Introduction to the jhanas

how to access the jhanas, jhanas retreats and jhanas people

NOTE: I wrote this blogpost deliberately after my daily meditation practice, lets see if there’s any change in my writing patterns!

I’ve made lots of tweets about the jhanas and its power on reaching some kind of inner peace. For those who don’t know what the jhanas are, the jhanas are many times described as “profound states of non-addictive bliss that you can enter through meditation practice”. You can think of jhanas like having an panic attack, where you start panicking and then you have panic of the panic and goes in spiral, but in this case it’s literally that but positive, you feel joy / peace / comfort / satisfaction / realization because you feel joy / peace / comfort / satisfaction / realization. You can access jhanas trough deep concentration, you need to have enough meditation experience to just understand what pace your mind goes and then you can easily go back to your meditation object after wandering around, wandering around is inevitable and it will definitely happen, what determines your success is if you have the ability to go back to your meditation object after wandering around. When I say meditation object, I mean your breath or any other bodily focal point, I think the breath is the most common meditation object. I had the immense pleasure of having the king and definitely the person alive with most expertise and wisdom about the jhanas, the unique Leigh Brasington, we basically talked almost an hour about the jhanas, Leigh is the author of the most known jhanas book “Right Concentration: a practical guide to the jhanas”, surprisingly lots of people have reported they accessed the jhanas because of this book! There’s this extremely popular meditation retreat that is focusing on teaching the jhanas called Jhourney, I would say they are much likely one of the few people responsible for teaching the jhanas and keep this “tradition” alive! I’ve not yet went on a retreat of them but I’m definitely looking forward to it, they have both online and in person possibilities and it’s quite shocking that people report almost the same jhana entrey success rate for both online and in person! From what I’ve been hearing and reading, at this retreat they kind of teach the jhanas the other way around from how Leigh teaches the jhanas (btw Leigh also has lots of retreats both in person and online), they start by cultivating enjoyment (metta) or any positive emotion and only then “observing” the process and eventually reach jhanas, whereas more traditional teachings are more like focusing on e.g the breath and then with enough concentration on the breath you’ll notice a shift of your attention to a “pleasant sensation”. I talked with Leigh about Jhourney and questioned him about the difference between the jhanas teached in Jhourney retreats VS the jhanas teached in Leigh retreats and he said “What he's teaching comes from Bhante Fibola Ramsey. It's called TWIM practice. And it leads to what I would call weak jhanas. You're not so deeply absorbed. I can't actually try that method because if I do, by focusing on metta, which is what they're aiming at, I wind up going into the jhanas that I know. I don't go into the weaker jhanas that they're teaching. Um, the jhanas that the TWIM method leads you to are lesser levels of concentration than what I teach. Now, are they useful? They seem to be, uh, but I can't go there because when I get close to that, I go into what I know rather than what they're teaching. Um, This has become a popular way of teaching. And Stephen is teaching these in not a Buddhist context, but a regular life context. And it seems to be helping people”. A big problem with the jhanas having the ability to being teached from different ways is that then if you ask your meditation teacher / jhana teacher what the real jhanas are, they're going to tell you “oh, it's what I teach. Anybody that's teaching more concentration is just indulging, and anybody teaching less concentration is not real jhanas” (I actually talked about spiritual integrity with the amazing Jac O’Keeffe about this!).

So basically you’ll access jhanas through deep concentration (or at least deep concentration is always evolved in the process of accessing the jhanas) so you can kind of easily predict if you’re gonna have trouble or not accessing the jhanas looking at your lifestyle and job! For instance, if your job requires a lot of multitasking, probably it will be more difficult for you to access the jhanas once you’re not used to only doing one thing and focusing on that same thing! Also, the culture you were raised and you live in also influences a lot your jhana success rating, europeans, latins and americans tend to be better and accessing the jhanas than the nordics and russians because are more used to face their emotions and are usually more open! The same thing happens with your drug use, if you in the past consumed drugs, it may be easy for you to enter the jhanas because you already experienced an altered consciousness state so you kind of won’t fear “oh what’s happening, am I doing this right?” and you won’t definitely need so much guidance (don’t do drugs ahahah)!

What’s amazing and unique about the jhanas is not the moment you accessed a jhana particularly. It’s about the insight you gain after that moment, it helps you I think, navigate the world with more happiness and more ease. This world is an incredibly mess and it seemed like most times this mess that is projected to the world, is just an reflection of the people state of minds, the only thing we can do in our power to make sure we try to reduce this mess is by looking inside at our own minds instead of looking for the problem in other people minds. I truly believe the jhanas are one of the most important and unfortunately quite unknown keys to navigate this world more beautifully!

Here’s Leigh’s book on the jhanas:

Here’s my awesome very worthwhile conversation with Leigh, and then I also has a conversation with Jac about spiritual integrity that doesn’t directly approach’s the jhanas but it’s very related with the tension between meditation teacher - student!