I went on a jhana retreat this year (2025), and this is a report of my three most important take-aways from that experience.

Just to quickly situate myself, I’ve been aware of jhana for about a decade, and I was around for the several tcot/tpot jhana discourses. I “tried it” at various points 2021-2023 and had some ✨sparkling✨ experiences, but I didn’t read the quasi-canonical Right Concentration until 2024… and concluded then that I probably hadn’t reached any jhanas. This year I finally went on a jhana retreat in the Brasington lineage. I reached jhana three days into the retreat, and indeed I had never had an experience like that before.

I’m not going to tell you how to jhana. I’m not a jhana teacher, and I am not qualified. My base assumption is that all of our psychologies and neurologies vary substantially and that you are probably not that much like me. If you are similar enough to me, however, and have a had a similar path to me, then you may identify yourself with my experiences, and what I have to say may be helpful for you.

The first important take-away was that access concentration is basically everything. It is the precondition for the next two, because without it there is not enough space for them. I won’t elaborate access concentration further; just read Right Concentration.

The second important take-away was how to relate to piti. In the experiences prior to the retreat I had been able to summon piti, feeling it mainly in my legs and somewhat also in my hands and face. In those experiences I virtually whipped it out of my body, with lashes of more More MORE! I’ve been describing it as pushing the piti. On the retreat I learned instead to sit with it, to allow it, to welcome it, to invite it for tea and a hangout. Access concentration gave me the ability to be a good, attentive host, rather than one trying to force the guest to play the game I wanted to play.

The third important take-away was how to relate to sukha. Even though sukha is primarily associated with second jhana, it is not restricted to being linearly after piti. In the experiences prior to the retreat I had been focused on attaining first jhana, ignoring sukha entirely, assuming I would work on it after I had checked the first jhana box. What I found in the retreat was that sprinkling in a little sukha in the prepatory access concentration phase (helped along with a little metta or a little smile), made relaxing equanimously into the piti much easier.

On a technical level, what I learned to practice on the retreat was access concentration on the breath, with a fully breath-entangled transition to access concentration on piti and sukha. The Brasington instruction is to transition discretely, but I found that doing it entangledly worked better for me. What I mean is that I would start with breath itself and then gradually find the susurrations of piti and sukha (usually not at the same time) that are breath-dependent—that happen before and in and after the breath—and gradually let my access concentration be on those susurrations alone, forgetting about the breath. Enough breaths and this eventually led to what my teacher would offhandedly call the “pillar of piti” once at the end of retreat (or was it “column of piti”? idk same visual), which is the perfect concept of first jhana: a bright rush of energy flowing upwards and skywards through and out of the body.

I like second jhana more than first jhana. First is exhilarating, but second is wonderful. Sometimes I just want to skip the piti party entirely. Still, just like rest after exercise is so much deeper than rest without having exercised, so is sukha after first jhana so much deeper than sukha without it.

I don’t have any important take-aways about third and fourth jhana, just that third is a natural quiescent resolving of second jhana, and that I have more stillness to practice to get fully into fourth. And one bonus take-away: definitely ask your teacher to narrate a walk-through all the way to eighth jhana and back.