How to Jhana — with Michael Taft

hello my name is Michael TAFTA and this is my video on how to Jonna so we're going to learn today how to enter the first jhana so what so Jonah Jonah is a word that means to meditate but in the context of terabyte of Buddhism old-school Buddhism it means a special state of absorption a deep absorbed concentration state that is particularly powerful and we use jhanas in order to deepen our concentration deepen our unification of mind purifying the mind so that we can for example do really good the pasta or really good non-dual practice and other deep transformative awakening practices so Jonah is by itself really fun but also it makes a great setup it's a wonderful practice to deepen your absorption to allow you to do even more meditation work so Jonah's are great and today I'll just briefly go into how to enter the first jhana so let's begin so the very first thing to understand about jhanas is everyone says they're about concentration but that word is a little confusing in English because when we say concentration in English we kind of mean grabbing the mind of wrestling the flashlight of attention and pointing on it something and then keeping it there no matter what so there's the sense of struggle and the sense of tightness and control and that's absolutely not what we want in jhana there's somewhere in the Pali Canon that the Buddha says you know someone asks them about how to do JA knows or what jhanas are for or about and he says jhanas are about happiness right and this is the essence of understanding how to get into a jhana we're not trying to wrestle with the mind we're not trying to control attention tightly or rigidly or with constriction we're trying to be loose relaxed open and enjoy it and so the word instead of concentration that I prefer is absorption or unification and the idea of the absorption or unification is that the mind kind of gathers naturally around something it finds very attractive okay so understanding that what we're doing is gathering the mind around something pleasant this is how we conceptualize the jhana and it makes it much much easier to enter the genre so in order to do this we start out doing some kind of shaman on an object summit on an object means essentially concentration meditation on anything very often you'll hear people say that for jhana you must focus at the breath at the nose or maybe breathing in the whole body and those are fine objects but honestly in order to do a jhana you can concentrate anything you want as long as it helps you get nice in focus and absorbed and unified right so you can use a mantra you can use a visualization I like visualization to enter jhana because it can get the mind very very absorbed and unified rapidly some people use fire cocina for the same thing or other casinos in fact casinos are for Ajanta that's why they were that practice was invented in a really interesting way to do the focused part of jhana the setup we might call it is with Metta loving-kindness meditation of compassion meditation why well again one of the things is we want to be focused on something pleasant and the Brahma fahara states are very pleasant also though something that's important for the first jhana is that what is called the hindrances or kind of a negative bummer qualities in your mind get reduced in other words you're not actively worried you're not actively struggling and try to control you're not actively angry or something while you're doing the jhana practice that's called you know abeyance or reduction of the hindrances and so what you want to do is get your mind your body in a happy place and mint is really good for that so no matter what your focus object is whether it's some breath object or a mantra or a visualization or some other body object or meta or whatever for any of those it can be really good to just take a moment to like soften your heart or feel some joy or some gratitude when you begin because it really really helps engender that mood so to begin going into the Jonny you're going to spend as long as it takes just meditating on your focus object in a relaxed heart open relatively peaceful and calm way and you're gonna do that as long as it takes for something to start happening and the specific thing that needs to start happening is called PT the PT needs to start arising so what is PT & Spell piti it's a word from the pali language that the buddhist sutras are written in what is PT well it's funny when you read the translations of PT it's pretty clear that most of the people who are translating this word in the past anyway did not have an experience with John because they call it all kinds of things you know bliss and rapture and stuff but these are not good descriptions the best description of PT is it's a body buzz a very pleasant body buzz and it can feel exactly like Kundalini type feelings buzzy tingly energy feelings in the body or you can well actually it can go anywhere from kind of a light warm fuzzy feeling when it's maybe kind of very very very soft and gentle sometimes it's like fireworks going off in your body when it's really unstable it they'll be like a burst of PT burst of PT burst of PT you know you feel this tingling this in your body and it can go all the way up to this kind of volcano of orgasmic rapture like you're just getting incredibly intense body pleasure that is actually so intense it's a little uncomfortable we'll talk about what to do with that but all of those are PT and what you want to do is concentrate on your focus object concentrate on your focus object in this happy relaxed non struggling on a tight way it's got to be open heart melted peaceful happen ready you're doing this in a very joyous and relaxed way without a lot of expectation and as you do that you will find in that you you start feeling more and more positive sensations in your body your body will just start feeling good in fact many people use us their focus object deep belly breathing these long slow breaths because that will tend to make PT happen anyway right that's like a Kundalini type breath and you'll feel very pleasant energy in your body arising when you do that and so no matter what your focus object it is eventually the PT will start but you're not ready to go into the Johnny yet because a lot of times the PT is momentary or very weak so you want it to be both stable so it's continuously present and also strong enough that you can focus on it if you want to so in other words you're waiting till the peak to become stable and pretty reasonably strong so you're on your focus object you notice the pts happening but you just keep going where their focus object just keep going with a focus object whatever it is until the PT is strong and stable and then you do the next thing and the next thing is the big thing so let's talk about that if there's one thing you remember from this entire video into this when the PT gets strong and stable enough you switch your attention from your focus object whatever it is you take your mind off that you stop focusing on that and you move it to the PT in other words you move it to focusing on these plans sensations in your body now for some reason something about human physiology for most people the PT starts arising in their hands you'll feel this sense that your hands are like warm and energized and buzzy and tingly and they'll feel maybe big like big oven mittens or something and they feel really good and so you switch you take your attention off the focus object and put it on the PT in your hands or it might be in your throat or your face particularly your mouth the mouth can get filled with this very delicious PT and if it's there than you focus there so wherever the PT starts happening you take it off focus object a put it on focus up does object B which is the PT and then leave it there okay so you switch focus objects and then you don't do anything more you simply rest the mind on the PT and leave it there in a very relaxed open pleasant manner if you try to force it or try to push the PT harder or try to kind of wrangle your way into the jhana it will fail so again it's about being happy open and relaxed but one thing you can do besides just being relaxed that helps a little bit is again you could have a mood of kindness towards the PT so let's say it's happening in your hands you just you kind of feel gratitude and joy for the PT or you just love it right and you kind of in your imagination being this sense of love and gratitude towards the PT and there's something about that that will help and again you do this in a very relaxed easy manner so the PT is happening somewhere in your body and maybe you beam a little open-heartedness towards it love little kindness and you're with that and then you just stay there and that may go on for a while but what will happen and this is the big moment right is that at a certain point the PT on its own will just would ramp up and it will ramp up a lot and it will take your mind and just click into the Johnny your mind will just gather or unify like that's what the absorption is that's the unification your mind will unify around the PT and congratulations at that point you are in jhana one the mind has gathered on the PT and you will definitely know it when it happens it's a very particular sense of being in an altered state and it's a really pleasant altered state so again you did it at that point no once the PT arrives a number of things could happen one maybe it comes on you know you're in the John on and then you get excited and get tired and try to roll it and play with it and wouldn't you just pop right out you were still in the jhana but you were there for maybe you know 30 seconds or something but good you still achieved it and now try again and eventually you'll kind of get more relaxed when you're in the jhana and then it will stay a lot longer so that's number one thing that can happen number two is that you don't get all excited and flipped out and instead the the PT r arises you're in the jhana and then it's relatively stable and you stay there and you kind of soak in the PT you absorb even more you spread it throughout your body this is one of the interesting things once the PT is strong enough you can kind of move it to fill the rest of your whole body and then just absorb absorb absorb to the point when you're either done with the meditation or you want to move on either to a further Jonah or to work on your pop asana which would be a very good thing to do or to work on your non-dual practice or whatever so you go into the into the jhana and it's stable and you work with it from there that's number two the third thing that can happen and this is not that rare it happens pretty often is that the PT arises there's like this mushroom event of the PT just suddenly and it is really strong it's so strong that it's uncomfortable it makes you feel like you can't breathe it makes you feel like you're gonna explode so it just came out stronger than you were ready for and if that's the case sometimes it pops you back out because you're like wow that's too much and then if that if it's too much that pops you know you just got it again you know a little more relaxed a little more openness and see if it can come on more smoothly next time or maybe less intensely but another things possible which is let's say it comes on really strong it's uncomfortable it's too much but you stay with it for maybe a minute or two and then you can just move on to the second travel right one way the past this intense PT is sort of through it and so if you're going to do that then you go into the second jhana yeah the second John it instead of focused on this body buzz buzzy tingling energy it's focused on joy unhappiness on just straight-up joy and usually that's centered around your mouth not always it can be in the heart it can be other places but for many people it's just this big big big grin of joy and it turns out if you switch from the PT unto the joy which is instead of a body buzz it's an emotional flavor right and you focus on that it's much more refined as much it's like going from a really coarse burlap or something to silk it's like going from crunchy peanut butter to smooth even though I like crunchy better in this case the smooth is really nice right it's because it's smoother and so you go into the second jhana into the happiness and maybe you could stabilize their congratulations you've already gone into the second jhana so that's great so this is how we do it that's it for going into John and maybe even jhana to the cool thing about the chana's is they're great for a number of things one is you can just get involved in developing the jhanas for a while so stabilizing jhana 1 into deepening them working on 3 & 4 or even going to the formless genres after that you know this is its own long and you know effortful it's a it's a it's a long path development of the refinement of the mind and this is worth doing on its own it's a very powerful practice it's a life changing practice if you learn to have you know wonderful body tingling this wonderful joy in jhana 3 peacefulness and John Horhn equanimity if you learn to do these at this very deep very stable level it's going to change or day very significantly because you can just learn to bring on non-ionic levels but still powerful levels of joy on-demand tranquility and equanimity on demand you've really trained your mind into these very deep very positive states and part of doing that is the mind has become more subtle more refined it's a more it's a sharper more and we're stable and it has more finesse it's a real benefit just work on the jhanas by themselves many texts say that there's a potential that you could get like addicted to the jhanas because they're so nice but I never met anyone who was like I dicted to jhanas maybe this is something that happened in the but most people you know get really good at if they work at it and then move on to the other things you can do with jhana but even by themselves jhanas are a great meditation object you know many people love working with them what can you do when you get better at them well for example you can work than your pasta in the scriptures of the Pali Canon the Buddha makes it clear that jhana is the prerequisite for insight when you have a jhana level concentration a jhana level absorption your mind is unified like that then it is powerful enough to do for pasta well you can get insight and move on into stream entry and so on so it's really super powerful very fun and fascinating to ramp up your concentration level to the jaw neck level so that you can then do the insight and that's very worth doing another thing a non-traditional thing you can do with it is use the stability and sharpness of the jhana focus mind to work non-dual type practices you know awareness of awareness practice when the mind is refined and stable enough that becomes much much easier and of course these later Buddhist traditions use either jhanas or things that teach jhana level concentration to do non-dual type practices so in other words the jhanas are this great platform set up themselves either to you know just work on in their own right to refine the mind or to use as a like a base camp for going to these higher peaks of meditate skill and insight than awakening so if you get good at even John one that is very useful somewhere in the suit as the Buddha says you know John afore is sort of really reliable for producing awakening but even John a one is enough even John a one is enough concentration to get Awakening and so it's really useful even at that early stage so I hope that you consider working with John us some of the things that will help you our books and audio tapes and so on the best ones that I found the very very best one I think is the book right concentration by the raising tone and the is a friend of mine he's a great guy you can listen to a deconstructing yourself podcast where he talks about jhana and his book is just simple it's straight to the point it's no nonsense and if you follow his steps you will get to the first job it might take you a while you might have to go to a retreat but if you work at this diligently you can do it most people can do it another really powerful book with a lot of information is the mind illuminated by chula dasa he really goes into the different depths of jonah so you know we talked about jhana one two three four in a sequence but there's also depth this way where you can be in a light one or a medium one or a really really deep jhana one and so on with the others so there's the second dimension of depth and chula dasa makes all that very clear and puts it in a nice chart in his book and also gives a lot of really useful instruction on how to going to the Giants very worth reading then there's the English teacher Robert bata who recently did an entire John retreat and recorded it so that's at the Dharma seed audio library so you can get audio recordings for free of that entire very deep very powerful jhana retreat where he gives unbelievably complete instructions lots and lots and lots of hints and tips and tricks and also guided meditations about John it's so worth it it's a great resource and even better there's a 457 page PDF like that back transcription of that retreat download it print it out write all over it make notes really dedicate yourself to your jhana practice and get in that first job you can get your mind cleanse clarify refined and stabilized so that your practice can be awesome so that's my instruction video on how to jhana I really hope it helps you I hope you get into the jhanas I hope you read the books I hope you do the practices and I hope that you achieve the jonna's so that you can use them to you know vastly improve your life to clarify your mind deepen your absorption to have a happier life and also to use them as a platform for awakening that's the real purpose so I really hope that you do that and if you like this video please subscribe to my channel all the best you

Channel: Michael Taft

Views: 33,324

Keywords: meditation, vipassana, buddhism, jhana

Id: 0K5ypXyF3dY

Length: 24min 13sec (1453 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 12 2020