This is super common for folks with a breath-based meditation background who are learning emotions-based jhana practice. Without knowing much else about Jason’s practice, we can speculate a few potential opportunities for him to create a more fun inner experience (increase jhana likelihood).

First, let’s highlight what Jason’s doing well. It’s great that he has some foundation of concentration/collectedness that the mind is automatically coming back to a meditation object at all, in this case the breath. Something to build upon, a reservoir of skill that will contribute to his jhana practice.

He’s also aware enough to realize when attention is on the breath and when it’s not on the feeling. And Jason’s noticing some relationship between his effort and tension created in his experience. Which hints that he knows the less tension in the system, the more easily nice feelings flow, the more likely jhana will be accessible. Jason also revealed he’s able to find nice feelings in his experience. We don’t yet know how he’s accessing nice feelings, but it’s useful to know he’s reached that milestone. Many wins so far.

It’s important to get in the habit of counting our wins because morale maxxing is key when learning the jhanas. Because it’s harder to access nice feelings with unaddressed habits that repeatedly cause low morale.

So when helping people with meditation, I like them to get in agency reps. So I’d ask Jason what he’s already tried given what he’s describing. Running new little meditation experiments on your own given the challenge-opportunities you experience is cheap, getting advice from meditation teachers is more expensive. Unless of course you dm them a question, go about your life, and in the background they write a blog post to answer your question.

One answer to Jason’s question is that nothing new needs to be done. He’s already had the insight that trying to yank attention away from the breath is less helpful to the end goal. He’s already spawning enough intentions to maintain awareness of the nice feeling. It’s only a matter of time. The habit of returning to the breath will fade and be replaced by a habit of tracking the nice feeling.

But he can also take a more active approach.

One adjustment to the pattern he describes is to reward the mind for noticing that attention is back on the breath. This adjustment can be short or long in duration. It’s often easier to start with longer, clunkier versions of adjustments to practice, then refine those down into their essential parts over time, which take up less time during meditation, and leaves more room for nice feelings.

A longer version of this adjustment, for example, is noticing attention back on the breath, then saying to yourself, “Oh, hey there. nice job noticing, Jason. WOOOOOO! :D” (1st version), then returning to finding nice feeling and responding to the nice feeling.

A bit shorter version of that kind of response could be noticing attention has drifted to the breath, then saying “nice notice :3”, and returning to interacting with the nice feeling. And eventually shorter: just saying “nice” in response to noticing the misplaced attention.

Meditators who don’t reward the mind for these ah-ha moments of metacognition, like noticing that attention is not where we intended for it to be, are leaving a lot of enjoyment on the table.

Eventually, if you develop the skill of appreciating ah-ha moments, you can notice that there’s an uptick in positive valence when you respond with that appreciation. And that uptick, or gratitude, is a nice feeling! You’re back to the thing you intended to be looking at.

The final form of appreciating the noticing of misplaced attention includes only the nonverbal components. It takes much less time than the full sentence (1st version) we started with. You nonverbally notice that attention is not where you intended, and immediately nonverbally pulse some gratitude for noticing, and start nonverbally responding to that gratitude using an option listed in the “How do we respond to nice feelings?” section of this post.

You don’t need to get there right away, start with longer, clunkier versions of moves until it feels easy or natural to simplify.

Okay, so there might also be the assumption that awareness of the breath is a problem, an obstacle to jhana. Not really. Jason has the option to embrace this breath anchor he’s already developed in meditation and interweave it into the core of practice, to use it as something that helps anchor awareness on nice feelings, and also helps produce them.

There’s a lot of ways to creatively accomplish this.

The breath can be relaxing in itself, and we can imagine sending that relaxation to others on the out-breath. We can appreciate the breath itself, its sweetness and automatic operation, and imagine sending that appreciation to others on the in-breath. Doing both of those at a pace that’s easeful. It doesn’t literally need to be every part of the breath cycle. Start to notice if the gratitude carries over beyond the in-breath.

Or you could just smile on the in-breath without any visualization, and relax the smile to its smallest form on the out-breath. Or play with a mantra like “happiness” on the in-breath, and something like “peace” on the out-breath.

There’s room for the breath and the nice feeling in awareness. And at a certain point the nice feeling will pick up in momentum and it will become easier and easier to let go of the breath. Again, it’ll probably happen naturally.

So there’s many possible experiments to run if you’re experiencing something similar to Jason. I’d love to hear how any of those go, and if you want help with jhana practice, dm me or book a call (:

*using a fake name for this person

In this type of meditation, we increase the duration of nice feelings until they take on a momentum of their own and turn into an altered state called jhana.

To increase the duration of nice feelings and in order for those feelings to phase shift into jhana, we do three things: find nice feelings, respond to nice feelings, and love anything else that shows up. These three actions don’t need to happen in order, they don’t need to happen in equal amounts, they can happen simultaneously, and they can overlap in their definitions.

What are nice feelings?

Anything that feels nice from neutral valence peace to positive valence euphoric bliss. Here’s a list of some nice feelings:

1. peace

2. calm

3. neutral feeling / relaxation (not something bleak or dissociative)

4. contentment

5. cozy

6. safe

7. compassion

8. love

9. gratitude

10. happiness / joy

11. amusement

12. excitement / thrill

13. glee

14. euphoric bliss

On “not nice” feelings

Feelings like anger or sadness can seem unpleasant and as if they’re source of our suffering. People often label those feelings as bad or not nice. It’s okay and normal if you find yourself automatically interpreting feelings this way. But a much different experience is possible, one where feelings like anger and sadness are cathartic and flow unobstructed, where it becomes clear no emotion is bad nor the source of our suffering. The way to get there is by experimenting a lot. And the jhana experiment can be one of the most fun and beautiful.

How do we find nice feelings?

Here’s some options:

1. do something to cause a nice feeling

   1. visualizing

   2. memories

   3. gratitude

   4. mantras

   5. practice metta / loving-kindness / generous intent / friendly intent

   6. smiling

2. notice existing nice feelings during or outside of “formal” meditation

3. love something that doesn’t seem like a nice feeling

4. increase emotional awareness if you can’t find any emotion in general

5. react to physical pleasure to cause a positive emotional reaction.

How do we respond to nice feelings?

Here are some options:

1. appreciating -- responding with appreciation/gratitude to the feeling that’s showing up

2. sending/sharing (metta) -- imagining sharing the feeling with others

3. savoring -- savoring the enjoyment and pleasure of the nice feeling

4. receiving -- imagining that we’re receiving the nice feeling from something or someone

5. relaxing -- relaxing into the feeling. like the other ways of responding to nice feelings, there are variations of relaxing. some include surrendering, letting go, unclenching, watching, and non-doing.

How do we love things other than nice feelings?

First, here are some things other than nice feelings:

1. expectations and limiting beliefs

2. thoughts

3. emotions that don’t initially feel nice

4. tension (body/mind)

5. sounds

How to love everything else?

I’m using “love” mainly as a pointer to anything that isn’t non-loving like pushing away or repressing, because loving everything else doesn’t need to be some huge, gushy move. For example, it can look like gently acknowledging the thing that’s showing up before returning to the object of meditation: the nice feeling.

Here are some ways to respond to things other than nice feelings in a loving way:

1. relaxing (associated mental/body tension), unclenching, surrendering in response to it

2. welcoming / embracing it

3. savoring it

4. gratitude for the thing and/or for being aware that you aren’t looking at the nice feeling anymore

5. forgiving it

6. accepting it

7. goofy responses to (booping, licking, etc) it

8. labeling / noting it

9. non-doing, just watching it

10. imagining hugging it

11. supporting the emotion by holding it with imaginary hands

12. petting the emotion in a comforting way

13. parts work (Core Transformation, IFS, etc) about it

14. inquiry (fetters style, wholeness work, Kiloby inquiry, etc) about it

How to keep practice simple?

Choose one way of finding nice feelings, one way of responding to nice feelings, and one way of loving everything else to experiment and play with per sit. You don’t need to know how to do all the types of things listed in the “how to love everything else” section.

Unanswered questions

What’s glowing in front of me are some key unanswered questions about how each of these three main moves fit together, interact, and change over the course of a meditation session. There’s probably others I’ll remember as soon as I send this. Anyway, my intention is to make some guided meditations that answer those questions and illustrate further concepts to help someone learn the jhanas.

If you want help learning the jhanas in the form of meditation coaching or live, guided, interactive meditations, I’m starting 1:1 calls again after taking a break. Here’s my booking link.

SAFETY: Making friends with emotions and steeping in ease and enjoyment during jhana practice seems to be a very safe type of meditation. To meditate safely, if you encounter challenging emotions, DON’T do things that look like pushing through the challenge or gritting out the experience to get to the other side. If a meditation session felt like it sucked, don’t keep meditating in the same way. Seek help to make it not suck. I have a lot of experience helping people into jhana and making meditation fun, but I am NOT a licensed mental health professional. Consult one if you have a history of mental illness before messing with meditation. I want you to be safe and happy and blast off into jhana, and am stoked to support you in that endeavor, but know that if you decide to go spelunking in your psyche, that’s on you.

1. Ability to notice emotions. I started with a very low ability to notice emotion. It’s a skill and can be improved!

2. Ability to access a nice feeling. By nice feeling, I mean anything from nourishing, neutral valence ease/relaxation/calm, to slightly positive contentment/cozy, to high energy high positive valence joy, euphoria. Yes, you can ride a neutral valence calm into jhana.

3. Ability to reliably access nice feelings.

4. Positive feeling during meditation starts to take on a momentum of its own and the need to do moves to access nice feelings becomes less. It becomes more about lightly engaging with what’s already there.

5. Takeoff. A spillover, phase change, intensity increase, or real bump in momentum of the positive feeling begins. It’s not quite self-sustaining, but it feels like things are starting to take off on their own. Sometimes there’s hesitancy at the door to jhana, but that’s normal and there’s a suite of responses to gently open the floodgates of euphoria, love ,etc.

6. First jhana experience. Even a few seconds can be significant, as it shows wow, imagine an hour in this state, imagine if this was reliably accessible. A brief glimpse of jhana can also be very motivating. A small piece of the best chocolate in the world is still pretty tasty.

7. Longer duration jhana experience. There’s often noticeable afterglows, or lingering positive effects on the nervous system and emotional landscape.

8. Reliable jhana access.

9. Fractal jhanas. Experience deepens on its own and takes you into deeper and deeper nourishing, profound states.

If you just had the above list, several ouchies could arise. Maybe beating yourself up because you’re working on #1 and you think you should be at #7, maybe you’re judging your meditations based on the availability of nice feelings. In order to progress through those Mission Success Events above, you’ll have to gain more and more love, lots for yourself (and this naturally spills over towards others, ime). I mean, I bet you can have less self acceptance and love for others and still access jhana via other means, but that sounds way less fun for you and the people you care about.

Further posts may address the pitfalls that can present when only using the above skill tree. What about integration practice? How does it fit in with jhana practice? What about insight practice, addressing emotional repression that shows up in relationships, and beautifying conditioning post meditation shifts? How can jhana practice bleed into those areas and how do they all fit together? Later, I’m going for a jog, but chat soon ✌️

Since last June, there’s been a handful of emotional and a couple physical experiences that have caused me to suffer. A ten hour tattoo session, McDonalds binge that triggered stomach pain and returning cancer fear, indoor olympics performance issue caused much shame and disappointment, intense waves of prolonged fear caused by airplane turbulence [2], and a few other periods I’m sure happened but I didn’t log. So about ten or less days where I suffered. 355/365 days, or 97% of the rest of the year I didn’t suffer.

I mean suffering with a capital S. What remained after that shift in June didn’t feel like I was Suffering. What remained included occasional slight, subtler meh-ness here and there, slight unsatisfactoriness. Calling those “suffering” feels inaccurate, like it trivializes the level of suck I felt when experiencing the components I bundled up in what I called “negative” emotions in the past. And those subtler ouchies that prevent 100 proof peace have dissolved more and more in the momentum gained from that before-after event last June.

Why have some moments still caused suffering? Maybe there’s experiences that are rare and trigger dusty conditioning which hasn’t been rewritten yet, where the logic behind resistance to emotional experience still lingers. Some patterns of my experience support that idea.

Or perhaps certain levels of combined duration and intensity of “negative” emotions still cause suffering, that the June shift just raised the capacity much higher but not all the way to account for the full range of what god’s gonna gift me. Some patterns of my experience support that idea, but maybe it’s also a characteristic of the former, where high levels of both duration and intensity of “negative” emotion trigger not-updated code.

I didn’t need off-retreat deterministic access to higher jhanas or multiple cessations or 35 noticings per second to stop resisting emotions, just a sporadic practice of looking in direct experience in specific ways (for like four months). But deterministic access to the second jhana, and the emotional work needed to get high without drugs, certainly helped weaken resistance to emotions.

It’s exciting that the jhanas are more widely known, even if still much an open secret outside meditation/tech twitter. And that it’s possible to nix the default assumptions causing emotional resistance using seemingly simple inquiry practices, or most suffering, is an even bigger open secret.

There’s a handful of other folks who publicly share that they've reproduced the results I’m talking about using the same practices, and I hope lots more do so. The shift last June has been the biggest upgrade to my wellbeing, but I’m not a special person who did something exceedingly hard. You can drop emotional resistance too, and there can be lots of ease and enjoyment along the way.

It took me a long time to experience my first jhana, and now most people learn in a week via Jhourney [3]. I hope a similar quickening happens with these inquiry practices.

I don’t know if how I feel is permanent, but over a year is great, and I don’t know why it’d stop being this way anytime soon. I’d love to help others drop default resistance to emotion using jhanas and inquiry. I’m doing more 1:1 calls with folks when I’m not working Jhourney retreats. See here [4]

[1]

[2] https://x.com/blissbrah/status/1878923447004266547

[3] x.com/jhanatech

[4] cal.com/blissbrah

The goal is continuity of an enjoyable feeling (e.g. love, joy, gratitude). If there’s enough continuity, then intensity takes care of itself. Build continuity by creating a positive feeling, reacting to it, identifying prominent things that aren’t enjoyment, reacting to those, and repeating (not necessarily in that order). Find a pace of reacting that feels easeful. If it feels effortful, that’s the wrong direction. During meditation, repeatedly do something to spark a positive emotion (e.g. smiling, metta phrases, things you’re grateful for, picture a puppy). any above zero valence feeling is enough. Once a way of creating positive emotion is found, stick to it. Sometimes it stops working. Good, that means level 2 unlocked. There’s some reaction or expectation that needs to be included/softened. Include/soften things other than positive feeling by welcoming/loving/appreciating/forgiving them, appreciating noticing, or some move that doesn’t create more internal violence. If anything detracts from building continuity of enjoyment, then respond using one of those ways. Respond with low complexity moves first, then return to sparking and reacting to positive emotion. If thing doesn’t go away easily / on its own, then gradually increase the complexity of moves (e.g. longer forgiveness session, asking what it wants [core transformation moves], maybe IFS, etc.). once it feels attended to, softened, or dissipates on its own, return to sparking nice feeling and reacting to it. Whenever positive feeling shows up, react to it with savoring, appreciating it, or giving it away / sending it (metta style). All moves (things used to spark positive feeling, reactions to positive feeling, and reactions to things other than positive feeling) can start complex, then become subtle, and nonverbal eventually. For example, gratitude can start as visual memories plus phrases, then one image plus a mantra, then just the mantra, then just the feeling of gratitude alone. Less complexity helps develop continuity of enjoyment. If pure physical pleasure shows up, that’s helpful, but not the goal, so react to it using savoring, appreciating, or sending to create an enjoyable feeling. Notice enjoyment and react to it irl as well. This helps build momentum so you’re not “starting from zero” every time you formally meditate. Noticing “negative” feelings and thoughts irl and responding with the softening reactions listed earlier can also build momentum for the second skill. It’s all skills. Once the skills are learned, jhanas emerge naturally. Emotional blocks are normal. Longer forgiveness sessions can help, or some other integration technique (bio emotive, core transformation, ek meditation). It’s normal for emotions other than “positive” ones to show up as you create a friendlier emotional space. If some hesitancy about intensifying enjoyment emerges, that can be responded to similarly to any other thing other than the positive feeling. If you feel worse twice in a row from meditation sessions, then find help to debug before doing so again. Measure success by if you continue to try new things in response to challenges (opportunities) encountered. The fuel of jhana is fun.

This part doesn’t count as the 500 words lol , but i highly recommend Jhourney retreats for a more comprehensive guide to learning the jhanas :D (i work for Jhourney)

Here's what has helped me build the skill of forgiveness.

How to find things to forgive

I don't know what to forgive. I have nothing left to forgive. Well, is there anything in your life or in this world that you're not okay with? That's an opportunity for forgiveness. Maybe there's nothing about yourself that you need to forgive, but can you forgive everyone else for not meeting your standards? This can often surface more trailheads for feeling things that we've been unconsciously pushing down. Point forgiveness at the reaction that's happening. Try forgiving yourself for not having anything to forgive. Not because it's wrong, but because there may be part of you that's not okay with not having anything to forgive.

Say stuff out loud

It can be helpful to say some statements out loud. Cycle through the different categories of your life: relationships, career, learning, community, contribution, nature, whatever. Say things like I hold no anger in towards my family. I hold no fear in my career. I have no sadness about how I act in romance. Say so and wait to see if anything emerges, if any part of you objects to those statements. Some part of you might come up and say actually yes you do have anger, here's something from your childhood that can be forgiven. Or for some minutes, repeatedly say out loud one of bio-emotive's nine core feeling statements. I feel inadequate. I feel inadequate. I feel... And pause. Silence creates safety for what's been suppressed.

Point forgiveness at reactions

Often there are reactions to the process itself that arise, like objections to doing forgiveness meditation. There's annoyance about the particular phrase you're using. It makes me feel like I'm doing something wrong, but I don't think what I'm doing is wrong. Try forgiving that annoyance. There's an expectation that forgiveness is supposed to create some giant emotional release. Forgive that expectation. There's fear that if I forgive my lackluster results, then I'll never get anywhere. There’s fear that if I forgive this person, then I won’t have good boundaries. Forgive the fear that's coming up. All these reactions are okay. But I’ve never seen forgiveness reduce agency or disable people from setting healthy boundaries, only the opposite. Forgiveness just helps to let reactions come and go because it gives permission for the system to feel those emotions more fully. When they're felt, then they can dissipate. If you feel stuck in forgiveness or other types of meditation, what's the meta-level reaction that's happening? How do I feel about the process? And that can be forgiven.

Guess

If there's lack of confidence about anything you're doing in forgiveness, you can just guess. If you're going over some tough memories and say fear surfaces. What do you forgive? You can forgive the fear itself, as if you can point it directly at the emotion. Maybe it doesn't feel like it in the moment, but in the past you've noticed a subtle expectation that using forgiveness will disappear the not okay thing. Just guess. Forgive that expectation proactively. You can forgive any resistance to the fear, any parts of you that may not like the fear. Play around with whatever variations you can come up with. Perhaps you don't see any part of you that resists the fear, but you can just guess about what might be there. And if you have a parts work background, it's not necessary to start an involved process of dialogue with parts. It can be nice to play with varying degrees of fabrication. A nonverbal confidence that whatever little forgiveness phrases you drop into the depths are heard by every part of you.

Moving to subtler experience

Try moving from more complicated, involved mental experience to less so. To start, it can be helpful to really visualize situations ripe for forgiveness, to see the people we're forgiving standing before us, to call up rich memory. Sounds and stories. But maybe the forgiveness phrases can simplify. I forgive John for drinking milk directly from the jug when he first met my parents. And then I forgive John. Maybe simplify again to forgiven, forgiven, forgiven. Can you notice any mental movement that comes with the phrases? Maybe there's something about your attention that reaches out into the center of the tough feeling and lets go. Can you do that mental move without the phrases? Can that intention of release be done by itself, nonverbally? On any tension in experience? Forgiveness meditation done in this way can lead directly to the fourth jhana.

Pair it with positivity

Forgiveness and enjoyment practices feed into each other. Any gains made in one area benefit the other. If we’re overflowing with gratitude and joy, we feel much more resourced to venture into tough emotional territory. And it can be surprising how much more easily joy flows after 20 minutes of forgiveness. Gratitude can even erupt on its own during forgiveness practice. Breath in gratitude, breath out forgiveness, or whatever pace feels easy. Start with a forgiveness meditation before doing loving-kindness practice. Switch between them every fifteen minutes. What experiments would you be most curious about? Sometimes folks have a big emotional release from forgiveness meditation, and start chasing down more and more of their tension to dissolve with forgiveness. Instead, I believe it’s more effective to continually test how forgiveness practice and any other integration practice affects our access to joy, because balancing an integration practice with the jhanas is a faster way to greater wellbeing and positive change.

Forgiveness resources

I’ve listened to Delson’s guided forgiveness meditation many, many times. I was introduced to forgiveness meditation on my first Jhourney retreat, and I think doing forgiveness meditation when we have much more collectedness of mind (from meditating all day for several days) is a rare opportunity. Just fyi, sometimes I work for Jhourney, so I’m biased :D. Lately I’ve been having fun doing interactive, guided meditations with people to help them learn forgiveness, the jhanas, and more. You can book a call here if that interests you.

Disclaimer

This post is about what’s helped me and some others. I’m just some guy, not a licensed anything, not an authority. It’s your adventure.

There was persistent painful sadness behind my eyes. Two pinpricks of pain. It sucked. I had lots of joy during the day, with others, and gratitude as well. But whenever I'd sit down to do some jhana practice or some other meditationy thing, these ouch points of sadness would show again.

I tried a lot. I flipped the valence of that experience using EK meditation [1], which helped for a time, but it didn't last. I did a technique of using metta to create a pain-happiness forge, knowing the emotional pain behind my eyes was turning into happiness for various people, happiness that I felt simultaneously as the pain. This also worked for a time. I looked for the I that was observing that pain, several layers deep of these identity structures, and would ask them to dissolve into the rest of Awareness [2]. They did, and this helped the sufferyness of the pain behind the eyes to lessen, again, for a time. I did parts work on the painful sadness behind the eyes [3]. It showed the sadness in that location was perhaps a part of me that said "I hate myself" at various times when I felt like I wasn't doing my best. The pain persisted. I welcomed the painful sadness, I forgave it and everything around it, I sent it metta, I just sat with it (do nothing). Lots of experiments, but no lasting effects.

Following a distinct shift [4], my fetters guide asked me to come up with a situation that didn't feel good, where I suffered, and say it in the form of "When x happens, I feel y", then say to myself or in my head, "Where is the y button?" And actually look in direct experience for said button.

I said, “When I sit down to meditate, I feel painful sadness.” It was there as I spoke. As I asked myself where the button was, as I looked, part of me already knew there wasn't a button to be found in the space of awareness where I was looking, but I was actually looking as if it might be there, because sure, I'd never really looked before.

It lessened. The sensate experience I would label as sadness shrunk, the pain quality lowered, the resistance around it dissolved much, and the sufferyness around the experience basically disappeared. In real time, what the technique of looking for the button felt like was that as the ripple of searching awareness expanded throughout the sensory landscape of my experience, the territory that this looking awareness occupied no longer felt bad, there was no more suffering in that space. As soon as it was touched by this expanding border of looking awareness, it was as if the suffering component of the experience evaporated.

That suffering returned in showers later on, following that initial call where the technique was introduced to me. But the technique of looking for the button was clearly in another league in its immediate ability to alleviate my suffering, and the hypothesis was that if done enough, another big, enduring shift would happen and this would contribute to lessening suffering in some more permanent way, so I did lots more of the technique. Here are the specifics:

It felt easy to apply the inquiry in daily life. I'd notice some triggering reaction, say the x y statement, ask myself the question, and look in direct experience for the button. Sometimes I would spam this a few times for the same immediate situation. There was a daytime dance party that I was feeling nervous at, so I said, “When I'm asked to dance, I feel nervous. Where is the nervous button?” And as I looked, the jaggedness, the sharp edges of the emotional experience would melt away. I think for a time, it just felt like the entire emotion was disappearing, and that the emotion was the thing that was meh feeling. I think sometimes a lot of the emotional experience would lessen, or disappear altogether. I did this inquiry for nervousness, for anger, for sadness and whatever I would notice in daily life. I wasn't a perfect machine about it, but it was fairly easy to notice situations where it'd apply, to apply it, and see the great benefit of doing the technique.

So I'd been doing the inquiry a lot irl, doing some longer dedicated sessions with it, maybe 30 minutes or so, maybe more, I forget. But I was going to Canada to visit a friend with another buddy. We were going to do a Mahamudra retreat together. I bounced off the retreat, it seemed way lower ROI, and just decided to do a lot of the techniques I was already running: fetters inquiry, do nothing meditation, wholeness work, and some metta-ey jhana stuff.

Up in Canada with those friends, I was meditating maybe four to six hours per day over like six days. Maybe more, and also was chatting about meditation-related things with them most of the time, going on high-awareness walks, etc. One could say I was somewhat locked in.

The main experiment I wanted to run was larger dosage on the techniques I was already doing, and I wanted to bring up the most tough emotional experiences possible to do the inquiry technique on. This was suggested by my fetters guide [5].

To brainstorm, I wrote out a lot of the most heavy regrets, fears, and aversions I had, as well as things I might be regretful, fearful, or aversive of, but maybe just wasn't consciously aware of. I brought up in as much detail the emotional experience from my gnarliest memories, I used visuals and narrated the events and how I felt aloud to create the best simulations possible. I would run through these different memories and situations in sessions of 30 minutes plus.

Some examples. *Warning! Skip this paragraph if you don't want to read about some of my tougher experiences.* The fear I'd felt in the past from stomach pain, that it might be cancer returning. The regret of breaking a dear friend and romantic interest's heart, because I ghosted her when I got cancer. When I was hit with a belt by my dad when I was younger. The anger I felt when my brother punched me in the face when I was younger. The helplessness and sadness watching a family member struggle with psychosis. The nervousness I'd felt asking out some gal in the past. The potential fear of failing at everything publicly. The doom I'd felt when I was young, and later when I had cancer, of not existing for eternity. The idea of never having sex again. Fear of running out of money. Being a public disgrace. Whatever toughest memories and potential scenarios I could think of to summon a big emotional response.

For memories, I would construct the inquiry like so: "When x happened", "When I did x", or “Because I did x, I feel y.” Like, “Because I broke Xenomorph's heart, I feel regret.” And then I would say, "Where is the regret button?" And actually look. For the things that might happen, I would put it in this form: “If I never have sex again, I will feel sad.” And I would try to call up that feeling. Sometimes emotions would be there, and part of me suspected that they were just there because I was giving space for intense feelings, rather than it being associated with the specific phrase I was using or scene I was trying to simulate. No matter, the inquiry was working.

It felt a bit like a game of iterating on the best combo for highest emotional response. I had a lot of enthusiasm about dredging up my toughest moments.

What also worked was to invoke triggering memories like my brother eating aloud, and say, “I hold no anger.” Or to think of ghosting Xeno and say, “I hold no regrets.” Often, there would be some anger or regret. Then I would look for the regret or other y button of course. Other versions of the question were also helpful, such as “Where's the lack button?” “Where's the trigger button?” Or “Where's the y reason?” Saying the causes x and results y portion (not the inquiry question) out loud and repeating them helped evoke stronger emotional responses in the body.

Between these inquiry sessions, I was doing do nothing meditation, some wholeness work, and some metta and gratitude collectedness practice, all of which would sometimes bubble up some emotional stuff to do inquiry on.

A few days from, or near the end of the somewhat lax retreat with my friends, I was doing the inquiry maybe nonverbally on several memories and situations as I was falling asleep. Suddenly, something shifted and it was clear there was never a button, there was never a reason to react to those patterns of sensation that were rising and falling as I cycled the scenes. I tested on more scenes and normally suffery simulations, but there was no thin blanket of suffering over the experience, no resistance to the sensate experience I could label as an emotion. It felt so obvious.

That night I had a vivid dream that was symbolic of the system update I had while falling asleep, and when I awoke I was confident something big had happened. When I told the others I'd dropped fetters four and five, one of 'em slapped me in the face and asked if I had a reaction :D. When I tried do nothing meditation it felt like I could sit forever, and I slipped into some uncommonly hyperrealistic and lasting imagery, including a super slow motion closeup of an iridescent rainbow wave that a woman was surfing on. 

In the days following, there was a ton of baseline light airy joy and no traditionally-negative emotional reaction to anything; however, nothing challenging was really happening. The persistent painful pointed sadness behind the eyes has gone. I don't know if it stopped after that big update, or gradually before. I can't remember. The main thing that's persisted for me months after that experience is zero resistance to emotions that I can see, no suffering around the emotions, and some other stuff I wrote about in my last post [6]. I think there’s still updates cascading throughout the system.

I don't know if it's necessary to drop fetters one to three before this technique is effective. I only know the technique has been effective for me and two others, including my guide. Most of the stuff I tried was from my guide, he’s a fun wrapper for a website called SimplyTheSeen [7] and more, but I wasn't really studying every sentence the guy said on that site, I was just getting in reps in the version of the technique that I've described and seeing what worked for me. I hope the inquiry works well for you if you try it. <3

[1] https://www.blissbrah.blog/p/no-more-bad-feelings

[2] https://www.thewholenesswork.org/

[3] https://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2021/03/threefold-training.html

[4] https://www.blissbrah.blog/p/debugging-doubt-pt-2

[5] https://x.com/Plus3Happiness

[6] https://www.blissbrah.blog/p/buddhas-basilisk

[7] https://www.simplytheseen.com/fetters-45-guide.html

This post was written shortly after a big meditation shift. I would also recommend reading a longer-term reflection on how it affected my suffering here.

On suffering

I no longer suffer from emotional experience. Dropping fetters four and five using this process has been the greatest upgrade to my well-being.

Social anxiety is gone. There’s no reaction on top of emotion that naturally presents itself in the system. If fear comes up, there’s no contracting against that emotion, no internal violence created about that emotion. So the loop that creates social anxiety is gone.

A lot of the identity structure that existed as the conditions that would create the initial nervousness in social situations is gone. So fear in social settings, with some women I find impressive and attractive, or where I’m supposed to present to an unfamiliar crowd doesn’t arise, or at least so far, since fetters four and five fell away.

Previously tough emotions to feel, like fear, anger, and sadness seem much smaller now. Sadness can be there, but it doesn’t cause me to suffer. In hindsight, I was associating the suffering around the emotion, the resistance to the emotion, the want for that experience to be different, with the emotion itself. I was blending those together. Since that aversion is no longer there, the emotions seem much smaller. But they’re also much more clear. 

My emotional experience seems much more visible and unavoidable. My guess is because there’s a lot less structure built around avoiding certain emotions, or pushing them into blindspots. There’s no fear of emotional experience anymore. I think I had a lot of unconscious fear about feeling certain ways previously.

Since dropping those fetters, I have experienced brief suffering from pain. I booked a 10 hour tattoo appointment to test resistance to pain (and because I wanted tattoos), and by the end, I was definitely resisting the pain, squirming under the needle. Interestingly, I didn’t physically sweat during that whole appointment, where previously I’d sweat from my palms and armpits even for a tattoo that would last an hour and a half.

On conditioning

I assume I have most of the same conditioned responses as before dropping fetters four and five. There’s so many conditioned responses siloed and ready to launch to protect something that’s no longer there. There’s so much conditioning that has been built to avoid suffering, to avoid certain emotions, to get certain things like sex and money.

I still like sex and money, but I think I wouldn’t suffer if I never had sex again. That’s a pretty wild statement that a younger me would have found extremely off-putting. I’d have been like, “Wow, this guy sucks and probably sucks at sex.”

I also don’t have any fear about money. I certainly would prefer more money than not, because of how the medical system works where I live, because of the quality food it can buy, because blah blah obviously more money is better in this world. But all the weird deprecated code I may have about sex and money are still probably there even if the reason for their existence is gone. That might sound like a bummer, but it’s not because

Currently all the conditioning I have around what I’m moving towards is coming under question. And I have much more freedom to choose new responses. There were prison walls, now they are permeable, and eventually they won’t appear.

But why change anything if everything’s okay?

On right and wrong action

I can see that others suffer. I can see that I cause suffering in others. Every action I take has the potential to perpetuate or lessen suffering, or free people from suffering. Now this is really internalized and intuitively felt. Now the Buddha’s basilisk is seen, and there’s no returning.

Creating purely engagement bait slop creates suffering, so does eating shitty food, so does not consistently exercising, so does withholding my effort and not actively creating good things in public, so does doing anything less than the optimal policy.

Previously, I'd been living purely like an animal, thrashing around trying to escape emotions and clenching, constricting, suffering while desires weren't met. I didn't have a lot of room for thinking about others’ suffering. And often it didn't exist to me, because I chose not to keep that info in my head. 

Before it was harder to want to do something about suffering if it wasn’t right in front of me, just like objects cease to exist when they disappear from a baby bat’s visual field (chill, bat scientists, I’m just guessing how this works). I had little object permanence for suffering.

It’s not like I was a complete zero empathy zombie. I got along with almost everyone, people enjoyed my company, and I felt bad for causing harm. But reducing other’s suffering wasn't my main mission, sustainable hedonism was (which includes not causing obvious suffering in others). And I don’t know if reducing others’ suffering will ever unconsciously be my main mission, or maybe it will be when there’s no more 6th fetter (subject-object prior), or 8th fetter, or beyond.

Now it feels like morality has reentered the chat, but not in a way where I’m beating myself up. It’s not like I’m freaking out about all the suffering, and the suffering I may be causing. There’s no self-inflicted sting when I notice I am repeating conditioning that isn’t the optimal policy.

My actions and speech still often cause suffering (there’s a lot of room for improvement :D), but at the same time whatever I do feels kind of perfect, because that’s what’s unfolding in reality. There’s a growing deep trust that these insights will percolate further throughout the system as old, waiting conditioning is continually triggered and illuminated, and that more skillful speech and action will continue to replace those responses. 

There’s confidence that this movement towards less suffering is happening actively and passively at the same time. There are thoughts about how to lessen suffering, and actions that flow from that, but also all these feel like they’re happening on their own, without a controlling agent. It also feels like the system is moving towards creating less suffering in ways that I’m not conscious of.

I’m no longer obsessed with being a controlling agent or not. If I look, yes, there’s nothing there moving the steering wheel, but that experience of being a driverless car is ordinary now.

On impatience and parts

I still get impatient with others. According to some, this means some part of my structure isn’t okay with another part of me. I accept that hypothesis, and I’m interested in exploring how to move towards a system of parts that all love and accept each other.

There’s probably many parts of me that are in conflict with each other, different motivations in conflict. There’s a preference for all of these parts of me to be satisfied, to have their needs met in a way that doesn’t create internal violence, and the knowledge that propagating this internal violence in some way to others in the future creates the conditions for suffering.

I also think internal violence is eroding naturally, without any obvious conscious action, but I’ll probably try something like taking shrooms while doing Core Transformation at some point. I don’t think this erosion is happening because under the hood my parts are now hugging for some reason, but because the parts themselves are disappearing because some major upstream priors that cause them to exist have gone.

On thoughts, on jhanas, on sleep

There’s a lot less thoughts appearing, but I’m still thinking about what’s important. There’s little or zero auto fantasizing about what Owen could be, which was a prominent aspect of my experience in the past. I’m not sure if that’s a consequence of dropping fetters one to three, four and five, or all of ‘em.

I have no urge to do jhana practice. There’s no urge to cultivate long, refined experiences of happiness. My remaining main interest in jhana practice would be if they turn out to be necessary or are an outsized supportive practice for dropping fetters via inquiry.

I think jhana practice is super valuable. It’s been extremely helpful for me, and maybe it’s the reason dropping four and five went relatively swiftly. But the main reason I was doing it was to learn to have a reliable way to have cessations, which I assumed were necessary for dropping fetters.

Practice traditions that use the jhanas are complete systems, and for some (maybe many!) people only doing jhanas works (like Nadia Asparouhova I think). But I stumbled into fetters inquiry while learning and doing jhanas, the inquiry worked, and so I’m stoked to continue using a hodgepodge of techniques.

A fun bonus has been that I have not felt shitty upon waking up once since my experience of dropping four and five. I’ve definitely gotten poor sleep according to my WHOOP app. Some 20 percent and 40 percent sleep score nights, but every time I wake up I feel good. There hasn’t been a huge, heavy blanket of grogginess or tiredness upon waking up since.

On being wrong

Apparently fetters four and five can drastically weaken, then break altogether. For me, I think they were already weak because I had been marinating in the second jhana for lots of time. Maybe doing EK meditation helped also. Unclear.

I'm happy to update y’all if I find out later that this was a temporary, months-long state, rather than what I currently believe to be an enduring trait.

How to drop four and five

I’m currently undecided about how I can best help others experience this, so for now ask Michael, who helped me in this process.

Assumptions about what’s next

Apparently suffering is still happening at this stage of the path, and dissolving later fetters will erode more subtle patterns of suffering. But it doesn’t feel like suffering is happening anymore in any important or noticeable way. I’m very interested to see what happens when the rest of the fetters fall, so I’m going to continue the inquiry into six and beyond.

It seems my orientation towards the world and what to do in it has shifted a bit because of this experience, so I’m assuming this’ll happen again if the sixth fetter is dropped, which creates the perception of there being a subject in a world of objects.

I hope this post has been helpful. Until next time, friends <3

“Doubt is the only thing holding you back from enlightenment,” Frank Yang said to me in October 2023 on a jhana retreat, and he was right. It took me until a month or so ago to realize that, and maybe that realization would’ve been faster had I started the direct pointing / fetters approach sooner.

My learning journey with the approach of direct pointing to drop the fetters began when I came across this unfiltered guy on meditation twitter named Michael. He claimed to have hit Streamentry, this magical trait that I aped into seeking after reading The Mind Illuminated and scrolling r/Streamentry (without really understanding all the available practice traditions out there). And he did so after a week of strolling around Barcelona doing some exercises he curated in a couple page google doc. I’d been wanting Streamentry, Enlightenment, or the real goods that these meditation folks advertise since I started meditating in 2018.

“It is possible that the wall of knowing is so thick that simple things are not visible.” - Gateless Gatecrashers

If this guy can do it in a week, wtf have I been doing this whole time? I’ve had similar feelings come up while helping teach the jhanas. Reliable access to some of the lower jhanas took me a lot of trial and error, and during my first jhana retreat I went from reliable access to j2, to experiencing 1-5 (j5 briefly). But some people who I help guide on these retreats just go from much less meditation experience to j6 and beyond in a week! So there was this fear that Michael and these jhanas-are-ez folks have some unique psychology that I missed out on.

There was also a lot of skepticism about his claims. It’s some random, loud guy on the internet. Maybe he’s just scripting all these people into local peaks in the landscape. But I still wanted to find out, and I thought that at least someone needed to verify if he’s legit. Even if he wasn’t, then that would be something valuable for the community. I was also tempted to try the methods he was advertising because maybe just as Jhourney is to the jhanas, the direct pointing path could be to enlightenment: a movement or set of practices that demonstrate access to fancy meditation states/traits can be much easier than we think.

“Those lucky enough to know that there is a way out, a mysterious thing known as enlightenment, often spent years fruitlessly seeking a truth that is simple, real, and immediate—right in front of their eyes.” - Gateless Gatecrashers

I had a couple first calls with Michael, one where we just chatted about terraforming the Sahara and another where he actually guided me through some of the exercises in the google doc. A lot of it is about separating direct experience from some extra, imaginary layer of experience. This never really connected with me. All the exercises seemed to be obvious and have zero standout effects. I was tracing the outline of different objects, noting thousands of times per day (I had a little counter ring from Amazon) for a few days, but wasn’t seeing my visual field become luminous or take on extra levels of juicy saturation like I’d seen in random internet reports. I was labeling my experience into thoughts, sights, sounds, sensations, and my metacognitive awareness was more continuous, but this all seemed pretty standard noting effects that I’ve seen before. What was new here?

After about a week of these haphazard experiments, I stopped doing the practices for a couple weeks or more (I forget). Some conditioning came up and I was busy with work. By conditioning, I mean some patterns of beating myself up mentally for no good reason, avoiding those feelings of shame by eating lots of sub-par pizza, then repeating that pattern over the course of several days before fading back into a more neutral baseline. It was a lot less intense than in the past, but it’s not like all bad habits are completely, immediately cleaved from experience doing a smattering of jhanas and emotional work. Another week or so passed, and then Michael posted a chart of the trajectory of people’s experience that he’s been guiding. And I did not want to end up as one of the folks who didn’t Succeed, so I reached out again to set up some more calls.

This next round I was told to focus on the section about separating direct experience from the imagined layer, so I spent an hour and a half staring at different fruits, then imagining their mental simulation. Smelling lemons, apples, and cherry tomatoes, then trying to imagine the smell. And doing the same thing with all the senses I could. Same thing with the auditory field, I tapped on my desk with my fingers, then imagined the sound continuing without tapping. Once again, no fireworks. My thoughts at the time:

“So this first section I’m feeling very know-it-all about. Like obviously I can tell the difference between mental images and imagery in my visual field. I can obviously tell the difference between any experience experienced from its actual sense door than a simulated version of that. We'll see if I spot anything different. I should set some intentions around being open to experiencing or learning things I don't know. I'm open to that idea. Maybe there's something hiding in a blindspot that I really haven't noticed before. Maybe I'll learn something super simple, but very fundamental in this first exercise.”

A lot changed when I read Gateless Gatecrashers, a book with several conversations between people seeking to drop the first three fetters and a guide who helps point out how to do that. Essentially, a book of examples of what Michael was offering to do for me. At first, I just noticed some emotional reactions to a few quotes. Sadness in response to this one:

“So now look at the real possibility that there is no “you” in real life. That all is happening by itself, without a manager. Look inside and tell me what feeling comes up; do you recognise fear, resistance, frustration, what is it?” - Gateless Gatecrashers

Again sadness arose while reading more of the conversations. So much of the seeker’s pattern of delusion, frustration, and doubt matched my own. As I looked in experience for a Self in the different ways the guide prompted, there was some amusement about the fact that there's this idea of a Me doing all these things when there's only every senses, thoughts, imagery and the rest arising without a Me.

“There is no thinking about and no doing, just seeing and the me-ness makes no sense.” - Gateless Gatecrashers

There’s nothing new here intellectually, and a younger Owen might’ve been dismissive, but then I hadn’t truly looked in direct experience to verify those intellectual beliefs about no-self and build confidence around the undeniable evidence.

“There is nothing wrong with you. The “you” that you think you are, you are not. What you are is nameless. You could call it “life itself” or “existence” or “presence” or “awareness” or nothing. You are already free. It is only a matter of seeing through the thought-illusion that makes you think you are in bondage. The bondage is not real. It is just a story. And you are not a story.” - Gateless Gatecrashers

These quotes I’m sharing from the book would’ve sounded trite to me in the past, but once I spent some time looking in my direct experience, they seemed to hold more weight, they felt like accurate descriptions of the real-time transformation of my understanding. And it’s not really a transformation. I think I’ve been here for a while, but doubt has been clouding and discrediting my experience.

Maybe there was some point of no return that would’ve been clearer in the past if doubt wasn’t ratcheted up to the highest gear at that time. I’ve had experiences that pattern match with cessation or j7 during my previous breath-based concentration/insight practice, but the habit of strongly discounting the value of my experiences was so strong back then, and the expectations for what these kinds of realization are was so fantastical, that now I don’t really know what happened or where the stream began.

On a subsequent call with Michael, he confirmed my experience. Yeah, there’s no heavenly trumpets to announce Streamentry, just this recognition that there’s only experience, no special doer. I said, “That’s so dumb” a few times. I mean, it’s dumb that they call it Streamentry and that it is made to be so special. It is and it isn’t elusive and special. I felt a relief and a mostly-amused, slight annoyance about this joke. I riffed on how I’d built it up to be such a huge thing without actually investigating those assumptions. And yes, life is so much better than before I started meditating, and if I flipped the switch between my experience as a 21 year old to what my baseline well-being is now, then that 21 year old would probably freak out and say it’s better than a lot of common hedonistic loops.

Now it’s clear a lot of suffering can be contained in wanting experience to be grand, wanting Streamentry, wanting to be saved. Doing Michael’s curation of Liberation Unleashed and Simply the Seen techniques, and reading Gateless Gatecrashers, regardless if it helps you drop the first three fetters, helps to really uncover blindspots. And maybe this kind of cobbled-together direct path tradition is just overlooked, dismissed because it isn’t considered as a possibility because our Self-made contracts to suffer don’t allow for easier paths.

As Jhourney is to the jhanas, direct pointing is to dropping fetters. The “light” jhanas are life changing. Yes, maybe the hard jhanas are way better for specific uses, but there’s lower hanging fruit that tastes absolutely delectable, so let’s fucking eat it. Michael’s Streamentry may not hit as hard as the type where you dualistic concentration your way into popping a cessation, just as the TWIM jhanas don’t produce as gnarly phenomenological descriptions of j1 as the Brasington techniques, but the fetters approach may still take you all the way, just like the “light” jhanas.

Currently, I still get caught up in deprecated code, there isn’t always a metacognitive awareness of the fact that there’s no Me (or a feeling of agencylessness), but it doesn’t really feel like there’s ever a Me, just sometimes there’s more contracted experience. Doubt seems to be mostly gone, or I haven’t felt doubt in a while. Sometimes I notice a speech pattern where I tag caveats to what I’m saying, which originates from previously-held doubts. I’m happy to admit if I’m wrong about anything I’ve said here, but I also feel confident in my diagnosis. Later I’ll write about my experience doing the exercises to drop the fourth and fifth fetters. Thanks for reading so far and I wish you a chill Sunday.

“Liberation has been oversold. It does not guarantee immediate and passive release from suffering, or freedom from thoughts, or love and peace forever. That’s a caricature. The reality is different—but it is genuine. Finding that reality for yourself brings clarity—and opens a new path to developing a way of life that is smooth, kind, humble, and overflowing with joy.” - Gateless Gatecrashers

Lately I’ve been crying and slowly convulsing with pleasure like I’m being exorcised because of a mental move I learned after being inspired by these understated posts: The Craziest Thing That Ever Happened To Me and How I Attained Persistent Self-Love. The technique is from a book called Existential Kink, which I wouldn’t recommend for everyone, because the first half is about magic and alchemy and a BDSM-framing of all your recurring unwanted patterns. But I would recommend the technique, because it makes normally-unpleasant emotions feel good, and this has cascading benefits.

The simple instructions:

Think of any recurring unwanted pattern (internal narrative, life event, emotion. etc.), find the unpleasantness associated with that recurring event in your body, then savor those sensations as if you actually enjoyed them. Keep doing that for like 15 minutes. That’s it. Post over.

So the first step. This can be any recurring yikes event. Like if you continually eat lots of microwaved sourdough bread and applegate organic hotdogs after late night workouts and you feel bad that this keeps happening. Or maybe you keep dating the same type of person who you know isn’t good for you and you regret dating them after the fact. It can be a recurring emotion, or a recurring thought pattern that isn’t fun. Any little way that you beat yourself up mentally. Sometimes these self-made suffering contracts are hard to see, but that’s what friends are for. A buddy of mine recently pointed out such a blindspot for me, and it was a huge relief to use that as a starting point for this type of meditation.

Any recurring unwanted thing is a trailhead to explore using this type of meditation. Repeating stuff you don’t like is an indicator that some underlying emotion needs to be fully felt, but that isn’t happening. The returning unwanted thing is just your body and mind giving you yet again another opportunity to feel the underlying emotion, but you slap it away, avoid it, or react with shame (reputable source of this theory? me).

So you’ve mentally summoned some situation you don’t like using internal imagery or verbal narrative. Whatever works to cause the slightest hint of the recurring emotion you don’t like, or some way of producing the thing that triggers you. Either way, you look for where the unpleasantness appears in the body. And perhaps you can label the emotion you don’t want to feel. That’s great, but not necessary. All you gotta do is find where you’re contracting, where the tension is, or wherever your experience is unpleasant. Try to get a handle on the location, shape of the sensation group, and the sensation quality. Is it dense, coarse, prickly, tiny bubbles of pain? It’s not important to find a label for the sensation quality, what’s important is that you’re honing in on the sensations of unpleasantness. And doing so doesn’t have to be super precise or serious, it’s just useful to separate what feels shitty from the narrative and conceptual layer that it spawns or that creates it.

Next we savor the unpleasantness that’s emerged. I’ve found the easiest way to learn this technique is to really exaggerate the savoring. There’s a few ways to do this. Recall or generate some reference experiences, some mental imagery and scenes like a really enjoyable massage, sinking back into a warm jacuzzi, nuzzling into the last bit of honey from a jar, savoring a juicy steak, or the best stretch in the morning you’ve ever had. How would you act in those situations if you were experiencing three times the pleasure they would or have given you? That’s the kind of savoring you can simulate with your imagination and act out internally while doing this technique. It’s also possible to get a feel for how to savor by doing so with positive valence emotions and sensations. I’ve written about that here.

Okay, so it’s not necessary to incorporate the original book’s philosophy into your working identity, that you’re a messed up person who loves trash situations and suffering, but I think using a lightweight frame of sexy enjoyment of the unpleasant sensation works well to trigger the valence flip. How sexy exactly? I don’t create mental image scaffolding to interpret the initially-unpleasant sensations as if I’m enjoying them in a sexual way. I mostly just use narrative helpers, and these fall into two categories.

I’ve been working with sadness a lot using this type of meditation. It may be small at first, just behind my eyes in little concentrated points, and I’ll have the intuition that there’s probably more of it to feel. At this point I’m very motivated to feel it fully, and there’s an eagerness to feel it fully, because I know it’ll feel good during and after since I’m using this type of meditation.

The sadness may have started to emerge in a number of different memories or recent events that I’m recalling in the meditation context. For example, I felt some shame about not getting good sleep even though I know that’s how I feel the best and whatnot. In this case I would lean into the sensations I’m calling sadness and also say things like, “I’m so fucked up,” and “Why can’t I do the right thing?” This type of narrative device pumps the woe-is-me narrative. It’s an aid to pull out the emotion a bit more that you’re trying to process. Maybe there’s some hesitancy about reinforcing patterns, but that hasn’t happened in my case, and I don’t think others would love this technique if it made the problem worse or created new ones. That fear of making the problem worse is another thing to savor as pleasure!

The other narrative device I use emphasizes the masochistic narrative. It’s so helpful to switch between lamenting the suffering you’re experiencing, using internal verbal monologue to reinforce this, and to savor the unpleasantness or tough emotion as if you enjoy it in a sexy way. Okay Fine, some real internal verbal examples that I’ve used to pump the slut-for-suffering frame lol (Hello, future grandchildren reading this. I am not sorry): *more like dom sexy voice* “Mmm, yeah, you fucking love that don’t you?”, *more coy sexy voice* “Oh no, I’m gonna be sad / in pain forever”, and of course *really into it voice* “Fuuuck yeah”, “Oh yeahh”, and “Mmm”.

You don’t really need to make it sexual, but that’s a very helpful device if savoring is not coming easily. Currently, I’m mostly savoring nonverbally as if I’m having a really good stretch, with a couple of those shorter verbal cues sprinkled in.

In the past I used this technique within a parts work frame, but now that feels unnecessary, like adding lots of extra concepts. Just using the raw power of an upgraded emotional heat-sink is enough. But I think it’s probably skillful to experiment with both, just doing the technique and integrating it into other integration practices and moves. Especially if you pull this move in a meditation context, where you’re trying to cultivate collectedness/concentration, staying at a lower nonverbal level of abstraction is more helpful in my experience.

It can be a bit tiring to go through five to ten cycles of emotional release in a fifteen minute period. I’ve found expressing gratitude between these waves keeps my energy up. To do so, simply thank yourself for feeling tough emotions, for doing this practice, or thank the pleasure for being there, or give thanks to any easeful elements of your experience. One of the main benefits of becoming more friendly with emotions we’ve been suppressing or not feeling fully is that joy, happiness, and other traditionally “positive” emotions become more available. It’s fun to experiment with a bit of this type of meditation, followed by fifteen minutes of gratitude practice or jhana stuff.

Eventually, the act of savoring initially-unpleasant emotions as pleasure becomes natural, nonverbal, and like an invisible lever that’s available for you to pull. It’s been interesting to explore when to pull the savor lever, to trigger the valence flip, because sometimes sadness will be blooming, and if you don’t savor it immediately, it’ll grow even larger and feel cathartic without the savoring move at all. And if you do the savor move just as an initially-tough emotion is erupting, it can result in that pattern of tension in the body to dissipate very quickly or immediately. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Watching the emotion naturally come and go is just often a slower process, and savoring it speeds up how quickly it’s metabolized.

I doubt the idea of fully feeling an emotion is a metric that matters. What’s been more useful in my experience is to notice when I’m contracting in events throughout the day, to notice when I’m not following through on intentions, or to notice when joy is stifled in and out of meditation, and to use those as trailheads for integration/emotional work like savoring. Whenever the question emerges of whether I’m feeling something fully, it’s usually been spawned by fear, and a subtle lens that I’m broken and need to be fixed. I just spot that and do the moves described in this post on that fear. 

When and if to pull the savor lever on “unpleasant” emotions is just an interesting exploration to explore. Sometimes savoring isn’t necessary because there’s acceptance to just let the emotion be felt on its own, and when there’s no resistance to arising emotions, they feel cathartic already. It’s also fun to let the emotion rip, then pull the savor lever, then stop savoring, almost like edging the savor move. And what’s really cool is to get both going at the same time, savoring the pain or sadness or something, but doing it lightly so the pleasure doesn’t totally dominate the experience, so you’re feeling the pain and pleasure simultaneously, like you’ve created an emotional forge of some kind.

At times an emotion will start to bloom and emerge, but will hang during its deployment. The body will be frozen in tension. It feels like you’re emotionally constipated or something, like you want it to be emerging fully and dissipating, but something is stuck. In these cases, it’s helpful to do the savor move on the fear that the hanging, stuck emotion won’t ever resolve. You take a step back and do the savor move on the present situation of stuck, frozen emotion. Recursive savoring in this way can unblock the original emotion.

If you practice savoring as I’ve described, you’ll be able to do that thing in action movies where the villain gets punched in the face, but licks the blood from their lip and smiles. Joking, but there’s real positive, prosocial effects from this practice. Massively reducing and totally dissolving major areas of our shame and other emotions we’ve been avoiding, and burning up all the little contracts we make with ourselves to suffer– doing this reverberates into our behavior and relationships with others. And it also gives us more agency. If I feel meh about writing, I can just notice those unpleasant sensations in the moment and turn them into a pleasurable emotional release. Then I feel refreshed and excited to write more instead of approaching the rising resistance as a taskmaster who shoves down the bubbling emotion to be dealt with later. This type of meditation feels like a hack in the system, and I’m just happy to share it with you.

Doubt prevents jhanas and other fun, useful things in life. It's been a challenge I've been working with a lot, so I wanted to share the techniques and thoughts I've found useful for doubting less.

The first step is to just notice doubt. Noticing makes it dissolve because awareness is its own solvent. If you are thinking about doubt in your experience, friends and teachers are pointing out that you’re seeming doubtful, or you’re reading a blog post about doubt, then you’ll eventually map out the ways it shows up for you, but I’ll share my experience, so you don’t have to learn to spot everything on your own.

At the lowest level, it’s a pattern of sensation in the body that we slap a verbal label on, an emotion. We also call strings of thoughts, or narratives, doubtful. There’s subtle and more obvious versions of each kind of doubt. Whenever I notice doubtful narratives or thoughts, it’s useful to nonverbally notice where it’s showing up in the body, in what shape, and what the sensation quality is like– bubbly, prickly, dense, coarse, smooth, velvety, sand-like, etc.

Frequently questioning the validity of experience is doubt. Is the jhana happening? Am I there yet? Am I doing the technique right? During sits, this type of doubt sucks because continually asking if it’ll happen prevents it from happening, because doubt is a type of tension in the body that’s not conducive for cultivating jhana, and questioning breaks continuity of the nice feeling we’re trying to cultivate, preventing you from ever reaching full saturation of that experience. Doubt is a rate-limiter on pleasant emotion, pleasure, and peace.

Another symptom of doubt is switching practices or techniques too frequently. The solution here is to just notice it’s happening and investigate why you’re switching. 

Are you switching because you’re bouncing off the emotion of doubt, creating a narrative about the technique’s effectiveness because you’re running from challenges appearing in meditation, preventing you from fostering curious and creative responses instead? I’ve recognized myself doing this in hindsight, but being aware of it will help you avoid this trap altogether. And if doubts are coming up as stories you are telling yourself like this, that’s great because you have a trailhead to begin seeing the emotion that spawns them or that’s simmering underneath.

Doubt can be quite subtle. When I was first trying to move into the fifth jhana, I was using a technique of radiating equanimity in different directions. 

The first example of doubt in this situation that I noticed was that the intention to radiate was like holding the assumption that the space would never be fully filled with equanimity. Radiating assumed there was a differential, and assuming part of experience was not yet the reflection of my ideal intention prevented it from being fully realized. 

So I just intended for the entire space in front of me to be filled immediately with equanimity, which worked.

Later I noticed I was spending little moments checking to see if I was in the fifth jhana by checking if the sensate field of the body was still appearing in consciousness. And again, this is a subtle, nonverbal example of the “Are we there yet?” habit mentioned earlier. 

This separate little checking process was a counter intention to what I was trying to accomplish: the fifth jhana, where the boundaries of the body drop away. At this subtle level, the truth was that I lacked faith in the desired intention. The combination of intentions propagated in my experience averaged out to be the intention to fail. Once I realized this subtle lack of commitment was holding me back, I just intended for the entire space around me to be filled with equanimous void, and I was in the fifth.

Another subtle form of doubt is viewing experience through the lens that you need fixing, are going to fail, or that you’re a loser. I’m talking about a thin layer of tension blanketed over my shoulders and back of my head, nonverbal doubt, that became evident for me when I played around with wearing the lens– holding the assumption –that I was fine and that I was going to win. 

A guided meditation that really helped me get a feel for wearing different perceptual lenses was Goldilocks Zone of Oneness by the Qualia Research Institute. In my experience, the light tension associated with this version of doubt dissolves as soon as it’s seen, but can creep up in the background of experience where I don’t notice it immediately. 

One reframing that I like is that doubt is not the problem. Doubt is just your brain letting you know you’re bumping up against limiting beliefs or challenges. My mind doesn’t give me an itemized list of limiting beliefs and exact upper bounds of every skill I’m cultivating (...yet). It has to paint a cumulatively clearer picture of my cutting edge, with every brush stroke being a moment of doubt or failure. 

If I’m not noticing failures or doubts some of the time, then how do I know I’m really growing? It’s possible to build evidence for growth without tallying doubts and failures, and tactics that do so can actually serve as a key building block in the foundation for jhana practice.

Celebrating savoring any little win, any experiment ran, or any triumph helps build the mental habits that support extended feelings of glee, joy, and contentment. I’ve done this at least hundreds of times: labeling doubt, congratulating myself for doing so, savoring the nice feeling resulting from congratulating. And I’ve written about how to build the skill of savoring positivity in experience here.

Lastly, I want to be clear that you can still experience jhanas that are profound, fun, and helpful for emotional processing without “solving” every example of doubt I’ve discussed, mostly it’s just the overt levels that need to be cleared.