Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas

by Leigh Brasington

As a practical matter, to move from the first jhāna to the second jhāna, you should take a nice deep breath and let it out slowly and totally, which will calm down the pīti yet leave the sukha strong enough so that you can focus on it. In the first jhāna, the pīti predominates and the sukha is in the background. To move toward the second jhāna, you want to do a foreground-background reversal. When you take the deep breath and deeply exhale, both the pīti and the sukha calm down in intensity, but the pīti drops much more in intensity and is now low-grade and more in the background. The sukha, although perhaps now a bit less intense than it was before the deep breath, is still strong enough to now be the more prominent of the two.