Pragmatic Dharma

A clear walkthrough of five classical jhāna skills like calling the jhāna state, fully entering absorption, and sustaining uninterrupted concentration. Practical tips on intentionally leaving the state and reflecting afterward are explored. Stories from long-term training and metaphors like an elevator illuminate how maps and models help orient practice.

In “What is Social Noting?”, Vince Horn traces how Kenneth Folk developed the Social Noting approach — one that broke two deep taboos of traditional meditation culture — becoming a bridge between intensive introspective meditation and the messy, relational reality of modern life.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.💬 TranscriptVince: 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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit substack.pragmaticdharma.com

A practical dismantling of myths about deep absorption and why intense focus is more natural than you think. Clear guidance on choosing compelling concentration objects, including using the breath as a conceptual anchor. Explanations of jhāna signs like rapture and bliss and how steady practice yields better attention and less pain. Cultural and psychological barriers to practice are critiqued, with an invitation to persistently try.

Leigh Brasington explains how the mind progresses through the four jhānas—from initial access concentration and the energetic, pleasure-filled first jhāna to the progressively quieter states of happiness, contentment, and equanimity—emphasizing their practical characteristics, traditional similes, and their role in supporting insight practice.💎 Community of PracticeThis 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) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit substack.pragmaticdharma.com

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Leigh Brasington, an experienced jhāna teacher trained by Ayya Khema, provides a practical guide to entering the first jhāna. He shares the importance of pleasant sensations and their role in sustaining deep concentration. The conversation dives into the nuances of access concentration, meditation objects, and the significance of pīti and sukha in jhāna experiences. Leigh underscores avoiding control and the feedback loop of pleasure that enhances mindfulness. He captivates with insights on the neurobiology of reward, linking pleasurable states to dopamine release.

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