* The most important First Jhana baseline of all, the one you should be checking for progress every day

 Link to this article: 🔗📚: collection of articles for an eventual book, "Jhāna Passaddhi Baselines"

articles in this series:

(read intro and remainder of this article first before following the linked series)

* The most important First Jhana baseline of all, the one you should be checking for progress every day

* what does energy blockage feel like? many concrete examples

Introduction

Read this sutta. The whole book is essentially a long commentary with detailed ideas on how to put it into your practice, moment by moment, activity by activity.

● SN 47.8 - 🔗🔊 9m, sūda: 👩‍🍳 🍳 The cook:
simile of cook: how to use 4sp🐘 (learning the sign (nimitta))to take you into jhanas. Obtaining pleasant abiding here and now is a code phrase for the first 3 jhānas (AN 6.29), or all 4 jhānas (AN 4.41).

Passaddhi = pacification, relaxation, the same as "fang song" ("release tension") that taiji quan teachers tell students for decades. Most of them think they're relaxed, but they're not relaxed enough.

It's the same thing with jhana meditation. Students ask the teacher, how come I don't have jhana? The short answer is you don't know how to relax and maintain the relaxation (passadhi sambojjhanga awakening factor, deep pacification of body and mind). 

The student says, "But I am relaxed. I've been doing it for over 10 years."

The teacher says, "if you were relaxed, you'd have jhana and taiji skill."

People think the teachers must be withholding some deep secret, something they're not telling the public. 

There's no secret. Just relax, and maintain that relaxation, as much as possible, all the time. Sitting still with eyes closed, standing still, standing with eyes open, walking, exercising, you'll find you can maintain 30-70% of the passaddhi that you can in a sitting position if you put enough practice into it. 

Jhana is as easy as this:

squirrel passadhi demo: video of squirrel teaching jhana and passaddhi.

The trick is, it won't feel like jhana until you charge up the battery.

There are two things, that most taiji teachers and jhana meditation teachers don't explain clearly if at all. 

1. Everyone has an internal  jhana battery that powers the whole operation. Jhana is really easy, but if you don't spend enough time charging the battery with enough PIE (precious internal energy), there won't be enough heat to melt existing blockages, and not enough force to circulate internal energy pervasively, that causes the characteristic second jhana hydraulic sensation of orgasmic piti sukha juice permeating every cell of your body.

2. If you want to be a billiionaire, you have to save more money than you spend. If you want to charge up your jhana battery, you have to sacrifice coarse pleasures for higher sublime pleasures. Most people can't do this, i.e. they can't give up sex, drugs, rock and roll, under sleeping, all kinds of debauchery to drain their jhana battery. It doesn't have to be debauchery, if you spend too much time thinking deeply about dharma, that drains your jhana battery too. So if you want to charge up the jhana battery, it has to be genuine celibacy and noble silence most of the time. 

I discuss a lot of the issues here:

See Jhāna-constipation ⛜🌊 for comprehensive details.

If you make the commitment to jhana, and cure your constipation, then jhana is available on demand, and as easy as doing this: squirrel passadhi demo

Jhāna 🌊Passaddhi Baselines

So now we get to the main idea for the book.

SN 47.8 says, if you practice 4sp correctly, you will remove 5 hindrances (upa kilesa is a synonym for nivarana), obtain samadhi and pleasant abiding (sukha vihara, a code phrase that the samadhi is 4 jhanas quality). 

A skillful cook will lucidly discern and remember what he did to line up the causes and conditions for that 4sp practice to result in jhana. Those are the samadhi nimitta (signs) that he remembers. 

A foolish cook doesn't pay careful attention, doesn't remember and doesn't notice exactly what causes and conditions  he used to produce 4sp that resulted in 4 jhanas, or what he did to fail to produce jhana, and fail to remove 5 hindrances. 

So it's not just the nimittas for successful jhana samadhi that the meditator has to remember, it's also remembering all relevant things, what worked, what didn't work, and figuring out why.

So I'm calling these markers and reference points for success and failure baselines:

base·line 

1. a minimum or starting point used for comparisons.

Keep a journal

Even if you have a great memory, it's a great idea to keep a detailed journal and track all of these baselines.

A big secret to success that most people don't know

 Jhāna-constipation ⛜🌊  phase can take a long time. Months, years, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, and it's a relative term. What constipation blocked you from first jhana might only take a few months, but 2nd jhana might take years, etc. 

Most people lose faith and give up, because jhana constipation can feel like it's permanent, that nothing is changing day to day. 

Here's the big secret: things are always changing, and if you learn to notice that, you'll never feel like your practice is stuck and going nowhere. Your body condition is constantly changing, the force and heat built up from a charged up jhana battery are constantly working it's way and dissolving all blockages in the body. It's just that  your lucidity and body sensitivity have probably not been trained  to be subtle enough to notice it. If you invest the time and energy to develop the subtle body awareness, then whatever level of attaining jhana you're in, overcoming 5 hindrances, entering first jhana, etc., you'll be able to notice improvement, regression, changes daily, even within the day. 

It certainly doesn't help when many Theravada lineages teach meditation methods that, instead of teaching subtle whole body awareness, they teach brute force samatha techniques of being one pointedly focused at the nostril, and ignoring pain and whatever is going on everywhere else in the body. This is not what the Buddha taught in the suttas. Brute force samatha methods may produce some desirable results for certain stages, for example if someone is just overrun with distracted thoughts, one pointed nostril attention may be useful. But as MN 20 states, this kind of mind crushing mind brutality, is the 5th and last option, for when the previous 4 more desirable solutions are failing.  And this 5th method is meant is just a short term stop gap measure to prevent worse outcomes (for example stopping thoughts in your mind that would want to commit a crime), not as a normal long term operating procedure. 

  

repeat: The big secret is,

repeat: The big secret is, if you practice step 3 and step 4 of breath meditation correctly, becoming very soft in mind and body, subtle in awareness of every cell in your body, and how to calm the co-activities of the body (breath, posture, etc.), even if jhana constipation lasts months or years, if you track your baselines you'll see improvements and changes every day, and even within the day. 

Some personal examples so you get a clear idea:

The first major blockage I had, was this intense lower backpain

The first major blockage I had, was this intense lower backpain that was contained in a tiny area, let's say for simplicity a 1 inch diameter sphere. The pain would only flare up when I meditate, when I didn't meditate, no pain. It was extremely mystifying, and western medical doctors would be baffled, I wouldn't even try to ask them. They would  probably say it was my imagination. 

Now in hindsight, 30+ years later, with most of my energetic blockages dissolved (any blockages that would prevent a decent experience of the four jhanas), I can tell you that even at this beginning of my meditation journey, I was already doing jhana. The thing is, intense lower back pain doesn't feel like jhana, it feels horrible and you makes you want to stop meditating. 

Do you understand the point? Jhana is super easy to do, but it's not going to feel like jhana until you clear up jhana constipation blockages. 

Luckily, I had strong will, desire, and probably collective past life instincts to know that samadhi and jhana was worth fighting for, and to stick it out and fight it. But it really would have helped if someone knowlegable and experienced would have explained to me I was already doing jhana correctly, I would just need to keeping pressing on and the pain would pass. It wouldn't make the physical pain any less, but it would have gotten rid of 75% or more of any doubts about myself or whether I was practicing correctly. 

So I'm telling you now, jhana is super easy, but depending on your preexisting health conditions, sila, jhana constipation may be painful or require a long time to overcome. But the benefits of jhana are so worth it, more than you can imagine. 

This lower back knot lasted maybe 5 years? But back then I was meditating between 60-120 min. a day, and not every single day. If you have chronic pain, you try to ignore it, and it just becomes a normal part of you. I don't even know when the back pain disappeared, I just know that one day, I noticed it was completely gone, not even a trace of any soreness where it had resided for so many years. 

 

Chest constipation: Energy blockage that probably every meditator has to deal with 

There are all kinds of weird shaking, vibrations, ants crawling on your face sensation, leg pain, hip pain, knee pain, forces, winds, heat moving through loops of energy channels and trying to dissolve their way through, and we could fill books with the various kinds of experiences people have. 

The chest constipation is probably universal, so it's worth spending some time on this one.

I'm going to talk about a 10 year period where I transitioned from having no jhana, to having some first and second jhana, and what the chest blockage felt like so you can get an idea of what many people go through.

For the first 5 years of the period, I was doing a lot of volunteer Dhamma work, so my meditation was inconsistent not by choice. If I could, I would have meditated 10 hours a day, but Dhamma work meant that instead of charging my jhana battery 10 hours a day, maybe I could only charge it for about 3 hours a day on average, and sometimes less if the Dhamma work was intense and using up my reserve energy. 

The second 5 years, I was meditating 6-10 hours a day, living a monastic lifestyle with much of the day in noble silence (no thinking and evaluation which drains the jhana battery, not just vocal silence).

First, what does energy blockage feel like? (many concrete examples)

The thing about blockages, is that if you weren't pay attention to them forming in the first place, and don't have reference points (jhana and passaddhi baselines) that you have a clear memory and comparison with, to you that just feels like normal, you probably don't even realize you have knots, blockages.

One more concept you should be familiar with, that's fundamental to describing the energy flow of first and second jhana. The microcosmic orbit needs to be open and flowing. 

Watch the first 45 seconds of video at the beginning of this article:

🔗Jhana constipation explained by Qigong Gorilla

In someone whose body isn't ready to do jhana, the microcosmic orbit, the two energy reservoirs are disconnected. Instead of PIE (precious internal energy, qi) flowing in that orbit as shown in the video, an ordinary person just draws on those first two energy channels as reservoirs of energy to perform thinking, seeing, hearing, moving the body, etc, and the flow of energy is often in the wrong direction.

Doing correct jhana practice does two things to open the microcosmic orbit:

1. Proper pacification/relaxation/passaddhi cultivates energy. Charging up the jhana battery, collecting qi, baking PIE.  

2. The force and heat generated by correct relaxation over time melts the blockages, and then when you have enough PIE, you can feel the current of energy circulating the microcosmic orbit like a surge of piti sukha juice.

In jhana constipation stage, where you're doing jhana practice correctly, but you haven't baked enough PIE (charged up the battery with enough juice), blockages in the microcosmic orbit will start to become obvious. The stronger the force, the more intense the reaction. My lower back pain for example. But when the ice (energy blockage) melts from the force and heat of the jhana, it likely will be more intense and obvious also.

In my case,  sometime during the first 5 years of the 10 year period I'm covering, my chest felt like a block of ice, literally, except it wasn't painfully cold like a real block of ice, probably just slightly cold, but felt like a big mass that was obstructing flow of the microcosmic orbit.

For many years, it didn't really feel like the blockage was getting any smaller or feeling any smoother.

But probably around the time I started spending a lot more time meditating, I finally had a major breakthrough. It felt like a very thin thread of water was going from my mouth and throat area and flowing into my stomach. Felt kind of like if you had one drop of sweat on your chest, it slowly crawled down to your stomach. Or if you take a tiny sip of water the sensation of it flowing down into your stomach. You might be asking, how do I know it wasn't either of those two? 

Because when you swallow saliva, or water, you know it. There are muscle contractions, and if you have tight energy channels and blockages in the mouth throat area, which most people do prior to first jhana, swallowing saliva can be pretty loud. When sweat drips, gravity and friction on the skin also governs the speed of it such that it has a distinct sensation. And after sweat drops, there's an after effect itch of skin where it passed through. 

The energy channel opening up was not neither of those two options. Felt similar to both in some respects, but energetically felt different. It had a different velocity and pathway. Felt below the skin, but not saliva or fluid. It was like the block of ice in my chest had a tiny hole and pathway drilled to connect my mouth to my stomach. 

It wasn't a continuous thread of flow, it wasn't just one drop of qi going down either, but the sensation lasted just a few seconds. 

After this very distinct incident, I didn't immediately feel a current loop of energy flowing continuously around the microcosmic orbit, but it marked a point where in hindsight I could say this was the day the microcosmic orbit was open for business. 

With continuous years of meditating 6-10 hours a day, after this point I could not always tell day to day, but probably months at a time where I could feel the block of ice was shrinking, and a distinct sensation of current flow became discernible. When you get a pleasant buzz that's affecting 20% of the cells of your body, you don't know if it's jhana, but you're pretty sure you're heading in the right direction.

In hindsight, I can definitely say that was jhana, just as even when I had that intense lower back pain at the beginning of my meditation journey,  that also was genuine correct practice of jhana, just that the jhana was constipated. 

Take heed! I'm giving you an incredibly valuable piece of information I wish I had back then. If knew what I know now back when I started? I had the intense lower back pain blockage in my early 20's, was meditating at most 1-2 hours a day. If I knew the secret that I know now, that I was practicing correct jhana all along and just needed to put in the time? I would have made it a priority to  meditate 6-10 hours a day right at the beginning of the long journey, knowing the pain would pass. Instead of taking several years to fix that first back pain blockage, I would guess I could pass it in a few months, and instead of taking 10-15 years before getting a full blown first and second jhana experience, it probably would have taken 1-2 years at the most. 

Unfortunately we in modern times have  all been groomed by Vism. and LBT (late buddhist teachings) with their redefined jhana propaganda to some extent, so we lack the correct information and confidence to pursue meditation with complete dedication free from doubts. Doubts cause tension, tension blocks correct jhana relaxation, so blockages won't melt very quickly and PIE won't bake on time, jhana battery will be slow to charge.

back to the chest blockage

As I said earlier, after the chest blockage finally opened up, it's not like right in that very moment the angels started singing and 90% of my body was flooded with piti sukha juice just like the jhana similes in AN 5.28. At least it wasn't in my case, mine took several more years. Everyone is different, has different health issues etc., so for some people it will be faster and more dramatic, especially if they fully commit to correct jhana practice in the prime of youth. 

But one great benefit for all of mankind from my slow jhana progress, was that I could chart the progress and see things develop distinctly and clearly, personally validating exactly what many of the great meditation masters of the past described. 

So gradually what was a huge block of ice in my chest became smaller over time.

Also, instead of being one solid block of ice, it started to become several chunks of ice.

Then instead of being a bag of ice cubes, it became a bag of part ice cubes and part snow.

Then just a bag of snow.

In the bag of snow blocking my chest stage, for example once I start meditating, my chest would still feel somewhat blocked and congested, but after 20-30 minutes the snow would melt and the energy was flowing  mostly freely, though the passage was still somewhat congested compared to parts of the body that were more completely penetrated by jhana sukha. 

After a few more years, it would just take a few minutes for the snow to melt.

After a  few more years, no more snow. The instant I turn on jhana, my body just expands like a balloon with no congested feeling in the chest. 

During the many stages I just described, the force and area of the current of flow gradually started to expand. It was like before jhana, it felt like rush hour traffic that comes to a standstill, and occasionally moving as fast as someone walking or casually biking. But after you open up the microcosmic orbit, it's like you discover the car pool autobahn lane that has no traffic and no speed limit. Then the more you meditate, the regular roads all get replaced by car pool autobahn lanes, and they just keep adding more lanes and you keep adding more cars and drivers to follow you on the microcosmic orbit highway.

Also instead of just the belly area feeling like a buzzing beehive sometimes, your entire torso and chest start to connect and you feel like every cell in your torso, and the enntire body will feel like magnetic gooey force that keeps growing and adding more layers the more you meditate.   

conclusion of chest blockage section:

If you just compare day to day, it's hard to see change in major blockages. But if you're meditating 4+ hours a day, you're more likely to notice day to day change, but certainly over a longer term. 

 

Is Jhana hard or easy?

What Vism. and Ajahn Brahm teach, a redefinition of jhana that contradicts the suttas, is definitely difficult. Vism. estimates maybe one in a million earnest and super diligent meditators can accomplish appana samadhi of just the first jhana. 

What about a correct jhana definition following the suttas?

Some teachers say it's hard. They're not wrong, but hard and easy is relative, so you have to examine the details of what they say and try it out yourself.

I would say, jhana is very easy and natural to do (if you practice correctly and ignore the wrong jhana propagandas out there), but that it requires a deep commitment in time and energy before you can do what feels like the jhanas described in AN 5.28. 

Depending on your ability to keep pure sila and preexisting health conditions, it can be as short as a few weeks, or many years. 

If you still want to say correct jhana is hard, what's really hard is whether you realize the noble truth of dukkha to the extent that you see the 5 cords of sensual pleasure (such as sex, drugs, rock and roll, feasting and socializing with friends talking about nonsense)  are a counterfeit happiness, and that the pleasure of seclusion from those coarse sensual pleasures is free from that danger, and is true pleasure.  

Note that even samatha kung fu experts who can do Vism. redefinition of fourth jhana, often fail the test in the above paragraph for a genuine first jhana. That is, when they're not in a frozen stupor trance of appana samadhi, they're still inclined and tempted as much as an ordinary person by the 5 cords of sensual pleasure.  

Real Jhana is easy, however Jhāna-constipation ⛜🌊 requires intestinal fortitude and commitment to unblock. 

Don't believe Vism.  and Ajahn Brahm redefinition of jhana, 

and  Have no excuses.