Measuring progress in jhana practice and beyond – Part 1
On Jhourney retreats we talk about learning milestones within jhana skill development. Those are akin to the following (please don’t assume my hipfiring and interpretations of anything meditation related is representative of the more professional, polished material you get on Jhourney retreats):
Ability to notice emotions. I started with a very low ability to notice emotion. It’s a skill and can be improved!
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.
Ability to reliably access nice feelings.
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.
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.
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.
Longer duration jhana experience. There’s often noticeable afterglows, or lingering positive effects on the nervous system and emotional landscape.
Reliable jhana access.
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 ✌️
Good stuff Owen! Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
I really liked this. Well written. Thanks!