Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas

by Leigh Brasington

At first, what’s most likely to occur is that either your mind wanders away from the subtle pleasant sensation or the pleasant sensation itself goes away. If your mind wanders away, as soon as you notice this, return immediately to the pleasant sensation. But if this wandering away is happening repeatedly, it’s a sign of insufficient concentration; therefore, return to the mindfulness of breathing or whatever other access method you were using, regenerate access c...

It’s also very important to let go of the breath when you make the shift to the pleasant sensation. The breath (or other meditation object) is the key to get you in—”in” being synonymous with establishing strong enough access concentration.

So you’ve found the pleasant sensation and fully shifted your attention to that pleasant sensation. You now observe the pleasantness of the pleasant sensation and do nothing else. If you can do that, the pleasant sensation will begin to grow in intensity; it will become stronger. This will not happen in a linear way. At first, nothing happens. Then it’ll grow a little bit and then grow a little bit more and then hang out and grow a little bit more . . . . And then eventually, it will suddenly take off and take you into what is obviously an altered state of consciousness. In this altered state of consciousness, you will be overcome with rapture . . . euphoria . . . ecstasy . . . delight. These are all English words that are used to translate the Pali word pīti. Perhaps the best English word for pīti is “glee.” Pīti is a primarily physical sensation that sweeps you powerfully into an altered state. But pīti is not solely physical; as the suttas say, “On account of the presence of pīti there is mental exhilaration.”1 In addition to the physical energy and mental exhilaration, the pīti will be accompanied by an emotional sensation of joy and happiness. The Pali word for this joy/happiness is sukha, the opposite of dukkha (pain, suffering). And, if you can remain undistractedly focused on this experience of pīti and sukha, that is the first jhāna.

So to summarize the method for entering the first jhāna: You sit in a nice comfortable upright position and generate access concentration by placing and eventually maintaining your attention on a single meditation object. When access concentration is firmly established, then you shift your attention from the breath (or whatever your meditation object is) to a pleasant sensation, preferably a pleasant physical sensation. You put your attention on that sensation, and maintain your attention on that sensation, and do nothing else.

You must become totally immersed in the pleasantness of the pleasant sensation. And I mean by this just what I say: the pleasantness of the pleasant sensation—the quality of the sensation that enables you to determine that it is pleasant, rather than unpleasant or neither. It’s not the location of the pleasant sensation nor its intensity nor its duration. It’s not whether the pleasant sensation is increasing or decreasing or staying the same. Just focus entirely upon the pleasant aspect of the pleasant sensation, and the jhāna will arise on its own. Now, admittedly, the sensation will be located in a particular area, and your attention will be aimed at that area. That’s fine; just don’t get caught up in the location; stay with just enjoying the pleasantness of the pleasant sensation. All you can do is set up the conditions for the jhāna to arise, by cultivating a calm and quiet mind focused on pleasantness. And then just let go—be that calm, quiet mind focused on pleasantness and enjoy the pleasantness—and the jhāna will appear. Any attempt to do anything more does not work. You actually have to become a human being, as opposed to a human doing. You have to become a being that is simply focused on a pleasant sensation that is simply existing, and then the jhāna comes all on its own.

You are trying to do exactly the same thing, except, rather than a positive feedback loop of noise, you are attempting to generate a positive feedback loop of pleasure. You hold your attention on a pleasant sensation. That feels nice, adding a bit more pleasure to your overall experience. That addition is also pleasurable, adding even more pleasure, and so on, until, instead of getting a horrible noise, you get an explosion of pleasure that goes by the names of pīti and sukha.

These are the instructions for entering the first jhāna. But don’t expect the necessary concentration to show up anytime soon. In fact, don’t expect anything! Expectations are the absolute worst things you can bring on a retreat, and they are equally detrimental when practicing while not on retreat. Simply do the meditation method. And when access concentration arises, recognize it, sustain it “long enough,” and then shift your attention to a pleasant sensation. Don’t try to do the jhānas. You can’t. All you can do is generate the conditions out of which the jhānas can arise. Recognize when you’ve established these conditions, and then patiently wait for the jhāna to come find you.

The concentration generated by “a few breaths in a row” is far too little to sustain attention on the pleasant sensation. The student becomes distracted and/or the pleasant sensation disappears. Similarly, someone switches to a pleasant sensation as soon as one appears. They have not established access concentration and soon become distracted and are unable to maintain focus on the pleasant sensation or the pleasant sensation disappears. Similarly, someone does actually generate access concentration but almost immediately switches to a pleasant sensation, maybe just as soon as genuine access concentration is recognized. But because the access concentration is not strong enough, the student becomes distracted or the pleasant sensation disappears.

Learning the jhānas is very definitely a trial-and-error process—with lots of errors along the way.

A much more serious problem is that someone generates good access concentration, but when they attempt to switch to a pleasant sensation, there is none to be found anywhere in the body. This is a much more difficult problem to remedy. A pleasant mental sensation can certainly be used as the meditation object for generating pīti—but there are two major drawbacks: the pleasant mental sensation, which is most likely an emotion, is likely to have a story connected with it that then leads to distraction, or the pleasant mental sensation is unstable and soon fades away. If this is the problem you are dealing with, the best pleasant mental sensation to work with is the feeling of loving-kindness (mettā).

The psychological condition dysthymia has a number of typical characteristics: low drive, low self-esteem, and a low capacity for pleasure in everyday life. That may or may not be what’s happening here, but raising the “capacity for pleasure in everyday life” does seem to be helpful in establishing the ability to find a pleasant bodily sensation once access concentration is established. One of the best methods for doing this is more mettā, more compassion, and more muditā (appreciative joy) practice.

KEY PALI WORDS: samādhi indistractability, concentration pāmojja gladness, worldly joy vitakka thinking vicāra examining pīti glee, rapture sukha happiness/joy

The first jhāna description starts: “Quite secluded from sense pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, one enters and remains in the first jhāna.” As mentioned previously, this seclusion from sense pleasures, seclusion from unwholesome states, refers to the abandoning of the five hindrances, the five mental states that hinder progress on the spiritual path. The method for setting them aside is generating access concentration. Access concentration gets you to the point where, if there are thoughts occurring, they are wispy and in the background and they are not pulling you away into distraction. At that level of concentration, these hindrances will not arise.

In the gradual training, just before the description of the jhānas, frequently the suttas say, “When one sees that the five hindrances have been abandoned within oneself, gladness arises.” In other words, when you generate access concentration, the gladness referred to here (the Pali word is pāmojja) is the mental state generated by the pleasant sensation that you’re to put your attention on after having stabilized and deepened access concentration. With the hindrances out of the way, this is a pretty nice state. “From gladness, rapture arises”: rapture (pīti) being the primary ingredient of the first jhāna.

The unwavering attention on the gladness (the enjoyment of the pleasant sensation) generates the pīti, which is both the gateway to and the primary component of the first jhāna. Ten the suttas describe the qualities of the first jhāna, “which is accompanied by thinking and examining and is filled with the rapture and happiness born of seclusion.” These four qualities are often identified as factors of the first jhāna. The later commentaries assert that there ar...

When you generate access concentration and sustain it, there may be still a bit of thinking in the background—which can basically be ignored. This background thinking persists in the first jhāna and is what is being referred to by the words vitakka and vicāra.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, the move from access concentration to the first jhāna is to shift your attention to a pleasant sensation and stay with that as your object of attention, ignoring any background thinking. If you can stay with your undistracted attention on the pleasant sensation, then pīti will arise. The pīti, being the physical release of pleasant, exhilarating energy, could be anywhere from mild to quite intense. It can be finger-in-the-electrical-socket intense; it can be so intense that it’s not even pleasurable. And hopefully the pīti is accompanied by sukha, which is an emotional state of joy, happiness. Both pīti and sukha are required in order for the experience to be classified as the first jhāna. And most likely, the experience brings a big grin to your face. The first jhāna is enough of an altered state that if you think some experience perhaps might be the first jhāna, it probably isn’t—there’s an unmistakable quality to the arising of pīti and sukha that lets you know for certain that something quite different is happening.

Once you have arrived at the state where the pīti and the sukha are sustained, the suttas say: “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 which is not suffused by this rapture and happiness.” When you’re initially in the first jhāna, the pīti energy may seem to run up the spine and involve the back of the body, upper torso, and head more than anyplace else. Or maybe it’s just in the upper torso and head. Either of these is fine. Actually, when you are first learning, just get the pīti-sukha going and sustained; it doesn’t matter where it’s located or that it’s not yet throughout the body. Spreading it throughout the whole body is a more advanced practice. The pīti-sukha will probably feel like it’s centered more in the area of the face. Sometimes it’s most prevalent in the head, sometimes in the spine, but in general, it’s principally in the upper body area around the face. Then when you get skilled enough to stabilize the first jhāna, you’ll find that it is possible to move the energy into the arms and legs so that your whole body is filled with it. The method is to just move your attention from the location where the pīti feels the strongest to an area where it does not seem to be occurring, such as down an arm. You are not trying to move the energy; you are only moving your attention. Bring your attention back to the place where the pīti felt strong, and then ...

The first jhāna is not a calm, peaceful state. Its energy is pretty intense,

Another thing you can do in the first jhāna is play with the intensity level of the pīti. Once you’ve gotten to the point where you can stabilize it, see if you can decrease the level of intensity of the pīti and then bring it back up. You are, so to speak, finding a sort of mental volume control for the pīti. It is easier to bring the pīti down and then back up than it is to try to pump it up higher still.

The method for decreasing the volume on the pīti is to give it a little less energy, a little less attention. Don’t pay quite as much attention to it, and it will begin to decrease. Once it comes down, put your attention fully back on it, and bring it back up. Once you are skilled in playing with the intensity level of the pīti, you can try to shut it off suddenly and completely, followed by immediately bringing it back. These skills will begin to give you mastery of the pīti that will be useful for learning the second and third jhānas.

The length of time you’ll want to stay in the first jhāna is inversely proportional to the intensity of the pīti. In other words, if the pīti is very strong, you probably won’t want to stay there very long. Half a minute or so might be sufficient, maybe even less than that if the pīti is seriously intense. If the pīti is not so very strong, then you might want to stay there five to ten minutes.

Pīti comes in a number of “grades.” It can show up as momentary pīti, which is like a shiver and then it’s gone. It can be minor pīti, which is a little tingly feeling that’s sustaining but not very strong and is more or less in the background. Minor pīti can also show up as gentle, involuntary rocking as you meditate. You might experience showering pīti, which is when you get a burst of pīti and then it’s gone, another burst and then that’s gone—the pīti is arising but not sustaining. It c...

The fifth kind of pīti is what I usually refer to as full-blown pīti. The correct translation is “all-pervasive pīti.” This is the pīti that is everywhere. It’s present, it’s sustained, and you experience it throughout your body. It’s the pīti necessary for the first jhāna; the other four types are pre-jhāna pīti, and they may or may not show up as you progress toward access concentration and then to the arising of the first jhāna.

Pīti can manifest as rocking or swaying, or it can be very intense so that you are actually vibrating to the point where it is visible to others. It can manifest as heat and get very, very warm. Hopefully it has a pleasant aspect to it. Most often, it manifests as an upward rush of energy, often centered up the spine.

Sometimes, having recently entered the first jhāna for the very first time, one finds that it is much harder to reenter the jhāna. This is usually caused by an increase in wanting—wanting the jhānic experience to reoccur—and the wanting is an instance of the first hindrance, so no jhāna appears. It is important to realize that for most people, when they begin learning the jhānas, they are not going to be experiencing the jhānas every meditation period. Again, the remedy is patience. At first, the mental effort required to generate sufficient concentration and the effort required to patiently wait for the jhāna once the attention has been switched to the pleasant sensation are definitely tiring. It’s not uncommon for someone to only be able to generate such effort once a day at first.

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.

Place your attention on the sukha—that sense of emotional joy/happiness—and stay focused on it. Its intensity may increase a bit, yet the experience will leave the pīti in the background as long as you don’t let the sukha increase too much in intensity. The inner tranquility is a much calmer experience than the experience of the first jhāna. Now let your mind collect on this sense of happiness. In the first jhāna, it is like holding a piece of paper with both hands upon which a marble has been placed; you have to really pay attention to hold it steady. But if you let the paper fold up around the marble, then it will stay there easily. This is similar to what is happening here. Your mind collects around the experience of happiness and settles into it, so that it’s much less likely to go wandering off.

You may not experience a level of concentration where the thinking shuts off totally on a retreat of less than a month (or perhaps even longer).

If you can remain fully focused on the sukha, really giving yourself to this experience of happiness/joy, the thinking will indeed subside and fade more and more the longer you stay there without becoming distracted.

In the second jhāna, the pīti is going to be more like rocking or swaying than vibratory in nature—more like what was described as “minor pīti” in the chapter on the first jhāna. The pīti should remain at this minor level as long as you don’t let the sukha get too strong. What you want is sukha that is moderately intense and a mind that is strongly unified around this experience of sukha—in other words, moderate happiness/joy, strong one-pointed focus.

In the Poṭṭhapāda Sutta (DN 9.11), we find that after one makes the transition from the first jhāna to the second, “one’s former true but subtle perception of pīti and sukha born of seclusion vanishes. At that time there arises a true but subtle perception of pīti and sukha born of c...

If you find yourself wandering back up toward the first jhāna, in that the pīti is beginning to increase in intensity, take an intentionally deeper breath, and once again bring your attention back to the moderate happiness. In the suttas it says that thinking is a thorn to the second jhāna.1 So to enhance your experience of the second jhāna, let yourself sink into the quiet stillness of the happiness and just be with it.

Again, the suttas provide a simile: Suppose there was a deep lake whose waters welled up from below, it would have no inlet for the 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 that 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 the rapture and happiness born of concentration, so that there is no part of one’s entire body which is not suffused by this rapture and happiness. (DN 2.80)

The experience of the second jhāna seems to be located lower in the body than the experience of the first jhāna; it’s more in the heart center for most people. It feels like the happiness is coming from your heart and welling up as from a spring.

Imagine it’s your birthday and someone gives you a very nice present. You open the present and exclaim, “Wow, this is great! I always wanted one of these,” and you are really happy. The happiness of the second jhāna is this kind of happiness, but it isn’t triggered by anything external; it’s triggered by your concentrated mind.

What you want to do is to be able to get to this state and be able to maintain it for at least 10 to 15 minutes. If you lose it by getting lost in thinking, just come back to the happiness. If you get distracted, the sukha won’t entirely disappear at once—there quite possibly will be some weaker remnants of it hanging around when you notice that you’ve become distracted. Just put your attention on those remnants, and see if the intensity level will come back up to moderate. If not, or if indeed the sukha has completely disappeared, you will need to return to focusing on the breath, mettā, or whatever your access method was, regenerate access concentration, and try again. It is important to give yourself extended time in the second jhāna to let your concentration deepen; the objects of the following jhānas are going to be even more subtle than the sukha of the second jhāna.