Going Deeper

(Note: If you’re reading through this whole guide all at once, having never meditated before, a lot of what I’m going to say in this section might be totally incomprehensible. It’s hard to perfectly describe any of these experiences to someone who’s never had them before, and without that context, I don’t blame you for being a confused or weirded out. But don’t worry – if anything here seems bizarre, or a little goofy, just put it aside and focus on the more down-to-earth stuff we covered earlier. As you become more comfortable with deeper states of concentration, and begin to experience piti for yourself, the strategies I’m talking about here will hopefully start to make more sense. For now, just know there’s a huge amount of joy and peace waiting for you down the road, and don’t worry too much about it!)

What is piti?

As I mentioned briefly at the start of this guide, piti is a pleasurable sensation that arises when your mind becomes sufficiently calm and focused. Every person is going to experience piti a little differently, and even the same person can sometimes get distinct “flavors” from one session to the next. Generally though, most meditators first feel it showing up as a gentle tingling in their chest, face, or hands. (Speaking for myself, feel it most often in my thighs and down through my knees, but I’ve been told that’s relatively rare.) During the initial stages of your practice, it’s very likely that you’ll only experience piti in short bursts, and oftentimes the feeling will be so intense that you’ll get overexcited and lose your focus. But that’s totally normal – just keep practicing, and eventually you’ll grow familiar enough with the sensation that it will gently stabilize, and even start to grow, as you continue to patiently watch your breath.

How can I use piti to reach jhana?

The classic answer to this question comes from the Samadhanga Sutta, where the Buddha uses a very vivid (but admittedly outdated) illustration to explain the process:

Just as if a skilled bathman or bathman’s apprentice would pour bath powder into a brass basin and knead it together, sprinkling it again and again with water, so that his ball of bath powder — saturated, moisture-laden, permeated within and without — would nevertheless not drip; even so, the monk permeates, suffuses and fills this very body with the rapture and pleasure born of withdrawal. There is nothing of his entire body unpervaded by rapture and pleasure born from withdrawal.

— from the Samadhanga Sutta, AN 5.28, translated by Thanisarro Bhikkhu

What’s being described might sound a little strange to us, because nowadays no one uses bath powder. But at the time of the Buddha, they didn’t have the kind of soap you buy today in bars. Instead, there was a dry powder you slowly mixed with water until you had a big soaking lump to clean yourself with, a little like how you might knead wet and dry ingredients together to make bread dough. When it comes to meditation, your physical body is the powder and piti is the water – to reach jhana, you need to consistently suffuse that body with the pleasantness of piti until every square inch is smoothly saturated, until “there is nothing of your entire body unpervaded by rapture and pleasure.”

I love this illustration because it perfectly captures just how hands-on and physical the process of jhana meditation is. While you certainly can just sit back and passively let the piti spread, the real fun comes from rolling up your sleeves and actively working it into your body until everything everywhere feels good. Of course, this doesn’t mean you’re nervously scanning up and down with a critical eye, desperate to bring on jhana as fast as possible; that kind of attitude is a surefire way to make sure you never get there! Instead, try to think of it more like a playful, good-natured competition with yourself, where the goal is to see just how much pleasure and joy you can experience at once.

It’s important to remember that, even if you never reach a jhana state in your regular, daily practice, just the opportunity to play around with piti is enough to make a session more than worth it. That’s what this period in your meditation practice is all about: Balancing a wholesome desire to achieve your meditation goals with a genuine commitment to letting go of any expectations and engaging immediately and uncritically with whatever comes to pass.

How can I spread the piti throughout my whole body?

Once you’ve identified a relatively stable patch of piti somewhere on your body, you can start trying to mentally “stretch them out” as far as you can. If you’re feeling piti in your chest, for instance, try gently “tugging” that piti up to your shoulders, and then down your arms. It might take a bit to get used to, but with enough practice, the piti will start to follow your awareness and extend down whatever path your attention takes. (You can even imagine some simple object, like a small sphere or bright point of light, that pulls the piti along if it helps.) Keep doing this over and over again – remembering to keep centered on your breath the whole time – until you feel at least a little bit of piti across every major region of your body.

Finally, once you feel like your whole body is covered, return back to your full-body awareness until your piti and your breath become completely indistinguishable. When you breath in, feel the piti expand with you, until your entire body is a perfectly round sphere of pleasure; when you breath out, feel the piti contract with you into a single, infinitely precious point at your center. Bask in this experience long enough, having completely let go of anything else, and the first jhana is guaranteed.

As you go through this process, it can also help to occasionally pause and fill your mind with anything positive or wholesome: Loving thoughts towards family or friends, gratitude towards anyone who’s helped you in life, or just general feelings of goodwill and compassion towards the entire world. Personally, whenever I hit a “blockage” somewhere in my body that piti just can’t seem to get through, I’ll back off for a moment and spend some time imagining my wife and I telling our child we love her while she smiles back and laughs. Nine times out of ten, after a few minutes soaking up the joy that image brings, the blockage disappears!

You can even pick someone in your life who you really don’t like – maybe a politician, or a childhood bully, or a particularly annoying coworker – and try conjuring up as much compassion and care for them as possible, just so you can feel the true depths of your goodwill. Normally, you don’t want to be entertaining these feelings instead of the breath, but rather alongside it, as though they were one and the same. But if you try out this strategy and find it’s really effective for you, then you might want to experiment with dropping the breath entirely and making those feelings your central meditation object.6

How do I know if I’ve reached jhana?

You’ll definitely know when you reach jhana – it’s the kind of radical change in your conscious state that you couldn’t possibly be unsure about. But a good sign you’re getting close is when you begin to feel your mind entering a “feedback loop,” where the physical sensation of piti in your body and your internal experience of joy and peace start building on each other at a rapid pace. During this critical period, which usually lasts only a minute or two, it’s very common to experience an elevated heart rate and even some bodily tremors or flashing lights in your visual field.

But don’t worry! Those physical reactions are perfectly normal, and learning to let go of every last desire and accept them with equanimity and calm is the final skill you’ll need to develop in your practice. It’s hard to give specific advice for navigating such an indescribable experience, but remember: You don’t have to do anything. Just give yourself over entirely to the rapture you’re immersed in, let go of any distractions, desires, expectations, or fears that might still remain, and let the piti do its thing.

Eventually, with enough practice, you’ll be able to consistently enter and remain in the first jhana, basking in an infinite flow of pleasure for as long as you’d like. While this isn’t the final station in a meditator’s journey – there are seven more jhanas to explore if you’d like! – it’s a wonderful achievement you should be proud of, and a constant source of joy and peace you can rely on for life.