This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Mingling of Breath and Joy; Samadhi (44) Five Jhanic Factors. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Hello and welcome to our meditation. In this now multi-week series on Samadhi1, we are touching into the topic of Jhāna2. Jhāna is a deep absorption. It’s not something that we storm, not something we assertively, aggressively expect to experience or push ourselves to have. It’s a little bit like grace; it’s a little bit like a gift that we receive. We set up the conditions for some deep letting go, set up the conditions for some deep settling and steadiness that leaves us deeply absorbed, deeply engaged, interested—a kind of interest that is almost enraptured in the simplicity of the meditative experience.
So how we approach Samadhi, how we orient ourselves towards it, is very important. There is something called the approach stage, and part of the function of that stage is to reorient us in a way where we’re not selfish, not greedy, not feeling like we’re in charge and it’s up to us. But rather, we orient ourselves with some feeling of receptivity, of gratitude, of appreciating that there’s something more profound operating here than ourselves as the agents of meditative change.
Some people find that for the reorientation at the beginning of meditation, they express their faith; they evoke their faith. Some people have a deep kind of faith in the Buddha, Dharma3, and Sangha4. They chant the refuges for themselves—something that allows for a shift. What would be a lost opportunity is if we just live our life and then just slide into our meditation seat and continue the mind stream and the momentum of our day without any other concern. There is a way to go through a little process of reorientation. This is not daily life as usual; this is not the mental stream as usual that we’re going to connect to. We are reorienting ourselves.
One ritual for that reorientation is the care we give to our posture. That posture is not incidental. It’s not just to make a posture which is only comfortable enough that it doesn’t disturb our meditation because it’s cozy and comfortable, but to take care and time to get into the posture, to make that a ritual transition, a ritual reorientation to something profound that might happen. We’re going to make ourselves available, receptive, ready, and open in a way that maybe our minds or hearts are not as we go about our daily life.
So, taking a comfortable but alert posture. There’s some small degree, even a small degree, that the posture evokes attention, a physical alertness, a physical presence here at this time, at this place, in this body. Lining up the vertebrae of the spine, placing the hands in a way where the hands themselves, the way the arms are, provokes a certain kind of attention, attentiveness.
As part of this ritual reorientation to another way of being than the usual one, another set of values, another way of attending to this life of ours, part of that ritual is gently closing your eyes. Gently relaxing the eyes. The eyes don’t have to work in meditation; they can relax.
And then take a few moments, again, part of this ritual transition and reorientation, to feel your body in some broad, global way. Kind of like if you step from ordinary life into a sacred place, we enter maybe through a door, through an opening, a gate—not casually, but we enter it with all of who we are. And so we enter by feeling our body, entering our body. And if it seems nice, you can readjust your posture a little bit more.
And then to begin orienting yourselves on breathing. Without breathing deeper or fuller, slow the inhale so it just takes longer to inhale. Slow the exhale, but do so just short of being uncomfortable. So maybe just a moment or two slower to do the ordinary amount of breathing. In slowing your breathing down enough that you can feel the body’s desire to breathe. And trusting how the body is breathing at this moment, not making anything a problem. And if you prefer, you can go back to your usual speed of breathing, maybe now a little bit more conscious of breath, of breathing.
And as you exhale, to soften your body, softening the edges of your body. Softening the thinking mind, softening in the heart.
And maybe as an act of love or faith or tenderness, let there be a small pause at the end of the exhale. Very short, but long enough for there to be a feeling of care, tenderness, love, or faith in this process of meditation. Where the short pause is like saying hello to the deeper meditative process that your inner life is capable of, maybe more capable than your mind’s belief that it is in charge.
And in whatever way there’s some pleasure, gladness, well-being, or joy, however small it might be, in whatever way you feel it in your body, orient yourself with that by connecting your breathing to the well-being. As if breathing breathes with or through the well-being. Or as if the well-being is what’s providing the awareness of breathing. It’s well-being that tends to the breathing.
If there is any gentleness, tenderness, in a very simple happiness, contentment deep in your body, or tingling along the surface of your skin, a happiness that feels calm and peaceful, allow that to mingle with the body breathing.
Where part of you gets absorbed, pulled into the mingling of well-being and breathing. Part of you gets pulled into the rhythm of breathing, where there’s a massage, where there is a gentle care between breathing and an embodied feeling of contentment, happiness, well-being, however small that feeling is.
If there’s any way in which you’re holding yourself apart, away from where breathing and well-being meet and mingle, see if you can let go, give up the holding back, holding away from. Release yourself into the breathing. Allow yourself to slide into the embodied experience of breathing, breathing through and with happiness, contentment.
And as we come to the end of this sitting, take a few moments to feel whatever degree of well-being you feel in your body. Any warmth, glow, tingling, any radiance or pleasure associated with a simple happiness and well-being.
And as if that well-being is being held in check, held within a certain limitation in your body, a certain area, as you breathe in, stretch the area wide. As you let go and breathe out, let that well-being be unbounded. Let it release, almost as a balloon where a person releases the string, and the balloon can fly out across the world. Let your well-being free into the sky, the space around you. Imagining that your happiness and well-being can be shared, can touch the hearts of others. That your happiness is not just your own. We are living on this planet in kinship with all other people, all other beings.
And may it be that what we know about happiness and well-being is experienced fully in us so we can share it with others.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
And may we know these four things so we’re in a better position to wish it for others. May all beings be happy. Thank you.
So welcome back to this ongoing series on Samadhi. This week we’re covering the first Jhāna, the first level of absorptive, immersive meditation. One of the great aspects of this stage of meditation is that we’re allowed to give ourselves over to being happy. We’re allowed the ability to trust joy and well-being. It’s okay to give ourselves to it.
There are a number of reasons why it’s more than okay; it’s actually a beneficial and very important part of the Buddhist path. One is that the happier you can be in a genuine, peaceful, meaningful way, the more you know that this is a possibility for others, and the more you can support others and see people’s potential for well-being. I think it inspires care and love for others. And perhaps also, it’s a gift we bring others. Our happiness is a gift.
It’s also a gift to ourselves because there’s something about a peaceful, healthy happiness that’s embodied and present that helps the mind get organized, helps the mind become whole, be fully here, be immersed in this experience. And what “immersed” means, in part, is that we’re not distracted, we’re not divided, we’re not fragmented. We’re not caught in any attachments or clinging. This full, embodied happiness has a movement in it to spread out through our whole being and bump up against the places where we’re restricted, where we’re tight, where we’re holding, where we’re afraid. And it’s a loving happiness that can gently touch the places that are hard for us, hold them, care for them, accompany them, so that we’re not over-identified with our challenges, with our pains, our emotional difficulties. We don’t over-identify, so we’re subtly reinforcing them or picking the scab, in a sense. But we’re loving them, we’re caring for them, we’re offering them something profound: the nourishment of attention and care that comes in the form of well-being and trust and confidence. This allows us then to continue on the path of being settled.
In the teachings of the Jhāna, it’s quite common to provide a listing of what jhanic factors are present in each of the four Jhānas. In the first Jhāna, there are five factors, and then as we go along into the deeper Jhānas, certain ones of these factors fall away, and so there’s a shorter list. Sometimes the way that these Jhānas are taught is that there’s a kind of quantum step of letting go, of deepening, of releasing as we go through this. What gets released is what’s more coarse, what has more energy or more activation to it. We let go of those so that we can drop into the more subtle factors that are much more sublime and more peaceful. So there’s a movement from coarser to more refined, from more activated and energetic to less and less, to more and more peaceful and quiet.
Some people emphasize these stages as being the four stages: the first, second, third, and fourth Jhāna. There can definitely be a feeling of taking a big step, a quantum, sudden dropping and going further, opening further. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Sometimes there’s an overemphasis and attachment and expectation and drive to go from one to the other. Instead, I find it sometimes much more useful if we don’t focus so much on the stages as being these rarefied states that we go into, but to just learn to recognize the primary factors that characterize the deepening of practice.
These five first jhanic factors are useful to recognize, so I’ll go through them. There is the initial application of attention, and there’s sustained attention. It means placing our attention someplace and keeping it there for a while, then doing it again, like a massage or kneading dough. Then there’s joy and rapture. I’ll talk a little more about joy tomorrow because it’s such an important part of the beginning stage here. The fourth factor is happiness, sukha5. Some people will call it bliss because it’s kind of deeply embodied. Some people call it even pleasure, but that doesn’t quite give it justice because it’s so sublime, so satisfying, such a contentment that comes with it, that I prefer to use the word happiness. And then there’s becoming one, the unification, the one-pointedness that I talked about yesterday.
So these are the five that are at play: the initial application of attention, the sustained attention, joy, happiness, and becoming one. It’s nice to recognize them. The one that seems most important at this stage is, you know, they’re kind of in order. Initially, we need some kind of subtle intentionality, a subtle continuation of some gentle effort to stay present. We’re pretty much locked in, we’re pretty much not going anywhere. It feels like the mind’s not going to wander off, and there’s no discursive thinking. It’s very peaceful. But there still needs to be a little bit of staying here, “stay here, be here, yes.” I like the word “yes.” Yes, with this kneading of our attention into this present moment. So it’s very subtle, very slight, but it’s “stay here, stay here.”
And there can start being this joy. The joy, compared to happiness, is said to be, even though it can be a lot of manifestation of joyful energies in the body—tingling, thrill—it is understood to be more of a mental activity. The mind is a little bit excited, a little bit delighted. Like when I say, “Yes, this is good,” it’s a little bit more that “yes” in the mind than it is the deep contentment where the mind is hardly involved. It’s almost like the body, the breath is involved in saying, “Ah, this exhale. Ah.” The happiness is that deep place of “ah.” So the joy is a little bit of a “yes.”
But both of them are present, so it’s not that important at the moment to distinguish them initially. But the instruction the Buddha gives when this joy and happiness arises from really being in the moment, in the flow of the present moment, is to relax with it, open with it, let it pervade, suffuse, and spread. The Buddha uses a series of words like this: spread through the body. There’s a tendency in the body and mind to hold things in check, to hold things in place. There’s tension in our body, there’s tension in our mind, there’s attachment to what’s happening. There are many ways in which we bound things up to keep them limited. The opportunity here is to soften the body, soften the attention, open to a receptivity in the body and mind.
As we do this blowing on the fire, as we do this kneading of the dough, as we do this “yes,” it’s almost like, sometimes I’ve thought of it as ironing out the wrinkles on a sheet of paper, just kind of spreading it out, spreading it out until the sheet is completely flat with no wrinkles at all. Sometimes it’s just more like a gentle heater that’s heating up from inside and spreading out in all directions. Some people like the image of light; there’s a light that’s spreading, a golden light that’s spreading through the body and beyond. And some people are much more physically oriented; it’s actually the physical sensations of that joy, the physical warmth, glow, tingling, vibration of it, the pleasure of it, that begins to flow outwards.
The pleasure is actually quite useful as an object at this point. We’re letting that pleasure spread and spread and spread, so it’s not kept bounded. It’s almost like a letting go around it or with it, so there’s nothing holding it from spreading out beyond us, beyond the edges of our body. I prefer—some people will just focus on the pleasure itself, like become one with that pleasure—I prefer to have that pleasure and the breath be coterminous. The pleasure, the well-being, the joy to be intimately associated with the breathing. Almost like the pleasure, the joy, and the breathing are holding hands, or they have become one. And so, this wonderful rhythm of breathing is what supports the spreading, the letting go, the opening of that well-being through everywhere.
This can’t, of course, be done too easily or just, you know, sit down, plop down, and do this. This becomes the instruction when we finally arrive in the present moment. We feel, “Oh, now I’m really here. This is good.” And as I’ve said a number of times now, don’t expect that often. What you should expect often is that you’re always a beginner, and that is incredibly profound: to always be a beginner and be content to practice with how you are at any given time. But if you do practice regularly, every day, slowly the tendency to go into deeper meditation will become easier and easier. There’ll still be ups and downs through the days and weeks depending on what’s happening in your life, but you’re predisposing yourself to be able to go further and further over time.
For this Samadhi series, as I’ve said, this is a time in the series where I want to encourage you again to consider meditating more, maybe twice a day. I mean, once with this YouTube offering, then maybe one time on your own. Or if you really need the support, you can listen to the guided meditation again a second time. But really kind of make this more part of your life.
So as you go through your daily life today, look again for the pleasure, look for the times of well-being. For most people, there’s a lot more pleasure, a lot more things that are joyful that are available to us than we avail ourselves of, that we take time to experience. The weather—it’s springtime here in the northern hemisphere—maybe there are delightful colors of green or flowers or new life being born. Or maybe there’s a delightful animal running around that brings you a lot of pleasure. You see someone smiling. Whatever it might be, the small pleasures of life, take time to feel those. Your ability to let go and feel the small pleasures might support you to feel those pleasures in meditation as well.
May you be happy. Thank you.
Samadhi: A state of meditative consciousness or concentration. ↩
Jhāna: A state of deep meditative absorption. ↩
Dharma: The teachings of the Buddha. ↩
Sangha: The community of practitioners. ↩
Sukha: A Pali word often translated as “happiness,” “pleasure,” or “bliss,” especially the deep, embodied contentment experienced in meditation. ↩