The jhana factors are the gateway to deep meditation. But they're also something we can access in daily life to refresh the mind. We'll get a feel for these qualities, now, by inviting them into a brief meditation.

Getting to Know the Jhana Factors

This is a course on the *jhana* factors. The *jhana* factors are qualities which are needed to be cultivated if one wants to enter into a deep meditation. They are...

When you read about these in a book, they can seem rather remote and apart from our daily experience. But in this course, I'm going to show how these are factors which do arise in our life and which we can enjoy and appreciate when they do and when they're skillful. All of them can in some way not be quite skillful and not quite right, but we'll look at that during the course. And perhaps we can start to recognize when they're not working so well or when they're misapplied.

But the intention of the course is to help you to feel that the vocabulary that you read in Buddhist texts or in discourses about suttas, or suttas themselves, is not something that's alien from your experience, but involves factors which we feel and experience every day. 

And if we can start to enjoy them in our daily life and to appreciate how they support our activities during the day, it'll help us in the practice of a deeper meditation.

The role of seclusion

A deeper meditation is conducted in viveka, seclusion. It's not something for daily life. But the skills we learn there, where we refresh our mind with the meditation object, can help us as we go about our activities during the day. In a deep meditation, the object is different from the kind of things that usually grab our attention during the day, like our phones and trying to get to the bus stop, trying to negotiate through crowds. We use factors of the mind then, but we can often feel that they're getting very tired and very strained and sometimes quite unhappy when we're trying to keep up with things and our attention is constantly being lost in all sorts of ways.

When we sit in meditation in seclusion, we can find our attention again and find that we can refresh it through a simple meditation object, apart from the world. It doesn't mean we reject the world. We just give our minds a bit of a break and allow them to restore themselves.

Jhana factors are present in all sorts of things we do during the day. So we'll just start off with a little exercise that shows how they can also be present in what we do when we sit in a meditation.

Calm in support of insight

I should also say at the outset that the intention of this course is to explore the value of jhana, samatha, as a support to insight. It's not to try and dash and achieve states like jhana. They'll come in time if they have a healthy ground in which to develop. We're looking at that ground and that soil and finding ways that we can help our mind to develop so that when the time is right, we might enter a meditation state. But it's not the main objective at this stage. 

The objective is to learn to feel comfortable in our minds and bodies and to feel that we can, during the day, not feel the victim of our attention going everywhere and being grabbed by various things.

Meditation: Getting a Feel for the Jhana Factors

So we'll start off with just a very short practice of just two or three minutes. We'll just observe the breath. And if you'd like to sit in a meditation posture, that's fine. But if you prefer to sit in a chair, that's also fine. But keep your back freestanding and make sure you have a sense of your contact with the ground.

So we'll just start with a short exercise. If you shut the eyes, and be aware in a friendly way of your own body. You don't have to break it up into parts. Just feel that it's there on the cushion, or the mat, or the chair. And that there's a process of breathing going on at the same time. So just watch that breath and see if you can enjoy it—just the simple process of breathing. 

Application of mind

There's part of the mind that's just applying itself to the breath. It's turning your mind to the breath.

Exploration

And then after a while, you can explore the breath a bit. If you're feeling unhappy or tense, don't worry. Just let the breath breathe over that, and just explore what happens if the mind is receptive and lets the breath be felt in the whole body.

Joy

Now just see if you can arouse joy, and don't worry if you can't. Just feel that the breath is bringing in joy and breathe that in, and breathe it out. And if it's not, just be open to that. 

See if you can feel an enjoyment in your body: just to be where you are, in seclusion, doing what you're doing.

All sorts of thoughts might be coming up, so just breathe over them—tensions in the stomach, tensions around the body or face. Just suggest to yourself that you're breathing in joy and that you can breathe it out as well.

Happiness

And breathe in something a little quieter—happiness or contentment. If you're feeling very discontented, just let that breath find that area of discontent. And don't fight it or tell it it has to go away. Just let the breath go through it and breathe into it with happiness and with contentment. And it can be surprising to find that sometimes if the mind is open it's possible just to do that. Breathe in happiness. And breathe out happiness (sukha).

Unification of mind

Now you've done that, see if you can appreciate a sense of being at one. The mind and the body are together in one place. That's now, in this location, here. Just feel the breath giving a sense of unification, just where you are.

And finish the meditation.

§

It seemed the best way to introduce the jhana factors is just to see if we can find them a little in our own body and in our own mind. And in this unit, we'll be looking at them as a whole and seeing how they work together and how we can start to appreciate them and to find them in seclusion in our meditation.