is the breath an obstacle in jhana practice?

Jason* dmed me, “During my sits, my attention often shifts away from the positive feeling to my breath, possibly bc the breath is more stable and associated with meditation. And then I try to remove attention from breath which creates tension. Any advice?”

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