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💬 Transcript:

Vince: I was a student for a few years at Naropa University, which we jokingly called the “Buddhist Harvard,” simply because there are only like three Buddhist universities—so by default, it must be an Ivy League one.

While I was there, they had this really interesting thing—I don’t think you’ll find it on any other college campus in the world—called the Maitri Rooms. Maitri is Sanskrit for “Loving-Kindness.” The Maitri Rooms were designed to be spaces where you could go meditate in a room that had a single color theme. There were four different rooms—yellow, red, blue, and so on. They basically mapped onto the kasinas that we’re working with here, though I’m not one hundred percent sure that’s the case. But they were very similar.

Each room wasn’t just painted in one color; everything was that color. The carpeting, the walls—everything. And, in addition to that, each room had a unique physical shape. They weren’t just square boxes. They were shaped intentionally to evoke some particular quality of mind. That was the purpose of the Maitri Rooms—to go into these spaces where the environment itself invokes a certain state in you, leaning you toward that state through both color and shape.

There are a lot of parallels here with the work we’re doing now with kasinas—especially the color kasinas. It’s an interesting thing to explore, this relationship between color and mind. I don’t know a ton about color theory myself. I know there are different theories and they don’t all agree—like most theories.

Still, it’s safe to say color impacts perception. It affects how we see and feel. And in the Visuddhimagga—the Path of Purification—it’s said that unitary kasinas, or colored kasinas, are especially supportive for those with an aversive-type mind. That makes sense. As someone with that kind of mind, I can see why something unitary—a single color or shape—helps settle things down.

Part of the challenge with an aversive mind is that you’re always seeing differences, distinctions—you’re attuned to what’s wrong or out of place. It’s a discerning mind, but one that lacks patience or compassion for what’s arising. The clear seeing isn’t the problem—it’s the reactivity that follows.

So here, we apply that same clarity to something simple: a circle, a colored circle. You can’t do much with a colored circle in terms of analysis. You can take an abstract teaching and spend days dissecting it, but if you just say, “Look at this circle—this blue circle,” there’s not much for the mind to hold onto. And that’s the point. It gives the mind very little to grasp.

Today, I wanted to introduce the Blue Kasina as a tool for practice. It’s the one I started with, partly because of that reference in the Visuddhimagga. Knowing my own mind’s aversive tendencies, I figured it made sense to start with an object that, for thousands of years, practitioners have found helpful for that temperament.

And I did find it soothing—very calming. Which shouldn’t be surprising, given how the color blue shows up in our natural environment. It’s the color of the open sky, the vast ocean—spaces that are expansive and tranquil. From an evolutionary psychology point of view, it makes sense that blue evokes spacious, open, calm states of mind. And in my experience, it really does.

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In the Buddhist wisdom tradition, the Buddha speaks of crossing to the “other shore” while swimming against the stream.

Phew. I’ve been feeling this lately. Have you?

A desire for freedom—and yet, at times, it can feel like the world is collapsing.

This image of crossing points to liberation… a freedom from certain kinds of suffering. And in this beautiful and dangerous world, I find myself wondering about a collective crossing.

What would it be like if we attuned to this sense of inner freedom together?
If we practiced together, might we also experience a kind of shared or collective freeing?

Within the tradition, there are many teachings that guide us from a self-centered orientation toward a deeper sense of interconnection.

Often, this has been framed as transcending the body or escaping the conditions of this life. Over the years, I’ve found myself questioning and gently deconstructing that view—wondering instead about evolution.

What if, as we access deeper layers of consciousness, we aren’t leaving our humanity behind—but actually evolving within it?

As we begin to recognize the capacity to witness our experience, something opens. We can move more freely in and out of the content of our lives.

And yet… witnessing isn’t the whole story.

What we think, feel, and perceive becomes more malleable. Discernment grows. But learning how to access the witness and remain fully engaged in our human life—that’s the real challenge.

To both transcend and include our humanity requires a deep reworking of our conditioning.

We might begin to celebrate differences more fully as the “other shore” becomes a kind of baseline. And still, the question remains:

How do we live in this wild and chaotic world—moving toward the other shore and back again—until the crossing becomes more seamless?

Until we can be fluid in our perspectives: I am. We are. It is.

A kind of shape-shifting in identity… where what is centered in experience can change.

So how do we cultivate this kind of freedom?

Recently, I was walking through Haarlem in the Netherlands when the bells of the great church began to chime.

Each night at 9:00pm, they rang and rang.

I imagined people hundreds of years ago orienting to that sound—perhaps feeling called into something larger than themselves.

A collective attunement.
A remembering that we coexist within something vast and mysterious.
A way of centering not just the self—but the field of life itself.

And of course, we contract too.

Moments later, I found myself thinking with feelings of anxiety:
“I need to get back before it gets dark.”

So what creates that sense of separation?
Between the universal and the personal?

How do we begin to recognize the patterns that lead to suffering—when we center ourselves too tightly… or even when we center something “greater” in a way that disconnects us from our lived humanity?

This is where I find myself turning again to the Buddhist wisdom tradition—and to the Pāramīs.

• Generosity (Dāna) – loosening the grip of self-centeredness

• Morality (Sīla) – aligning actions with clarity and non-harming

• Renunciation (Nekkhamma) – discovering the freedom of letting go

• Wisdom (Paññā) – seeing the nature of experience more clearly

• Energy (Viriya) – sustaining practice with steady effort

• Patience (Khanti) – building capacity to stay present through difficulty

• Truthfulness (Sacca) – practicing honesty with ourselves and others

• Resolution (Adhiṭṭhāna) – strengthening commitment to the path

• Loving-Kindness (Mettā) – cultivating goodwill toward all beings

• Equanimity (Upekkhā) – developing balance in the midst of change

These qualities—when practiced—may guide us toward that sense of freedom. Toward an “other shore” that reminds us our interconnection runs deep… perhaps even touching something timeless. And maybe, just maybe, they also offer very practical support for how we live together—right here, in our daily lives.

If the universal and the personal are truly connected, then it makes sense that these qualities could bring freedom not just “out there”… but here and now and together.

The practice can become:
How do we live in a way that remembers this connection—especially when we feel contracted, conflicted, or separate?

Over the next 11 weeks, I’ll be hosting 2 cohorts on this topic in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha.

To orient toward something larger.
To sense into this “other shore”…
And to live into the Pāramīs.

We’ll explore them both as expressions of universal qualities and as practical keys for living in relationship—in sangha, at a deep level… even in the midst of difficulty or conflict.

This is my hypothesis and I invite you into the experiment.

If you’d like to check out The Ten Paramis–without yet becoming a member of the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha–you can join the 1st session on either Wednesday, April 22nd or Thursday, April 23rd.

All are welcome to come and see.

Vince: So today we’re going to be exploring the five jhāna masteries. This is a teaching which, as I understand it, comes out of a text called the Visuddhimagga. So this is part of the commentary tradition of Early Buddhism. A thousand years after the Buddha was alive, people had been practicing this stuff for quite a long time.

They came up with these models and maps to describe what the Buddha was talking about when he talked about jhāna. Now, the Buddha never said all of these things. This isn’t a list from the Buddha. Rather, it’s a useful way of looking at what it is that we’re doing when we train in jhāna absorption meditation, and what the different skills involved are. I’m going to go over these different jhāna masteries and then also kind of weave in some stories of my own experience in doing this training.

The first of the jhāna masteries that we’ll talk about is called adverting. Now, this is a funny word because we don’t usually use it in English very often, but if you think about it, the opposite of to advert is to avert. So if you think about it — if you avert your eyes from something, you’re looking away. Advert is the opposite. You’re looking toward something. So we’ll start with adverting. If we want to learn how to train in jhāna, we have to be able to point our mind in the direction of the jhāna state. If you think about it, if you want to call someone, you have to know their phone number before you can reach out to them.

Likewise, you have to know the sort of jhānic address of the state you’re inclining toward. And you have to advert toward that state to call it up and to be able to see that it’s present. When we advert to the state, in a way it does emerge. It’s just that we’re not in it yet. So in a way, this connects with access concentration. Adverting is very important. We first have to call up the jhāna, whichever jhāna state it is that we’re working with, and you could say in a sense that mastery with adverting is developed gradually as you learn each of the jhānas and you know where they live, you know their address, you can advert to them — until you know where all of them live, or all the states that you’re trying to access, where they abide.

And you have enough of a recollection to do that. You can’t really advert to them if it’s just sort of random and happenstance that you’ll end up in the jhāna. Maybe someone guides you into it or you just randomly pop into it. But there’s not a sense of mastery yet because you can’t really call it up.

Another metaphor I’d like to introduce here that I found helpful is the elevator metaphor. So in practicing jhāna, adverting is like pressing the button on the floor you want to go to. And then of course the elevator starts working in your favor. Hopefully it’s working. It comes down, the door opens, and when the door opens — to me, that is the adverting.

You’ve called it up and now you see that it’s there. The natural thing next, right, is to enter into the jhāna in the same way that you’d enter into the elevator. So when we enter the jhāna, we are developing the ability to really, fully and smoothly and quickly gather our full attention into the state.

So this is the move from calling it up to going in, and now we’re absorbed. This is properly what you could call absorption. So we’ve entered the state. Now once we’ve entered the state, there’s another — it seems obvious in retrospect to say this, but there’s another thing we have to do, which is we have to learn how to abide in the state.

We’ve got to learn how to actually maintain this sort of uninterrupted, sustained, unwavering absorption without disturbance. Because if we can enter into the state, but then the second we hear a sound it pulls us completely out, or the second we have a stray thought it just yanks us out of the state — then we haven’t quite learned how to really be absorbed. This makes sense, right? It’s pretty logical.

I think here it’s also maybe useful to note that sometimes when we think about jhānic mastery, this is the only thing we’re thinking about — abiding in the state. We think, okay, the measure of my jhānic ability is how long I can be in the state, or maybe how complete it is. Because when we’re abiding in the state, it might be more or less immersive. If it’s really not that immersive, it’s a very light experience of the state — a very small amount of strawberry concentrate in a large glass of water versus the strawberry puree. If it’s that kind of thing, then well, we can abide there, but it’s not going to feel so solid.

Or you could be in the super hardcore Pa-Auk, exclusive jhāna estate, where you’re in it for like three hours, four hours or whatever it is. Or there’s even crazier stories of yogis who spend days in jhāna states. Let’s assume that those are probably true. There’s some kind of Olympic level people out there that can do these things.

Okay, great. That’s abiding, but that’s not all that there is to the jhāna. There are actually kind of warnings in a lot of these meditative traditions that come out of India — to not abide forever in the jhāna, because then you will die. So this next mastery is quite important.

You want to be able to exit the jhāna. Now, normally for us, we don’t have to do a lot to exit the jhāna because things are grabbing our attention and pulling us out of the jhāna state. But here, this is the intentional mastery of knowing when you want to exit and being able to do that at will.

Whether that is by setting a predetermined amount of time that you want to stay in the jhāna — what’s called an adhiṭṭhāna or resolution — or you actually are in the state, you’re probably not in a completely absorbed state. Say you’re in a light state of jhāna, and then you intentionally make the effort to exit the state.

The reason you have these resolutions, these jhānic resolutions, for the really hard jhāna estate — and especially the hard exclusive jhāna state — is because if you’re really in it, then you’re not going to be able to think consciously about it while you’re in it. So that’s why you have these resolutions, like, “I’m going to come out in an hour.”

To be honest with you, this has never been a really huge issue for me. I’ve never had the issue of being scared I’m going to be locked into jhāna. I know some people that are more like natural concentrators — this is probably more of a useful skill. But often the case is we don’t want to leave the jhāna when we’re in it. It’s not great to leave. So actually exiting is a useful skill also in terms of practicing non-attachment — of letting go of the state, of being willing to relinquish it.

And then finally — and this is very important — upon exiting the jhānic state, we can reflect on it and we can say, okay, what was that like? What did I notice while I was in the state? Were the jhānic factors present — the five jhāna factors? Were the hindrances present? What was I experiencing? Was it predominantly physical? Was it mental? You can kind of take stock in a variety of ways here in the reflection phase to see what was present and how the state was constructed.

This is important because the more we learn the basic patterns of how these states are composed, the easier it is to advert to those states. The more we understand the states, the easier it is to find them again, to locate them and enter them and abide in them. The more this becomes normal, the easier it is.

Now, my training in shamatha jhāna — before I realized that the vipassanā jhānas and the shamatha jhānas were really describing the same territory from two different perspectives — I had trained mostly in vipassanā jhāna. Working through the first four on the path to stream entry in that model. And after some years of doing that, I finally found I had some facility with that, some newfound facility.

At the time I was starting to work with Kenneth Folk. This was in 2006. And he said, “Vince, one thing you can do, since you’re in this phase of practice where you have the ability to move through these different states and you’re not stuck anywhere — this is a great time to learn the jhānas.” And here he was referring to the shamatha jhānas. And he explained to me, he said, “If you’re in New York, which is like where you are now with the vipassanā practice — New Jersey, just across the river, is where the shamatha jhānas live.”

It’s not far. You’re in the same basic location. What he was really telling me is that regardless of what practice or object you used to enter the jhānas, once you’ve done that, you’re not far away from entering these other jhānic states through a different doorway because you’re already inside.

It’s just a question of — you’re inside. Now you’ve got to find the room. That’s like the one you’re looking for. You’ve done the hard work, actually. So we reflect on the jhāna. I said that we can learn the patterns better. When we learn the patterns better, we can advert to these states easier. The more we do that, the more mastery we develop, the easier it becomes.

My training with Kenneth and Daniel — those are the teachers that I really did a lot of jhānic practice with, because they were really interested in that stuff — they had me doing things like, Kenneth taught me to ride the jhānic arc. He said, “Just allow the jhānas to naturally rise, to go up to the highest jhāna that you have access to.”

And then you’ll notice that then they go down back. And I don’t know if this is just scripted — like if he was telling me this and thus it happened — or if this is what normally happens and I was just tuning into it. To be honest with you, it’s an open question for me. But the reality was I was able to do that.

I was able to go up through the eight jhānas and then come back down, all without having to make a particular effort. I just kind of watched it happen. And that was really useful for me, for beginning to become more confident that I knew these patterns and that I could name them. And this isn’t — this is a lot like being able to learn the constellations, the star constellations, right?

Everyone can look up at the stars. But not everyone can name the patterns there in specific ways that others would recognize. So in a way, you could say these jhānic states are like the Buddhist wisdom tradition’s attempt to describe the cartography of the mind — to develop a kind of interstellar cartography of states.

And in that sense I find it helpful because... do constellations really exist? Perception is real. We’re always interpreting our experience, so we can’t avoid using schemas and maps and models. They’re really helpful for the kind of mind that we have, which is constantly trying to make sense of reality.

And so here I think they’re real in the sense that they’re helpful for pointing to things that other people can discover. Are they real in some absolute sense? Probably not. Or yes, you could say they’re completely real. Either way seems like a fine answer to me.

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This talk serves as an introduction to a 10-week Social Noting Facilitation Training, starting this Friday, March 13th–live groups meet from 12–1pm ET each week–in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha.

💬 Transcript

Vince: Wonderful. So, Social Noting. I want to start with, I guess, my personal story of how I encountered this practice in the beginning and then talk more about what the actual practice is. So, in 2010, I was living in Los Angeles. I was there for a year training with a teacher of mine named Trudy Goodman and teaching at a center of hers called InsightLA.

And at the same time, another one of my teachers named Kenneth Folk called me up, or actually as I recall, he Skyped me. We were Skyping, if you remember what it was like to Skype. And he was telling me about how he had recently discovered a new way of teaching his students how to do the Noting technique.

Now, if you have not heard of the “Noting Technique,” also known as Mental Noting, this is one of the classic and most popular forms of vipassana or mindfulness meditation that comes out of Southeast Asia. Specifically, it comes out of Burma, in the tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw, who is a Burmese monk.

And Mahasi taught this form of Mental Noting that he learned from his own teacher Ledi Sayadaw. And it is a very powerful method that employs the analytical mind. It uses the thinking mind in order to help one stay present with the constant change of experience. So this was the first form of vipassana that I really learned myself.

And by the time Kenneth Skyped me in 2010 to tell me he had learned this new way of teaching it, I had already spent some number of years going pretty deep on the practice myself, including at least at that time maybe four months of silent retreat practice where all I did was this silent noting technique.

So at that point, I had probably put thousands of hours into this practice. And the way I had learned it, which was the same way that Kenneth learned it, which is the way that the tradition teaches it, is that you do this practice to yourself internally, in silence. You may be on a retreat with other people, as I was for four months, and I never heard myself or anyone else say anything. It was all internal. From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, the instruction was to just note internally, moment to moment, whatever you are experiencing.

And what Kenneth did, which in retrospect was actually quite simple but was also kind of shocking because of the tradition that he was having to kind of work against — he just said, “I’ve learned how to do the practice out loud with other people, Vince, and it’s way better as a way of teaching.”

I had just started teaching myself at this time. That was appealing to me. Oh gosh, if I could find a better way to teach this stuff, then maybe I will be a better teacher. And if you have ever taught yourself in any context, you will know that for the first year or two of teaching, we are pretty much all kind of crappy teachers. We are learning still the basics of teaching. We have not quite become confident in what we know, even if we have trained a long time.

It is different to train in something and practice in it than it is to share it with others, and be at least partially responsible for the impact that has. So I was a really insecure teacher, a new teacher, and I thought, great, if there is a better way to teach, I am a hundred percent open. But what was kind of weird about what Kenneth did is he went against what I now realize is a cultural taboo in the Early Buddhist monastic tradition.

Actually, two taboos wrapped into one. The first taboo being, meditation is something that you do in silence, for the most part, or at least serious meditation. Maybe there is a little chanting at the end of the day at a retreat center, but for the rest of the day you are doing the serious work of introspecting.

And if people are speaking out loud, especially in a silent retreat context, that is considered a distraction. That is something that is going to disrupt your practice, not support it. So to meditate out loud was going in a completely opposite direction of the conventional wisdom — that meditation is something you do in silence, and it is something that you do by yourself.

You do it individually. It may be useful to go on retreat with other people. That helps get the cost of a retreat down and makes it easier in a sense to serve everyone. And you get the added benefit of doing this with other people. There is a very real social benefit, even if you do not talk to anyone or make eye contact, which are the instructions on a traditional noting technique retreat. You still have the benefit of knowing that you are not completely alone in doing it. But in a way you are alone, because you are not connecting with anyone really. And the idea being that you are developing your own practice as an individual.

So Kenneth had to break both taboos — the taboo of individuality and the taboo of silence — that were sort of just assumed to be right, in order to develop this technique. And that to me is the real innovation here.

What happens when you do this practice out loud, as Kenneth suggested — it is much easier to learn how to do the practice. And it is much easier, if you are in a teaching role, to be able to give someone feedback, because you can actually see how they are doing the practice.

You can demonstrate it yourself as well. You can show someone, “Oh, this is what it is like to practice out loud, to do this technique.” And if you see someone demonstrating something that they have done for thousands, or maybe tens of thousands of hours — someone who has achieved a certain level of mastery with respect to a technique — it is very, very useful.

I mean, if you think about it, most things that we learn in life are like that. We can see someone demonstrate the skill. Meditation is one of those weird things where, if it is done in silence and it is done individually, it is almost like it exists in a kind of black box of your own mind.

Like the black box in an airplane. We have to somehow find a way, I think, to externalize the practice in order to make it more pedagogically useful. The thing that Kenneth had not expected was that it also made the practice social. When he first started teaching me this practice, he called it Ping Pong Noting, and then after some time realized, “Oh, actually no, this is Social Noting.”

And if you know Kenneth or know anything about him — in a way it is super ironic that he developed Social Meditation, because that is not really his orientation. He is a self-described autist and is a hermit. And so I think it surprised him as much as anyone that this made this a social practice.

For me it was such a huge revelation. It was so timely and so useful, not just because it helped me become a better teacher, which it did, but more because it helped me bridge the gap that I had known was there but did not know how to bridge — which was this gap between long-term intensive silent retreat practice and living a normal day-to-day life as a lay person, having a job, being in a committed relationship.

Now I have a kid — at the time I did not — but it is like all of the things that we contend with as modern people. I did not really know how to bridge the gap between the deep introspective practice I had done and the kind of life that I wanted to live. And so in a lot of ways I felt, in that context, a little schizophrenic — like I am these two different experiences and they do not really connect.

So for me, Social Noting became a bridge between deep introspective practice and just living in the world, and all the craziness that comes with being a modern person. And it helped me kind of connect those two in a way that they did not feel so far apart.

I think what happens when we meditate alone is we get really good at introspecting. This for sure was the case for me, where I got extremely good at turning attention inward. If you hear someone say, “Hey, we’re going to meditate,” and your first inclination is to sit up and turn inward, you have developed the same habit I had.

And it turns out that habit, while great in many ways, leaves out everything outside of your experience. It does not include it in the scope of meditation. So that means your environment is not really included, unless you hear sounds or see things. If your eyes are closed, it is going to be hard to do that.

And those things are usually considered to be a distraction if they pull you out of your experience, right? So any external phenomena is not really included. We tolerate it as introspectives. We tolerate it, but it is not really included. And other people definitely are not included. We have to include our thoughts and emotions and feelings about other people, because we cannot turn that off. We are social beings after all. But we do not explicitly include them when we do introspective practice. So we are not learning how to meditate with others, or with the world, on their own terms.

That is the devastating critique of Social Meditation, once you have had a real chance to practice it. And that was the critique I would give myself of my own early practice. I had a profound introspective capacity and not a very good capacity to remain stable and connected to others in the world around me. When I got overwhelmed by relationships, or by the world, I would just escape inward, spiritually bypassing essentially.

So these social practices give us other tools, aside from bypassing, aside from just escaping into ourselves. And I think that is extremely useful if you find yourself, as I do, in relationship.

Additionally, the whole approach of Social Noting is, as I said, a mindfulness practice. So what happens is our introspection becomes something more like what I would call interspection. When I first started to try to find a word that described this experience of being aware not only of my own feelings and what is arising internally, but also of what is arising in the space between people — internally and externally, inter, between — I could not find one. There was not a word there.

There is no word for that. That itself is interesting. So I coined the term interspection to describe that process of bringing attention to the space, internal and external, in between the two.

Now, if you are or have a tendency toward thinking in individualist terms — and I do not blame you if you do, basically Western culture is built on individualism — so it is deep in many of our bones, but not all of ours. Not all of us come out of a Western culture. Some of my ancestors were born in the Levant, in West Asia. I grew up in a family where this was not hyper-individualistic all the time. There was a huge sense of communalism. And from that point of view, it is really, really odd to see a bunch of people meditating in silence by themselves.

I am kind of remembering here that one of the nicknames for the Insight Meditation Society — this retreat center I went to often in Massachusetts — the local residents, as they drove past it, they would call it “The Zombie Farm,” as they saw people walking slowly in front of the building really slowly. To them that was weird — someone in rural Massachusetts driving by, seeing a bunch of hippies moving like zombies.

Yeah. From the point of view of communal living, it is odd. It is odd that someone would act that way. Of course it is not when you understand what you are doing there. But in another sense, conventionally, it is totally weird.

So Social Meditation — I also describe this as meditation for extroverts. I do not know about you all, but I am something like in between. I am an ambivert. I like being social and extroverted at times, and I like being by myself and not having any demands on my attention at other times. But some people who I have talked to about meditation, who are true extroverts — they really enjoy socializing. For them, the idea of sitting alone in silence sounds like torture. It is close to, “Would you rather be waterboarded by other people, or would you rather sit in silence by yourself with your own mind?” It is like, “Well, there are other people there, maybe...” Half joking, half serious.

For those folks, Social Meditation is the kind of meditation they should have been introduced to from the beginning. This is the kind of meditation we taught our five-year-old when he was back when he was five. This was several years ago. I think it is a terrible idea to teach young children how to meditate alone by themselves. It is much better to do it in connection and out loud, as a type of fun, almost game-like practice.

Social Meditation inherently is interactive because of the nature of including each other in a process. And what I think marks it as also being quite different is that you can share Social Meditation without necessarily having to be a teacher or authority.

Because these practices are based on simple protocols — a simple description of, this is the technique, here is how you do it. For instance, we are going to do a practice called “There is” Noting Together. The instructions are super simple. We are going to take turns saying “There is,” and then using a word or two to describe whatever it is that we notice in our experience.

You can also say “there is uncertainty,” or “there is not knowing,” or you can simply say “pass” when it is your turn. That is it. That is the instruction. So do I need to have spent 20 years meditating an hour a day and have gone through multiple teacher trainings and received authorization in a certain lineage in order to share that with another person?

Gosh, I hope not, because not many people are going to be able to do it. So these practices can be done and can be shared with others with very little experience, because they are peer-to-peer. The facilitator is an important role here in that someone needs to take responsibility for making sure that people know what we are doing. And it is useful if someone can answer questions, although it is not completely necessary to know everything. Sometimes you figure this stuff out just through doing the practice together.

But the facilitator is not an authority figure necessarily. They may be, like in the case today — I am holding both roles. I am a facilitator. I am here with you as peers, and I am also a teacher. And I hold my seat of authority in that lineage, I think appropriately at this point in my life. I used to shy away from it and be scared to be in a position of power, because I was scared of power. Turns out that is not a very good way to relate to power. It is good to own it and then to be responsible with it.

But as a peer facilitator, I do not have to be so concerned about that. If I want to share this with a couple friends and say, “Hey, I learned this technique, would you want to try it with me?” — there is not a whole lot you need to know to do that. Which is why I love sharing these practices with others and immediately empowering people to share these techniques with anyone they would like. They are open source. You can share them.

Of course you can go out and be someone’s meditation teacher as well. I am not going to stop you from doing that. I am not a gatekeeper. But just to acknowledge, there are very real challenges — there is a lot more challenge that comes with putting oneself in a position of authority than there is with just sharing something that you want to share with a friend. So that is another thing that makes this practice different, and I think that is extremely important to point out.

Social Noting, as with all forms of Social Meditation, represents a kind of meditation for the internet age. If you think about what it was like before the internet — if you were alive then, as I was — you will remember that media, for instance, was all broadcast. One to many.

We still, of course, have one-to-many broadcast media, so this is not old news. It is just that now we also have a lot of peer-to-peer forms of internet — social media. And Social Meditation really is an adaptation of broadcast, one-to-many forms of meditation — like the guided meditation, right, which would be the perfect example of this. The teacher sits at the front of the room and instructs everyone else on how to practice, on what to do with their own minds.

Here with Social Meditation, the facilitator says, “Hey, this is the technique. Does anyone have any questions about how to do it? Feel free to not participate if you do not feel moved.” And then, let us do it together. The facilitator is just another peer when they are practicing with other people. They do not put themselves in a special place and just watch everyone and judge them. No, they participate. They do the practice.

Why? Because doing the practice is the best way to model the practice, the best way to show people how it is done. And if you have experience, that is a great way to teach — just teach through doing it. And then we can learn from each other. There is not one privileged person who is the teacher. Everyone can be teaching. We teach through our actual practice. We learn together.

Turns out this is more effective, often, as a format for learning. Because if we are confused and we do not know what is going on, we just say “there is confusion.” We do not have to feel like we are doing something wrong, or we are not getting it. Because then two minutes later, we are going to hear someone else say “there is doubt,” or “there is fear,” or “there is anxiety.” Yeah. We are all experiencing that.

I really did not know what other people were experiencing on these long silent meditation retreats. I assumed they were going through something like I was, but when you look at someone just sitting there like a rock, you are thinking, “Gosh, I wish I was that equanimous and stable.” And we start to make up all kinds of crap. But if you can actually hear what is going on in their experience, you are going to realize, no, actually they are going through the same stuff that I am. We are in this together. We really are. There is no room for misinterpreting that.

Practice with us: We learn more, when we learn together. If you want to learn together with experienced teachers & driven peers, we’re welcoming new members to the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha.

Work with me: I have over 15 years of experience being a catalyst for other’s natural process of awakening & integration. Schedule a free intro call with me, if you’d like to connect & learn more.

“As long as meditation is defined as sitting silent and alone, it’s not going to catch on. We are human primates. We are social in our very bones.” – Kenneth Folk

Social Noting was originally developed by one of my earliest teachers, Kenneth Folk, a long-time Buddhist yogi & teacher who has spent many years practicing in the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition, under the tutelage of Bill Hamilton, where he mastered the art of Mental Noting.

Kenneth developed Social Noting while attempting to find more effective ways to teach the traditional methods of Mental Noting to his students. He discovered that by doing the practice out loud–traditionally, it was only ever done internally–he could hear how his students were practicing, thus enabling him to give them instant feedback on their technique.

Kenneth also found that by doing the practice out loud, he was able to model the practice for his student’s, giving them the instant benefit of seeing what it’s like for someone with thousands of hours of experience to do the technique. By taking turns noting out loud with his students, what he originally called “ping pong noting,” he discovered a much more effective approach to teaching tradition noting meditation. He also, inadvertently, ended up developing an entirely new approach to mindfulness practice, one that is inherently social.

Noticing vs. Sensing

While there are many definitions of mindfulness, I’ll describe it simply as the practice of noticing what you’re sensing in real-time. Social Noting, then, could be described as the practice of noticing what we’re sensing in real-time. The only real change, between subjective mindfulness and intersubjective mindfulness is the subject of focus. In traditional Mental Noting practice one is focused solely on one’s personal experience, while in Social Noting one is focused on the co-arising of experience between self & other(s). Social Noting shifts attention from a me focus, to a me + we (“mwe”) focus.

“Who we are is both within and between: Me plus We equals MWe, the reality of an integrative wholeness of our intraconnected lives.” – Daniel J. Siegel, IntraConnected

It’s important to point out the difference, in this way of describing mindfulness, between “noticing” and “sensing”. Both noticing and sensing are ways of knowing, but they’re different. Noticing is a way of knowing that includes cognition. To illustrate this, we can do a simple exercise. If you take the time to do this yourself, I believe you will get a clear sense of the difference between noticing & sensing. So to begin with, when you notice the palm of your hands, what is there? Well, in order to find out, we have to check…

There is tingling. There is warmth. There is an internal image of my hands.

There are things which I can recognize, and clearly identify with my cognition. I am noticing my hands. Now, what happens, when instead of noticing your hands, you simply sense your hands? Stop reading this, and take a moment to sense your hands directly.... 🤲

When I do this, and when I’ve seen other practitioners do it, what’s discovered is that the thinking mind goes blank for a bit, as it becomes difficult to describe what we’re sensing with words. The degree to which we’re really able to contact the sensations of what we’re calling “the hands,” itself a basic concept, is the degree to which we become immersed in a type of experience that is non-conceptual & immediate. We are sensing something that we typically relate to as “the hands,” but at a level in which the concept doesn’t appear to be functioning in the same way anymore. We are contacting direct sensation.

“There is a huge debate about what mindfulness is – Is it sensing or noticing? Intention on focusing on breath – requires differentiation of noticing vs. sensing. You use the noticing circuit to disengage the distraction and then use the sensing circuit to re-engage your focus.” – Daniel J. Siegel

The purpose of noting practice is to continually engage the noticing function of mind, to help us investigate direct sensory experience. Once we’ve become lost in sensation–often in sensations related to feeling or thinking–the noticing function of mind helps us to identify that there is wandering, distraction, or forgetting. From there, as Dr. Siegel points out, we can re-engage with direct sensory experience. Mindfulness practice includes both noticing and sensing, working together in a kind of virtuous feedback loop.

The Noting Spectrum

In the practice of noting meditation we often use verbal notes, or what are also sometimes referred to as labels, to help engage the noticing function of mind. One can note silently to oneself–aka Mental Noting–or one can note out loud by themselves–aka Out-loud Noting. Finally, if one notes out-loud with others, this is what makes the practice Social Noting. It’s also possible to drop the verbal notes altogether and practice non-verbal noticing, what has also been called bare attention.

Just as a reminder, the use of verbal notes is always in the service of noticing actual sensations, not in merely categorizing experience. Again, from the point of view of this practice, knowing can take both the form of simple cognitive knowing (i.e. noticing) and direct sensorial knowing (i.e. sensing). Or as insight meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein put it, the function of a note or label operates in much the same way that the frame around a piece of visual art does. The art frame is meant to draw our attention into the artwork, not to be the central focus. In the same way, a verbal note is meant to draw our attention into the direct sensory experience of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, feeling, and thinking. The words are not the experience, rather they’re meant to put you more deeply in touch with your experience! And with the practice of Social Noting, the practice is further designed to not only put you in touch with your experience, but also to help you contact the experience of others–to develop, as Dan Siegel puts it, both inner resilience and interconnectivity.

Learning Social Noting

One of the beautiful things about Social Noting is that it’s a peer-to-peer practice. Because it is not necessary to be guided by someone with decades of experience who has been authorized to teach, anyone can learn to facilitate the practice and do it together with others.

This is how I originally learned the practice from Kenneth Folk in 2010, and for the last several years, I have trained well over 100 people to facilitate these practices and bring them into whatever contexts matter to them:

• Into their homes with loved ones

  • These practices are particularly great for young children, who almost never want to sit alone in silence.

  • Doing these practice with intimate partners dramatically increases intimacy.

• Into the work that you’re already doing

  • Facilitators, Coaches, Therapists, Teachers, and Leaders have all found it a useful additional to their ecologies of practice.

Anyone can learn to facilitate and practice these techniques in a trauma-informed way. I’m happy to share that I am offering my first facilitator training in Social Noting in over three years, coming up this in March in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha. It is freely available to all Pragmatic Dharma Sangha members.

I will also be hosting a free Introduction to Social Noting session this Friday if you’d like to come and get a taste of the practice–without necessarily joining our Sangha–as well as learn more about what’s involved in learning to facilitate this incredibly effective & timely social practice.

Practice with us: We learn more, when we learn together. If you want to learn together with experienced teachers & driven peers, we’re welcoming new members to the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha.

Work with me: I have over 15 years of experience being a catalyst for other’s natural process of awakening & integration. Schedule a free intro call with me, if you’d like to connect & learn more.

First, let’s understand what the word “dissociate” means, literally, without looking it up in the DSM. Let’s go back to first principles. To dissociate means to stop associating with something—to stop being connected to it or relating to it. It is like when you are in a fight with a friend, and it crosses a red line, and you decide you do not want to be associated with this person anymore.

From the point of view being whole, this is a problem. When we dissociate from some part of ourselves, or each other, or the world, we are in an oppositional relationship, where we feel separate, disconnected, and fragmented from the whole. However, from the point of view of becoming whole, I’d submit that dissociation is a natural, and even expected, part of the process of growth & development.

Transcend and Include

This is a phrase I learned from one of my first mentors, Ken Wilber, in his approach to Integral Theory. He described development as a process of both transcending and including. For Wilber, this means first that we have to let go of something that we were previously identified with; and then, and only then, can we begin to include what remains.

Disidentification is transcendence. You realize you are not just that. In my experience, when I let go of an aspect of self, an identity, or a relationship that is no longer serving, I experience a freedom beyond that association. I realize that I am bigger than that.

The initial reaction to that vast bigness is both an experience of freedom, and a desire for that freedom to continue. We think we will lose our freedom if we associate with that old thing again, so we distance ourselves. We seek out the opposite, because we finally have a frame of reference outside of that claustrophobic relationship, and we don’t want to lose it.

In a perfect world, this process of transcendence would not include any dissociation. We wouldn’t split ourselves up in the journey toward wholeness. But I do not live in a perfect world; I live in one that is both perfect as it is, and as Suzuki Roshi pointed out, “could use a little improvement.”

The Process of Integration

Part of the natural process of development is to spend time in the transcendence phase before you are able to go back and include what remains. There is a period of agitated, rebellious growth, in which we don’t merely transcend the thing we were once identified with, we reject it entirely. Once we move through this phase, we realize that the part, or person, or situation we tried to get rid of is still present in some way. If we really want to be whole, we have to make space for it and embrace it as part of the whole—not embrace it as who we ultimately are, but as part of who we are.

This doesn’t just happen once; it happens again and again across a lifetime (multiple if you’re Buddhist). While some may experience instantaneous transcendence and inclusion—where something is let go and then instantly embraced as part of a larger whole—most of us go through a process of gradual rejection and then coming back around to integration. We realize we threw the baby out with the bathwater, even as we can also acknowledge that the baby needed to get out of the bath.

Pathologizing Dissociation

I want to apply this same logic now to people who feel dissociation is always bad and should be avoided. Essentially, they are saying we should dissociate from dissociation. This results from the adoption of the pathologizing lens of Western psychology. Western psychology exists to point out what’s wrong, to point out what’s dysfunctional. We struggle with integration and inclusion, in part, because of this conditioning. But dissociating from dissociation is not integration; it is an insistence that only one side of reality is true, that only one side is “healthy.” It is like a religious zealot who thinks reality can be effectively split into Good and Evil, while their view of God doesn’t yet include both. They imagine a small God who only loves one half of reality.

What if dissociation and depersonalization are better understood, not “Evil,” but as part of the generative dance that drives evolution? Can you consider the possibility that dissociating from dissociation, is itself part of the process of becoming more whole? If you could hold such a view, how would you include dissociation back into your experience in a way that honors its reality?

Practice with us: We learn more, when we learn together. If you want to learn together with experienced teachers & driven peers, we’re welcoming new members to the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha.

Work with me: I have over 15 years of experience being a catalyst for other’s natural process of awakening & integration. Schedule a short call with me, if you’d like to learn more & connect.

Practice with us: Brian is leading a 12-week live series on Shamatha Jhāna 101, beginning in late February, in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha.

💬 Transcript

Brian Newman: Everything in Buddhism and meditation has what’s called a proximate cause, which is fancy language that means the thing that comes first. And so the proximate cause for all of us to have suffering would be that we were born, you know, we got born and therefore suffering was part of existence, so we suffer. Ricky, what’s the proximate cause for concentration, do you think?

Ricky: Attention:

Brian: Attention. That’s a great answer. Some people, I’ve heard people say focus. I’ve heard people say attention. In the tradition, what we say is that “concentration is the proximate cause for concentration.” As silly as that sounds, the thing itself is what causes more of the thing. And so we did a little check in there and Siobhan was zero, but then she went to one in like 10 seconds and I’m guessing, many of you, as I was sort of saying, I was deliberately saying that the word concentration, kinda like I’m like hypnotizing you into concentration, the concentration got a little bit deeper didn’t it? So quickly. So it seems that just the intent to concentrate can cause concentration and a little bit can be turned into more.

So this is a really important first lesson for us about what the proximate causes for us getting concentrated are. What I haven’t done yet is welcome you, and it’s really important to me to welcome you all into this room. Many of you who I’ve met before and been through my whole Shamatha Jhāna course, so I’ll try to find ways to say things a little bit differently for you today, but also several of you who I haven’t met, and maybe you’re new to the community, if you are new to the community, want to truly welcome you. It’s a rare thing to be really welcomed to a place.

I’m teaching Shamatha Jhāna, which is a specific focused type of jhāna, while Vince is exploring all the different jhānas here with you. My Shamatha Jhāna class will be starting later in February, so you have plenty of time if you’d like to take that. My practice background is something like 15 years, mostly in that time has been in Asia where I was living.

My wife is Japanese, and I spent a lot of time in China and Japan and had the good fortune to practice with teachers in Asia, as well as some in America. My particular version of jhāna practice is the Pa’auk tradition, which is considered the most rigorous and the most concentrated we could say in the tradition, we would say the most absorbed, the hardest absorptions.

I’d love to start today to talk about some of the disempowering propaganda that is going to potentially be an obstacle to you becoming a master at concentration. And this stuff is kind of all over in the tradition, and it’s quite subtle sometimes, and I want to point it out and I want to really sort of question it here right at the beginning.

Concentration meditation for the purpose of our discussion today is simply the act of applying all of one’s attention or focus or awareness or whatever word you like onto one object, we could even say one point. If I stared at my headphone case for a prolonged period of time, I might enter jhāna. In fact, I’m sure I would enter jhāna.

It’d have to be a pretty long time probably, but this would work just fine to enter jhāna. Paradoxically, when we say putting all of one’s focus on one point, that one point can include every possible point. So it’s not necessarily small. We all think, we often think concentration needs to be small and tight. It can be vast, expansive, and boundless as well, as long as it’s just one thing, not many things that we’re focusing on.

In vipassana practice we focus on what’s arising in our experience, so the mind moves to capture what’s arising. This only produces what’s called ‘momentary concentration’. In a single pointed shamatha practice, we get to ‘access concentration,’ which is harder than momentary, and then we get into full absorptions where the only experience that one has is the actual experience of the jhāna in itself. All the other sense doors have gone away.

So some of this disempowering propaganda that I’d like to nip in the bud here is, first of all in the Visuddhimagga, which is a commentary about the Suttas, because the Suttas are very sparse. The Buddhist suttas don’t really tell you what to do. They kind of point to some vague stuff. The commentary that Visuddhimagga written about a thousand years later has lots of specific ideas about how to do these practices. The Anapana and concentration, the Pa’auk system of which I’m part of is taking this direction from the commentary, the commentary tradition, which came a thousand years after the Buddha.

So imagine that the Buddha was around and then his talks got recorded at some later date. And then for hundreds and hundreds of years, a bunch of really serious practitioners were probably living in caves or monasteries, and they were trying to one up each other on who could get the most concentrated.

That’s what the Visuddhimagga would produce, this massive book that’s essentially saying you think you’re concentrated. Let me tell you what real concentration is. And then somebody else, like, You think you’re concentrated? Let me show you what this really is. Just kind of taking it as far as it could go. So it’s sort of like if you’re going to aspire to something, the hardest thing within Shamatha Jhāna, you would go for that tradition, the Pa’auk tradition.

So here’s what they say in that tradition about the ability that, uh, the ease with which one can enter jhāna.

“Now, the preliminary work is difficult for a beginner and only one in a hundred or a thousand could do it. The arousing of the sign is difficult for one who has done the preliminary work and only one in a hundred or a thousand could do it. To extend the sign when it has arisen and to reach absorption is difficult, and only one in a hundred or thousand can do it.” And so that was just sort of, it’s difficult in the beginning. It’s difficult in the middle. It’s difficult in the end, which is in great contrast to what we often hear in Buddhism, which is good in the beginning, good in the middle, good at the end.

The Visuddhimagga is kind of harsh here, isn’t it? If you do the math on that, it comes out to about one in a million. So it’s saying only one in a million people could possibly get fully absorbed into this thing, that’s the best concentration thing ever.

It turns out that this is patently not true. Patently not true, first of all, because many of the people on this call have access to jhāna. I know because I’ve worked with them and they were one of 10 people that came to my class, so they weren’t one in a million, you know, they were one of 10 that showed up to take a jhāna class.

It is also widely known in Burma where the Pa’auk tradition originates from. Pa’auk was a Burmese monk and uh, has a monastery there. It’s widely known that the Burmese lay people get jhāna in like two weeks. Here’s what happens: In Asia, there’s a great reverence to the teacher, and one simply does exactly what the teacher says.

And the teacher often will give guidance about how to live your life, who you should marry, what profession you should be. And it’s very normal for a Dharma teacher, a Buddhist teacher in Asia. And so one just does what the teacher says. In Asian cultures, the teacher is widely respected. It would be very contrary to not do what the teacher says. So you show up at the Pa’auk monastery, you can be a lay person. The story that I hear is often about lay women who are housewives. So they’re not—the husband is working, the woman is a stay at home mother. And at some point the kids leave home and the mom’s like, I want to go do some practice, shows up at the monastery and Pa’auk Sayadaw offers the instructions, which are the only instructions ever for this jhāna practice, which are focus here.

The simplest thing, the only instructions ever. You can come take my course. We’ll spend 12 weeks unpacking focus here. We’ll spend 12 hours on focus here. The simplest thing. The lay people, the lay housewives are like Pa’auk Sayadaw, who we love and revere and he’s a teacher and he’s clearly the most trained monk in all of Burma.

If he tells me to focus here, yeah, I’ll just focus here. And they just focus there. And then two weeks later they have jhāna. This is like widely reported and widely known. They have very little hindrances to their practice because of their faith. Guess what happens with the Western practitioners who make the trip to Pa’auk monastery?

We can all kind of guess, can’t we? The teacher says, focus here. And then for all of the next teacher interviews, the Western practitioner will psychologicalize focus here, and they’ll talk about all the reasons why they can’t focus there, creating vast stories about their past, present, and future. To talk about what the teacher—rather than simply talking about the practice of focusing here—all of that papancha, discursive thinking, detracts from jhāna.

And then it takes 200 years, or 20 years, or 14 years to get jhāna where the Burmese housewife got it in two weeks. Other disempowering beliefs. Brian, you’re really good at jhāna because you have a special talent for concentration. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I might have a high pain tolerance.

I’m not even sure about that, maybe. Maybe I have a higher pain tolerance or something, but I don’t think so. I think it’s just time in the cushion. Other disempowering beliefs. This practice requires heroism, heroic practice. You must do really, really hard things to make it happen. I don’t think so.

It’s the simplest thing. You just focus here. Is it hard for you guys to do that in this moment? Just to focus here?

What’s your concentration level right now? If you’re going to scale it after 20 minutes of talking about concentration?

Other disempowering beliefs...

This requires past life paramitas. Past life paramitas are good, karmic actions that you’ve taken in previous lives that got you into this room today. I don’t remember my past lives, so I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but I think it’s magical and fun to think that way.

If past life paramitas were a thing, everybody that’s on this call right now has them, has great ones because you made it into this room to talk about the Dharma with me and Vince. Congratulations, how wonderful. This is so wonderful. Or maybe they’re not true. I’m not sure. But they’re definitely not required for jhāna.

Other disempowering beliefs: You must have perfected ethics. Your sila is the first training. You gotta nail all the sila stuff. Get that really pinned down, nailed down, perfected. And then, and only then can you progress to the next training, your concentration practice. No, it doesn’t work that way. In fact, the concentration practice of jhāna as presented in the Shamatha Jhāna way that I’m talking about, that is the ethical practice also.

That is the practice of ethics. This is called the Path of Purification, as all of us know, because you’re all meditators here, we sit down, we close our eyes, we try to focus on the simplest thing, focus here, and then a lot of other things tend to happen, don’t they? And the mind will go to where it often goes, which might be lust or greed, or tiredness or aversion, or just general lazy procrastination, or Twitter or Reddit or wherever our sort of poison of the day is.

If we had no hindrances, there would be no obstacle to concentration, right? This is the simplest thing. It should be really, really easy to do.

So, because the mind doesn’t go so cleanly to the object, and it does spin to all our preferred poisons, it teaches us exactly where the hindrances are, and if you like this language or not, some people don’t like the language about purification, use your own words for it, but it teaches us where we need to be purified.

It teaches us the work to do, so to speak. If we always flip over into angry rage against ourselves instead of focusing here when we’re trying to focus here, it might be a good idea to talk to a therapist about anger issues. We’re getting taught the psychological work to do. This is the path of purification, this does produce the good ethics, by doing this practice. Two more beliefs that you’ll hear from different jhāna teachers are if you’re not fully absorbed, it’s not jhāna. So that would be an incredibly binary way to think about it. This is jhāna, this isn’t jhāna. And that would mean that on a spectrum of zero to a hundred, there would be a flipping point where it flips over to jhāna.

Are you guys aware of anything in life that’s binary like that? I’m not. I think it’s all just happening on a spectrum. You’re like 10 jhāna, or you’re like 80 jhāna. You’re like a 100 fully absorbed jhāna. And then finally the idea that jhāna must be practiced in a linear order, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

No, you can cold start right into different jhāna. In fact, some of you will find it’s easier to get into a third jhāna than the first. Depends on your personal predilections in your idiosyncratic system.

So what if none of these disempowering beliefs were actually true? I don’t think any of those are true. We’ve all heard this like really difficult to get, get absorbed or get jhāna, I don’t think any of that is true at all. I’ve been investigating this for 15 years. And what if your mastery of jhāna simply obeyed some natural laws?

That’s what I’d like to propose to you today. The primary law being mastery of jhāna comes from doing a little bit more than everybody else.

Maybe a little bit more interest. A little bit more effort. A little bit more care towards the jhāna than anybody else. That’s what master is. We’re not usually born saints. We’re not usually born perfected, mastery based natural laws. Because I have so many people that have been through this with me before. I want to talk about this in a sort of a different way.

And part of this is to help you frame it for yourself, but also to help you frame it for other people when they say, “Hey, what are you doing on a Monday at 11? You’re like, I’m doing this Shamatha Jhāna. And they say, what’s that? And then you can talk about it. You can kind of teach people three different metaphors and it’s nice to have different ways to talk about stuff.

So I’ve been reflecting on the animal kingdom, and as Ben knows I like cats. Ben and I co-created the Shariputra’s Cat, which has become a lovely meme in this community. I think cats are also wonderful symbols of concentration in our natural world, and their ability to phase shift is quite remarkable.

So a cat can be walking along. I just saw this two days ago actually, I was watching a cat chase a bird, and it goes from just kind of naturally walking on to immediately crouched, pounced, incredibly still, and highly alert. Perfectly poised, totally still. And it can hold that position sort of indefinitely until it decides to move.

So I have a little slide I’d like to share with you here.

So this is AI rendition of Tom and Jerry, y’all remember Tom and Jerry, right? The thing that I think is kind of funny about this is if you’re a cat one-pointedness isn’t an attainment. It’s how you get dinner.

The posture of this cat isn’t soft, receptive, receiving, blissed out. It’s definitely not Fat Buddha. It’s not Fat Buddha. Fat Buddha is super chilled out. This cat is coiled, alert, poised. Can you see? Often in the Tibetan traditions they call—they call—they talk about the dancing stillness or the vibrant stillness.

Can you kind of see that in the poised cat there’s movement somehow even in the stillness. And then the object of this cat’s practice is the hole. How long will the cat stare at the hole?

I think the answer is until the mouse comes out. So some of you like Mark, who was with me recently on retreat, when you’ve heard about the nimitta, it’s kind of a nice metaphor, isn’t it? We would just look at it until the nimitta arises. The nimitta is a mind generated object that appears in your mental space if you do a lot of concentration practice.

So the reframe that I’d like and that I’m presenting with the cat is I’m reframing the motivation of why one would do this sort of single pointed practice. So this kind of changes from, I think meditation is something good and I should probably do it, I think it’ll probably have some benefits in the long run — or maybe even like before that, why should I meditate?

Kind of an open question, like, what’s the point? Vince is really good at this. Like, sort of framing that around what’s the point? Why, why are we meditating? What if we change that to, what are you hungry for? Like the cat is hungry for the mouse.

What’s the object that would encourage you to concentrate that hard?

Bitcoin coming out of that hole? Little bees pouring out, or gold coins or silver coins? Silver’s having a run right now, or would it be like a delicious beef bifana? Ben, Mitch and I were eating delicious bifana sandwiches in Portugal recently. Or could it, would it be like, you know, like Miles Davis would come out of the hole and that would be good enough for you to sit there and stare at it for four hours with nothing happening?

Knowing that was going to happen.

It turns out that choosing the object, so in this case the, it’s the hole for the cat. It turns out that choosing the object is incredibly important. And In the tradition that I’m talking about, the Pa’auk tradition, the object that we use is the breath.

In many concentration practices, across traditions, the object that’s used is the breath. The reason for that is often said that the breath is easy to use for an object because you always have it with you. You don’t have to carry things with you. It’s always there for you. But it turns out that there’s 39 other objects that are known to take you into jhāna.

I encourage you all to sort of consider that. If you come to Shamatha Jhāna with me, we’ll be working with the breath, but I encourage you to consider that. What’s my mouse hole? What’s the thing that would be compelling enough for me to spend a long time waiting for something to happen? Jhāna is a lot about waiting.

It’s about faith, persistence and letting it come to you when it’s ready. Nobody ever really reached out and grabbed jhāna, jhāna showed up for them.

Just to give you a little hint of what some of the objects are, and Vince is going to get really deep into this over the next 10 weeks with you all, you have different colored shapes.

So these are called kasinas, and they’re signs. You could have a red one or a blue one, or a yellow or a white circle that you would stare at. And that’s why I say if you stare at your headphone case for 10 hours a day for two weeks, this is just another version of a kasina. It’s a white kasina. You could just stare at it and you would get really concentrated and maybe after two weeks you would get drawn up.

I think many people that would happen for actually.

So maybe you’re an artist and you’re drawn to colors. Yeah, think about kasina practice. Maybe you’re a Sky dancer or a Shaman in training and you’re drawn to the elements. Think about the wind and the fire kasinas and the water kasinas. Maybe you’re really a heart-centered practitioner. It turns out that the Brahmaviharas, metta, mudita, karuna, upekkha, compassion, equanimity, sympathetic joy, these all produce jhānas. Those are part of the traditional 40 objects meditating on the body. So hair, nails, flesh. And specifically the foulness of the body is a strong concentration object. So plus blood, bile, feces, urine.

These are all part of the traditional 40 objects. Now, many of us would sort of wince at that and be like, why would we meditate on foulness of the body? In fact, in the monasteries where I practiced in Asia, they have books to help you do this. And these books are cadavers that have been cut up and they’ve taken pictures of them for the sake of the Buddhist practice, and they’re held in these books, and you’re meant to look at the picture, you know, really study it and then set it aside, and then you do the meditation with that mental image.

These are pretty hard books to look at. Now, why would anybody do that? Why would anybody choose to meditate on foulness of the body as their preferred object? Anybody have an idea of why that would be done? Feel free to drop it into chat, or if you’ve got an idea, you can just come off mute and say.

Look at those other more pleasant subjects — what about lotuses, roses? It attenuates lust and attachment to the body, exactly what Benjamin is saying. One of my teachers, Steven Snyder and uh, Tina Rasmussen were a married couple when I first met them. They since divorced, but when they went to practice with Pa’auk Sayadaw for the first time, they had just gotten married.

He had them face each other in the meditation hall and meditate on the foulness of each other’s body, what that practice is like. I’m, I’m going to be a little bit explicit here now, not because I’m getting off on it, but because I want to be super clear what that means. It means that Tina would look at Steven and then reflect fairly deeply on his feces and where they come from and the repulsiveness of that over and over and over again for hours and days on end for the newly married couple. Just kind of take that in, like, Wow. So Pa’auk Sayadaw, who knows why he offered them that practice, but maybe he saw something, there was some attachment.

He wanted to sort of send a message. I also don’t know Tina had just taken robes at that time. She’s since disrobed, she’s not a monastic, but maybe they were in the celibacy thing anyway, so that might’ve been a way for them to, you know, keep the celibacy tight or something. I don’t know the reasons.

And then finally we have fancy objects, fancy things that we can meditate on to fill out the list of 40. Some of those fancier things. The breath would be one of them. I call the breath fancy because it’s nuanced and there’s a lot of complexity to it.

In jhāna practice as one of the 40 objects, we take the breath as a concept. It’s not looking at all the subtle sensations of the breath and noticing all these things about it like we would do in Vipassana. We’re simply noticing the breath coming in and out as a concept. Breath, like everything is empty, we’re just assigning words to some sort of thing that’s happening, and we’re noticing that and not vipassanizing it and just letting it be sort of a concept.

Other concepts that we could meditate on would be impermanence. Some people might consider that a perennial truth rather than a concept we could meditate on, the Buddha. We could meditate on the Dharma and lots of other things.

Then there’s stories that break all the rules in the tradition. For example, one of the ones where the Buddha meets a person who he can see was a jeweler in the past life and knowing that person’s love for jewelry in the past life, the Buddha offers a Red Ruby or a Sapphire as a concentration object. And so that you could call that the 41st concentration object, but what that really means is any concentration object could work, most likely. It’s just that we sort of have a documentation around 40 traditional ones.

So back to that question for you, if you’ve tried jhāna practice before and you’ve thought, oh, the breath is boring, or I find it too dry, or, I really prefer the pageantry and craziness of the Vajrayana Tibetan tradition. Then what I encourage you to do is find an object that suits you. You know, take the fire kasina or pick something else that has a little bit more vibrancy to it, and that that might solve your, your dilemma of dryness in the practice.

What I’ll close this out on is just some of the things that one can expect from doing this practice. The first thing that you can expect to happen is that the simplest thing ever, focus here, turns out to be not so simple.

And so I’m saying that to normalize the difficulty that many people have in doing the simplest thing for some of the reasons I mentioned earlier. So it turns out the simplest thing’s not so simple, but the mind stabilizes over time. The next thing we can expect to happen is you’re going to start to get really good at darts.

You know, you go play like that game you play with darts and beer or whatever. You know, those bar games. Darts, pool, golf. Anything where you’re needing to focus on something with some clarity and then hit it or do something with it. I’m kind of joking here, but there’s these practical applications to jhāna practice, which you can start to see things really, really clearly.

I noticed in my practice that it built up, in the very early stages it built up my ability to work in Excel spreadsheets, which is not something that I love to do. It’s not my strength. I built up the ability to do it for very long periods of time or anything like desk work, whereas usually I’d kind of burn out after 45 minutes or an hour.

I would have to start to set timers to even remind myself to go to the bathroom and take bio breaks, because my concentration got so good. I don’t know if this is a good or a bad thing, I was sort of disconnecting and getting sort of disembodied, you know, because my concentration was so strong. But it’s pretty cool to go from, oh, I’m so tired of looking at this Excel to, you know, spending six hours at it and not feeling fatigued or tired at all.

I can say lots of other sort of like silly lay outcomes, but they’re not that silly. These all produce really, really nice improvements in quality of life. Here’s another one that I just thought of. It allows you to sit with another human being and not look away. Many of us are really, really bad at eye contact.

We flinch and we look away. Because you’ve stabilized the mind, you’ve stabilized the eyes for the practice of the system, you can just sit there and be with someone in a non-penetrating way, in kind of a nice way, and you’ll notice that about yourself. You notice that you stop flicking away, which we often do sort of subconsciously when our mind is not stable.

Our simple nervous system is broadly governed by a sympathetic and a parasympathetic response. Sympathetic is things that make us active, so drink some caffeine, activate the sympathetic response and get kind of, um, excited or energetic. Parasympathetic is the rest and digest system, and so this is what we feel after a big meal.

After making love, that sort of happy, drowsy feeling. It turns out that the parasympathetic system—well think about that for a moment. So sympathetic is highly activated. What would you do if someone was really highly activated like they were having a panic attack? If you see somebody at a Starbucks and that person just starts to have a panic attack,

most of us would probably go over, maybe we’d lay hands or we do something and we’d probably say some version of, “Breathe deep, take deep breaths,” something like that. Why would we say that? Do we even know why we’re saying that? It’s an intuitive human thing to say. By taking a deeper breath and exhaling longer, we’re holding more carbon dioxide in our body.

Carbon dioxide has a parasympathetic stimulating action to it. So it turns out that we tell somebody to take deep breaths, we are getting them calmer through the withholding of carbon dioxide. The same thing happens in meditation, and so jhāna practice is known to be blissful. This is going to produce really, really amazing things, incredibly esoteric, blissful factors of jhāna that I won’t talk about in detail, but I’ll hint at today.

One of the reasons these things arise, and one of the reasons our whole system and central nervous system gets regulated is because we’re slowing down our breath naturally. We’re not doing it on purpose. It just starts to slow. All of you in the room, I suspect, are meditators. It’s interesting to clock your breath sometimes, see what your breath rate is.

I predict for those of you who’ve been doing this for some time, you’re probably breathing five to seven breaths per minute. That’s what people tend to stabilize over longer periods of practice and that’s pretty slow. If you were going to try to breathe five breaths a minute right now deliberately, which would be about one breath every 12 seconds, I think that would feel difficult for you.

Maybe you would sort of be forcing, it might even start gasping if you tried to do that right now. But that’s what we settle on. So the slower breathing produces a parasympathetic response. Taken a long way that produces dramatic bliss in the body.

This is also a hint to us, which is if we want to be advanced meditators, maybe we should not follow that rule about not controlling the breath, and maybe we should try to control the breath once in a while to see if we can slow it down to stimulate the parasympathetic response.

I absolutely advocate that, and I’m in the great tradition of Robert Burbea who said, “Don’t control the breath? Control the breath. Breathe with pleasure.” Breathe pleasurably. I stand by that. If we can breathe pleasurably, please do. Other things you have to look for pain reduction as we move up the jhānic arc.

When I say the jhānic arc, I’m referring to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. We’re moving from gross to subtle. Up the arc, and as we move more towards the subtle, it becomes so subtle that the body starts to dissolve. And by the time we get to the fifth jhāna, which is known as the first of the formless jhānas, there’s no more form.

There’s no more body to experience the world as it is this flesh and bone system has essentially become non-existent in the experience of the meditator. And therefore any ache, pain, sprained ankle, shoulder hurting, tight neck that was experienced up until that point is completely gone, utterly and completely vanished.

What this means is the jhāna master, the jhāna practitioner even has access to OxyContin on demand. You never have to be in pain. Anything can be managed with your breath and your jhāna, including jail, including terrible situations. Pick something, anything that I’ve just said. I would only say if I’ve tested it out,

so everything I’ve just told you has been tested by me as holding up. Sprained ankles, various difficult pains, blood and guts, and jail. All of those are completely nothing when it comes to jhāna. Jhāna beats them. What this means is culmination of the Buddhist path, which has been said to be happiness beyond conditions, and so clearly jhāna is offering that.

The dilemma with jhāna that we need to understand here right at the beginning is that it’s something that we create. The causes & conditions have to be there for it, and that ultimately it fragments and vanishes.

Which can be a hard thing to bear when one has put a lot of time towards cultivating their jhānas. There’s a big, a really important message in the Dharma in that.

And then finally, what we have to look for are esoteric, mystical things that we can experience in our body. We would call these mind generated physical sensations, and these are called the jhānic factors. There’s five of them. The two that probably get the most attention and rightfully so are piti, which is often translated as rapture, which is not a word we use too much.

When’s the last time that you use the word rapture in a normal conversation? But I think you probably know what it means. The French have lots of evocative language and they call this frisson (F-R-I-S-S-O-N), and it means aesthetic chills. It’s that thing you get when you say, “Ooh, the hair on the back of my neck is standing up.”

I have lots of examples of this as you do you, um, one that’s coming to my mind right now is about two years ago. I’m living in Lisbon, Portugal. The Pope, the Catholic Pope, came to town. And Portugal is an incredibly Catholic country, as much of Europe is. And I think this is maybe like the first time he came in a long time.

It was a really, really big deal that the Pope came to Lisbon and I don’t know what they did, but they somehow like wired the city, this entire city, which is about almost a million people, where everywhere you went outside, everywhere I went outside, they had somehow projected the sound of angelic voices singing throughout the city.

And so it was kind of like one would imagine heaven, like I imagine heaven. So I’m in my office, and then I would just like walk outside and there’s angelic voices singing everywhere and I’m getting it right now. Every time that happened, the hair in the back of my neck would stand up and I’d be like, “Oh, this is, whoa, this is so nice.”

And that’s piti. The aesthetic frisson, the little bit of reaction to aesthetic beauty. Something really interesting about piti is just the memory of piti can bring up piti as it is for me here right now, just talking about it with you all. I think maybe the proximate cause for piti is concentration.

And then the proximate cause for piti is also piti. I urge you next time that your friend says, “That made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up,” or the next time that you feel that to take a pause and to notice that. And to steep and marinate in that feeling. Because what you’ve just experienced is a jhānic factor happening in just daily life. To notice that makes it more likely to arise.

And finally, sukkha is one of these five factors. People really like sukkha. This is the promise of jhāna, and when I say it’s on demand, OxyContin. OxyContin is a really strong pain pill. It’s like a drug pain pill that makes you feel really blissed out and euphoric. When I say that, I’m pointing to the sukkha aspect. Sukkha is often described, translated as bliss, and so what, what can I say about this?

In my experience, sukkha is to have the experience of being perfectly held by one’s perfectly ideal mother figure.

And how lovely must that be? Every time I meet it, it always surprises me about how beautiful it is. No matter how many times I’ve felt it.

If you plant a seed, a tree will grow. It is in the nature of seeds to grow into trees. If you focus on your breath at the tip of your nose, jhāna will arise. It is of the nature of human beings to experience concentration. This is not something that you can experience by listening to me talk about it.

And so what’s required at this point in your practice, if you don’t have access to these states yet, is faith. And in the Christian tradition, since we’re talking about Catholicism, the Christian tradition would like you to have faith about the next life, and that’s where you’re going to go when you die, and that’s where you’re going to hear the angelic singing and everything’s going to be really great there.

The Buddhist tradition is an experiential tradition that’s making an offer to you in this life, and it says, if you do this thing, even if it’s not happening yet, we promise you something’s going to happen and here’s what’s going to happen. And the Buddha would always say, “Don’t believe me. Come and see. Just come and see.” If this is interesting to you to maybe come and see what’s going to be required for your faith is to be doing something even when you don’t feel like it’s working yet.

To trust that drop by drop, the bucket will become full, and it’s to have faith in an ancient tradition, and the ancient teachings from that tradition. It’s to have faith in your teacher, someone who has done that practice that can tell you how to do it. It is to have faith in your concentration object, which has been used by human beings for many thousands of years, before the dawn of written words.

But the most important thing is to have faith in yourself and to believe that you can do this practice. And if you just listen to me talk for the last 45 minutes, you can do this practice.

Practice with us: We learn more, when we learn together. If you want to learn together with experienced teachers & driven peers, we’re welcoming new members to the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha.

What is Pragmatic Dharma?

What is it that we’re doing here?

On one level, it’s just a name—just words. But on another level, it’s a name that points to a specific orientation to practice, a way of approaching meditation, dharma practice, and really the question of what it means to be a human being. In that sense, it strikes right at the heart of what it means to be alive.

For me, the simplest answer to the question is this: doing what works.

That’s Pragmatic Dharma—doing what works.

It’s been super helpful to think about it as the coming together of these two ideas: Pragmatism and Idealism. I’ll have to acknowledge that although I’m kind of interested in philosophy and kind of geeky on that front, I never really read the Pragmatists. And maybe this is a very pragmatic reason for it—I didn’t feel like I needed to. What’s this about? Oh, doing what works? Yeah, I get that. So why read about doing what works? In that sense, I’m a pragmatic poser. But not in the sense that, from the very beginning of my practice career, I haven’t been interested in the question of, “What can I do that’s actually going to work?”

I don’t want to waste my time. I don’t want to fall into some kind of magical cult situation where everyone’s believing absurd things and doing rituals and practices for no good reason. I’ve always been interested in finding out what practices will actually help alleviate some of this suffering, some of this difficulty of being a human being—being alive.

I was very fortunate early on in my practicing career to meet Kenneth Folk as a teacher. I met him through Daniel Ingram, who many of you may know as the author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. At the time, Daniel was busy and wasn’t really teaching much, so he said, “Hey, listen, I’m super busy, but I can pass you to a friend I know who really knows this stuff.” I was very lucky to start working with Kenneth in 2005. Several years later, the term Pragmatic Dharma arose in the community we were both part of—the Dharma Overground—which we’d helped start with Daniel. Once that phrase arose and Kenneth identified it as the best way of describing the approach he was taking—and that I was so interested in—it just made sense. On the one hand, there’s this focus on doing what works, the pragmatic aspect. On the other hand, there’s the Dharma.

Practice with us: We learn more, when we learn together. If you want to learn together with experienced teachers & driven peers, we’re welcoming new members to the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha.

The Experimental Ethos

Kenneth often uses the metaphor of mixed martial arts, and I really like it. I don’t watch MMA, but I love the idea behind it: people from different lineages, techniques, and styles coming together and actually testing what happens when those approaches meet in real conditions. What’s fascinating is that, by running that experiment, a whole new hybrid form emerged.

I think of Pragmatic Dharma in the same way. We have all these amazing contemplative traditions and meditative approaches, and here we are trying them out—seeing what actually works. What kind of results do they lead to? Are those the results we want? Are they the results we need? And if not, how do we adapt?

Bruce Lee, who’s often considered a godfather of the modern mixed martial arts movement, developed his own martial form, Jeet Kune Do, in the 1960s, which inspired a lot of what came later. It turns out Bruce Lee was deeply influenced by Daoism and Zen. I came across a quote from him and immediately thought, This could just as easily describe Pragmatic Dharma. He lays out four principles:

1. Research your own experience.

2. Absorb what is useful.

3. Reject what is useless.

4. Add what is specifically your own.

Research your own experience—that’s meditation. We’re looking directly at what’s happening in our own lives. Absorb what’s useful from teachers, techniques, and traditions. Reject what doesn’t work. Life is short—don’t spend it doing something that isn’t giving you the results you need. And finally, add what is specifically your own. This opens up a different way of seeing ourselves—not just as preservers of tradition, but as innovators.

I once spent time with Ken McLeod, and he asked me a question that really stuck: “What do you preserve?” I gave a joking answer, something about preserving strawberry jam, and he said, “That’s right, you preserve things that are dead.”

Pragmatic Dharma isn’t about preserving dead forms, unless we’re consciously conserving them as a kind of seed bank we might draw from later. There’s value in conservation, but blindly keeping forms alive that no longer function isn’t helpful.

Bruce Lee described Jeet Kune Do this way: “Jeet Kune Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms. Since it has no style, it can fit in with all styles. It uses all ways and is bound by none.” You could replace “Jeet Kune Do” with “Pragmatic Dharma,” and it still works:

Pragmatic Dharma favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms. Since it has no style, it can fit in with all styles. It uses all ways and is bound by none.

This is a kind of ruthless pragmatism. Everything is fair game if it serves the end. If something works, use it. If it doesn’t, drop it.

But Works For What?

Here’s an important complication… Doing what works only really makes sense if we ask another question: Works for what?

We can be willing to do anything to get somewhere, but if we never question where we’re going—or whether there might be more than one destination, or more than one way to get there—we create a new problem. For some people, some of the time, Dharma can stand for a bunch of spiritual ideals: perfect enlightenment, perfect skillfulness, completely uprooting greed, hatred, and delusion. There are a lot of very beautiful and also lofty ideals in the Buddhist tradition. And having some idealism is good. We don’t want to just do something that works without considering the ramifications of what we’re doing and why.

So bringing together and wedding pragmatism and dharma is really beautiful. It’s a pragmatic-idealistic approach. There’s both that quality of wanting to find what will actually give us traction in practice and in our lives, and also a sense of not falling into a narrow view about what’s important and why we’re doing this.

There’s a helpful model from the Buddhist wisdom traditions that speaks directly to this question of works for what: The Three Trainings. In Early Buddhism, the Buddha talked about three basic areas of training. We train in morality or ethics, we train in concentration—sometimes translated as meditation—and we train in insight or wisdom. These three domains aren’t completely separable, because they’re all part of one life, but they can be distinguished as different areas of practice with different standards for what works and different outcomes.

Ethics: Living a Good Life

Doing what works in terms of ethics or morality means living a good life and being a good person. You’ve probably heard this before, or maybe even said it yourself: the whole point of this is to be a kinder person, to be a decent human being. There’s something very deeply true about that.

What’s the point if all you do is get really good at meditating and having deep, profound experiences, but then you get up off the cushion and abuse people or take advantage of them? That actually happens sometimes. That’s why these trainings are differentiated. It’s possible to be highly enlightened and still deeply immature in certain ways, where wisdom hasn’t permeated one’s activity in life.

Suzuki Roshi had a great saying: “Strictly speaking, there are no enlightened people, only enlightened activity.” That’s a beautiful pointer.

Doing what works with ethics can take many forms. There are countless ways to become kinder, to have healthier relationships, healthier boundaries, to be a better parent, or to function more skillfully in our professional roles. Dharma traditions have a lot to offer here, and as practitioners we can share what actually works when it comes to living a good life.

Meditation: Many Paths, Many Outcomes

What works in meditation is another question. There isn’t just one kind of meditation. There are many forms and many possible outcomes. In Pragmatic Dharma, practices like noting meditation (vipassana), and deep concentration (jhana), & are often highlighted. They’re very helpful, but we don’t have to stop there.

We can look at other meditative practices and ask, “What works?” Maybe using the breath as a concentration object doesn’t work for you. Maybe another object would. Maybe a technique developed outside the Buddhist tradition could work. We don’t have to be wed to a single tradition. That’s the pragmatic part: if it works, let’s include it—and actually see if it does.

Wisdom: Singular and Multifaceted

Then there’s the question of what works for developing wisdom or insight. It’s important to distinguish meditation from wisdom. Just getting good at entering certain states doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve developed deep wisdom or awakened awareness. It may just mean we’re good at accessing states, which is useful, but not the same thing.

Jack Kornfield, in an article called Enlightenments, writes that the Buddha taught many approaches to enlightenment, all as skillful means to release grasping and return to the inherent purity of consciousness. When consciousness is free of identification with changing conditions—liberated from greed and hate—it’s multifaceted, like a mandala or a jewel. Through one facet it shines as luminous clarity, through another as perfect peace, through another as boundless compassion. Consciousness is timeless, ever-present, empty, and full of all things. When traditions emphasize only one facet, it’s easy to think enlightenment can only be tasted in one way, when in fact it appears in a myriad of beautiful forms.

When we ask what works to develop wisdom, we’re exploring this paradox: awakening appears to be both singular and multifaceted. On the relative level of being human, enlightenment is capable of endless enlargement, and yet there is just one enlightened awareness.

And yet, even here, we have to be honest about the relationship between wisdom and intention. As Sharon Salzberg sometimes says, the Buddha’s enlightenment solved his problem. It doesn’t automatically solve ours.

Different teachers were driven by different questions. The Buddha asked, “What is suffering, and how does it end?” Ramana Maharshi asked, “Who am I?” Those aren’t the same questions, and they led to very different methods. When people come to me and say they want stream entry, I often ask a follow-up question: What do you want from stream entry? Usually, the deeper answer has nothing to do with stream entry itself. It’s a strategy, not the real aim. This is why many people are disappointed when they attain what they were chasing—it doesn’t deliver what they actually wanted.

There’s a Tibetan saying: Everything rests on the tip of intention.

Intention matters because it changes over time. When I became a parent, my relationship to practice shifted dramatically. I wasn’t aiming for deep retreat states anymore. I wanted to be kind, present, and not lose my temper. That change in intention reshaped everything about how I practiced.

As practice unfolds, we often move into new phases while still carrying old motivations that no longer fit. This is especially common around disillusionment phases, when what used to drive us—often a sense that something is missing—stops working. At that point, we need to reset our compass.

I think of practice like riding a bicycle. You might have a general sense of direction, but once you’re moving, conditions constantly change. You steer dynamically. You adjust in response to what’s happening.

Pragmatic Dharma is like that. It’s a continuous feedback loop: We practice. We see what happens. We honestly assess the results. We check back in with our intention. And then we adjust.

For Whom Does It Work?

Another aspect of doing what works is asking: for whom does it work? We’re not all the same. We share the same basic biological hardware, but we also have real differences. Pragmatic Dharma is open to the question of skillful means—what works for this person, with these tendencies?

Through practicing social meditation, a technique Kenneth developed, I began extending meditative awareness into relationship. I noticed that some people tend to be more self-focused, while others are more other-focused. I realized how self-focused I can be—how absorbed I get in my own experience.

For me, doing what works often means focusing more on others. Parenting has been very effective in that way. Pro-social practices like metta and heartfulness have also worked well for me. Someone who is more other-focused might benefit from practices that emphasize turning back toward themselves.

Ken Wilber once joked that in Tibetan Buddhism, where there are practices involving a hundred thousand prostrations, people who are already other-focused might be better served by doing a hundred thousand stand-ups—asserting their own presence and authority instead.

So Pragmatic Dharma recognizes that different—and even opposite—practices may work for different people.

An Appropriate Response

And then there’s the question of what works when, and where. One of the things I’ve most appreciated learning from Kenneth and from Zen is the idea of contemplative fluency—being fluent in different modes of practice, like speaking different languages. With practice, can we become fluent in our own experience at every level—from basic sensory experience to abstract thought? Can we know what level of response is appropriate right now?

Over time, even our deepest questions can change. Early on, I was obsessed with the question, What is true? Ten years later, that question barely made sense to me anymore. More and more, the inquiry becomes simpler and more immediate.

In Zen, there’s a famous koan where a student asks, “What is the highest and most profound teaching of all the Buddhas?” The answer is: “An appropriate response.”

Ultimately, that’s what Pragmatic Dharma is about. It’s the Buddhist idea of skillful means—upaya. It’s about learning how to respond to an unfolding reality that is timeless and ever-present, yet constantly emerging. And we are part of that evolutionary unfolding.

Practice with us: We learn more, when we learn together. If you want to learn together with experienced teachers & driven peers, we’re welcoming new members to the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha.

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Today, I want to talk about the dissolution of The Jhāna Community and the arising of the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha.

Almost two years ago, I started the Jhāna Community in response to some Jhāna Drama—what I saw as negligent leadership by some tech founders who were trying to secularize the practice of jhāna. I wanted to offer something better, a secular presentation rooted in the depth of the Buddhist tradition.

After two years of running this project and bringing in collaborators, including Brian Newman and my long-time partner Emily Horn, we have created a robust, small community of practice focused on the experience of jhāna and the multidimensional practice of meditation. However, during our first in-person community retreat in Portugal, a participant asked: “Why doesn’t the jhāna community feel more like a community? Are there things we could do to make it more like one?”

At that point, I realized the problem is the original framing of The Jhāna Community. In response to the secularization of jhāna I had consciously unbundled the training of Concentration Meditation from the traditional three Buddhist trainings that also include Morality/Ethics and Insight/Wisdom. While this unbundling opens the opportunity to reach people who might not be interested in Awakening or who have different ethical systems, it also allows for a very narrow vision. If the extent of your aspiration is to experience a “drugless high” then well, that’s cool, but not all that inspiring.

For Dharma practitioners, like myself, who have taken refuge in the Three Jewels (the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha), this vision of unbundled meditation is missing something. It is lacking. There is dukkha in that vision. I believe the only way community truly arises is when we have a shared vision for how we’re living. The practice shouldn’t just be for ourselves; it must be for us and for those with whom we are connected. That shared vision, combined with being in the same room and doing things together, is what gives rise to a genuine community.

We just completed a 10-day in-person retreat called “The Flavors of Jhāna.” This was the first time in this community of practice that people have gathered in the same room to really be together—enjoying each other’s company, annoying each other, eating together, meditating out loud, and sharing in silence.

To address the question, “Why doesn’t the jhāna community feel like a community?” I actually see that inquiry as the spark of community itself. That question can only be asked within a community space: “Why is this thing lacking in so many ways?”

I believe there are two main reasons for this feeling. First, we haven’t fully integrated the three trainings. We lack a comprehensive vision that goes beyond the self. We need something we are doing together that is bigger than us. Second, we have been completely digital. In my experience building Sanghas, completely virtual communities are not truly communities at all. You must have an analog dimension for the digital to feel embodied.

For example, when I was helping to build the Dharma Overground with Daniel Ingram, we started as a virtual message board. While helpful, most people didn’t know each other “in real life” (IRL), and there was a lack of community. A few years later, Daniel invited several of us to his house to meditate and hang out and celebrate his 40th Birthday party. Even though only five or six people attended, that embodied instantiation created a deeper connection that flowed back into the message board and had a cumulative effect on the community vibe, for months after.

By centering the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha as both Analog and Digital, we believe the kind of community people are asking for will become possible.

The Pragmatic Dharma Sangha is a specific Buddhist lineage that is becoming more comprehensive and inclusive. Moving forward, we are expanding the domain of practice in three ways. First, we will explicitly include Ethics and Wisdom alongside meditation and concentration. Second, we will anchor the community in at least one annual meditation retreat. Our next Pragmatic Dharma retreat is scheduled for January 2nd through the 11th, 2027 in Western North Carolina. Third, we are intentionally cultivating in-person communities rooted in specific geographies. For instance, Brian has been leading a growing Pragmatic Dharma group in Lisbon, Portugal, that meets once a month and I’m now doing the same near Asheville, North Carolina. In addition, we’re inviting several dedicated students, including those that just joined us on retreat, to start-up local meet-up groups in their cities.

Our goal is to foster local communities of practice in specific cities while gathering together as a global community once or twice a year for retreats. This is how we transform from a community of interest into a true community of practice.

A Globally Distributed Holarchical Network

The Pragmatic Dharma Sangha represents a new model for Buddhist community in the 21st century: a globally distributed holarchical network. This structure honors the vertical dimension of traditional dharma transmission—where genuine depth requires years of training, intimate teacher-student relationship, and progressive stages of commitment—while embracing the horizontal dimension of networked, decentralized community. Local sanghas & meet-ups in cities around the world operate with creative autonomy while remaining connected through shared vision, periodic in-person retreat, and digital infrastructure that supports rather than replaces embodied practice.

At the heart of this model is a five-stage developmental pathway:

1. Wandering Seeker

2. Sangha Member

3. Sangha Leader

4. Meditation Teacher

5. Lineage Holder

These stages aren’t rungs on a ladder to climb as quickly as possible—they’re containers that are available to fully inhabit. Each stage carries its own commitments, guidelines, and scope of practice. A Sangha Leader facilitates local community; a Meditation Teacher builds livelihood around the training of meditation; a Lineage Holder carries the full training and transmission of lineage. The shape is an inverted pyramid: many seekers, few lineage holders, with each level including and building upon the commitments of the prior stages.

This structure emerged from a simple recognition: purely digital communities centered on technique alone don’t generate true sangha. Community arises when we share a vision for how we’re living—when practice isn’t just for ourselves but for those with whom we’re connected. By rebundling the three traditional Buddhist trainings of Ethics, Meditation, and Wisdom, and by anchoring the global network in annual embodied retreats and thriving local practice communities, the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha offers a path that is both ancient in its lineage and contemporary in its expression.

The Five Stages of Training

We are treating the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha as a course of depth training. We see the potential for depth in this lineage to span many years/decades. Consequently, we have identified five stages of practice or training within the Pragmatic Dharma lineage.

You can think of these as stages because you can move through them progressively, but you can also think of them as positions or places you inhabit. The goal isn’t necessarily to reach Stage 5; the goal is to find what you need and practice at the level of depth that is most important to you.

Stage 1: The Wandering Seeker

The wandering seeker is someone just beginning to engage with Pragmatic Dharma, the community, or the Sangha. This could be through an online course, a local community meetup (such as those in Lisbon or Asheville), or a YouTube video or guided meditation. Regardless of how they encounter it, they are in a seeking position. They are looking for something to engage with more deeply, or perhaps they are just checking things out. The main point is that the wandering seeker is not yet in a committed engagement with the lineage.

Stage 2: The Sangha Member

Moving to this stage means joining the Sangha and committing to the practice. As they say in The Matrix, you see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Sangha Members have access to local activities and events, the virtual domain and privately recorded material, all developed courses and live content, and any cohort or course of practice (without additional fees). We encourage you to dive as deeply as you like, as there is potentially more value the deeper you go.

Sangha members support the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha through a monthly financial contribution. They can change the amount they’re contributing at any time, or cancel it without any deceptive patterns getting in the way. This monthly membership fee supports the execution of our vision and the livelihood of our founding teachers.

Stage 3: The Sangha Leader

It is natural for many Sangha members to become leaders through their own training and engagement. To become a Sangha leader, you need to attend an in-person retreat with one of the following teachers (Kenneth Folk, Vince Horn, Emily Horn, or Brian Newman), so that we can meet “face-to-face and eye-to-eye.” Sangha Leaders are folks who are interested in bringing deliberate practice opportunities back to your local geographic community.

Sangha leaders can start or join local Pragmatic Dharma Sanghas and enact the vision of those communities. While they receive material support from the Global Sangha and Lineage Holders, they are free to lead creatively and manage their communities as they see fit.

All Sangha leaders will be trained in the facilitation of Social Meditation (a peer-to-peer meditation practice) and will be encouraged and empowered to host regular social meditations and silent meditations. They will bring in learning material from the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha and receive training support on facilitating peer-led discussions.

Stage 4: The Meditation Teacher

This is a very important role and represents a significant step in the developmental pathway: becoming a Meditation Teacher in the Pragmatic Dharma lineage. This stage involves mastering the training of Meditation–inside and out—learning to work with people individually one-on-one as a meditation teacher and coach, understanding best practices for working with people in groups, and teaching in Buddhist, religious-hybrid (mixed-tradition), and secular contexts.

A meditation teacher begins to build a livelihood around their teaching, borrowing from the wide network and content of the Pragmatic Dharma community. While we expect teachers to go deep in their own practice, this level does not yet include leading multi-day residential retreats, or training other teachers. Those responsibilities are reserved for the final stage of practice…

Stage 5: The Lineage Holder

The three people behind this project—Vince, Emily, and Brian—are already at this stage, having had the lineage of Pragmatic Dharma transmitted to and through them. A lineage holder is someone who is a Sangha member and leader who continues their own journey, has the depth to hold people in deep retreat practice, and trains others to become teachers and lineage holders themselves.

If you look at the number of people engaged at each level, it forms a reverse pyramid. There are very few lineage holders because of the immense training, commitment, and intimate relational dimension required. Decades of training and teaching are typically required before someone can properly represent a lineage, but by creating clear and transparent stages of practice, leading up to there, we hope that the path is clear, and that you’ll take it as far as you’re moved to.

We want to support as many seekers and practitioners as possible. The best way to do that is to support the full range and depth of this training so more people can support others as they go.

💡 How to Get Involved

Right now we are open to welcoming new Pragmatic Dharma Sangha members into our community of deliberate practice. The low end membership fee is quite low ($29) and while we suggest $108/month, the average that people give can be seen here.

If you apply to the join the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha, and are accepted, you’ll be able to join live teaching events with us, as well as gain access to our growing library of mostly unreleased content.

We’re already doing Pragmatic Dharma Meet-Ups in Lisbon, Portugal and Asheville, North Carolina, and will announcing 10 or more new meet-up groups across North America & Europe.

Finally, if you’d like to take things deeper with this community, and are interested in taking your training deeper with this lineage, please clear your schedule for a 10-Day Pragmatic Dharma Retreat from 📅 January 2–11, 2027 in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina.

💎 Community of Practice

This recording took place in The Jhāna Community.

If you’re interested in accelerating your meditation practice, and want to explore many dimensions of jhāna, consider checking out our community of practice:

💬 Transcript

🤖 AI Transparency: The transcript below was lightly edited with ChatGPT to correct for spelling & grammar errors. Also – we like em-dashes – so we . 🤪

Leigh Brasington: So last week I talked about how to get to the first jhāna. You’ve got to get yourself settled. You’ve got to generate access concentration, which may take a while.

There’ll be distractions. Label the distraction, relax, and come back. My favorite label is “story.” I am distracted, and I see I’m telling myself a story, and I just go “story,” and it goes away. Sometimes I’m telling myself a story about something I want to get, sometimes about something that shouldn’t be happening.

Sometimes I’m telling myself a story because I’m bored with my breath and I just want better entertainment — and I’m a good storyteller. So: story, and it’s gone. But eventually the mind settles in, I’m not getting distracted, and I’m knowing each in-breath and out-breath. If I’m doing mindfulness of breathing and I stay there for a while, this is access concentration. And then I shift my attention to a pleasant sensation and do nothing else.

This focus on the pleasant sensation has the effect of generating a feedback loop of pleasure, which eventually turns into the first jhāna. I’ll read you what the Buddha has to say about the first jhāna. This is from the second discourse in the Long Discourses — the Samaññaphala Sutta, the Discourse on the Fruits of the Spiritual Life: “Quite secluded from sense pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states…” Okay, that’s the abandoning of the hindrances, the getting past the distractions. Basically, you’ve got to abandon the hindrances temporarily.

So this is the seclusion. It says one “enters and remains in the first jhāna, which is accompanied by thinking and examining, and is filled with rapture and happiness born of seclusion.” One enters and dwells in the first jhāna. So there’s the actual entering of the jhāna, and then there’s stabilizing it so that it lasts for a while.

It says “thinking and examining.” The Pali words are vitakka and vicāra. Vitakka means thinking, and vicāra means examining or pondering. Unfortunately, in later Buddhism those words — but only in the context of the jhānas — got changed to “initial attention” and “sustained attention” on the meditation object. The Buddha would be shocked. I’ve done research on all the places in the suttas where vitakka shows up. There are 979 locations, all right? So it’s an important word, and it means “thinking,” always.

I looked through to see if I could find any place where Sujato — I’m just looking at his translations — has “placing the mind” instead of “thinking,” and doesn’t have “keeping connected,” which is his translation of vicāra, and it’s not related to the first jhāna or the second jhāna. And I found all of them: none. Zero.

Okay. Although you may hear that it’s initial and sustained attention to the meditation object — and you do have to do that, no doubt about it — but that’s not what these words mean. I suspect the reason for the change is that, as time went on, the understanding of the level of concentration needed to call something a jhāna kept increasing. And then they couldn’t have thinking. With this level of concentration, you couldn’t have any thinking and examining. You had to come up with something else to explain what was there. So they just took something that you did have, changed the meaning of the words — only in the jhāna instance — and stuck that in there. Not helpful.

When you’re in the first jhāna, your mind is not really deeply concentrated. It’s like, “Oh wow, this is intense.” Because the next thing it says is that the state is “filled with rapture and happiness born of seclusion.” Rapture is pīti, and happiness is sukkha. And suddenly you’ve got all this excess energy — the pīti — and it’s like, wow. “Oh, this is intense. What’s going on here? Is this… this has got to be the first jhāna. I’m sure it’s the first jhāna. This couldn’t be…” Whatever. You’re commenting on it and you’re thinking about it.

Now, it’s true it’s a little bit unstable, and so you do have to keep putting your attention back on it and not get lost in it. But basically what’s happened is that you’ve arrived in a state where the pīti comes up and predominates, and you have all this physical energy, and there’s some background happiness, and you’re commenting on the experience. That’s the first jhāna.

It says one drenches, steeps, saturates, and suffuses one’s body with this rapture and happiness born of seclusion, so that there is no part of one’s entire body not suffused by rapture and happiness. Okay, this is an advanced practice. The first thing to do is get to the first jhāna once. Then get there the second time, which might be a little more difficult because you know it’s there and you want it. Okay? So don’t let the wanting get in the way. And then get in on a regular basis.

When you first get in, it may be sort of the upper torso, neck, head — maybe the whole spine, probably not the whole body. Now, some people, when they get to the first jhāna the first time, yeah, it’s a whole-body experience. But for the majority of people, it’s upper body — particularly upper torso, neck, head, and maybe the spine.

If you’re good at the first jhāna, then it’s possible to put your attention where it feels strongest — probably in the head area — and then move your attention to someplace where you don’t seem to have any pīti or sukha, like the arm. You’re not trying to move pīti: you’re just moving your attention, but the pīti will follow. And then you do the other arm, the lower torso, one leg, the other leg, and you’ve gotten the drenched, steeped, saturated, suffused. But I’m going to say this again one more time, redundantly: it’s an advanced practice. Get good at getting in and stabilizing what’s there.

We have a simile: “Suppose a skilled bath attendant or his apprentice were to pour soap flakes into a metal basin, sprinkle them with water, and knead them into a ball so that the ball of soap flakes would be pervaded by moisture, encompassed by moisture, suffused with moisture inside and out, and yet would not trickle. In the same way, one drenches, steeps, saturates, and suffuses one’s body with rapture and happiness born of seclusion, so that there is no part of one’s body not suffused by rapture and happiness.”

So this gives us an idea of what soap was like at the time of the Buddha. You didn’t go to the store and buy a bar of soap. You got your skilled bath attendant to take a metal basin and pour in the right amount of soap flakes, then the right amount of water, and then mix it together until you had a homogeneous ball of soap. The mixing is kind of frenetic. The energy of the first jhāna is very frenetic. Okay? So that’s really what’s going on. You’re dealing with all this energy, and then, when you’re really good at it, the water totally permeates the soap flakes, and your pīti and sukha totally permeate your body.

Notice the body is mentioned here. It’s totally permeated with pīti and sukha. There is still bodily awareness, unlike in the Visuddhimagga, the later commentary. No bodily awareness there — you’re just checked out. But here in the suttas, there’s very definitely bodily awareness.

Yeah, you get concentrated enough, you put your attention on a pleasant sensation, the first jhāna arises. The intensity level can vary quite a bit — not per person, but over a group of people. Some people will get it so intense it’s like sticking a finger in an electrical socket, blowing the top of your head off. Other people just get, “Oh yeah, this is kind of nice.” The pīti can show up as movement or as heat or as both. Usually it comes as one or the other — doesn’t matter. And the sukha is the emotional sense of joy or happiness, depending on how you interpret it, but it’s a positive mental state.

If it’s mild, you could stay in the state for five to ten minutes. I’d say beyond ten minutes is not useful. If it’s intense, you wouldn’t stay as long. If it’s pretty intense, maybe you stay a couple minutes. If it’s very intense, maybe only 30 seconds. If it’s just way too much, maybe only ten seconds. And then the thing to do is to move on to the second jhāna.

The trick for moving on — when you’re ready — is to take a deep breath and really let the energy out. Last week I said that when you’re getting to access concentration and your breath gets shallow, don’t take a deep breath because it takes you away from the jhāna. Yeah. Now that you want to go away from the first jhāna, take a deep breath, and on the exhale just really let the energy out. That will calm the pīti.

This enables you to do a foreground–background shift. If this is the pīti and this is the sukha, then you take the deep breath and all of it calms down, but now the sukha is more prominent than the pīti. Pīti is still in the background. Focus on the sukha. That’s how you move from the first jhāna to the second.

I’ll read you what the Buddha has to say:

“Further, with the subsiding of thinking and examining, one enters and dwells in the second jhāna, which is accompanied by inner tranquility and unification of mind, is without thinking and examining, and is filled with rapture and happiness born of concentration. One drenches, steeps, saturates, and suffuses one’s body with a rapture and happiness born of concentration, so there is no part of one’s body not filled with rapture and happiness.”

Okay? So, the thinking is supposed to all go away. I don’t usually get it to all go away, except maybe if I’m on a really long retreat. But for most lay people learning the jhānas, the gaps between the thoughts get bigger. The thoughts are more like, “Yeah, okay, this is nicer. How long have I been here? How long should I stay here? I’m starting to lose it — oops.” That sort of thing. As opposed to, “Wow, this is too much, I don’t think I want to stay here too long,” or “This is really cool, I’m going to tell so-and-so about it when I get out of my meditation period.” Not that kind of thing. More gaps. It’s getting quieter.

Ideally, we get so quiet there is no thinking. The problem is: the kind of instructions you’re giving yourself about how to do this — is that counted as vitakka, thinking? Or is vitakka only the discursive thinking where you’re sort of going on and on? We don’t know. But I’ll say: don’t worry if there’s some thinking, as long as you can keep your attention focused on — now — the sukha, because the pīti is in the background and the sukha is in the foreground. So you’re focused on an emotional state. Unlike if you’re following the breath, you’re focused on a physical sensation; unlike in the first jhāna where you’re focused more on the pīti or the pīti–sukha, which is going to feel more physical. Now you’re focused on an emotional state. It may be a little more difficult for some people, but that’s the key thing you want to be focused on — the emotional state of happiness.

And it doesn’t need to be extremely happy. In fact, if it gets too happy, the pīti comes back up, right? So you’re just being happy. It’s like: if this is the happiness, it’s the focus that’s strong, so you’re not getting distracted. The problem is that the emotional state of happiness is far more subtle than the breath or the pīti. I mean, the pīti is not subtle at all. And so you now have a more subtle object to focus on. But the pīti and sukha of the second jhāna are born of concentration. The concentration developed by the first jhāna hopefully gives you enough concentration to remain focused on the more subtle object of the sukha — and the remaining background pīti — of the second jhāna.

And so you’re just sitting there being quite happy. The pīti has not entirely gone away; I find that in the second jhāna I’m sort of rocking — maybe this little swaying, something like that. In other words, it’s not still, but it’s not shaking; it’s not a lot of heat or anything like that. For me, the center of the experience has moved down to the heart center. It’s like the sukha is just coming out of my heart. It doesn’t feel like it’s my whole body at first.

When you’ve gotten really good at the second jhāna, you could do the drench, steep, saturate, and suffuse again. But again, you’ve first got to find it, find it multiple times, get good at sustaining it. I would say for the second and higher jhānas, you want to learn to sustain them for at least ten minutes, maybe even fifteen minutes. Get in there and be able to stabilize that experience for an extended period.

If it’s not full-body after you’ve gotten to where you can stabilize it, then you can play with trying to move it — which is to put your attention where it feels the strongest, like the heart center, and again, move your attention to the other parts of the body. You’re not trying to move the sukha — just your attention — and the sukha will follow along. And eventually, your whole body is filled with sukha.

We have a simile: “Suppose there were a deep lake whose water welled up from below. It would have no inlet for water from the east, west, north, or south, nor would it be refilled from time to time with showers of rain, and yet a current of cool water welling up from within the lake would drench, steep, saturate, and suffuse the whole lake, so there would be no part of that entire lake which is not suffused with the cool water. In the same way, one drenches, steeps, saturates, and suffuses one’s body with a rapture and happiness born of concentration, so there is no part of one’s body not suffused by rapture and happiness.”

So the picture is a lake far up in the mountains — no streams coming in, not even any rain — but a spring at the bottom of the lake. And the water from the spring completely permeates the lake, totally fills the lake. This is an incredibly accurate picture of what the second jhāna feels like.

When I was first learning the jhānas, Ayya Khema was not reading out the similes, and so I’m back almost a year later for the next retreat, and she reads out the simile and I was blown away by the simile of the second jhāna. After she left the meditation hall, I go running after her: “Ayya Khema! Ayya Khema! It’s just like that — it’s just like that!” I mean, I was so struck by how completely, accurately this simile captures the feeling of the second jhāna — this wellspring of happiness coming out of your heart, for no reason other than you have a concentrated mind.

Normally we’re out there looking for something to make us happy, right? Here, you’re just happy because — well — you’ve learned to generate the neurotransmitters of happiness via concentration. This can be kind of an interesting learning experience: the happiness is not out there; the happiness is in here. What’s out there is a trigger, and you find the trigger for generating the neurotransmitters, but you don’t have to have the external triggers. You do have to have a concentrated mind. And you can then trigger your own happiness. This can be a valuable thing.

So as I say, you could stay in these states — ten, fifteen minutes is good to learn to do that. You could stay in longer than that. I’ve never stayed — I probably never stayed more than about twenty or twenty-five minutes in the second jhāna or any of the higher jhānas. It may run out. In other words, you have a finite amount of neurotransmitters ready to generate the happiness, and eventually, yeah, it sort of wanders away — which probably will dump you into the third jhāna. Or you can move there on your own.

And guess what? The way to move there: take another deep breath and let the energy out. Let things calm down even more. You want to let the pīti calm down completely. It says here:

“With the fading away of rapture, one dwells in equanimity, mindful and clearly comprehending, and experiences happiness with the body. Thus one enters and dwells in the third jhāna, of which the noble ones declare: ‘One dwells happily with equanimity and mindfulness.’ One drenches, steeps, saturates, and suffuses one’s body with a happiness free from rapture, so there is no part of one’s entire body not suffused by this happiness.”

Okay, so by definition the pīti is gone. It may fade away because you’ve run out of the neurotransmitters that generate it — you’re hanging out in the second jhāna and the pīti just disappears and everything calms down further, and that takes you to the third jhāna. But it’s good to learn how to move intentionally, particularly if you’re on retreat learning the jhānas. You want to move intentionally because when you go home, you’re not going to have as much concentration. And so sitting around waiting until it moves on its own maybe is not going to be an option. But if you know how to move, yeah — you’ve been in second jhāna for ten minutes and it’s like, “Okay, I’ll go find the third jhāna.”

You take the breath and the pīti hopefully goes completely away, and the sukha calms down to not so much happiness as contentment — wishlessness, satisfaction. It is a state of satisfaction so profound that if Mick Jagger were to practice the third jhāna, he wouldn’t be able to sing that song. He would be satisfied.

Okay. One thing I found that’s helpful: I take the breath, and the intensity level of the sukha — the happiness — starts decreasing. And then I can remember an incident in my life where I was very contented, and pluck the feeling of contentment out of that incident, and then my mind just settles into that. So it’s a transition state — probably takes me, yeah, on retreat maybe two or three seconds. At home, more like five or ten seconds before it settles.

So you’ve got to have a brief memory of a contented experience. I don’t know — you’ve just eaten the perfect meal, you didn’t overeat, and you don’t have to wash the dishes, right? Okay. So you remember the feeling of that, and pluck from that feeling the contentment, and focus on that feeling, and it will stabilize.

It says, “One dwells in equanimity, mindful, clearly comprehending.” Yeah — you’re pretty much locked into this experience. You’re aware this is a really good place to be. It doesn’t have the agitation of the pīti like the first and second jhānas did. It’s much more equanimous. It’s still pleasant — being contented is quite pleasant. So it’s not emotionally neutral, but again, you’re focused on an emotional state, a positive emotional state.

Most people say that going from first to second is a dropping down of the center of the experience. Going from second to third is dropping down even further — slide to the belly or something. I’ve had students come into an interview and they say, “I was in second jhāna and I went down,” and I don’t know whether they meant down numerically to the first jhāna or down kinesthetically to the third jhāna. The kinesthetic dropping is that obvious — really quite a feeling.

One time I was doing meditation for science, and I showed up and they wanted to put me in an fMRI so they could look at my brain. And they wanted to tell me when to move between the jhānas. And they said, “We’ll tell you to go up or down.” And I said, “No, no — up or down is not going to work. You’re going to be thinking numerically, and I’m going to be thinking kinesthetically. I’m going to be in two and you’re going to say ‘go up,’ and I’m going to go back to one when you meant for me to go to three. You can say previous and next.” And that’s what we did, and it worked out just fine. The up and down really is quite striking as you go down through the first four jhānas.

Again, it probably isn’t encompassing your whole body. Put your attention where it feels the strongest — maybe in the belly — and move your attention, not the contentment, just your attention, to the other parts of your body, and you can feel it.

Okay. One thing I found that’s helpful: I take the breath, and the intensity level of the sukha — the happiness — starts decreasing. And then I can remember an incident in my life where I was very contented, and pluck the feeling of contentment out of that incident, and then my mind just settles into that. So it’s a transition state — probably takes me, yeah, on retreat maybe two or three seconds. At home, more like five or ten seconds before it settles.

So you’ve got to have a brief memory of a contented experience. I don’t know — you’ve just eaten the perfect meal, you didn’t overeat, and you don’t have to wash the dishes, right? Okay. So you remember the feeling of that, and pluck from that feeling the contentment, and focus on that feeling, and it will stabilize.

It says, “One dwells in equanimity, mindful, clearly comprehending.” Yeah — you’re pretty much locked into this experience. You’re aware this is a really good place to be. It doesn’t have the agitation of the pīti like the first and second jhānas did. It’s much more equanimous. It’s still pleasant — being contented is quite pleasant. So it’s not emotionally neutral, but again, you’re focused on an emotional state, a positive emotional state.

Most people say that going from first to second is a dropping down of the center of the experience. Going from second to third is dropping down even further — slide to the belly or something. I’ve had students come into an interview and they say, “I was in second jhāna and I went down,” and I don’t know whether they meant down numerically to the first jhāna or down kinesthetically to the third jhāna. The kinesthetic dropping is that obvious — really quite a feeling.

One time I was doing meditation for science, and I showed up and they wanted to put me in an fMRI so they could look at my brain. And they wanted to tell me when to move between the jhānas. And they said, “We’ll tell you to go up or down.” And I said, “No, no — up or down is not going to work. You’re going to be thinking numerically, and I’m going to be thinking kinesthetically. I’m going to be in two and you’re going to say ‘go up,’ and I’m going to go back to one when you meant for me to go to three. You can say previous and next.” And that’s what we did, and it worked out just fine. The up and down really is quite striking as you go down through the first four jhānas.

Again, it probably isn’t encompassing your whole body. Put your attention where it feels the strongest — maybe in the belly — and move your attention, not the contentment, just your attention, to the other parts of your body, and you can feel it.

🔗 Links

• Samaññaphala Sutta (DN 2)

• Vitakka & Vicāra (Pāli terminology overview)

• Pīti & Sukha (Pāli term definitions)

• Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification)

• Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (Foundations of Mindfulness)

• Ayya Khema (teacher referenced by Leigh)

• Pa-Auk Tawya Sayadaw (Venerable Pa-Auk)

• Manjushri (Bodhisattva of Wisdom)

• Mick Jagger

• fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging)

💬 Transcript

Vince: So, what is Access Concentration? This is the question I want to bring forward in this talk. I recorded something about this many years ago now—I hate to admit how many—in which I was working on a project that was kind of like a secular meditation-style app. Basically, that’s my whole career: doing these kinds of things. And this project was called Meditate.io. We had a course called Concentration Meditation, and we wanted to explain the basics of concentration—how concentration really works. This course lives on in The Jhāna Community under the course name Concentration 101.

One of the fundamental ideas is Access Concentration. I felt that this idea was so useful in my own experience within the Buddhist meditative context that I really wanted to bring it forward into a secular context and share it in a way that was more secularized. So there’s a YouTube clip below that basically gives my best overall definition of what Access Concentration is. I’m not going to go into depth here because that recording already exists. That’s the beauty of recording something—you don’t have to repeat yourself over and over.

This is how I formulate it for myself: I’m in Access Concentration when the subject of my focus—whatever it is, whether it’s the breath, the body, something I’m hearing, a visual orb, a mantra, whatever object—becomes the center of my attention. It flips into the foreground of my attention, and everything else goes into the background. It’s not that everything disappears. It’s not that there are no distractions or thoughts happening. It’s just that now those things are happening in the background, and this is in the foreground of my attention.

This is a really important shift in the practice, where you start to hone in on your focus. That’s the main thing that’s happening. You can fall out of Access, and people get confused about this and think, “Oh, I’m only in Access Concentration if I’m in Access Concentration for the whole time I’m sitting.”

No. That’s very deep, stable Access Concentration. What you’re describing takes time to develop—unless you’re just a real natural at this and come to it easily, which not many people do. It usually takes time. Rather, in any given moment that the breath or whatever your meditation object is becomes the main thing in your attention—when it’s in the foreground and everything else is in the background—you’re in Access Concentration. Something might be grabbing at you, trying to pull you out of your focus. That happens. We fall out of Access and then we have to remember to come back, return to the breath, be with the breath. The breath might not yet be the main thing in our attention while we’re with it. It might be moving around—50%, 30%, 20%—and then something grabs us over here. The practice of concentration is dynamic.

In my experience, when I’m getting deeper into it, it becomes dynamic. And at some point, we become so focused on our subject that it becomes the main thing we’re focused on. More than 50% of our attention is on the breath. It has the gravity of our attention. There’s a gravity well, and we want to put more attention into it.

There’s a sense of really being interested now in the breath in Access Concentration. It’s called Access Concentration traditionally because this is the place from which you access the jhānas.

Our earliest Buddhist teachings do not mention Access Concentration. This is a later development in the early Buddhist school, around a thousand years after the Buddha’s lifetime. Imagine a thousand years of Buddhist dudes—primarily. There were women in the earliest Buddhist order, but at some point it got too conservative and ossified and lost its radical edge. It became all these dudes meditating in monasteries, probably trying to out-meditate each other.

Then they developed this ridiculous tome—it’s like a giant meditation manual called the Visuddhimagga, or The Path of Purification. In that tome is a definition of what’s called Access Concentration, in the section on concentration. There, they define the state you have to reach before entering the jhānas. That’s Access Concentration from the traditional standpoint. They describe many objects you can use to get into Access—forty, according to the Visuddhimagga—and I doubt they caught them all. Hopefully that Pokémon reference got captured by someone. Yeah, Access Concentration.

What is Access Concentration? Another way of looking at it is that it’s one of the five Jhāna Masteries. One thing you have to be able to do if you want to master meditation is access the states you want to get into.

To put it simply, in Access Concentration we’re accessing whatever we’re focusing on. From there we can get absorbed in it. If you want to put it in math terms, Access is greater than 50%. When you have more than half of your attention with something, you have access to it and it has access to you. Then you can become more and more absorbed—closer and closer. This is the movement.

There’s a visual movement. I’ve been developing this meditation app recently called KASINA, in which there’s a visual orb on your monitor. You can move it, and as you move it closer to you, the circle eventually fills the whole screen. You become one with it. We become one with the breath in the same way—or with love, or the body, or the earth, or who knows, with not knowing. You become one with the state you’re focusing on. That’s jhāna.

The process of jhāna, one through eight, describes the evolving relationship you have with this merger. At first the merger is blissful—first jhāna. The initial merger. Think about first love. It’s like spring—intensity, first beginnings, magical, fireworks. At some point that chills out as we get to know each other, and we become a bit more at ease. We just want to be more focused. We move into the second jhāna, and so forth. The jhānas move through this pattern.

But we have to be able to access something to bring us into this process—into this merger. I think it’s interesting that the Visuddhimagga says there are forty objects that work for this, because that implies there are many that don’t. I have a question about that. I actually have a different opinion than the early Buddhists. I think anything could bring you through this. But why would you want to become one with terror? And could you handle being one with terror and being okay with being terrified?

Some people love horror movies. I’ve never understood this. I feel like life is horrific enough. But some people watch horror and feel elated or something—like, “Oh my gosh.” Okay, first jhāna. Maybe that’s through the doorway of horror or terror. I’m open to that. It’s just not my door. It’s not my doorway.

🎯 Practice in the Jhāna Community

Anyone interested in taking their jhāna (aka meditation) practice deeper, is welcome to apply to The Jhāna Community. Sincere practitioners welcome.

🔗 Key Links

• Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel M. Ingram

• Leigh Brasington (teacher)

• Kenneth Folk (teacher)

• Sayalay Susīlā of Appamāda Vihārī (teacher)

• Pa‑Auk Sayadaw Monastery (tradition)

• The Jhāna Community

💬 Transcript

Vince: The Flavors of Jhāna… I can’t remember where I first heard this term. I think it was from you or from Kenneth [Folk].

Brian: Maybe we should start with that. Yeah—so, Vince, you came to me and said… actually, no, I said to you, “What should we call the retreat?” And you were like, “Hey man, you’re the one who wanted to do it in Portugal—what should we call it?” And you put it back on me. And I said, “Can we call it the name of my half-written book?” So folks, this is all coming from a story that’s part of a lineage, and I promised we’d tell some of those today. This is a Kenneth Folk story, and it’s his way of demonstrating jhāna on a spectrum.

Kenneth says this: imagine you’ve got a bunch of strawberries, and you crush them into a pure strawberry smoothie. If you drink that smoothie, what would it taste like? The answer is: it would taste 100% like strawberries—because that’s all that went into it. Now imagine a glass of clear water and a really strong strawberry extract. If you drop one single concentrated drop into the water, what would that taste like? And the answer is: it would taste like strawberries, even with just that tiny drop.

And Kenneth’s punchline is: “It all tastes like strawberry, motherfucker.” I believe that’s the punchline. His point is: it doesn’t matter where you are on the spectrum of Jhāna. On one end you have the Pa-Auk tradition, which would have you so absorbed that a gun could go off by your head. On the lighter end, you have Leigh Brasington, who teaches Jhānic factors, a very Sutta-based approach, or even less-absorbed types of Jhāna. Kenneth’s point is: it all tastes like Jhāna. It’s just different flavors. How much of the flavor do you need to recognize it?

His point is: even one tiny part in a million parts of water would still taste like strawberries, so to speak. And if I’m misrepresenting this, let me know. But that’s how I took the story when Kenneth told it to me.

Vince: Yeah, I have a similar take on what he was teaching—that he was pointing to this sort of depth dimension of jhāna, using the strawberry analogy to show that these states are patterns of mind. Even if you experience them at great depth of absorption or at lighter focus, it’s still the same pattern. You can still recognize it. And that’s what we’re calling “jhāna,” essentially.

Brian: Yeah. So that’s the flavors part. Let me raise a question to you then, Vince: What is jhāna? We’ve got this interesting word with the weird diacritic over the A, and my understanding has changed over the years. How do you view jhāna these days, Vince?

Vince: Yeah, it’s changed for me too—and maybe the change itself is interesting. I imagine that’s the case for you as well, Brian. Maybe for everyone who takes up jhāna practice.

At first you experience jhāna in the very specific way you’re practicing it: you’ve got whatever tradition you’re working in, the meditation object you’re working with, the instructions you’ve been given, and a bunch of ideas about what’s supposed to happen—what constitutes jhāna. And you’re using all of that to try to get into the states being described in that system.

For me, when I first started jhāna practice, it was with Leigh Brasington. He was the first Jhāna teacher I worked with. This was 20 years ago. I went on retreat… sadly, I left my sick wife at home in our apartment because I didn’t want to get sick at the beginning of a Jhāna retreat. That’s how self-absorbed I was at the time: I left her there suffering so I could go—

Brian: So you could go get concentrated.

Vince: Yeah. So that should explain the emphasis on wishing all beings to be concentrated. That’s what I needed more of.

But yeah, for me it was working within Leigh’s system. Like you said, the emphasis there is on the breath and the jhānic factors, and noticing when they get strong enough that you can turn toward them and get absorbed in them—like getting absorbed in the strawberry.

Long story short, as I expanded to other practices—doing more vipassanā, noting style (which I now call vipassanā jhāna)—and as I worked more deeply with other techniques, I started to notice there’s a deep pattern or structure that’s the same regardless of the practice, the object, or the conceptual definitions of the state. Something consistent still happens.

For me now, I consider jhāna to just be meditation—which is literally what the word means. It comes from dhyāna in Sanskrit, which is also translated as “Zen.”

Brian: So it goes Dhyāna → Chán → Zen in China. And the Zen guys diss Jhāna all day long, but the name “Zen” literally means Jhāna, which is hilarious.

Vince: They just don’t talk about it because they’re being it, I think.

So yeah—that’s how I understand jhāna now. It’s just… this is what we’re doing: meditation. Whatever you meditate on changes the contours of the state and the experience. Whatever ideals you have change your relationship to what’s arising. For some people a state seems inadequate—a warm-up to something deeper. For others, that same state is the whole thing, and they rest or abide in it. So for me, the world of jhāna has opened up and expanded a lot over time.

Brian: You said there’s some similar quality across states. Could you say more about what that quality is?

Vince: Yeah—let’s explore that. It gets tricky. I learned it first through the noting maps, so I tend to describe things that way, even though that doesn’t capture the universal quality. But the stuff you’ve done with eye posture—pointing to that—there’s something there. Regardless of which state I’m in, the eyes seem to move through this sort of progression.

Brian: Yeah.

Vince: That seems universal.

Brian: Yeah.

Vince: The aperture of attention—how broad or open attention is, how much it includes the field of experience—that also seems to be a chief characteristic across states and objects.

Brian: Totally. The aperture, the width of the jhāna. I think Ingram also uses that phrase. It’s a weird term, like, “Width? How do I measure the width?”—but it’s basically the width of the visual field, what’s happening in that space when the eyes are closed.

Vince: Yeah. What else is similar?

I was going to say the body, but the experience of the body changes a lot depending on where one is in the depth dimension. Maybe you could talk about that, having experienced those really deep, exclusive states where the body is described as dropping off or dissolving.

Brian: Sure. So, I’ve been doing jhāna for 15 years—probably a little less than you, Vince—and I think we’ve come to a similar conclusion: we’re really just talking about meditation. “Jhāna” might sound like a specific technique, but it’s really more than that.

Like you, I’ve come to feel that jhāna just means meditation. From that perspective, when we call a retreat The Flavors of Jhāna, it’s the flavors of meditation. Our meditation community is called The Meditation Community. “Jhāna” just meaning meditation feels totally appropriate.

The more I teach, the more I see that while there are eight discrete jhānic states pitched as a linear progression—starting with the first and going to the eighth—the practitioner’s actual experience may differ. On any given day, depending on emotional state, a different jhāna might be more accessible. For those of us waking up in a lot of suffering or dukka-ñāṇa, a blissful third jhāna can be surprisingly available. You don’t necessarily have to start at the first to get to the third. You can drop right into it. Many practitioners can do a cold start into the fifth Jjhāna.

Follow that to its logical conclusion, and we can ask: Is it possible whole meditation traditions have been built around a single Jhānic state? And my answer is: “Absolutely Yes.”

You and I were talking about this the other day—what if someone reified the sixth Jhāna as the best state? Many meditation teachers teach “the best thing”—so imagine a teacher who thinks sixth Jhāna is the maximum, the only, the ultimate. What would that look like? I think we agreed it would look a lot like Ramana Maharshi—Advaita. “I am the world-creator, I am the world-destroyer, I am pure, infinite, boundless consciousness.”

So my current thinking is: the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth Jhānas could all be reified into entire traditions. And if you really love sixth Jhāna—yeah, go do Advaita. That’s your cup of tea. And similar things could be said for the fifth, seventh, and eighth.

Vince: Yeah, that’s really interesting. So you’re describing how entire practice traditions might center around specific states as starting points, then explore those states or the surrounding domains.

Brian: Exactly.

And we’re going to teach eye postures, folks. Briefly put: it’s all about aperture. A tight aperture is a first-Jhāna eye posture; a little bigger for second; a little bigger for third; and a really big, expansive aperture for fourth.

For the formless realms, this sparks curiosity. You start noticing eye postures in other traditions—Six Yogas, Dzogchen, Mahamudra. Where do the eyes go in Dzogchen? If you look at monks practicing Dzogchen, they often have eyes open, darting around subtlely. That maps to a distinct eye posture.

Each practice seems to have a discrete eye posture, most of which correlate to a Jhānic state. That’s how I think about non-jhānic practices these days: what’s the closest Jhānic feel, and what’s the eye posture doing? I know this sounds esoteric—did that sound esoteric?

Vince: Yeah—but for me, it also brings up something very practical. In the Dzogchen tradition, when I worked with Lama Lena, her basic instructions were to take a pebble or rock and, in Shiné (calm abiding), you focus on the rock. Then there’s another phase where you remove the pebble and continue focusing.

To me, that gets at the Dzogchen eye posture. Previously there was something to focus on; now you focus without the object. That’s a practical example of an open, spacious, but stable and focused posture.

Brian: And I love that. What would that be called? Samadhi without object.

Vince: Yeah—shamatha without a sign.

Brian: Right. And we don’t really talk about that in the Theravada lineage—we always have a sign. So this is fascinating. It’s deeply aligned with yogic traditions where they have objectless samadhi, which feels totally different. Looking at something, then taking it away and continuing to look—what is that other than eye posture?

My story on eye posture comes from a deep lineage practitioner. One of my main teachers, Sayalay Susila, was the chief attendant for Pa-Auk Sayadaw for a couple decades. She cooked his food and was extremely close to him and his teachings.

I learned eye postures from Kenneth Folk. I never felt the need to bring that up with my Pa-Auk teacher—she’s very traditional, and I didn’t want to introduce something that might make her uncomfortable. But one day I accidentally mentioned using eye postures and said something about “looking toward something.” She said in shock, “You’re looking with your eyes?” Eyes closed, but still “looking.” She repeated, “With your actual eyes? Not some internal, drifty thing?” And I said, “Yeah. I’m taking a gaze.”

And she said, “If you’re doing it already, keep doing it.”

I thought she’d chastise me. But she essentially blessed the practice. So even in the Pa-Auk tradition, I got a little wink.

Vince: Nice. I had a similar experience, although it turned out differently, with Daniel Ingram. I think I’ve shared this with you.

I wanted to explore the kasina object using a circular orb as a visual focus point. Daniel wrote the Fire Kasina book and talked about fire kasina a lot, but I wasn’t into the flame. I wanted to do it on my computer or something.

His instructions were: take the kasina object, close your eyes, see the after-image or eidetic image, focus on that—the internal nimitta—and eventually you get absorbed.

I understood that, but for some reason I wanted to keep my eyes open. Maybe it was rebellion. But what I found was fascinating: moving through the third Jhāna—what he calls “the murk”—I experienced the kasina breaking apart and dissolving. Eventually, my eyes settled so much that they were barely open—just a tiny slit.

At some point it shifted into fourth Jhāna, where all I saw was the color. Where I was looking and how my eyes were positioned mattered. I wasn’t engineering it—I was just moving through the state. Suddenly my eyes were closed the perfect amount and aimed in just the right spot so that all I saw was the color from the kasina. And I was completely absorbed.

Brian: That’s exactly what’s supposed to happen.

Vince: Yeah.

Brian: That’s full absorption. Beautiful. With eyes open! Amazing.

Vince: And I realized: “Ah, my teacher’s wrong. You don’t only have to do this with eyes closed using the internal image. You can work with the external image the entire time.”

Brian: Yes. Absolutely. Maybe that’s a good transition.

Vince: Sorry, Daniel.

Brian: No—we all love Daniel and have great respect for what he’s done. It’s good to have people trying things and reporting what works.

Vince: Yeah.

Brian: Maybe we could talk a bit about the many concentration objects, and what we’ll be offering on the retreat.

Vince: Yeah, that’s cool.

Brian: So folks—there are traditionally 40 concentration objects. The breath is one. The brahmavihārās—like loving-kindness—are included. Contemplating the foulness of the body—pus, urine, feces—is included. Then you have all the kasinas, which are really traditional. Contemplating the dharmas is another.

There’s this premise that the list stops at 40, but in Buddhism there’s always a sutta that contradicts the list. There’s one where the Buddha meets a person and sees—through past-life vision—that the man had been a jeweler. So when the man asked for a concentration object, the Buddha gave him a beautiful red ruby, knowing he’d love it. So we could say the ruby is the 41st object.

Really, I think the takeaway is: you can choose anything as a concentration object.

Vince, maybe later you can share your story about taking the number “1” as a concentration object for a whole retreat. What’s the sign of the number “1”? That’s fascinating.

The breath is wonderful because you always have it. The breath produces a nimitta—this visual sign—that allows full absorption. Some objects don’t produce a nimitta at that level.

For our retreat on January 2nd, Vince and I are very non-dogmatic. We like openness and exploration. We’ll invite participants to choose their object. I’ll teach from the breath, because that’s my preference, but you’re welcome to choose a kasina, flame, water, whatever.

Vince, anything to add about keeping it open for people?

Vince: Yeah—this is an interesting experiment. Most concentration retreats—both of ours included—usually have everyone working with one object. Here, we’re all focusing on one thing, but that thing can differ person to person. It’s a balance: diverse possible objects, and the universal experience of deepening with your object.

We’ll focus on the universal patterns and challenges that arise with concentration, regardless of the object—jewel, number, breath. My hope is that the deepening people feel on retreat—the extra support—doesn’t get lost just because people are working with diverse objects. Instead, it might create a more complex field of concentration. Like the complexity of wine.

Brian: Yeah—complex harmonics.

Vince: Exactly. There’s complexity because of the differences coming together. In the Jhāna community, with Shamatha-Jhāna, Vipassanā-Jhāna, and Metta-Jhāna, I’ve noticed people dipping into multiple groups get more of the flavor of practice by exploring different objects.

Brian: That’s fascinating. And the wine metaphor is lovely. Complex harmonics make interesting music.

Should we talk about breadth and depth? Some teachers have strong ideas about what Jhāna is—and I respect classical traditions—but you and I take a more open approach. What do we want to say about breadth and depth?

Vince: Yeah. I’ve struggled with this over the years. As a layperson, I didn’t go the monastic route because of my girlfriend—now wife. I didn’t want to lose that relationship. So I was always doing this oscillation of daily practice and retreat life. An hour or two a day, then a month on retreat, then back. Plunging into the depths, coming back, plunging again.

It was fruitful, but also confusing. “How do I bridge these two realities?” It could feel schizophrenic shifting back and forth.

Working with Kenneth’s Social Noting helped me see: I need to connect these states across relationships. I need to be present in relationship, not just alone in silence. I needed to bring practice to everything—and be more okay with not being in deeply concentrated states all the time.

I’ve laughed thinking about your experience—going from hardcore Pa-Auk retreat to being in Tokyo with your wife, trying to maintain depth in an environment not designed for that. Maybe you could talk about trying to maintain depth in that context.

Brian: Just a general comment: if your partner is mad at you because of how you meditate, you’re probably not doing it right. Something’s out of sync.

For a while I tried to live like this: I needed to be the best Western Jhāna practitioner ever. That meant meditating four or five hours a day while having a full-time job and a marriage. You can sustain that for a while. But practically it means: when your wife goes to the bathroom at dinner, you drop into the ānāpāna spot. And if you’re thinking about that during dinner, you’re actually thinking about meditating while eating. You might even touch the spot for a moment during the meal.

Your wife notices. She says, “Stop meditating.” She knows your moods—she knows when you’re meditating even if you think you’re hiding it. That’s failure mode. Not a good move.

So yes, full absorption takes time on the cushion. But we also have lives. So what’s the happy medium for laypeople?

One of my dear teachers is Tina Rasmussen, my first Jhāna teacher. Tina wouldn’t think what you and I teach is “Jhāna,” and some of the practices in the community she wouldn’t call Jhāna—they’re too far off the Pa-Auk rails. I understand and respect that. Leigh would probably have his own views.

All these teachers have opinions. What you and I want to offer is: we hold all of it. We agree with all of it, disagree with all of it, accept all of it. It all fits somewhere on the spectrum. And we hope to have teachers in the community who can orient students anywhere on the spectrum.

Did a month at Forest Refuge? Go for full absorption and nimitta—why not? Beautiful. Living as a layperson with 20 minutes in the morning? Maybe get some nice pīti going, per Leigh’s instructions. Very accessible in 15 minutes.

What’s going to make you feel good? Jhāna is an episodic intervention into suffering. That’s how the Buddha taught it. In the suttas, he entered Jhāna at the end of his life because he was sick. That’s how it was taught—and how we still practice it.

Vince: You mentioned the spectrum. We’ve talked about the depth dimension—visually I imagine depth as vertical. As you go down, you get deeper.

But I’ve also been thinking about another axis: breadth. If depth is vertical and breadth is horizontal, you get a kind of grid.

Pa-Auk sits in the lower-left quadrant: very exclusive and very deep. Hyperfocused on the object.

What I’ve been doing for the last decade is moving toward the opposite side: the more inclusive dimension of Jhāna. I find you can go very deep there too. Maybe the Zen tradition emphasizes this best—practice and life integrated into one, with no preference for posture or context. Your whole life is the meditation.

If everything you do becomes the meditation, then you can have an inclusive awareness that doesn’t get knocked off by changing content.

Brian: Say more about inclusive vs. exclusive. In your guided sit today, you talked about “may concentration arise for all,” and even did some visualization. Was that inclusive or exclusive?

Vince: Yeah—that was toward inclusiveness. Including imaginal capacity—working off the breath rails you’d already set. Also including a sense of others. And from Ken Wilber, the integral philosopher, we can include core perspectives: first-person (which is always included), second-person (others), and third-person (the external world).

In the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, mindfulness is instructed to be established “internally and externally.” That’s already pointing to inclusiveness.

For the last while, I’ve been sitting 24 minutes a day outside on my back porch. It’s very inclusive—eyes open, ears open, body open. Sitting with Emily and the neighborhood sounds. That’s inclusive practice.

Brian: Beautiful. And the proximate cause of concentration is… concentration. We say that jokingly. People sometimes say they feel more concentrated around me—I think that’s because I’m including them. I’m inviting them into my space, and they’re giving some back, and we’re building it together.

My natural resting place on the spectrum, and Vince’s resting place, are at totally opposite ends. That’s actually great for students—you have teachers at both ends who can cover the middle.

I’m 100% exclusive—that’s how I was taught. One of the main corrections I give to Pa-Auk students is that they’ve been influenced by you, Vince—or by The Mind Illuminated—and they’re leaving 10% awareness in the room to note things. No. You don’t leave awareness in the room. You put 100% here. That’s revelatory to people.

There’s a renunciate vibe to absorption. I have that. Vince, on the other hand, took Kenneth’s social meditation and ran with it. I took Kenneth’s eye postures and ran with them. We each took something from Kenneth and expanded it in different directions.

Our natural resting places make us strong teaching partners—we cover the entire spectrum from opposite ends.

Vince: Yeah. But we can meet in the middle, which is important. We both have experience on the other side.

We’ll do Social Meditation on the retreat too—playing with extending attention to include more.

The core difference between exclusive and inclusive practice often comes down to: are you saying “no” to experience outside the object, or are you saying “yes”? Or is the object defined broadly enough to include everything?

In that sense, all practice works with the spectrum. Even in Pa-Auk, I imagine there are times when something arises that keeps you from 100% focus here, and at some point you have to turn toward it and deal with it so you can come back. Is that accurate?

Brian: The most radical Pa-Auk teacher would say you don’t even do that. They won’t acknowledge the hindrance—that would be an admission of defeat or like feeding it. You simply focus here.

That said, the more modern Pa-Auk teachers talk about transformation vs. transcendence. With Jhāna, we aim for transcendence—intensely ecstatic states beyond normal human experience. But sometimes that doesn’t work—maybe we’re hungry or hate our boss. Hindrances pull us away.

When that happens, we can’t focus here. So the modern teachers say: shift from transcendence into transformation—personality transformation. Work with the hindrances to free up energy to return to ānāpāna. Any hindrance takes energy that could be used to focus here. “Focus here always and forever, even when you don’t feel like it,” is the message of the tradition.

Vince: So this is cool. I think what will happen on retreat is you and I will offer perspectives from opposite sides of the spectrum, and the exploration will be around figuring out how to work with more inclusive versus more exclusive focus—and finding your sweet spot.

I’ve never done a Jhāna retreat that wasn’t full noble silence, so it’s novel for me to go deep while also having space to be more inclusive. I think it’ll be fruitful for us.

A Jhāna Retreat

If this sounds like your jam, consider joining Vince Fakhoury Horn & Brian Newman for The Flavors of Jhāna retreat, this coming January in Portugal.

💬 Transcript

Leigh Brasington: Very nice to be here, I appreciate the invitation. I always like talking about the jhānas—very interesting topic. So what I’m going to do today is share the basic instructions for how to enter the jhānas as I teach them. I learned them from Ayya Khema. Actually, I stumbled into the first one when I was on retreat with Ajahn Buddhadasa in Southern Thailand. I didn’t know it was a jhāna. They told me I was experiencing pīti. I knew I liked it. It changed my practice from something I knew I should do to something I wanted to do. Just the pleasure of it—yeah, I’m a greed type—okay, here’s a nice source of pleasure.

The jhānas are eight altered states of consciousness. Actually, in the suttas there are four jhānas and four immaterial states, and it’s not until much later that they’re referred to as the eight jhānas. That’s convenient if you want to talk about the four immaterial states and the four jhānas at the same time, but they’re definitely different in the suttas. We do find many suttas where there are the first four jhānas and then three or four of the immaterial states, so it’s a pattern that makes a lot of sense.

Most of the Buddhist teachings are in three categories: sīla, samādhi, paññā—ethics, concentration, wisdom. Sīla is morality, keeping the precepts. Samādhi is usually translated as concentration, but I actually prefer “indistractibility.” Concentration’s got that furrowed-brow thing—people try too hard and it doesn’t work. That’s one problem with teaching jhānas.

I give students two warnings at the beginning of a retreat. First: if you have expectations, you’re in trouble. Expectation is wanting—the first hindrance. Over and over again the Buddha talks about the abandoning of the hindrances as a prerequisite for entering the jhānas. The other warning is that if you start fooling with concentration and you have any unresolved issues, they might come up. Hopefully none of you have unresolved psychological issues—but yeah, seems to be a problem for humans.

Then paññā is wisdom. Basically what the Buddha is saying is: clean up your act, learn to concentrate your mind, and use your concentrated, indistractible mind to investigate reality and understand what’s actually happening.

The jhānas in the suttas are frequently preceded by the abandoning of the hindrances. You might notice when you’re meditating and get distracted, you could label most distractions with one of the five hindrances: wanting, not wanting, sluggishness, restlessness, remorse, or doubt. What’s really necessary to enter the jhānas is a mind that’s relatively quiet.

In later Pali literature it talks about “access concentration.” I’ve adopted that phrase to describe what you have to generate before entering the jhānas—not the deep concentration described in the Visuddhimagga, but good enough to have a chance at the jhāna as described in the suttas.

So, basic instructions. Sit in a comfortable, upright posture—comfortable enough that it doesn’t generate aversion, but not so comfortable you fall asleep. Once you’re settled, put your attention on your meditation object. The Visuddhimagga mentions about thirty possible objects for developing access concentration. Most people work with mindfulness of breathing—the most common. Others use mettā meditation, or any of the brahmavihāras. A body scan works too—just slowly noticing sensations through the surface of the body without trying to change anything.

Some teachers, like Ajahn Sumedho, teach using the nāda sound—the subtle ringing you can hear when it’s quiet. That can work too, though I don’t recommend it unless you want to hear that sound forever. A fifth option is a mantra. If you do a mantra until the mantra starts “doing you,” that’s a sign of good concentration.

If you’re using the breath, you might notice some signs as you get concentrated. A diffuse white light may appear. That’s called a nimitta—just a sign that concentration is strong. Don’t do anything with it; it’s like a road sign telling you where you are. Later Buddhist texts describe a bright circular light, but the suttas don’t mention that. Still, if you see it, good—you’re concentrated.

As concentration deepens, the breath may become shallow or even seem to disappear. Don’t worry—you’re not going to die. Your body knows how to breathe. What’s happening is that your body doesn’t need as much oxygen because you’re still and calm. If you notice the breath slowing down, resist the temptation to take a deep breath. That resets the chemistry that helps bring on the first jhāna.

So: you sit, settle, put attention on your object. When you get distracted, label the distraction, relax, and come back. Labeling helps disidentify from it and shows where the mind tends to wander—wanting, aversion, past, future. Notice how seldom the distraction is in the present.

Relaxation is key because most distractions create tension. Just relax and return to the breath—or whatever object you’re using—letting it flow naturally. Access concentration is being fully with the object, with only wispy background thoughts like, “Is this what he meant?” instead of full-blown planning.

Once you realize you’re in access concentration, stay there for five to fifteen minutes. Time will feel distorted, so just hang out. If you’ve been there long enough—or your breath is so subtle it’s not usable as an object—there’s a trick: drop attention on the original object and shift to a pleasant sensation.

If you look at statues of the Buddha, he’s always smiling—that’s a teaching. Try smiling slightly and notice the pleasantness of it. Focus on that pleasantness. For some people it’s the hands—a warm, tingling glow. For mettā, the heart center. It could be anywhere: third eye, top of the head, shoulders, feet—whatever’s pleasant.

Once you’ve found a pleasant sensation, here comes the hard part: do nothing. Just enjoy it. Anything you do will mess it up. Remain focused on the pleasantness itself. If you stay steady, the pleasantness will intensify gradually, building until it erupts into pīti-sukha—physical rapture and emotional joy.

The instructions, in short: sit, settle, focus on your object; label distractions, relax, return; stay non-distracted; find a pleasant sensation; focus on it; do nothing else. The jhāna will find you. You don’t do jhāna—you set up the conditions for it to arise.

The most common problem is jumping too soon—grabbing at pleasant sensations before concentration is stable. Wait until you’re really steady. Another problem is trying to make something happen or getting excited when it does—both break concentration. You can’t enter jhāna and stay in control. You have to let go into the experience.

Ayya Khema said, “Letting go is the whole of the spiritual path.” That applies here. The first time the jhāna comes, it might feel mild or like it’s blowing the top of your head off—either is fine.

The length of time to stay in the first jhāna is inversely proportional to the intensity. If it’s strong, 20–30 seconds is plenty; if mild, up to 10 minutes. When you’ve had enough, take a deep breath to release the energy, then focus on the sukha—the emotional pleasure. The first jhāna is pīti with background sukha; the second is sukha with background pīti.

The purpose of the first jhāna is to get you to the second. If you’re concentrated enough, you can enter any jhāna directly, though that usually takes years of practice.

You could think of the mind like a still pond. Normally it’s wavy; concentration calms it. Then you drop in a pebble of pleasure, and the ripples bounce and reinforce until they rise as a geyser—that’s the first jhāna.

I suspect pīti involves dopamine breaking down into norepinephrine, and sukha involves opioids like serotonin. I’m a retired computer programmer, not a neuroscientist, but Jud Brewer thought that made sense. Focusing on the pleasant sensation is rewarding—it releases dopamine, which stimulates the nucleus accumbens, generating opioids. The norepinephrine explains the heat or vibration some people feel.

So essentially, you’re setting up a feedback loop of pleasure. Everything we experience is neurotransmitters; this is just a skillful way of using them to shift consciousness. The first jhāna alone won’t give deep enough concentration for strong insight—that develops more in the higher jhānas, especially the third and fourth.

So, by the time you get to the third and fourth jhānas, your concentration is deeply enhanced. The first jhāna is mostly about learning how to make the mind happy. It’s a wholesome form of pleasure, because the hindrances have been set aside. It’s blameless pleasure. The Buddha said it’s a pleasant abiding here and now. It’s not sensual pleasure—it’s mental pleasure.

You can’t be lustful or hateful and be in the jhānas at the same time. The hindrances have to be abandoned first. So, the first jhāna is a good antidote for desire, aversion, restlessness, doubt—all of that.

If you look in the suttas, you’ll see that the Buddha talks about entering and abiding in the first jhāna, then emerging and reflecting on it. He often says, “He enters and abides in the first jhāna, then emerges mindful and clearly comprehending.” The reflection part is where insight comes in.

You can look back and notice what was present and what was absent. “Okay, in that state, there was one-pointedness, there was rapture, there was happiness. There wasn’t anger, there wasn’t craving, there wasn’t restlessness.” You begin to see the conditionality of mind states—how some qualities lead to happiness and peace, and others to agitation and suffering.

That’s insight. Seeing cause and effect directly. And the more concentrated the mind, the more subtle the distinctions you can notice.

Now, I should emphasize: the jhānas are not necessary for awakening. There are people who wake up without ever entering them. But they are very helpful. The Buddha himself discovered the jhānas as a young man, then later realized they were a useful foundation for insight. He used them as part of his own path to awakening.

The first jhāna trains you to gather and steady the mind, and to be at ease with pleasure that doesn’t depend on external conditions. You can use that stability and joy to look into impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self.

It’s like building a campfire. You need enough kindling to get it going, but once the fire is burning steadily, you can cook something useful. Concentration is the kindling; insight is the cooking.

People sometimes get attached to the jhānas. It’s understandable—they’re very pleasant. But they’re not the goal. They’re a tool. They show you that the mind can be trained, and that happiness doesn’t have to come from the world—it can arise from the mind itself.

And, importantly, they show that pleasure isn’t the enemy. The Buddha didn’t advocate self-torture; he advocated wisdom. Pleasure used skillfully can support wisdom. The pleasure of the jhānas is wholesome because it’s not mixed with craving or clinging.

When the Buddha first described the Middle Way, he said it avoids the extremes of sensual indulgence and self-mortification. The jhānas are the perfect expression of that. They’re pleasure that’s blameless, balanced, and leads onward.

If you keep practicing, moving through the first, second, third, and fourth jhānas, what happens is that pīti—that energetic, bubbly joy—drops away. The mind becomes more serene, more equanimous. By the fourth jhāna, it’s just pure awareness, neutral feeling, total balance.

That’s the foundation for deep insight practice. In that stillness, you can start seeing impermanence very clearly. The slightest movement in the mind stands out. You can watch sensations arise and pass with precision.

So, to sum up: the first jhāna is pleasure and joy born of seclusion. You get there by letting go of the hindrances and focusing on a pleasant sensation until it amplifies. The second jhāna is pleasure and joy born of concentration itself—more stable, less effort. The third is equanimous pleasure—contentment without excitement. The fourth is pure equanimity and mindfulness.

The jhānas are not something you force; they’re something you allow. You set up the right conditions, and the mind naturally inclines toward stillness and happiness.

And then, when you emerge, you use that clarity to investigate. That’s where the liberating insight arises—not in the absorption itself, but in seeing how it all functions.

The Buddha described this process as samādhi-paññā, concentration leading to wisdom. The jhānas are simply one way, one very skillful way, to cultivate that.

A Jhāna Community Retreat

Come join Vince & Brian on Retreat this coming January in Portugal.

Learn More

💬 Transcript

Vince: Welcome everyone to this exciting special event here in the jhāna community. We’ve invited Brian Newman to join us today to talk about, in quotes, nut job jhāna. Of course, we’re using this sort of tongue-in-cheek term for really hardcore, deep jhāna training.

Our mutual teacher, Kenneth Folk, jokingly used that term on a retreat that we were both at. And it stuck, in terms of just, again, tongue-in-cheek. But Brian has that background. Brian’s trained in the Pa-Auk tradition, which is one of the most prestigious and hardcore of the jhāna traditions in Asia that I’m familiar with.

And they have some, you could say, really high standards with respect to what constitutes jhāna. I would love to jump into that with you, Brian, but first, before we get into your nut job jhāna days, I’m curious to start with a bit about how you initially got into this stuff.

Did you grow up around it? Did you have a moment where you learned about meditation or dharma? What was your way into this world?

Brian: Thanks for having me, Vince. It’s a great question. My origin story changes depending on my mood in the moment, so let’s see what I’ve got here.

I didn’t start practicing until I think I was 38. I’m 50 now, guys, so that’s a 12-year practice history. And the practice was associated with me becoming an executive coach. I was a salesperson, and I switched professions. I was switching to doing one-on-one work with people, and I had the idea that I realized very quickly I needed to be a better listener.

I’d like to be a better listener. And I had the idea that if I got real still, if I learned how to be really quiet, then I could probably listen to my clients better. And what happened was, I got real still, and I realized how insanely loud my mind was, even if I wasn’t talking. That was a real revelation, and my practice quickly changed from becoming a better listener to getting super fucking enlightened.

It became the interest. Is it okay if I say things like that?

Vince: Thanks.

Brian: Oh yeah, for me it’s fine. Yeah, please. Is that okay, guys? You’re looking for nut job jhāna, but I’m gonna give you a true dose if that’s what you’re into.

And so I, like many of us, I think—I don’t know what you guys did—I started with a Goenka retreat. Who doesn’t? It’s so accessible. It’s so free. It’s so there, right? So you go do your Goenka retreat, and then I went and did Reggie Ray Tibetan stuff. So I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m doing Goenka, and then I go do Reggie Ray in the Tibetan tradition, and I’m doing other retreats here and there.

And then, you know what, it was—I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I spent so much of my life based on one sentence I read in one book—but it was Daniel Ingram’s book, actually. It was Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, which I think is a great gift to the Dharma community, a wonderful book that is very inspiring.

Daniel is clearly a great practitioner. Anybody who’s read the book understands what a great practitioner he is. And I appreciated that. And then, at the beginning of the book, there’s one line that says, “If I had to do it over again, I would’ve started by attaining at least the first jhāna before I got into my vipassanā practice.”

And I’m like, if this dude says that, I’m just gonna take that at face value and do it. And that became my jhāna journey. So that was probably a year into meditation when I got that book introduced to me. The book had a huge impact.

And then I was actually working with Ron Crouch at the time—another of Kenneth’s quite well-known students and a great Dharma teacher. And I’m like, “Ron, I wanna do jhānas,” and he says, “You’re not gonna do them with me ‘cause that’s not my thing.”

And we agreed that I would go do something, I would go pursue that, in a very nice way. Like, you always want the teacher that says, “That’s not my thing.” That’s the best teacher ever—“It’s not my thing. Learn it from somebody else.”

So I started to look for the jhāna teachers, which, twelve years ago, there weren’t many. Right, Vince? There’s hardly anybody. So it’s like there’s Leigh Brasington, there’s Steven and Tina Rasmussen—Steven Snyder and Tina Rasmussen—there’s Shaila Catherine. Both those two are in the Pa-Auk tradition.

Leigh Brasington’s Ayya Khema—it’s a totally different genre—and frankly, I couldn’t find anybody else. And I’m living in Asia at the time, guys. I’ve lived in Asia most of my life. So I chose the hardcore route—read Steven and Tina’s book—and I’m like, if I’m gonna do the thing, I might as well do it as hardcore as possible.

And I started to do retreats. I did one retreat with them, to be clear, and then I worked with them for about a year. And then I found a nun in Asia, Sayalay Susīlā, who has a retreat center called Appamāda Vihārī, which means “dwelling in diligence” in Sanskrit—which tells you exactly what kind of practitioner and teacher she is.

There’s something very special about finding a hardcore nun in Asia to teach you the Dharma. This is the way. I think it’s really a beautiful experience. She’s not public—you can go look at her retreat center, and the first thing you’ll read is “Not open to any new students. No private retreats allowed.”

All this is negotiable, in case you guys are interested. So she’s setting up a lot of obstacles for you to even get there. Interesting, isn’t it? Very interesting. Very Asian.

And I go to the retreat center, and it’s just a magical place in Penang—on the island, in the jungle, on a mountain. I can’t even describe it. And there’s nobody there. You guys, this retreat hall could fit 300 people. There’s a Buddha statue the size of a house in there. It’s unbelievable.

And I’m the only one practicing. Sometimes there’d be rotating nuns who’d come through. So I probably went there five or six times over the course of a couple or three years.

And in February of 2018, she said, “Brian, it’s very clear to me that you have attained the third jhāna, and I think you’re probably bouncing around the fourth.” This is the first time ever anybody acknowledged me as attaining jhānas.

So, Sayalay Susīlā had spent ten years at the Mahasi Center under the Sayadaw teachings, under Mahasi. Then she became lead attendant for Pa-Auk Sayadaw, traveling with him around Asia. She spent like three years with him in Sri Lanka. She told me once, in confidence, that one of her big breakthroughs was just softening in Sri Lanka, attending to Pa-Auk Sayadaw in this primitive environment.

She was with him the whole time—the lady behind the curtain. So I’m getting the Pa-Auk Sayadaw teachings in their full form from her. And this was a really beautiful experience to me. It’s what I’d been looking for—the essence of it, I thought.

And then I met Kenneth, and Kenneth took a hatchet to what I had learned in the traditional way. You guys, I think maybe you have some experience or know of Kenneth—he’s an iconoclastic teacher—and he really opened up the jhāna for me in amazing ways. That is where my practice is today.

So maybe I could just rephrase that. I have very traditional teaching, specifically in the Pa-Auk lineage. I’ve been validated in that lineage. Their model of attaining jhāna is a three-hour timed sit—you make a resolution, you exit three hours later without looking at a watch. You naturally come out of the absorbed jhāna after three hours.

I’m sitting on the floor, guys. I’m not sitting in easy chairs like they do at a lot of retreat centers—on the cushion, straight back, three hours, come out in a moment. That’s how you get jhāna.

If you talk to Steven or Tina, that’s the way they did it. They went through all eight. They did all the kasinas for every single one. This is serious—a multi-month practice to complete the whole cycle.

And Sayalay Susīlā said to me, “I think you should teach.” So I’ve been validated by her to go ahead and teach this.

So I have a very traditional Pa-Auk background. I’m very appreciative of those models and understand them very well. And then I have a really sort of modern, postmodern view as well—about not needing to be totally absorbed. I have a much looser view about jhāna on the spectrum. I believe there’s a flavor of jhāna that can be very light, and then a really strong flavor—and different ways to get into those states.

Vince: Okay, cool. We should talk more about the spectrum, because that’s something we’ve been exploring.

Brian: Are you into the spectrum community?

Vince: (Laughs)

Brian: I’m all into the spectrum. Yeah. It’s only the spectrum. Anybody telling you it’s not is engaged in black-and-white thinking, which is unskillful. Like, what is black and white in the world? Jhāna versus not-jhāna is a really misguided way to approach it. Think—how about, how much jhāna?

Vince: Okay, cool. Before we switch into that, could you talk a little bit more about the training that you received with Sila—

Brian: Sayalay Susīlā. S-U-S-I-L-A.

Vince: Right. One side note here: very interestingly, a couple of my friends here in Asheville recently organized a retreat for college kids and invited her out to lead it. They were telling me, “We’ve got this nun who’s in the Pa-Auk tradition, she’s from Malaysia…” The more details I got, the more I realized this was your teacher.

Brian: Really?

Vince: Yeah, and I was shocked because of how you’ve talked about how inaccessible she is. I was like, “Wow.” And they were like, “Yeah, no one’s ever heard of her.” I said, “I have. My friend Brian’s trained with her.”

Brian: Oh, that’s impressive.

Vince: Anyway—did she come?

Brian: Yeah, she did. She came and led a really—I think it was a weeklong retreat—for American college kids.

Vince: Oh man.

Brian: It’s amazing. She’s an incredible teacher. We have a close relationship. I can be joking with her and I’ll say, “I don’t know, these three-hour sits are killing me, they’re brutal.” She’ll say, “I’ll come sit with you tomorrow.” I’d never seen her sit before—like a stone, forever. You guys, eight hours, I don’t know, six hours? She’s just not going to move. She’s sitting like a fucking stone. So impressive.

Vince: Okay, so how does one learn to sit like a stone? What was the training like on the way up to three hours of stoniness?

Brian: This is the primary dilemma, guys, because all these books about jhāna—and I’ll tell you, the instructions on how to get jhāna—it’s two words, right? There are all these books, but it’s two words: “focus here.” That’s it. You realize that’s the end of the practice instructions.

So then we just become sort of masturbatory about all the different ways we can “focus here,” but it’s constantly “focus here.”

Here’s what happens. Westerners go to the Pa-Auk monastery—Pa-Auk now has one in San Francisco or something. He doesn’t live in Burma anymore, maybe in Malaysia, I’m not sure if he’s alive actually—but they go to the Pa-Auk monastery and are told to focus here, which is the only instruction in jhāna: focus here, focus on the anāpāna spot (or region, more modernly, since it’s not just a spot but an area).

Then the Western practitioner, who’s been trained at perhaps Western retreat centers where it’s really okay to psychologize your practice, will come in with all the reasons why they can’t “focus here.” They’ll tell lots of stories—life stories, traumas, challenges, aspirations. The teacher listens kindly, says some nice things, and they go back and try to practice more.

So the Western practitioner takes a long time, is what I’m getting at. It doesn’t seem to go too smoothly, is what I hear in the Pa-Auk monastery.

I haven’t been to Burma, but the laypeople—the Burmese women, often the ones who have the time to practice—will come in, the teacher says, “Focus here,” and they just go. They don’t think about it, because they’re reverent to the teacher. They just focus here. And two weeks later, they’ve got jhāna. This is well known.

There’s something fascinating about just taking that simple instruction and doing the thing for a really long time.

So I’m super into getting jhāna fast, and I have lots of hacks. A certain kind of person can jack their way, hack their way, grind their way into jhāna. If you guys want to know that, I’ll talk about that all day. I wanted to know it. It’s good to know, right?

However, I would suggest to you that jhāna is much better slow—like some other things in life. Slow food is better than fast food, right, Vince?

Vince: Indeed it is.

Brian: Making love slowly is often better than fast. Playing the saxophone with a slow vibe is nicer than playing it fast, I think, in many cases. Isn’t it amazing there are still practices in the world that encourage patience?

If you remember—or if you’ve read—the Buddha predicted that the end of times, the end of the Dharma, would come when people stopped practicing jhāna. So I think it’s wonderful that we’re talking about it.

I think it’s wonderful that Vince is in fights with people on Twitter about nuances of jhāna, because that means we’re still talking about it—and that means we’re not at the end of time. I’m super delighted by this. I have no opinion on the arguments; I just think it’s interesting we’re talking about it.

Twelve years ago, we weren’t even talking about it. I’m stoked about that.

What’s the practice, what’s the right way to say it—what are they actually teaching you in the practice? I think you’ve got to fill it out for yourself.

So I’m going to get “focus here” from the Sayalay, and she’s really not going to engage with me much more than “focus here,” and then question me if I say anything.

I’ll give you an example. I went to a teacher once—actually Tina—and said, “Every time I sit down to sit, all I’m getting is spiders. I’m just getting spiders all the time—spider images. I’m trying to do jhāna, I’m just getting spiders.”

And there were spiders all over the retreat center—somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—crazy numbers of spiders. I didn’t love spiders at the time. I’ve changed my relationship because of that retreat.

And I’m talking about the spiders, and she says to me, “What’s the most important thing to you right now?” And I said, “The breath—and getting jhāna.” And she says, “Then why are you talking to me about spiders?”

That was good teaching, you guys. She just said, “Focus here. Stop talking about stuff. Focus here.”

So that’s the instruction, I think. We need to fill that out a little bit for somebody who’s interested.

If you’re on this call today, you care about this, I think, so you want to fill it out. I’d suggest you go read some other books. Read Richard Shankman’s book, which tells you how all the different teachers think about jhāna—that’s a great start.

Go to Leigh Brasington and learn the jhānic factor way in—that’s a great teaching, totally in the suttas, very sutta-based. And then all the other ways we can hack our way in. Kenneth has lots of hacks.

But primarily, Vince, I’d say the teaching I got was “focus here,” and when you don’t feel like focusing here, focus here more. That was basically it. It was very rigorous, down the line. If you can’t take it, fine, don’t come back.

Vince: Okay. So in that sense, that fits with the kind of traditional method of—it’s pretty simple and straightforward and direct. But sometimes maybe there’s a lack of exposition or opening up to all the different ways you can hack or grind, like you said.

Brian: Yeah. So it’s extremely powerful, but if it doesn’t work for someone, it can really not work.

Vince: Yeah.

Brian: Even the sutta-based instructions are better than “focus here,” right? So here’s what the sutta says: Find somewhere really quiet. Bring mindfulness to the fore. So this—we could have a whole session: what does it mean to bring mindfulness to the fore?

Interesting. Does he mean bring it to the tip of your nose—maybe it’s an anāpāna spot thing? Does he mean bring it to the mind—have awareness that you’re doing a mindful practice?

If you’ve looked at the suttas about the bathmaker making the ball of soap—that’s the simile of the jhāna—those are great practice instructions for the practitioner.

May I remind you that the fruits of the practice are only available to those who practice—roughly quoting Mahasi.

So if we haven’t done the practice, “focus here” is the best instruction ever. If we have done the practice, the similes of the bathmaker—making that weird ball of soap—suddenly start to make sense.

The jhānic factors become entry points. You can have pīti all day long—have you ever had pīti just watching a movie or listening to angelic voices of a choir? I’m getting it right now, talking about pīti.

Why couldn’t I just take that and use it to access jhāna? Because it’s a jhānic factor—I think I could. So we start to—what we’re looking for, guys, and this is a Kenneth teaching—we’re looking for handles.

You’ve got six senses—five senses plus the mind—and there are going to be handles that allow you to hold jhāna in many different ways.

We could go through each of the senses and talk about handles, but let me just give you an example from the auditory sense—the ear sense.

Many people, not all, will get a ringing in the ears that’s associated with high concentration, and that’s called the nāda. Are you guys aware of that? It’s like the sound of the universe, sometimes said to be.

Does anybody get that—a ringing in your ears? You might not even notice. It’s very subtle. It’s said to be the cosmological sound of the universe—or it could just be the sound you hear internally when you get super concentrated.

So if I can get a sense of the nāda and there’s a jhānic factor arising, I know where to put my eyes, and I’m good at following the breath.

Ajahn Chah said he could enter jhāna in one breath. I suggest you can enter jhāna in one moment. You don’t need to—you can just go in, you can just drop in.

I’m saying this sort of nonchalantly only because I met Kenneth Folk some five years ago, and it’s true that you can only go in—but he was the person who made that a possibility for me, by opening the idea of that up, as did, in his own way, Ajahn Chah saying you could enter in one breath. That seemed revolutionary at the time.

Vince: That’s interesting. I never heard the Ajahn Chah quote on entering jhāna through the breath. But his background—a lot of people don’t know—he did super hardcore jhāna training and vipassanā-jhāna training before he met his teacher, Ajahn Mun, of course, who was like, “Let go of the states,” berated him for being in jhāna, right?

Brian: Yeah, which was a good advanced teaching.

Vince: But—

Brian: So, Ram Dass used to enter jhāna when he was with Babaji in India, and it’s talked about in Grist for the Mill, which is a wonderful Dharma book. And Babaji would see him super concentrated and he’d come up to him and say, “Hey, Ram Dass, how much money you make?”

He would deliberately break his concentration, to teach him about not being stuck in those concentrated states.

Vince: That’s lovely. Okay, so Brian—when you stopped intensively working on the Pa-Auk jhāna program, you said there were a few years when you were going on retreats and working hardcore on that project. Where did you leave that training—in terms of what you felt you’d learned or accomplished, or however you’d like to talk about it?

Brian: Yeah. My Dharma path has been a lot about trying to attain things I didn’t have—and then not being so impressed when I attained them. Does anybody have that experience?

I think this is a really good experience to have, guys, because it allows it all to fall away—and we become immune from states.

So the pinnacle of my nut job jhāna practice was probably when I checked into an Airbnb in Hong Kong and did a two-week solo. It was on an island actually, not in Hong Kong proper, and it was a super crappy, disgusting Airbnb—150 square feet total. I hadn’t vetted it first, and I brought enough food for two weeks.

I decided I wasn’t going to leave this 150-square-foot place for two weeks. And I didn’t. Basically, I wasn’t going to leave until I got jhāna.

So it was two weeks, but I was willing to extend it. I was just going to go for it. And I think I should have taken a picture—around day five, I started putting writings up on the wall. So I’d gone full-on mad person now—if the police came, it’s a crime scene.

And I didn’t bring much paper, so I’ve got paper towel tubes and stuff I’m writing on, and all I write is “focus here.” I put it everywhere I could possibly see—including the shower, you guys. It says “focus here.”

One of the areas you’re going to lose your concentration is in the shower and eating. So we learn, if we’re serious jhāna practitioners, you never let the pot stop boiling.

So really slow eating becomes a practice—maintaining the nimitta if you have it, or the awareness of the breath. And the shower’s a tough one—try washing yourself while maintaining jhāna. So: in the shower, “focus here.”

Around day 12, I had a massive breakdown—who wouldn’t? I actually left in the middle of the night and went down to the beach and cried for three hours. Then I finished the retreat out and said, “I’m never going to do that again.”

It was so much suffering to be free of suffering—which is a Dharma dilemma, isn’t it?

Around this time, I was really fortunate to have met Kenneth. The first thing Kenneth said to me was, “Don’t take this stuff so preciously. Let me show you how I can go through the eight jhānas in two minutes.”

I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “If you’ve been there once, you can just do it again right now. Just remember.”

That really loosened up the practice.

Now, I continued to go see the nuns. I asked Kenneth, “What should I say to her?” and he said, “Don’t tell her anything. Just say, ‘I’m here to learn, please teach me.’” That was great advice.

So I kept getting “focus here” from her and “magic” from Kenneth—and that duet really worked for me.

What ended up happening from Kenneth’s teaching was, he taught me eye postures. I think that’s the hack. If you’re able to bring your eyes—the jhāna one, two, three, or four—there are distinct eye postures (drishti, it’s called in Sanskrit). I think that’s the thing that gets us into jhāna quicker than anything else.

And, guys, just a general suggestion—it’s worthwhile to pay attention to where your eyes are in any practice of meditation.

If you’ve ever done Mahāmudrā, where do your eyes go when you do it? That’s interesting. Where are the monks’ eyes when they’re doing open-eye Dzogchen? You can take a look.

Very interesting what’s happening with eyes. There are some hidden teachings there, I think.

I mentioned to Sayalay Susīlā about eye postures once—against my better judgment—and she said, “You’re looking with your eyes.” Because she wants an internal drishti. She doesn’t want a real one.

And I said, “Yeah, I’m looking with my eyes.” And she said, “If you’re already doing it, keep doing it.” That seemed like an interesting way to respond.

So I felt Kenneth was really onto something there when she validated that.

Kenneth really helped me make things quicker so I didn’t have to sit long. I would sit like—daily life, three hours to start my day, for years. Then I’d sit an hour at night.

That’s how you maintain jhāna in daily life. I probably would have to do an hour and a half to two in the morning and thirty minutes to an hour later in the day.

With that practice, I could enter any jhāna on the Tokyo subway in rush hour if I was sitting down. That’s where I got with the practice.

So—what else do you need to do? At that point, I didn’t need to do anything else. I’d had it. I realized that there were two people in the world who cared—my teacher Kenneth and my friend Vince.

And I wasn’t really impressing anybody. My wife didn’t care, my friends didn’t care, nobody else cared. So it really loosened me up.

And when I got loose around it, I started to have some fun with it. My jhāna now is much more like playing the saxophone. It’s real gentle.

If there’s a nimitta, I’ll go with it, but I don’t worry about it. So it’s very—I’m going to call it opportunistic jhāna, where I’m not so rigorous.

Preparing to talk to you guys today, I wanted to dust off the skills, so I’ve spent the past couple weeks practicing pretty rigorous jhāna. It’s fascinating to do that—how fun it is, and how much it impacts my life.

I notice that I sit much quieter. My yoga practice is really different, just by doing a little jhāna practice before that.

Does that answer the question, Vince? I might have gone on a tangent.

Vince: Yeah, no—really interesting. What you were saying about ramping up your jhāna practice recently flashed me back to the last retreat I did—a jhāna retreat with Phillip Moffitt.

Right after that, I had a Rolfing session—where they massage the fascia—and it was shocking how much more pliable my body was after sitting on my ass for ten days breathing.

Even the Rolfer was like, “Holy crap, this is a lot different than our normal sessions.”

That really showed me the power of jhāna—like hard jhāna.

Brian: Yeah, and what you said is so interesting, because what’s the end game here, guys? Nobody ever said the end game was to get jhāna. What’s the end game?

The Buddha wants us to have a mind that is pliant and malleable—that’s what he said.

So if we have a triangle where first jhāna is the bottom layer, second is above that, and you get nirodha somewhere at the top—the peak of the triangle is a mind that is malleable and pliant.

Which is interesting, because that’s not quite what an absorbed jhānic mind is. The absorbed jhānic mind is super one-pointed—it can burn a hole through things, like a laser.

And I really lived in that dichotomy for a while. I had to make a life choice: which do I like better?

I like a pliant and malleable mind more than I like a laser-focused pointer.

I can see tremendous value in that. It’s great—for my golf game, if I want to putt, turn on the jhāna mind, great. Archery—wonderful.

If I need to sit down and plan a class I’m going to teach, I need four hours of focused concentration—no problem anymore.

But it’s much nicer to play the saxophone, I’d say—more in line with where I’m at.

Also, when you get something—you know how it goes—once you’ve got the call, you can hang up the phone. Isn’t that what somebody famous said?

Vince: That was Ram Dass, no?

Brian: Was that Ram Dass? Once you’ve got the call, yeah—you can hang up the phone.

Vince: Yeah. That’s cool. Makes sense. So you had this period where you were training intensively—and what I find really interesting about your description is what it took you to maintain that type of access in modern life.

Brian: We’re talking about that. People—yeah, no one’s—

Vince: I’ve never heard—

Brian: Wife goes to the bathroom at the restaurant—I’m going to be in jhāna. I’m waiting in a line at the grocery store—I’m going to be in jhāna. Crowded Tokyo subway—I’m going to be waiting for a client meeting in a corporate lobby—I’m going to be in jhāna.

That’s how I was living my life.

Vince: So you were living in a way that would keep you from losing access to that subtle level of concentrated awareness.

Brian: To go into the seventh jhāna while waiting in line at the post office—it’s no easy feat. That’s not meant to be egotistical.

It’s super cool to be able to play the drums. It’s super cool to do aikido. It’s super cool to cook Vietnamese food. And it’s super cool to go into seventh jhāna in the post office.

We all have our things we’re into. It’s just another fun thing to figure out in one’s life, for those who are interested.

Vince: Nicely spoken. Like a true lifelong learner.

You’ve mentioned the term nimitta a number of times, and I know probably everyone here is familiar, but for those who might not be—could you talk about what the nimitta is in the context of Pa-Auk training?

Brian: Yeah, sure. So, in the tradition, the nimitta is a sign—I believe nimitta means “sign”—and it’s something that arises in the mind through concentration.

In the Pa-Auk tradition, it’s ānāpānasati leading to the nimitta, and then one takes the nimitta as the object, which is interesting, right? Because you might wonder, why would you move away from the thing that got you there in the first place—the breath—and switch to something else? That’s a really interesting question.

Some traditions say don’t do that. Ayya Khema, my understanding is, said that was a distraction and one shouldn’t look at the nimitta.

Now it doesn’t matter—I’ll talk more about the nimitta in a second—but it doesn’t matter because a nimitta is going to arise.

Here’s what happens: in my experience, the nimitta arises—it’s a very exciting moment when it arises for the first time, and one wants to look at it, because this is the best thing we’re trying to get.

And the nimitta is squirrely. It always goes away when you look at it. So it doesn’t really matter whether you choose to look at it or not; if it happens for you—and not everybody is prone to getting it—then one will become absorbed in it, not by looking at it but by continuing the ānāpānasati practice that you were doing before.

Let me flesh out the nimitta a little bit more. It doesn’t happen for everybody, and the Pa-Auk tradition acknowledges this. There’s a separate path for those who aren’t predisposed to getting the nimitta, which I think is wonderful—isn’t it nice to have an alternative?

The alternative path is, you’re going to work on the four elements, and you’re going to do vipassanā using the four elements as your framework.

So instead of saying, “pressure in my shoulder” or “my elbow is resting on the chair,” you say “earth element,” because that’s earth. Then the wind element would be the pressure.

This is very interesting and shamanistic. So they want you to do four elements—you do that a ton until the body dissolves—and that’s enough concentration to start vipassanā practice, which is meant to get you enlightened.

Pa-Auk tradition is not about getting jhāna; it’s about getting enlightened. He just wants you to get all the jhānas super great, then bring that into vipassanā. His whole game is getting enlightened.

So much so that, if I’m not mistaken, in that tradition you have to revoke the Bodhisattva vow so that you can get enlightened.

I’ve had teachers who were asked to revoke their Bodhisattva vow so they could progress in his tradition—and they declined because they didn’t want to revoke it. Super interesting. Also tells us how these rigorous traditions differ from Mahāyāna and so on.

What else is not really talked about in the nimitta? Traditionally it’s considered a bright white light—like someone turned the lights on, headlights shining in your face.

That’s not true for everybody, though. Everyone can have different nimittas—reverse nimittas, black with a white ring around it, for example, not rare. And then there are just “signs.”

Probably the most concentrated I’ve ever been—way deep into a long solo in Penang—I was getting Buddha-head nimittas, spinning skull nimittas, upside-down Buddha-head nimittas—wild stuff. I could basically take any of those things as an object and use them.

I don’t know other traditions well enough to know what would happen, but the act of absorption is the nimitta getting bigger and closer, then a sense of being sucked into it. That’s absorption in the tradition.

And I think, Vince—you can see if you can validate this—I think if you’ve been absorbed, you know it. I don’t think it’s one of those things like, “Maybe I’m a stream-enterer, maybe that was A&P.”

I think if you’ve been absorbed—you know it.

Vince: Yeah, definitely.

Brian: What else about the nimitta? It’s very frustrating when it’s not arising and you’ve been told that’s the thing that’ll get you to jhāna. So baked into that practice is real frustration.

My first retreat with Tina and Steve—it was all about the nimitta.

So I just basically sat for eleven days not getting it and freaking out because I was a jhāna failure. I only learned later that not everybody gets the nimitta.

I’m fortunate that it arises for me—it’s wonderful to be absorbed into that.

Vince: This is a really interesting conversation, because for me, I don’t get nimitta—or not often. My very earliest practice years, there was a lot of light and visual stuff, then it all died down and didn’t arise again.

Even on very long retreats. So for me, I’m not super into the nimitta—vipassanā was more my way into concentration.

I would’ve loved the element practice, I think. But when I was on retreat with Jack Kornfield, I remember talking to him about the Pa-Auk tradition, and he suggested that probably only about 10% of people who went on those retreats—Americans, in this case—would even be able to get into Pa-Auk jhāna one.

So they would have the capability or body-mind fit for that model.

What do you think of that statement?

Brian: It’s so disempowering—it’s painful, isn’t it? Steven and Tina told me that I think they were on a one-month retreat with Pa-Auk the first time he came to the U.S.—and nobody else got jhāna on that retreat except for them. Which is wildly disempowering.

But I do think there are predispositions, Vince—and guys—it’s an open question.

I have a sense that maybe I’m just prone to concentrated states in general as a human being. I’ve done martial arts from an early age. I’m a black belt in Japanese archery, which is very single-pointed.

I’ve done three hours of yoga every day for ten years. So I’m doing lots of things that support concentration.

I’m not sure if it’s predisposition or if I developed it—but like anything in life, some of us have talents in some areas and others don’t. Which leads us to the wonderful truth that dry or wet both seem to work.

Vince: Okay, yeah—this is interesting. The best analogy here is high-performance sports.

I was an amateur cross-country track runner before I got old and became a parent. And I remember competing at the state level—you had to prove yourself in multiple races before that. You don’t just show up to the state championships and say, “I’m ready.”

So that’s something that seems different with the Olympic-level jhāna versus Olympic-level anything else. There’s more of a filter.

Brian: It calls to mind a couple of stories that are so on point with that.

I had a teacher interview once—the teacher said to me, “I can look around this retreat center and tell you who will ever get jhāna and who won’t. And Brian, you will.”

This was helpful for me—not so much for everyone else—but he’d been doing the practice for thirty years. He could tell.

And the first time I met Sayalay Susīlā, I remember vividly, I was in the kitchen of the retreat center and she comes up to me and says—the first words out of her mouth—“I can see you have very strong past-life pāramīs.”

The Western world isn’t unapologetically Buddhist-cosmology like that, but if you believe in karma, then maybe I’ve had some great past-life stuff going on.

She literally said, “You’re going to work on the light kasina, because that’s the fastest way to get jhāna, and fast is better.”

I said, “Okay.” Isn’t that great—to meet a teacher so rooted in the tradition?

In the suttas, the Buddha chose a red sapphire for a jeweler to concentrate on. Kenneth’s got a story—if you want to get concentrated, take a cereal bowl, set it on a table, and look at it every day for an hour.

There’s something special about finding an Asian teacher still in that model—they’ll say, “This is the best object for you. You probably did this in a past life. So do more of that.”

I’m not saying true or false—it’s just wonderful to hear it.

And, Vince, it does seem like there’s a quality of amateur versus pro.

Vince: Yeah, absolutely. Even within professional levels, there are distinctions—amateur pros versus Tiger Woods or Caitlin Clark.

This isn’t talked about much because most meditation conversations are broader—people just trying to maintain daily practice. We’re not professional jhāna practitioners, most of us.

But it’s useful to acknowledge that professional levels exist.

Brian: Right. And jhāna isn’t a hidden teaching—it’s right there in the five masteries: advert, enter, abide, exit, reflect.

That’s what I’d do next after “focus here,” because that fills out the whole practice. It starts with “May the mind incline to the first jhāna.” At the end we say, “Did the mind incline to the first jhāna?”

What a great practice.

And how many jhāna practitioners are doing that? If they’re not, they’re not opening up to mastery—it’s right there in the suttas.

Vince: Yeah, clearly this is what it takes to be a master.

Brian: Such a good model. And it’s interesting to consider that alongside what you mentioned—jhāna on the spectrum—because presumably you can attain that mastery at light, deep, or ultra-deep levels.

Vince: Absolutely.

Brian: My criteria lately is: did I have the flavor of jhāna?

Here’s a Kenneth story. Someone gives you a glass of clear liquid and adds a tiny bit of super-concentrated strawberry essence that has no color. They give you the glass and say, “Drink it.” You drink it. They ask, “What does it taste like?” You say, “It’s strawberry.”

It’s always strawberry. Doesn’t matter how much—it doesn’t have to be red or have actual strawberries to taste like strawberry.

So that’s my barometer now: did I have that quality? Because I know if the quality’s there, it’s just a ball rolling down the hill, gathering speed. That’s what jhāna is.

If I have longer to let that quality manifest, it’ll happen. If I only have thirty minutes this morning—good enough with just a taste, a little tingling on the back of the neck, a little bliss in the lower region. Sounds good to me.

Vince: Now, your earlier question about entering jhāna with the nimitta—how that’s very obvious—I’d say that rings true to me at the moderately deep or deeper levels.

But the light jhāna doesn’t have that quality for me. It’s not even close.

Brian: Not even close for me.

Vince: Yeah.

Brian: I think there’s a fine line between really deep jhāna practice and absorptions. What’s the difference? Someone tell me the difference between a long fruition, eighth jhāna perception/non-perception, and a good nirodha.

Maybe Daniel Ingram will parse that for us someday. Nobody really knows.

So basically, the way my practice concluded—or at least settled—was practicing one by one as they occurred, working up and down, vipassanizing the jhānas.

Every time I’d do this and reach the later stages, I’d be gone—not just absorbed, gone—for significant periods. And it happened often enough that I became clear about coming out—“Oh, auditory formations just kicked in, mind just came back online.”

It was like nirodha, pretty much. But maybe that’s perception/non-perception, maybe a super-long fruition. It doesn’t matter. I was gone for a long time. It seemed good.

Maybe it’s my personality—I don’t have the desire to parse those states so much.

I’m comfortable calling that the super high-end Pa-Auk tradition.

A teacher once told me—I asked, “How long does it take you to get to jhāna?” He said, “Two to three days on retreat, maybe more.”

I vividly remember that. I didn’t love it—I wanted access all the time. But to his credit, he was saying, “That’s how long it takes me to get a massive nimitta, get absorbed, sit for three hours, and demerge without a prompt.”

That’s amazing—for two or three days. I don’t know if I could get up to that level in just two or three days of practice.

Vince: Yeah, I heard the same thing—someone asked her how long it would take to power up to that level of jhāna where you can be absorbed for days, and she said, “Yeah, a few days.”

Brian: I totally appreciate that now. Then I was dismissive—“He’s defining jhāna too hard.” But now I see—that’s how long it takes to get that.

How long does it take to get a light jhānic flavor? One moment—less than a breath.

Vince: Cool. Okay, great. This brings nuance to the jhāna spectrum. The deeper end sounds attainable but requires lots of daily practice—multiple hours a day.

Brian: That’s my sense, and I’ve heard that echoed. I remember hearing Leigh Brasington say you need four hours a day or so.

Vince: Yeah, but it’s not like ten minutes.

Brian: Basically, for me, it’s the nimitta. When you take the pot off the boiling water, it stops boiling.

So in the classical Thai Theravāda tradition, they talk about guarding the sign—guarding the nimitta—like it’s the most precious thing. You never let it go.

That’s why I had to maintain such a long daily practice—so whenever I looked, I could find the nimitta.

It was frustrating to rebuild it if I lost it. So I tried to maintain it—but honestly, it’s not sustainable in daily life.

Here’s how that plays out in relationships: I’d be sitting there in jhāna at dinner with my wife, and she’d say, “Stop meditating.” And I’d be like, “Oh, you caught me.” I was completely tranced out, not even with her.

Vince: Yeah, I could see that being a problem.

Okay, so that’s an interesting statement—is it even possible to maintain ultra-deep jhāna in modern life?

Brian: Answer is yes—but at the cost of life. Yes, with significant practice—and being careful.

I’ve had—really crazy—you guys have had big experiences, I’m sure—it’s like being stuck in a third-jhānic state. Has that ever happened to you, Vince?

The world is super wacky. Trying to have a client meeting while being stuck there—not skillful. Quite difficult.

It has a direct impact on daily life.

Have you guys talked about correlating stages of insight with jhāna?

Vince: I think we’ve talked about it a little bit—that you can look at both the samatha-jhānas and vipassanā-jhānas as two different ways of looking at jhāna.

Brian: Yeah. Third jhāna for me sits in the whole dukkha-ñāṇa spectrum. Then the second and the first would be pre-dissolution. So third jhāna is dissolution and onwards, everything before that would be first and second.

Vince: Yeah, I was gonna say I feel like I spend about 50% or more of my time in third jhāna.

Brian: (Laughs) Yeah. So it’s an interesting question. When you—if we play with eye postures, or just notice—where do your eyes want to go when you close them?

Sometimes the anāpāna spot is comfortable; sometimes it’s super uncomfortable, maybe because we’re abiding in a dukkha-ñāṇa.

My position on that is: take the easy one. What jhāna do you want? If third is sitting there for you, take third, work down to first, then back up—play a little.

If I’m grinding away at first, like I was this morning—hilariously—I literally cracked up after twenty minutes. I was like, “Wow, it’s literally impossible to get first jhāna right now.”

But if I’d tried the others, I’m sure they would’ve been accessible. I was trying to make a point about how good I was—not skillful. It was a great comeuppance.

Vince: Yeah, Rob Burbea talks about that as well—in his jhāna retreat he said if you can’t get pīti going and access through the first, maybe the fourth is more accessible. Come in through the fourth, then explore the spectrum.

Brian: Rob Burbea—may he rest in peace—a wonderful Dharma teacher. What was the line he had about that? “Don’t control the breath”? Ānāpāna is all about letting go of the breath—notice it being long or short, count the breath, don’t control it.

Burbea said, “Who said don’t control the breath? Do whatever you want. Breathe well.”

He encouraged using the breath deliberately to provoke pleasant sensations in the body. Seems skillful to me. If you get some sukha, you’ll easily fall into jhāna.

He was totally iconoclastic—it’s not really spoken about how much of an iconoclast he was. He was so out there with some of the stuff he said—wonderful, helpful, what?

Vince: Yeah. It helped that he came up within the insight tradition and then became more samatha-oriented over time, so he maintained one foot in the institution but also went beyond it.

Brian: Totally.

Vince: Yeah. Thanks for mentioning him.

So anything else you want to say before we open it up for questions?

Brian: No, I think that’s enough. I’d love to hear from other people.

Ten years ago, I was invited, through my role as a Meditation Coach at Reboot.io, by companies like Etsy, DigitalOcean, & Codecademy to share Social Meditation, a uniquely relational form of contemplative practice.

Today, with MindfulCoach.ing, I’m working with high-tech teams at Akamai Technologies & Smartsheet, and I’ve noticed something new: the same practices now hit even harder. Of course, I’ve grown as a teacher over the past decade, but the shift I’m seeing isn’t just about me, I think it reflects a change in global culture itself.

"If there is one word which brings together the multiform new logics which are so rapidly changing the structure of our world, a word which describes the ways in which everything is fracturing so as to reconnect more intensely, it is the term ‘network.’" – Christopher Vitale, Networkologies

As an elder millennial, I was online before I was a teenager. My son, though, is a true digital native, his first months of kindergarten were spent on Zoom during COVID. That generational leap, accelerated by lockdowns, pushed all of us further into a digitally networked way of being.

Now, we’re starting to move beyond seeing individualism, and individuation, as the ultimate stage of development. Instead, we’re beginning to understand ourselves more as nodes in a network—connected within and between each other. This is why I think Social Meditation feels so resonant now.

I hypothesize that the same organizations that build networked technologies, are made up of people who already know, on some level, that identity itself is networked. When they encounter meditation that starts from that assumption, it strikes a deeper chord than simply closing their eyes and turning inward–i.e. introspecting.

Traditional meditation assumes truth is found by looking within. But if we are, more accurately, networked beings, than introspection alone is incomplete. We also need interspection: the ability to pay attention to the experience between and among us.

Through interspection, we notice how our patterns show up in relationship, whether we habitually focus on ourselves or on others, and how we continually shape one another in real time. We discover that we’re not just interior processes, but exterior ones as well. We are a processes of relating.

As Daniel J. Siegel puts it: “Who we are is both within and between: Me plus We equals MWe, the reality of an integrative wholeness of our intraconnected lives.”

With Social Meditation, MWe learn who we are, together.

If you think your organization might be interested in exploring this approach, you can send our brochure site, MindfulCoach.ing, to whoever you think would be best to see it in your organization. If that person is you, you’re welcome to schedule a short demonstration session with me to see what the practice is like, and ask whatever questions you may have.

I used to be a Popularizer of Buddhist Modernism.

A Popularizer's job is to be ignorant in public, while they go through a learning journey that takes others with them.

What I learned from a decade as a Buddhist Popularizer–after some 15 million podcast downloads–is that as you incorporate valid criticisms of your work, you realize just how wrong-headed your past approach was. As genuine wisdom grows, the desire to share the thing you love with everyone diminishes, because you’re no longer a naive faith-filled evangelist, but rather are an experienced veteran that has digested some of the valid criticisms of your thing.

The role of Elders is critical here, because Popularizers are usually either novice & intermediate practitioners that are actively amplifying perspectives they’re still learning about. Amplifying dangerous perspectives is an ethical issue. The results come back to you, in the form of angry and critical feedback. And a good amount of it is correct, because again, you're making a learning journey in public.

At some point the Popularizer may find themselves passing into the Elder role. This is a confusing transition, one marked by epistemic humility and a critical perspective of other Popularizers, who you can actively see are making the same mistakes you once did. But the role of Popularizers remains critical, at an ecosystem-wide level, because they help connect Newbies with Elders, while also helping to push the tradition forward, innovation-wise, as they're still progressive & arrogant enough to think they can come up with a better way. This challenges Elders to incorporate whatever wisdom is actually present, and the best Elders will evolve in response to what they see resonating between Popularizers and Newbies.

The TPOT Overfloweth

I am concerned about the strong anti-authoritarian bent I see among many folks who are my age-peers–particularly in the epestimic tribe known as TPOT. My issue with too much anti-authoritarianism is that this mentality disconnects the virtuous feedback loop between Popularizers and Elders. Popularizers end up posing as Elders, as they (knowingly or unknowingly) delude Newbies. As they reject external authority, they prematurely elevate their own internal authority.

These anti-authoritarian TPOT Popularizers also regularly invite other Popularizers–i.e. their peers–to join them on their platforms, so they can collaborate on the growth of their respective platforms. This increase in breadth happens at the expense of the depth of their Newbie followers, who can value much more from the seasoned perspectives of Elders.

The problem is that Newbies don’t yet have the wise discernment to be able to differentiate between someone who is making a learning journey in public, and someone who has already made the journey and is now available to support others. For a Newbie, anyone who seems to know more than themselves appears as an Elder. And for the Popularizer the danger is always to be found in the Dunning-Kruger Effect, wherein it’s easy to believe that they know more than they do, especially when a bunch of Newbies are telling them how brilliant they are.

Recently, I was taken to task on X.com by one of the leaders of TPOT for taking other TPOT Popularizers to task. The truth is I wasn’t doing it in a very skillful way, and my shadow was involved. I sense that this is part of the journey of becoming a more skilled Elder, and I’m far from there. But my heart-reason for sharing criticism with these folks, was to help them make the transition that I’d been through. I saw that it was engaging with valid criticism from Elders–not amassing praise from Newbies, or getting reassurance from other Popularizers–that ultimately leads toward greater wisdom. And wisdom matters. From my point of view now, it’s really all that does.

Mentorship

If you’d like to receive meditation coaching or dharma mentorship from a former Popularizer & aspiring Elder, I’m open to having an initial conversation to see if it’s a good fit.

In this talk, given to the jhana.community, I introduce a new model for plotting both the depth & breadth dimensions of jhāna (aka meditative absorption).

I believe that properly understanding the jhāna matrix will help you go beyond arguments about what constitutes legitimate jhāna, to figure out the exact kind of concentration that would be most helpful for you, and your life circumstances.

Is deep dharma practice possible as a parent? Is the frame around this question itself problematic? Listen in if you are a practitioner and are either a parent, or are considering becoming one…

During this recent dialogue, I pointed out to Michael that the last time he & I were in round-table dialogue together, was in 2018–my son was 3 and his hadn’t been born yet–where we spoke about Psychedelics, Technology, and the Future of Meditation. How things change!

Share What is This?

Fast forward a dozen years later, and I totally get what they meant! And it wasn’t awakening that clarified this–although that probably helped–it was just living. As I got older, and watched one idealistic non-sense idea after another flame out, not come to pass as I’d hoped, or back-fire in stupendous ways, I began to realize that the frame of saving the world was the problem. 

In the Zen tradition there’s a koan, called The Goose in the Bottle:

A woman raised a goose in a bottle. When the goose was grown, she wanted to get it out. How can you get it out without breaking the bottle?

The rough answer to the koan is that the goose was never in the bottle, outside of this story. Once you stop believing the frame, you see that there wasn’t a problem to begin with. It’s the same with saving the world. We assume there’s a world that needs saving–a world in a bottle–and think we need to save the world without breaking it.

So, here’s the essential point, for those ready to hear it:

Don’t try to save the world!

In the same way that the Zen student is assuming that there’s a goose that they need to get out of a bottle, in order to solve the koan, you’re assuming that you know what the world is, that it needs saving, how it needs saving, and that you’re the one to do it. This is total and complete grandiose bullshit at every stage of assumption-making!

At the heart of the desire to save the world is our savior complex, our need to feel special, to feel admired & loved–all of which is tied to a bottomless pit of unworthiness & lack. We hope that by saving the world we will prove our worth. Sorry to tell you, but it’s not going to happen friend, it’s a neurotic pipe-dream. When one is comfortable in their own skin, they don’t feel the compulsion to save anyone, least of all themselves. Now that’s freedom!

A common retort to this, from other enlightened assholes, is: “Who is truly there to save? But - ultimate truth isn’t gonna slake the thirst of the thirsty unenlightened worldlings. Explaining emptiness does not fill bellies”, to which I reply, “One can feed bellies without adopting a savior complex.”

See, it’s very easy to confuse the two truths of being human–the personal/relative truth and the universal/ultimate truth. Universal wisdom is recognizing that, strictly speaking, there’s no one to save. Personal wisdom is realizing that despite all my best efforts at saving myself & others, it just hasn’t worked out. This is hard-earned wisdom that comes from living, not from some kind of transcendent spiritual experience.

Prior to being anointed as a world-changing super geek, I had already experienced the great ego death, was already abiding in & as the always-already. But it takes time, dear friends, to wake down. And it’s very much an organic process. So, yes, while it’s true that emptiness does not fill bellies, what I’m trying to convey here is that the world doesn’t need you to save it, not only because there’s no one else to save, but also because the whole idea of being a savior is rooted in a grandiose and inflated sense of self-importance. In reality you have virtually no hope of saving the world, being far more likely to make it worse by buying into such grandiosity.

Someone then asks, “1 person trying to save the world is silly. Is a million?”

“A million times sillier, and more dangerous, yes.”

Let go of the goose,
let go of your savior complex,
let go of the grandiosity,
let go of thinking that your special group can save the world,
and do your best to be kind and decent people. 
This is enough.

Want to Wake Both Up & Down?

Part of how I make a livelihood, while bringing great meaning into this fleeting life, is by working with people one-on-one. I do this as both a meditation coach and a dharma teacher, depending on whichever role people are looking for. If you’re interested in the powerful potential of a transformative relationship, feel free to schedule a short call with me to discuss the potential of working together.

“I fart out of a big asshole.”
– Latif Fakhoury (my grandfather)

After launching a podcast called Enlightened Assholes React, I figured it might make sense to explain why I selected that name. At first, I was going to call it Enlightened Masters React, but then I remembered that the glory of enlightenment is that nothing is left out of it, including our assholeness.

What is an asshole? And no, I don’t mean the chocolate starfish, I mean the person who partakes in assholery. Here, I’m going to stick with a very simple definition, which is that an asshole is someone who regularly pisses people off.

Based off this definition, I bet you can easily name at least a few different types of assholes, right? You’ve got the self-absorbed asshole, the holier-than-thou asshole, the smarter-than-thou asshole, the aloof asshole, and so on… Mostly, assholery arises from some type of ego contraction, and since there are as many egos as there are snowflakes, it follows that there’s a cornucopia of assholes out there. Enter, the enlightened asshole.

The enlightened asshole understands the above quote at a deep & intimate level. They get that just because they’ve seen through the conventional fiction of being a stable & independent entity, this doesn’t automatically mean that their every behavior is going to be a) perfect, or b) appreciated by others.

The Korean Buddhist master Chinul once said, “Just because the Sun is out doesn’t mean all the snow will melt at once.” This is pointing to the fact that just because someone is awake to their true nature (i.e. enlightened) it doesn’t mean that all of their thoughts, words, & deeds suddenly come into alignment with their deepest wisdom. Waking down is even harder than waking up, and very few can appreciate this journey, since there aren’t many on the other side of awakening.

The enlightened asshole has thus realized that they don’t have to try and act perfect, because perfection only exists as an ideal. And also, because assholery is, to some degree, in the eye of the beholder. Why should we contort ourselves into pretzels trying to fulfill our ideals or those of others, when we know damn well that they’re bullshit?

So, the enlightened person, having transcended the ideals of enlightenment, re-enters the world in an attempt to reclaim their fullness. This is illustrated beautifully by the 10th of the Ten Zen Oxherding pictures, also known as Entering the Marketplace with Open Hands.

The enlightened asshole works to own whatever arises, as a manifestation of their deepest nature. Instead of shying away from the ego, theirs or others, they digest ego, one bite at a time. Num, Num, Num.

The enlightened asshole becomes fearless in their desire to include the entirety of reality, not as an ideal, but as a daily exercise in wholeness. And you know what, that can piss a lot of people off! Nothing makes others so mad, as publicly digesting the taboos that are normally repressed & denied–for example: claiming that one is both enlightened and an asshole.

The enlightened asshole cares more about freedom & fullness than they do comfort & stability. And they also realize how ridiculous it is, to claim to know better than others. All they know is that they don’t know, yet as Shunryu Suzuki rightly pointed out, “Not knowing does not mean you don’t know.”

The enlightened asshole knows how they stand apart from garden variety assholes. They can see that others are confused on the fundamental point, especially spiritual seekers, out there chasing the truth.

Those that have given up the chase, and are comfortable letting the truth come to them, will always make people uncomfortable. Their very presence, while it can be quite loving, is also intolerant of existential bullshit. They don’t believe your stories, anymore than they believe their own! Yet, the most mature enlightened assholes, also don’t reject the importance of stories, which is to say, they don’t buy into the story that one needs to get rid of stories.

How would you story things differently, if your awareness was truly free? 

Guess what, it already is…

Want to Chat with an Enlightened Asshole?

One of the fastest ways to become an enlightened asshole is to hang out with other enlightened assholes.

For the benefit of others–and also because my deck is falling apart and it isn’t going to replace itself–I’m working with a handful of people one-on-one, either in a meditation coaching capacity, or in a dharma teaching capacity.

Want to explore what that would look like? Schedule a short introductory call with me, and we can do that together!