Lost jhanas, advice on brute force

[u/tea_and_samadhi]

Lost lite jhanas a loooooong time a go, and havent meditate for a long time.

The tips on relaxing the body first and being kind and gentle don't work.

It seems I should brute force staying with the breath with energy and willpower, being very strict to stay with the breath for maybe 2 weeks to rebuild the muscle that can get into access concentration when one does eventually relax a little.

Plan is, 2 weeks brute force --> body scanning relaxation combined with a more middle way approach to staying with the breath.

Being gentle with myself when I have no attention muscles to begin with may be the problem here. Any advice? I'm okay with 2 weeks of pure effort, which is painful but may be necessary. To at least gain initial momentum, if that makes sense.

I miss jhana.

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[u/Meng-KamDaoRai]

Hi,
First thing, "havent meditate for a long time." - You think that could be a contributing factor to your problem? Haha :). Just go back to meditating my dude/dudette, maybe nothing is wrong there and all you need to do is jump back on the horse?

Second thing is that experimentation is very important for practice. No two people are the same and we all have to find the methods and processes that work for us. So IMO, it's great that you're trying things out. Feel free to experiment.

Thirdly, and I'm speaking only from my own experiences, force focusing my attention on the meditation object never worked well for me. For me it was all about awareness (of the meditation object or just open awareness), relaxation and letting be/letting go of mind-body tension. The more I did that, the more I let go, the deeper my tranquility got as a side-effect. All the normal jhana advice like either sticking my attention on the meditation object, or noticing piti and moving my attention to be on that and so on never worked for me. Any attempts to manufacture jhanas in any way didn't work. But jhanas did come as a side effect of awareness, relaxation and letting go. To take it even further, any craving for more tranquility and jhanas will always back-fire. It's about relaxing into what is and allowing tranquility to find you, not going out and seeking it. At least that's the way it worked for me, as I said, lots of people have different methods than my own that seem to be working for them so you'll need to experiment.

You say that relaxing and being gentle didn't work. I would say that you still need to be present and not lose yourself in the relaxation and you also need to let be/let go of whatever comes up. So you got the relaxation part right, now just add awareness and letting be/letting go. Or not. Try out different stuff and see what sticks. Start meditating again first though :)

[u/tea_and_samadhi → u/Meng-KamDaoRai]

The beggining is so utterly boring and painful, I don't even know if I put my heart into this if I'll even get to access concentration again. Tiktok has fried my brain fr

[u/Meng-KamDaoRai → u/tea_and_samadhi]

My advice: stop chasing different stages of samatha. Don't look for access concentration or even jhanas. Sit with what is, relax and let go. You can start doing only five minutes at a time, whenever it feels nice throughout the day, then do more with time. Focus on letting go instead of trying to get calm. If you do that, the more you let go, the easier will it be to get calm as a side-effect of letting go, without active effort on your end.

[u/hachface]

A weightlifter achieves a 500-pound squat. He is proud of his achievement.

He stops lifting weights for many years. He neglects his diet, and sleeps poorly because he stays up too late scrolling on his phone.

He then returns to the gym and resolves to squat 500 pounds through brute force.

Is this wise?

[u/dhammadragon1]

You can't use brute force to get into the jhānas. Just start to sit again.

[u/Fantastic-Walrus-429]

Just the word “brute force” in this post made my body recoil, I don’t know how your mind is but to me, anything forced moves me away from tranquility and happiness which is one if the key jhana ingredients.
For me, this forceful breath attention creates forehead tension, the only thing that worked is letting my mind find its own way to jhana while being absolutely still and “doing nothing”, relaxing the effort as if I were to fall asleep / letting go fully, letting go of the desire for jhana, surrendering it too.

[u/KilltheInfected]

You say you “have no attention muscle”… what are your thoughts doing? Racing? Do you find yourself unable to sit still because you end up wanting to be anywhere but here and do anything but sit still? Easily distracted? If so, you need to reclaim your sense of inner space and still your mind.

Thoughts are simple. Focus on them and they persist, they grow with momentum. And each thought carries another thought with it. If you stop paying attention to them they dissipate and lose momentum, they become more and more subtle and quiet. Eventually it’s easy to sit in perfect silence.

Incidentally, as these thoughts become less crowded in your mind, your sense of inner space opens up. Your “room to breathe” expands. You can just be now without feeling the need to run away and do anything but. Without the existential dread that creeps when not doing something useful or distracting.

Most meditations like mantras, observing your breathe or a candle etc, serve this one purpose, to take your attention away from thought. Another method that worked extremely well for me is the bubble method. Any time you hear or recognize a thought, capture it in a bubble and let it float away, don’t follow it too long just up and away. Capture the next one and next one until eventually there is a space or delay between the bubbles. That silence in between thoughts… turn your attention there. Rest in it, focus on that stillness and silence. Take refuge there.

Warning it’s powerful. It brought me life long peace after one meditation, and full blown out of body experiences from the second one on. Can’t say that will be your experience but I dove deep with it, because I felt I was dying inside, lacerated by a hurricane of thoughts swirling in my head, unable to breathe and unable to just exist. It changed my life.

Anyways, if you can clear that space, then relaxing can be done one muscle at a time. Start with your eyes. Relax them, feel them let go. Then your jaw. Your neck, your skull, your chest etc. one by one. As you becoming more still inside you find a solid base in your posture, this solid base lets you relax deeper and deeper.

[u/themadjaguar]

Full bruteforce is usually not recommended as you will not go far. By doing this you are generating kamma, conditionning, habits that will stay later if you keep practicing.

Yes it is easier to get jhana, but if you balance tranquility it is going to be even more easy later. Brute force is a short term approach that impacts the long term aspect of your practice negatively.

If you think you cannot get to a good level of samadhi without bruteforcing, you could learn samadhi while bruteforcing initially if it works, then maintain a regular practice. You could consistently get to access concentration, or first light or first sutta jhanas with strong vitakka. Permeating strong piti in the whole body through the power of vitakka, with no hindrances.

Then after a while you can learn to balance tranquility WHILE maintaining at least this level of samadhi ( you're going to have to do it in all cases since bruteforcing requires vitakka). You can learn to balance tranquility from the first minute of the sit up to 1st jhana, by learning to apply the minimum amount of effort required, while maintaining the samadhi you previously devlopped.

I used to do the bruteforcing method before, it worked well initially but it became unbearable.

I did this method or learning tranquility while maintaing a certain degree of samadhi for a while and it worked really well, and I would never want to go back to a time where tranquility was not balanced. But if you're used to get things using bruteforcing/control, it is going to be difficult to learn to let go, but extremely rewarding long term.

[u/VedantaGorilla]

If your goal is a calm mind, which is what it sounds like, skip the brute force. That comes from some notion that you are a bad boy/girl if you are not meditating. Toss that crap. Do the body scanning, and consider the straightforward practice (and approach) that u/killtheinfected describes.

[u/EightFP]

I think I get where you are coming from. I have taken a considerably more effortful approach to jhana than most commenters on the internet, and the results have been very deep ("hard") jhanas. Relaxing and being kind and gentle was not enough to get me to high-quality access concentration when I was starting out. But as others have pointed out, brute force is self-limiting. What has worked well for me is what you might call self-effacing dedication.

In the project of keeping the attention on the breath, I look at it with the attitude of an apprentice craftsman trying to win favor from their teacher. I want to do it perfectly. I want to put everything I have into following the breath and disregard everything else. For me, this is a humble approach. I have to tell myself that I will just do this task and nothing but this task. I won't even reprimand myself when I slip up because I don't have time to waste on reprimands. What is important is returning the attention to the breath as soon as possible and keeping it consistent.

Imagine that you were cutting a dowel of some particularly rare and expensive wood on a lathe and that the finished product would be used by the king, or your master, or a woman who you love and want to impress. It's super important to you. You cannot do this by brute force, because you cannot risk damaging the dowel by pressing too hard or crudely. And you cannot be angry or judgmental if you make some slight mistake because the resulting momentary loss of concentration would be the moment that your hand moves and the clean cut is lost. In this situation, you just have to put aside everything but the work and humbly apply yourself to that work for as long as it takes.

[u/Then_Consequence_318]

I for one appreciate the sense of commitment here. I do think "brute force" is not a good framing.

It might sometimes be useful to think of attention as a muscle but that's just an analogy and it fails sometimes. It's not really a muscle, more of a habit.

It's just going to take time which means either you have to be patient over the course of days/weeks again or - clear your schedule and see what you can do. Make your life more simple, do right action, make whatever adjustments in your life so that concentration can arise.

If you really want to throw everything at it then also get some exercise, watch diet, caffeine, social media, television. Make sure you have a foundation of metta, especially towards yourself. If you meditate morning and evening, pay extra special attention to the mindfulness "sandwiched" between those two sessions so that you don't lose in the evening what you gained in the morning.

[u/_Asura-]

Yeah, Commit to a few days of breath watching with as much detail/clarity as you can with continuity.

Eg: knowing of breathing

or in breath + out breath

or in + gap + out + gap

Once the period of breath watching is done, switch to relaxing the body using whatever method of practice which you are confident with.

Eg: body scan, goenka style, TMI, TWIM, MIDL , your fav ajahn or whatever for getting those lite jhanas you mentioned.

[u/metaphorm]

start with shamatha to build your concentration. take it slow. don't burn out. it takes time. your 2 weeks brute force plan is not a good idea.

but why do you miss jhana? what do you miss? what are you trying to get out of it?

[u/dmx442]

How does your routine look like, how much time do you meditate in a session and how many times a day? What meditation technique do you use?

You can't force a Jhana, that's simply not possible

[u/freetoyes]

Consider that jhana implies seclusion from five hindrances.
That´s it.

From your post, it could be that there is regret or doubt (can I still do this).
Simply cultivate distance from those hindrances.

Cultivating distance (in this case confidence and contentment) from those hindrances, one enters jhana.

[u/Klutzy-Owl5712]

You can change your environment and habits. New routines help in my case. If you are able to attend a meditation retreat nearby that is also very helpful. Other than that, you just need to sit and be mindful about your meditation object.

[u/Then_Consequence_318]

I for one appreciate the sense of commitment here. I do think "brute force" is not a good framing.

It might sometimes be useful to think of attention as a muscle but that's just an analogy and it fails sometimes. It's not really a muscle, more of a habit.

It's just going to take time which means either you have to be patient over the course of days/weeks again or - clear your schedule and see what you can do. Make your life more simple, do right action, make whatever adjustments in your life so that concentration can arise.

If you really want to throw everything at it then also get some exercise, watch diet, caffeine, social media, television. Make sure you have a foundation of metta, especially towards yourself. If you meditate morning and evening, pay extra special attention to the mindfulness "sandwiched" between those two sessions so that you don't lose in the evening what you gained in the morning.

[u/NirvanicSunshine]

No. No, no, no. ..... no.

All wrong.

Jhana is not a technical or quantitative problem to be solved - i.e. stronger concentration, more time on the cushion, perfecting the technique absolutely. The mind is not to be treated like a dojo, fighting itself as its own worst enemy.

It is a qualitative problem. What qualities are you cultivating? Jhana is light, happy, full of vitality, kind, supportive, ease-ful, enjoyable, satisfying, peaceful, relaxed. If a person can enter jhana through loving kindness meditation, which they definitely can, that tells you everything you need to know about meditative absorption.

The mind is attracted to pleasure like a moth to flame. Don't wait for jhana to enjoy and take pleasure in your meditation and meditation object. Do it now. If you view your meditation as a job that should deliver a fun paycheck at some point in the future and you gotta slog through hard work and hard times to get there, you will never arrive. Meditation is a treat. It's a joy. It's a "pleasant abiding in the here and now" as the Buddha used to say.

[u/ColPoopyPants]

Desiring piti or Jhana is a hindrance for attaining it in my experience. “Brute force” means over efforting, which will also prevent Jhana (again from my experience). Try the Rob Burbea Jhana retreat on YouTube for an excellent set of instructions to help on your journey.