexible, while still requiring you to engage your core a little bit, which keeps you from just totally zoning out. And if you have trouble finding a suitable bench, or have any other issue that makes kneeling difficult, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with just sticking a pillow behind your back and sitting upright in whatever chair you have around the house. (Office chairs are especially good, since most come with built-in lumbar support for long periods of sitting.) Don’t let spiritual pride make you think that sitting on the floor with crossed legs and an aching back is somehow more enlightened than just using your kitchen chair, when the only thing that actually matters is ensuring you can sit still and comfortable for as long as you need to.3
How long should I meditate for?
When you’re just starting out, all that really matters is consistently meditating every day. Don’t get wrapped up in trying to hit some arbitrary target immediately; one great way to ruin a meditation practice is to jump right into miserable hour-long sessions you aren’t ready for, just because you think that’s what “real meditators” do. Instead, pick a comfortable length - maybe fifteen minutes for an absolute beginner - until you feel like you aren’t ready to stop when the bell (or beep or whatever) goes off. Of course, if you’re only meditating for that short amount of time, it’s very unlikely that you’ll be able to cultivate piti or reach any of the jhanas. But those shorter periods are a good training ground for developing skills that will allow you to slowly expand your sessions until you hit thirty minutes to an hour, which I think is a good place to land for a daily practice. (I personally aim for two half-hour sessions every day, or one hour-long session on weekends.) I would also suggest getting an app on your phone that lets you set flexible timers and has a nice, gentle sound for letting you know the time is up. It can be surprisingly jarring to hear your phone’s default alarm sound once you start really getting focused, whereas a gentle bell or chime will let you keep going as long as you’d like.
Part 3: Meditation Basics
How should I start my meditation?
Everyone meditates differently, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach that works for everyone. But generally, every jhana meditator practicing anapanasati will follow the same basic roadmap: Find a comfortable position, relax the body, and gently bring your attention to wherever you feel the sensation of your breath most clearly. For me, that’s at my upper lip, but for others it might be more in their chest or belly. Wherever you locate your breath, it’s important to remember that this attention you’re bringing to it isn’t a strenuous, constant mental effort where you drill down on that one particular spot and keep your mind there through sheer force of will. Instead, you should work to develop a loose, whole-body awareness that radiates out from that point. An old teacher of mine used the metaphor of a candle, which burns brightly in one place but illuminates everything around it. In the same way, while the sensation of your breath should be most noticeable at the spot you’ve chosen, you should always make sure that your attention isn’t shrinking to just that spot.
If you find yourself struggling to develop this kind of whole-body awareness, it can help to identify three or four points across the body - maybe your knees and elbows, or your head, chest, and feet - and try your best to be aware of all of them at once as you breath in and out. Or, if even that seems too difficult at first, you can try to cycle through them with each new breath until you eventually bring them all together. It might also help to scan your body slowly from head to foot, moving up and down in little increments between every new breath. While doing this, you might find one particular spot where the breath feels especially good, and you’re more than welcome to “camp out” there for a while as your concentration deepens. Just like there’s no particular posture that’s inherently better than any other, there’s no place on the body you should feel pressured to watch - so feel free to spend your whole session focused on your toes if that’s really where your breathing feels best!
How should I breath during meditation?
When you first start out meditating, don’t focus too much on how you “should” be breathing; don’t try to breathe especially deep, or especially shallow, or any particular way at all. Just let your body find its own natural rhythm, until you feel like you’re no longer in control of your inhalation or exhalation at all. This can a little tricky, of course, and there’s nothing wrong with subtly guiding your breathing if you feel like you can’t let go entirely at first. Still, your ultimate goal should be getting to the point where you feel like you’re just watching yourself breathe, rather than actually making the in-breaths and out-breaths happen manually. Once you reach this state, you’ll notice pretty quickly that your breaths will naturally become very shallow, and you might even start worrying that you aren’t breathing enough. But don’t worry, there’s no risk of self-imposed suffocation! You’re just entering a state of relaxation and focus where your body’s need for oxygen is lower than you’re used to. If you really feel uncomfortable, you can always slowly lengthen your breaths to get more air - just don’t take one big gulp all at once, or you might throw yourself out of the peaceful state you were entering right as it was just getting good.
What should I do with my eyes during meditation?
This might seem like a weird question to ask, considering the vast majority of meditators keep their eyes closed the entire session. But exactly how you keep your eyes closed really matters! You don’t want to be squeezing them shut with a lot of extra effort, which is something a surprising number of meditators tend to fall into without thinking. To counteract this, it can help to start a meditation session by intentionally relaxing your facial muscles and letting your lids fall naturally. It’s even okay if they don’t close all the way and you still see a little bit of what’s in front of you on the bottom edge of your vision. Give it some time, and they’ll eventually close by themselves - but even if they don’t, it’s really not a problem.
Another habit to watch out for is inadvertently “pointing your eyes” towards whatever part of the body you’re focusing on. As someone who tracks their breathing at the tip of my nose, sometimes I’ll start to feel a little sore and realize I’ve slowly gone cross-eyed! Having your eyes held downwards or to either side can lead to headaches and strain over time, so make sure to keep them unfocused and looking straight ahead at the back of your eyelids. This is especially important when you start to scan the body, since any unconscious eye movement back and forth can really short-circuit the developing feeling of peace and stillness. If your attention on some particular body part ever feels a little rigid or unpleasant, or you’re having trouble transitioning from that body part to a more open, full-body awareness, take a second to check in on where your eyes are; chances are, mindfully bringing them back to that forward position will help relieve the tension.
What should I be thinking during meditation?
Unfortunately, there tends to be a stereotype in western culture that meditation is just about “emptying your mind” until you’re completely thoughtless. But this is actually really bad advice for jhana meditation. Rather than trying to empty your mind until it’s entirely devoid of thoughts at all, your goal should actually be to do the opposite: You want to fill your mind completely with the breath, until every aspect of your cognition is aimed at it in some way. Many new meditators burn themselves out immediately by trying to tamp down anything and everything that isn’t some pure, unadulterated awareness - but five minutes into a meditation session, you aren’t at the point where conscious thought or conceptual analysis is something to be avoided.
In other words, don’t feel bad about thinking! You should absolutely be making mental remarks like “Hey, I feel the breath on my nostrils a little better when I lean forward” or “Hm, I just realized my shoulders were a little tensed up,” and you should absolutely be asking yourself questions like “How does it feel when I inhale like this?” or “When I focus on my chest, is the breath more noticeable when rising or falling?” As you get deeper into meditation, this sort of thing will fade away and be replaced by a more direct, unmediated awareness. But as long as you’re thinking about anything, you should make sure it’s the breath. That’s why I encourage meditators to make this commitment to themselves: With every single in-breath and out-breath, I’ll notice at least one thing about how my body felt. You don’t necessarily have to say each observation in your head as a full sentence, but you should think it concretely enough that you’re crowding out other distractions from your mental space until your focus deepens.
What should I do if I lose focus, or can’t get focused to begin with?
At the beginning of every meditation session, there will be at least a few minutes where keeping your attention on the breath feels like a real chore. You’ll find yourself hopping between all sorts of weird stuff - the temperature of the room, lines from TV shows you just watched, embarrassing moments from second grade, whatever - and having to pull yourself back to the breath over and over again. You definitely won’t get a hit of peace and clarity right away. In fact, your mind might feel even more scrambled than usual for a bit! This is perfectly normal, and actually a really good sign. When mindfulness starts to develop, it makes the sensation of your breath a little more vivid, but it also makes everything else going on in your head a little more vivid too. This can make things feel like a bit of a free-for-all until enough concentration develops enough to narrow your focus. Don’t get discouraged! Once things settle down and your breath grows calmer, those other thoughts will start to fade away and you’ll be able to really lock in.
Still, it’s inevitable that you’ll sometimes lose focus on the breath and start to think about other things, even deep into your session. That’s perfectly fine! But whenever you do realize that you’ve drifted away, you need to reset and come back immediately. I can’t stress this particular point enough: By far the most effective skill you can develop at the beginning of a meditation practice is the ability to cut off a train of thought the moment you realize you’re on it. If you realize you’re thinking about a movie you saw last weekend, don’t let yourself keep going until the scene you’re imagining finishes; if a funny idea for a tweet pops into your head (talking to myself here) then you can’t think, “Okay, I’ll get back to the breath once I get the wording right.” Mindfulness and concentration are resilient qualities that can survive even a bunch of momentary digressions, but actively deciding to abandon the breath will really set you back. So whenever you realize you’re not on the breath, just stop - don’t think about what was distracting you, don’t beat yourself up for letting it - and come back, no matter how many times it takes.4
How can I make my concentration deeper?
There are dozens of little tips and tricks for building concentration during the early stages of a meditation session, but I'll just cover two big ones that will be very useful when you’re just starting out. The first is counting as you inhale or exhale, which can really help to keep you tethered to the breath and prevent you from drifting off to other things. I like to go from one to eight and then back down again, but it might be better to start with a smaller number like five if you find yourself losing track too quickly. You can count when you breathe in, or when you breathe out, or during the moment in between. Just make sure that you don’t start stretching out the “ooooonnnne, twwwooooo…” in your head to fill up the whole breath - if you try to match them up perfectly, it’s too easy to let the counting control the breath and not the other way around.
Another thing that can really help is having a word or short phrase to mentally recite on each in-breath and out-breath. What word you pick doesn’t really matter, as long as you have something to engage yourself with so you keep your focus steady and your mind free of distracting thoughts. One popular word that’s often used by meditators in the Thai tradition is the Pali term ‘buddho,’ with the meditator thinking ‘boo’ on the in-breath and ‘doh’ on the out-breath. Personally, I like to use the phrase, ‘not me, not mine,’ which I split over two cycles of breathing - ‘not’ when I breathe in, ‘me’ when I breathe out, ‘not’ when I breathe in, ‘mine’ when I breathe out, and then repeat. I’ll also sometimes use the three-part cycle “I am nowhere, I am no one, I am nothing,” with each line being mentally repeated across one entire breath.5 Feel free to experiment with whatever words or phrases work best for you! Just be willing to drop them gently once you feel like your concentration is deep enough - at a certain point, they can start to hold you back.
How do I know when my concentration has developed enough?
After a period of consistent practice, you’ll reach a point where your attention really settles down. Some meditation teachers call this stage “access concentration,” but I’m not convinced that concept is actually very helpful. It’s better to just think of this as the period where your breath is the dominant, but not sole, object of your attention. You’ll still have distracting thoughts and sensations pop up from time to time, but they’ll be largely in the background - they’ll be things you think about while you’re watching your breath, instead of things you think about instead of watching your breath. Even this level of stillness and concentration, which is much weaker than the experience you’re ultimately aiming for, can be refreshing and enjoyable. So once you feel like you can consistently reach this point, feel free to celebrate!
There are a few helpful ways to recognize that you’re in this stage. The one that was most obvious to me is that your mindfulness will “catch” the intention to do something before that intention actually triggers a response. You’ll notice the sensation of saliva in your mouth, for example, or an itch on your arm, and instead of automatically swallowing or moving to scratch it, you’ll just sit there with the intention until you make a conscious decision to do so. You’ll also find yourself becoming much less sensitive to sensations in the first place, which makes long periods of meditation much easier. You might notice that the thoughts you still have become much more like discrete full sentences than one long, rambling stream of consciousness. And finally, your breath will most likely get shallow enough that you no longer feel it at the rim of your nose (or wherever else you’ve been watching). Instead, you’ll just feel a general pleasant sensation of expansion and constriction, and your awareness will naturally spread to cover every part of the body that moves as you breathe. It’s during this period when, with enough practice, you’ll start to feel piti.
Part 4: Reaching Jhana
(Note: If you’re reading through this whole guide all at once, having never meditated before, a lot of what I’m going to say in this section might be totally incomprehensible. It’s hard to perfectly describe any of these experiences to someone who’s never had them before, and without that context, I don’t blame you for being a confused or weirded out. But don’t worry - if anything here seems bizarre, or a little goofy, just put it aside and focus on the more down-to-earth stuff we covered earlier. As you become more comfortable with deeper states of concentration, and begin to experience piti for yourself, the strategies I’m talking about here will hopefully start to make more sense. For now, just know there’s a huge amount of joy and peace waiting for you down the road, and don’t worry too much about it!)
What is piti?
As I mentioned briefly at the start of this guide, piti is a pleasurable sensation that arises when your mind becomes sufficiently calm and focused. Every person is going to experience piti a little differently, and even the same person can sometimes get distinct “flavors” from one session to the next. Generally though, most meditators first feel it showing up as a gentle tingling in their chest, face, or hands. (Speaking for myself, feel it most often in my thighs and down through my knees, but I’ve been told that’s relatively rare.) During the initial stages of your practice, it’s very likely that you’ll only experience piti in short bursts, and oftentimes the feeling will be so intense that you’ll get overexcited and lose your focus. But that’s totally normal - just keep practicing, and eventually you’ll grow familiar enough with the sensation that it will gently stabilize, and even start to grow, as you continue to patiently watch your breath.
How can I use piti to reach jhana?
The classic answer to this question comes from the Samadhanga Sutta, where the Buddha uses a very vivid (but admittedly outdated) illustration to explain the process:
Just as if a skilled bathman or bathman's apprentice would pour bath powder into a brass basin and knead it together, sprinkling it again and again with water, so that his ball of bath powder — saturated, moisture-laden, permeated within and without — would nevertheless not drip; even so, the monk permeates, suffuses and fills this very body with the rapture and pleasure born of withdrawal. There is nothing of his entire body unpervaded by rapture and pleasure born from withdrawal.
— from the Samadhanga Sutta, AN 5.28, translated by Thanisarro Bhikkhu
What’s being described might sound a little strange to us, because nowadays no one uses bath powder. But at the time of the Buddha, they didn’t have the kind of soap you buy today in bars. Instead, there was a dry powder you slowly mixed with water until you had a big soaking lump to clean yourself with, a little like how you might knead wet and dry ingredients together to make bread dough. When it comes to meditation, your physical body is the powder and piti is the water - to reach jhana, you need to consistently suffuse that body with the pleasantness of piti until every square inch is smoothly saturated, until “there is nothing of your entire body unpervaded by rapture and pleasure.”
I love this illustration because it perfectly captures just how hands-on and physical the process of jhana meditation is. While you certainly can just sit back and passively let the piti spread, the real fun comes from rolling up your sleeves and actively working it into your body until everything everywhere feels good. Of course, this doesn’t mean you’re nervously scanning up and down with a critical eye, desperate to bring on jhana as fast as possible; that kind of attitude is a surefire way to make sure you never get there! Instead, try to think of it more like a playful, good-natured competition with yourself, where the goal is to see just how much pleasure and joy you can experience at once. It’s important to remember that, even if you never reach a jhana state in your regular, daily practice, just the opportunity to play around with piti is enough to make a session more than worth it. That’s what this period in your meditation practice is all about: Balancing a wholesome desire to achieve your meditation goals with a genuine commitment to letting go of any expectations and engaging immediately and uncritically with whatever comes to pass.
How can I spread the piti throughout my whole body?
Once you’ve identified a relatively stable patch of piti somewhere on your body, you can start trying to mentally “stretch them out” as far as you can. If you’re feeling piti in your chest, for instance, try gently “tugging” that piti up to your shoulders, and then down your arms. It might take a bit to get used to, but with enough practice, the piti will start to follow your awareness and extend down whatever path your attention takes. (You can even imagine some simple object, like a small sphere or bright point of light, that pulls the piti along if it helps.) Keep doing this over and over again - remembering to keep centered on your breath the whole time - until you feel at least a little bit of piti across every major region of your body. Finally, once you feel like your whole body is covered, return back to your full-body awareness until your piti and your breath become completely indistinguishable. When you breath in, feel the piti expand with you, until your entire body is a perfectly round sphere of pleasure; when you breath out, feel the piti contract with you into a single, infinitely precious point at your center. Bask in this experience long enough, having completely let go of anything else, and the first jhana is guaranteed.
As you go through this process, it can also help to occasionally pause and fill your mind with anything positive or wholesome: Loving thoughts towards family or friends, gratitude towards anyone who’s helped you in life, or just general feelings of goodwill and compassion towards the entire world. Personally, whenever I hit a “blockage” somewhere in my body that piti just can’t seem to get through, I’ll back off for a moment and spend some time imagining my wife and I telling our child we love her while she smiles back and laughs. Nine times out of ten, after a few minutes soaking up the joy that image brings, the blockage disappears! You can even pick someone in your life who you really don’t like - maybe a politician, or a childhood bully, or a particularly annoying coworker - and try conjuring up as much compassion and care for them as possible, just so you can feel the true depths of your goodwill. Normally, you don’t want to be entertaining these feelings instead of the breath, but rather alongside it, as though they were one and the same. But if you try out this strategy and find it’s really effective for you, then you might want to experiment with dropping the breath entirely and making those feelings your central meditation object.6
How do I know if I’ve reached jhana?
You’ll definitely know when you reach jhana - it’s the kind of radical change in your conscious state that you couldn’t possibly be unsure about. But a good sign you’re getting close is when you begin to feel your mind entering a “feedback loop,” where the physical sensation of piti in your body and your internal experience of joy and peace start building on each other at a rapid pace. During this critical period, which usually lasts only a minute or two, it’s very common to experience an elevated heart rate and even some bodily tremors or flashing lights in your visual field. But don’t worry! Those physical reactions are perfectly normal, and learning to let go of every last desire and accept them with equanimity and calm is the final skill you’ll need to develop in your practice. It’s hard to give specific advice for navigating such an indescribable experience, but remember: You don’t have to do anything. Just give yourself over entirely to the rapture you’re immersed in, let go of any distractions, desires, expectations, or fears that might still remain, and let the piti do its thing.
Eventually, with enough practice, you’ll be able to consistently enter and remain in the first jhana, basking in an infinite flow of pleasure for as long as you’d like. While this isn’t the final station in a meditator’s journey - there are seven more jhanas to explore if you’d like! - it’s a wonderful achievement you should be proud of, and a constant source of joy and peace you can rely on for life.
Closing Thoughts
Hopefully, this guide has been helpful for anyone who is interested in beginning a meditation practice that will eventually take them all the way to experiencing jhana. If you’ve followed me through the entire thing to end up here, I want to express my gratitude to you and wish you the best in your journey. If I could close with one thought, or really just one word, it would be this: Experiment! Jhana meditation is an intensely personal thing. I’ve done my best to lay out methods and strategies that have worked well for me, but it might be that your mind and body respond very differently. The best thing you can do for your practice is to make a commitment that every single session, you’ll try something new: A slightly tweaked posture, a new phrase to repeat, a different part of the body to focus on, whatever. Then take what works and toss out what doesn’t until you have a routine that’s perfect for you. I truly believe that jhana is open and available to every human being who can sit still and breathe, and I wish you the best in your practice - so much joy and happiness is waiting.
The Pali suttas are the oldest existing Buddhist scriptures. Think of them a little like chapters or verses in the Christian Bible - they’re mainly collections of stories, speeches, teachings, rules, and so on. The only difference is that the Pali suttas are absolutely massive, with a full unabbreviated copy coming in at easily a thousand pages or more. They’re also written in the relatively obscure dead language Pali, which is where the name comes from.
‘Bodily fabrications’ is just a slightly archaic way that Pali translators refer to anything related to the physical body; in this case, you could just replace it with ‘the body’ or ‘bodily activity’ and the meaning would be the same.
If you’re still unsure about what posture would be best, Wildmind’s posture workshop is a great resource to help you work through the options.
This is, for the record, one of the many ways jhana meditation has positive benefits for your regular life: It shows you exactly how active we all are in perpetuating our own unproductive or harmful thought processes, and it trains you to let go of them more easily. If you struggle with anger, obsessive thoughts, anxiety, or other issues, it can really help!