The Complete Guide to Advanced Meditation
This is a long post that condenses several large books worth of knowledge and practical advice about meditation into a single read. I’ve split the content into sections, covering key topics: what is advanced meditation, the amazing long-term benefits of meditation, and how-to instructions on how to start advanced meditation: meditation habits, meditation skills, and a daily advanced meditation practice. Let’s begin with some context around my own practice.
I’ve been meditating with increasing seriousness for the past three years. In the early days, I followed the basic apps like everyone else. It was great for a while. Initially, you get a real sense of discovery, finding a new “muscle” that you can build to cope with stress and anxiety, among other things. But after a while, you level off, and it just doesn’t seem to go any further. Why?
Well, because like many good things, meditation has been productized by capitalists. Some former monks, granted, others just your average MBA looking to ride the latest trend. Right now, when it comes to apps, content is king. That’s what sells. So, if you look at meditation apps, you’ll see marketing slogans like “100,000+ guided meditations” or “10,000 teachers”.
For me, the more I digested this content, the less progress I made, and the more confused I felt. Should I get into insight sessions or stick to mindfulness? Should I follow new-age hipster teachers from California or self-proclaimed gurus from authentic India?
Instead, I decided to go back to the source. Yes, that source. The Buddha.
What the Buddha says about meditation
There’s one important fact we should get out of the way. The Buddha did not write down anything. After all, he’s from a period of history when oral history was mainly preserved from one guru to the next by just teaching. All of the reference material we have now is written after the fact, mostly much after the fact. So there is not really such a thing as original source material here, which leaves a lot, sadly, to interpretation.
Scrolls from the “Pali Canon” are the equivalent of The Bible for Buddhism. Source: By Wellcome Collection gallery (2018–03–30): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/cpxnthrw CC-BY-4.0, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36048938
As a clear example of this, the following passage is pretty much the basis of everything we now think of as mindfulness meditation. I kid you not. It’s called the Anapanasati Sutta.
“Breathing in long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in long’; or breathing out long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out long.’
Or breathing in short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in short’; or breathing out short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out short.’
He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in sensitive to the entire body.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out sensitive to the entire body.’
He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in calming bodily fabrication.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out calming bodily fabrication.’”
~ Buddha
The passage does go on beyond this, but trust me when I tell you, if you even get here you’ve gone very far indeed. From there, you’re capable and motivated to research those by yourself. My aim here is to get you on that path. Out of simple curiosity, you can read the rest here, although it’s unlikely you’ll gain much from it. Nevertheless, the goal we’re setting here is to do “advanced meditation”, which simply means going beyond what most people are doing already, to start making serious progress in your practice.
The whole trick here is interpreting what exactly one should do with these few lines of instruction left to us by the Buddha’s disciples. Many a book have been written about this topic. I’ve read a few of them, and most of them don’t agree on much of it. So what I’m telling you is also partially biased by my experience and interpretation. If this doesn’t work for you, you’ll have to do your own research.
Before we get to the “how to” portion, I do want to quickly cover the “why”. If you, like millions, are meditating and like it just the way it is, why do anything more than an occasional 10-minute session?
Why meditate - The many benefits of long-term meditation
Serious (Western) academic research has been going on for decades now on the many forms of meditation. The number one takeaway from it is this: volume and intensity are key.
Let me be clear, any meditation is better than no meditation. But more is better, and a lot more is even better. Further, most of the big benefits only ever happen if you meditate a lot. What’s a lot? Well, call it an hour a day. For most people, that’s a huge sacrifice in time, or so you think now, before you have gained any benefits from the investment.
Even worse for us city slickers is that intensity is potentially most important. So even an hour a day isn’t enough to get all the benefits. You must occasionally meditate for many hours per day, for several days in succession. In Buddhist terms that’s called a retreat.
Source: Van Dam et Al. Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation. Perspectives on Psychological Science. 2018;13(1):36–61. doi:10.1177/1745691617709589
As you can see from the chart above, there has been exponential interest in the scientific basis and impact of meditation. This coincides with public interest as well as meditation app revenue. A fantastic source for a summary of the Western scientific research studies is the book Altered Traits by Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson.
I’ve listed some of the studies they feature below, grouped by the amount of meditation time required:
Beginners (100 total hours)
Meditators (1,000 total hours)
Experienced Meditators (5,000 total hours)
Lifetime Meditators (10,000+ total hours).
Beginners: Benefits of 100 hours of meditation
The first milestone we’re looking at is 100 hours, which is a beginner in terms of serious practice. For reference, this is also my current level at approximately 300 hours of meditation to date. So what should I expect to have gained?
“The amygdala, a key node in the brain’s stress circuitry, shows dampened activity from a mere thirty or so hours of MBSR practice.”
To me, this is surprising. That starting after a few months, already, you may see changes in your brain. These aren’t small changes either, as Goleman reports amygdala activation can be reduced by 50%. That’s huge. Another study by Mrazek et al. found that with just a few weeks of meditation students could improve their test scores by 16% compared to a control group, thanks to better working memory and stronger attention.
Here’s a summary of early benefits from meditation that have been researched, from the book Altered Traits:
Decreased stress response
Increased attention and working memory (study link)
Small improvements in molecular markers of cellular aging
Decreased activation of the Default Mode Network (more on that later!)
NOTE: If you stick to your biweekly 10-minutes, then you will take 6 years to get here. Six whole years, to where you don’t even gain the basic benefits! I cannot emphasize this enough, if you want to get serious about meditation, you need to put in the time starting right now.
NOTE: If you put in a whole hour per day, you achieve this first milestone in just under 4 months. That’s a massive difference!
Meditators: Benefits of 1,000 hours of meditation
This level represents several years of serious daily practice, and also where things start to get seriously interesting with the brain. One study found that experienced meditators’ brains were more effective at solving working memory problems. That’s great. But what’s fascinating is that when they measured the brain’s activity, comparing controls to meditators, they found huge differences.
Source: Bailey et Al. Mindfulness meditators show enhanced working memory performance concurrent with different brain region engagement patterns during recall. bioRxiv 801746; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/801746
The image above highlights how differently the meditators’ brains responded to the working memory tasks. Importantly, the meditators had a faster and stronger brain response, but overall brain activity was actually lower. So it’s not more activity, but different activity, that leads to better results!
“Improved Working Memory from altered neural strategy rather than increased neural activity.”
Now to list longer term meditation benefits, again from the book Altered Traits:
Neural and hormonal indicators of lessened stress reactivity
Stronger emotional regulation
Interoception, or the ability to sense internal states of the body like your heartbeat
Experienced Meditators: Benefits of 5,000 hours of meditation
Now we’re getting into the elite zone, of people who have meditated daily for more than a decade. Anyone can get here, if you make meditation not just a habit, but a lifestyle. That means not quitting, or taking a break. It means assuming meditation as a permanent and mandatory part of your daily routine, alongside sleep. Your brain will thank you.
One study compared 50 long-term meditators with average 20 years of meditation experience with 50 control subjects, and ran detailed brain scans to find how much brain matter was lost from age 24 to 77.
“These findings seem to suggest less age-related gray matter atrophy in long-term meditation practitioners.”
If you take a look at the visualization below, it’s pretty striking. More meditation means more brain left at old age. It’s clear to me which of those brains I’d like to have at seventy! You might wonder what mechanism could possibly explain such differences. While nothing is definitive, it seems likely to be a combination of a) using your brain more through meditation and b) lowering your cumulative stress levels which are known to correlate with rapid aging.
Less blobs means more brain left! Source: Luders et Al. Forever Young(er): potential age-defying effects of long-term meditation on gray matter atrophy. Front. Psychol., 21 January 2015 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01551
Other findings from the book Altered Traits:
Decreased brain aging, up to 7.5 years less compared to baseline
Increased connectivity between amygdala and prefrontal cortex, i.e. conscious regulation of your emotional brain center
Decreased size of nucleus accumbens circuit, associated with feelings of attachment and wanting
Slower baseline breathing rate, potentially indicating lower overall metabolic rate
Finally, one study in India supports the final point, where yoga practitioners were shown to have up to 13% lower metabolic rates compared to baseline.
Lifetime Meditators: Benefits of 10,000+ hours of meditation
For reference, there are approximately 80,000 hours in an average person’s career. Meaning that’s all the work you’ll do in your entire life. That’s 8 hours a day. So for someone to accumulate 10,000 hours in meditation is a gigantic commitment, mostly reserved for monks and yogis who frequently go on retreats for months or years, to meditate like its their only job, which it is!
I don’t want to say this level is out of reach for normal people with normal jobs, but it would take at minimum several decades of dedicated practice to get here. Further, it seems these benefits are more strongly correlated to extended periods of meditation. Meaning an hour a day won’t cut it, you must also regularly go on retreats where you are meditating continuously for several days at a time. Intensity seems to matter in addition to volume. That’s a heck of a commitment. So is it worth it?
Here’s what we can take away from the yogis and monks brains, courtesy of Altered Traits:
Off-the-charts synchronized gamma oscillations, i.e. persistent extended activation of brain activity associated with creativity and problem solving (study link)
Baseline brain patterns similar to novice meditators during meditation, i.e. they are kind of meditating all the time
Shrunken nucleus accumbens organ, reducing ability to identify with self
Instant voluntary control over pain response
So that’s all that science has to say. Personally, and functionally, I would say the biggest benefit is this: meditation makes you a better person. To me, that’s priceless, and worth any effort you can afford to make.
How to meditate - Habits for advanced meditation
So, where do we begin to unpack the “how to”? Well, meditation is one of those things in life that is mostly experiential. No, I’m not waving my hands as I say that. It just means that there is no way to skip to the end by being naturally good at it. You must feel your way through the stumbling to actually understand the instructions.
For example, you might find you’re naturally quite good at chess because you’re more intelligent than the opponents you face. Nobody is good at swimming, skiing, or golf on the first try. You have to learn what it means to be in water, get comfortable with the water, before you can even apply skills to the task. Meditation is like that. Even if you do everything right, it will take time for you to adjust to the new stimulus.
So we start by building some foundational habits, that will ensure you stick to the daily practice. No daily practice, no progress, no way around it.
Isn’t guided meditation enough?
At this point you might be wondering, why can’t you simply use the apps you know and love, and let Sam Harris or someone just teach you as you listen. Well, think about it. Imagine a monastery where monks are meditating. Do you imagine someone is walking around, talking to the monks ears in a soothing voice? No. It’s dead silent. They do teach meditation, but not during meditation.
Meditation, again, is an experiential skill. The only way to get better, is to practice. Practice means practicing yourself, alone, in silence, to develop your mind. If you simply sit back and listen to a tape, you aren’t actually gaining much, because you are entertaining yourself by listening. You aren’t alone with your thoughts, because a familiar voice is always there to pick you up. The process of listening is a distraction, that will prevent you from making progress. You might find even after years of fantastic guided meditations, that you struggle to sit quietly for even five minutes, let alone an hour!
You can still use guided meditations as part of your practice, but the main bulk of your practice must be silent meditation. Once you start practicing that way, you’ll understand what a difference it makes.
When to meditate
Time: As early as possible, with minimum exposure to people or devices
Various schools of meditation have some variation on this, but it’s quite consistent that the earlier the better. With experience, you’ll discover this for yourself. The positive and gradually lasting impact after meditation sets your day up beautifully. It will be both harder to get into focus, and less impactful on your day, if you do it later.
Further, you want it to be the same time every morning, with only rare exceptions. Figuring out where to cram some meditation time between Zoom calls is not a strategy that will work here.
In my experience, the ideal time is 10–15 minutes after waking up. At most, I’d have a glass of water or a quick cup of coffee. No devices, no TV, just when you’re in that peaceful, calm place before the onslaught of content starts. A good way to ensure this is to keep your phone in airplane mode overnight. I would only properly open my phone after meditation, giving you an Zen-like edge in attacking the day.
Where to meditate
Place: “Forest”
So the actual instruction left by the Buddha is literally to meditate in the forest. But, unless you happen to live in the forest, that’s gonna be logistically challenging. So the modern interpretation is to use forest in quotes, i.e. the place inside your home most like a forest. Practically speaking, you’d want a secluded, peaceful spot with some natural light and ideally less noise.
While you might see gurus calmly sitting for hours on wooden planks, you will want to start on a rug of some sort to minimize pain early on. Similarly, sitting your butt on a small pillow will help with posture, as it elevates your pelvis above your knees and legs, making it easier to keep your back straight.
Image: Bodhidharma was a “Westerner” that appeared in China in 500 AD, founded Zen Buddhism, and taught Kung Fu to the Shaolin monks. Once, he stared at a wall continuously for 9 years. All-round meditation badass, then.
Source: “The moon through a crumbling window” in the “A Hundred Aspects of the Moon” series. Bodhidharma, by Yoshitoshi, 1887. Wikipedia (public domain)
How long to meditate
Duration: 20 mins (minimum) — 60 mins (maximum)
We’ve already established that research shows the goal is 60 minutes every day. Let’s not start there. Don’t dream of it. We will start from 20 minutes per day, not more, but also not less.
This is the place to start, because even if you had an hour, which you don’t, there is simply zero chance your body will survive even half of that. Don’t worry, we’ll cover proper posture below, and there’s even a video to show you.
There is no plan on how quickly you should build up from 20 to 60 minutes. It is more likely to be months, even years, before you reach 60 every day. It will depend on how quickly your body and sitting posture adjusts, and simply how motivated you are to find the time.
Where to find the time
This is the big question, isn’t it. Well, this isn’t an article on time management, so that’s your homework. If you finish this article, and making progression in meditation feels like a priority in your life, you’ll find the time. Given we should ideally meditate first thing, the natural thing to do is to go to bed earlier, and simply wake up earlier. Maybe one episode less of Netflix in bed?
How to meditate - Skills for advanced meditation
Okay, now begins the real training, young Padawan. We’ll run through some basic skills, none of which are easy or automatic. All of which you will need time to practice to even understand properly. I’ve even added further reading material on each. So again, maybe bookmark this article for reference. There’s a nice reference summary at the end, too.
Don’t create regrets
This might seem like a counterintuitive place to start, but meditation will not make a bad life good. If you are constantly betraying your own trust, you will have a terrible time meditating, as the weight of your remorse will hit you like a ton of bricks. This will linger as a sense of anxiety or stress. So here’s the solution: stop creating regrets. Live a better life, and be a better person.
“Let them not do the slightest thing
that the wise would later reprove.”
Regret falls under the so-called Five Hindrances, and there are many known antidotes to each, which you can read about here.
Loving kindness
Something you’ll need along the way, and will help you get past inevitable baggage you already carry is loving kindness. Yes, it’s a whole type of meditation on its own, and quite popular at that. Don’t get too carried away though, you just need a little to make sure you can make progress on the main path of mindfulness.
What is it? It’s thinking good thoughts about yourself and others, both friends and enemies. Do not forget yourself. Start with yourself. Just close your eyes and say this to yourself: “May you be free from suffering”. Then go to people you love. When you get comfortable with this, you can expand it to include people that are causing you grief.
Read more about Loving Kindness.
Gratitude
Serotonin (pictured) and Dopamine “happiness” molecules are emitted during gratitude.
When you go to bed, go through a list of things you were grateful for today. If you have a spouse or kids, do it out loud together. Trust me, this can make a huge difference in your life alone. If you want, you can also start a whole gratitude journal, but do the list every night.
Read more about gratitude and the brain.
Source: Wikipedia(Public Domain)
How to sit still for a long time
So here’s how you should sit properly. It’s called Half-Lotus, and the only yoga position you’ll ever need, at least for meditation. It’s one of the most important skills you will need, otherwise you will never make it past 20 minutes of meditation without feeling pain or discomfort. If you find a good position, it will stay with you your entire life. Just watch the video and practice daily, and soon you’ll be sitting comfortably for longer and longer.
Besides just sitting, the next questions is what to do with your hands. Generally, there’s two schools of thought. The traditional Buddhist style is to set them palm up, one over the other, on top of your feet in your lap. Simple, clean. The Hindu style is more elaborate, whereby you place your hands, palm up, fingers extended, on top of your knees. Then you lightly touch your index finger and thumb together. Personally, I feel more stable and relaxed with the latter, but definitely experiment with both. You can explore both options here.
“Body like a mountain
Breath like the wind
Mind like the sky.”
Something you may have never thought about either is how hard it is to be still. I mean absolutely still. No fidgeting with hands. No adjusting your position. To enter advanced states of meditation, you will have to get to this place, whether you have ADHD or not. I find stillness is like a muscle. Resisting the urge to move or scratch requires willpower. The more you practice this resistance, the easier it will get. Gradually, you will learn to enjoy the calm of that stillness as a place of relaxation and freedom.
Focusing on the breath
Breathing is meditation, more or less. If you read the Anapanasati Sutta, it pretty much shows you how you go from zero to guru with just the breath. The simplicity of following the breath “all the way” is perhaps the Buddha’s most practical advice. Now, mind you, there’s breathing and then there’s breathing.
This is one of those things you have to experience to understand. When I say breathing, I mean the sensations you feel when breathing naturally. Not following the air into your lungs, not controlling the breath, or anything else. Stop for a moment and just consider how those are different. It’s very important.
So what exactly are those sensations you’re looking for? Ideally, and traditionally, you want to find sensations of air passing in and out of the nostrils, i.e. “tip of the nose”. Just by focusing your attention in that small area, you should be able to gauge more detail about your breath, and separate the different phases and pauses each breath is made of. In fact, initially, it may be easiest to simply notice the pauses in between inhalations and exhalations, and notice if there’s any differences between them.
“Breathing in long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in long’; or breathing out long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out long.’
Or breathing in short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in short’; or breathing out short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out short.’
~ Buddha
Many instructions include counting the breath as a way to build enough focus, even though the source material has no mention of it. Let’s call it optional, but good if you’re developing skills. Counting is what it sounds like, and you’d typically go up to 10 breaths. You may find it much harder than it sounds.
If you need more detail, read here.
Introspective Awareness
At the heart of a serious meditation practice is what Culadasa refers to as Metacognitive Introspective Awareness, in his excellent book The Mind Illuminated. That’s quite a mouthful. Really, what we’re talking about here is an ability to observe your thoughts and mind as if from the outside.
It doesn’t sound like a skill, until you practice it. Before meditation, it’s more likely than not that you’ve felt your life is just playing out by itself. It’s because our brains have something called the Default Mode Network. Sorry to get all jargony on you for a moment, but we’re at the core of what it means to mindful.
“Our default mode continually rescripts a movie where each of us stars, replaying particularly favorite or upsetting scenes over and over.”
Default Mode Network
This default network is one of the main functional parts of the brain, with the other being our executive network, responsible for proactively using your brain to think and remember. Interestingly, as seen from the rather complex looking graphs below, the default network is only fully developed in adulthood. Thus gracing us with the full power of ruminating about our mistakes, and worrying about the future!
Source: Fair DA, Cohen AL, Power JD et al. (2009). Functional brain networks develop from a local to distributed organization. PLoS Comput Biol 5 (5): e1000381. DOI:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000381. PMID 19412534. PMC: 2671306., CC BY 2.5
The implication of all this is that your brain simply tunes out when not in active use. It will wander into random thoughts and memories as if a screensaver is turned on in your computer. This is not a state that gives you any sense of control, quite the opposite. It’s like a movie of your life that you participate in. Meditation and awareness are skills that will increase your control over your thoughts. Here’s one study that found meditation directly reduces the default mode network’s grip on your brain.
So how do we develop our awareness? You guessed it. More breathing. But now, rather than just try to focus on breathing, we want to specifically and especially notice moments where we lose track of the breath. It will happen all the time during meditation, and initially, perhaps even most of the time. Modern life hasn’t done us any service in terms of just being alone and still, without even thinking.
When you do lose yourself in thought, it may take seconds or minutes before you catch yourself. Sometimes, you can spend a good portion of the session lost in a single compelling thought that grabs you completely. The key is catching yourself.
Introspective Awareness 1: Labeling your thoughts
Once you snap out of it, whatever it was, you’ll want to set it aside by assigning it a label. This is a tried and true method of returning to breathing and mindfulness. The labels are: Remembering, Thinking, Planning. They should be self-explanatory. So if you drift off into a memory, once you catch yourself in the act, just say “okay, that was a memory” and go back to breathing.
Introspective Awareness 2: Set an intention
A good way to settle into a groove with your breathing is to focus on the next breath cycle. Let me elaborate. When inhaling, think about the pause that will come. When the pause happens, think about the exhale. When the exhale happens, think about the pause. When the pause happens, think about the inhale. Just go around and around, almost hypnotically going deeper into the breath.
Introspective Awareness 3: Checking for thoughts
The brain has a curious ability to ask itself questions. It feels like there’s a conscious part that you can control, but most of the work is done by other parts, that are unconscious. For example, you can try this: think of your favorite movie. Most people will come up with a handful of candidates, magically, out of nowhere, and you pick one. Why that handful, not another, given the hundreds of movies you’ve seen? That’s your unconscious brain doing it’s thing. So, similarly, during meditation, you can ask yourself a simple question: are there any thoughts in my mind right now? Initially, you can do this every 5 breaths or so, and it will actually help you stay mindful, because it engages your awareness and prevents the unconscious from doing random things.
NOTE: If you find this section confusing, which is likely, and you are struggling with implementing these points, then I do recommend reading the book The Mind Illuminated that goes into these topics in great depth with tons of practical tips. Aside from that, this is a skill you should practice outside meditation also. When working, when exercising, when cooking, when doing laundry… try to catch yourself drifting in thought. Label it: remembering, thinking, or planning? When bored, ask yourself if you have any active thought. If not, savour the moment.
Calming the body
Once you’ve really stabilized yourself in breathing, your body will naturally start to relax. What you will feel is that meditation is a combination of control over the body and the mind. Certainly, 90% of the task is within the mind, but you must start by calming the body first.
He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in calming bodily fabrication.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out calming bodily fabrication.’”
~ Buddha
This is one of the more straightforward skills, luckily. You simply transition your focus away from your nose, and start to examine your body parts, slowly scanning down from your head to your toes. As you “visit” each part of the body, you simply maintain your natural breath, and make it a point to relax that body part further.
The result of this step is simply to remove any remaining influence of your body in your mind, such as discomfort or tightness, and further deepen your focus on the breath once more.
Whole body breathing
If you struggled with Introspective Awareness, then it’s too early to move here. Before transitioning to whole body breathing, you should be able to stabilize into a deep state of focus on the breath on your nose, where you don’t get distracted for a continous period of at least 5 minutes. Otherwise, you’re just moving your problems forward, and will get distracted more easily as the object of focus is wider.
He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in sensitive to the entire body.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out sensitive to the entire body.’
~ Buddha
The key word here is “sensitive”. It means we’re trying to discover sensations the breath is causing in our body. That might sound odd, but its only because you’ve never looked. Finding those subtle sensations does take practice, and it does require you to develop the previous skills thoroughly.
The obvious place to start discovering these sensations is your chest. So you drop your focus on the nose, and move to the chest, to feel it moving up and down, in and out, with the breath. From there, you try to follow the ever more subtle sensations up to your shoulders and neck, down to your arms and hands.
Ultimately, the goal is to discover all available sensations, and pay attention to them at once. This might sound like it wouldn’t work, but it does. The sensations form a unified chain as the breath goes in and out. Kind of like an orchestra of sensations played to the tune of the breath. Typically, it will be easier to find more sensations related to the inhale, than the exhale. That’s fine. They may also be different sensations. In my own practice, I find the most intense sensations to settle along my arms during the inhale. Your mileage may vary.
NOTE: You’ll notice I already deviated from the original source material by switching up these last two instructions. What’s up with that? Well, that’s how it makes more sense to me as a progression. You can try it both ways, of course, and make up your own mind.
Access Concentration
This is the first boss level of advanced meditation. Not the final level per se, but think of it like the basecamp at Everest. This is where mere mortals hope to arrive, just to witness the awesome magnitude of what’s still ahead. This is already a very high place, and will give you all the benefits that current science can attribute to meditation. Beyond this point is truly a different place that I can’t tell you much about, because I’ve only been there once. You can read about that experience here.
The word “Access” here implies access to the next stage, which is the so-called Jhanas I refer to above. Access Concentration itself is already a state of intense concentration and focus, with singular attention on the breath as it moves with the body.
In terms of activity, it is the same as before, meaning we keep with the whole body breath, but just develop it further. Gradually, you should start noticing new and surprising sensations beyond what should be expected with the breath. Common additions are tingles and vibrations, and they aren’t always subtle. Sometimes, they can be quite energetic indeed, as waves or even a flood of energy running through the body. As a first timer, you will potentially think something is wrong. In fact, something is right!
“He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in sensitive to rapture.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out sensitive to rapture.’
He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in sensitive to pleasure.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out sensitive to pleasure.’”
~ Buddha
So, what’s all that now? Let’s break down the terminology quickly.
Piti — sense of energy.
Sukha — sense of joy, non-sensual pleasure.
In my experience, you are more likely to start with Piti, those vibrations and tingles. Once that settles, you may notice just a general sense of pleasure, that the sensations just feel really good. Not at all in a weird way, but a genuine sense of joy or happiness that pops in, and comes and goes.
There is a growing field in academic study of meditation practices, highlighting the conceptual frameworks and their relationships. Source: Mahatthanadull, Sanu et al. (2020). A conceptual model of bi-dimentional development for happiness access by biofeedback process. Researchgate.
Basically, you’ll know when you’ve arrived. A lot of what we’ve covered above has been increasingly subtle. When you’re deep into Access Concentration, the script is flipped. While these sensations may start subtle, they may and should grow, potentially exponentially so. Again, this isn’t likely to happen in one session, but develop over weeks and months as your focus deepens further, and your body calms itself even more.
That’s it. The end of the road, as far as I can show you, that is. You can read more about what’s beyond here.
What about Insight Meditation?
Did we miss something? Isn’t Vipassana better than Mindfulness? Isn’t insight the ultimate goal of meditation, not concentration?
Well, let me give you my understanding of this point. Before the Buddha’s time, the Indian gurus would only focus on concentration, like we have here. The Buddha‘s innovation was mainly around the use of insight meditation, but if we follow the Anapanasati Sutta, as we are, then it is logical to say that Insight follows Mindfulness. The instruction begins with breathing, and uses breathing to go all the way to enlightenment, inclusive of insights into reality and self along the way.
“Once we glimpse our mind as a set of processes, rather than getting swept away by the seductions of our thoughts, we enter the path of insight.”
Having said that, there are many teachers and sources suggesting to mix it up. There are for example, tons of guided meditations on specific topics within Vipassana. So if you’re stuck and frustrated with breathing all the time, there should be no harm done in doing some insight meditations in between.
But here’s one important thing to remind you of: meditation isn’t supposed to be fast or easy. So don’t wander too far from your daily practice, even if you make zero progress for months, and struggle through every minute of it. That’s just your mind working through your inner barriers before it can move on. Quitting is the only guarantee of failure.
Read more about this debate here.
How to meditate - Daily advanced meditation practice
This is putting it all together into a simple recipe. It’s like those annoying recipe websites where you have to read the person’s lifestory plus their grandma’s lifestory to see how many eggs you need. Sorry, it’s not for SEO purposes here, just that the recipe would make zero sense without all the context and explanation.
But now you can just copy or bookmark this list, and go forth to meditate.
Time: As early as possible, with minimum exposure to people or devices
Duration: 20 mins (minimum) — 60 mins (maximum)
Place: “Forest”
NOTE: Each stage has its own exit conditions for proceeding forward to the next stage. It may take you months to move forward in stages, that’s to be expected. So use whatever time you’ve committed to in the stage that you’re comfortable with, before moving forward.
Setup (1 minute)
Sit down in half-lotus
Take a few deep breaths
Preparation (1 minute)
Quick Loving Kindness for the people in your household or family, e.g. “May you be free from suffering.”, and always start from yourself!
Express gratitude for the Buddha for showing us the path.
Determine a simple goal for this session, such as extending how long you can sit, or feeling the breath, or even reaching access concentration.
Stage 1: Find the breath (1–5 minutes)
Examine if breathing is short or long, notice the pauses in between
Allow breathing to become more natural and subtle
PROCEED: Only move to the next stage once you have found the breath.
Stage 2: Focus on the breath (1–30 minutes)
Focus breathing sensations on a single point: nostrils or upper lip
Count the next 10 breaths in your mind
PROCEED: Only move to the next stage once you have counted 10 breaths without losing focus or wandering off.
Stage 3: Stay with the breath (5–30 minutes)
Set intention to next step in the breath cycle: inhale, pause, exhale, pause
Check if any active thoughts forming every 5–10 breaths
Labels: Remembering, Thinking, Planning
PROCEED: Only move to the next stage once you have a very stable and deep state of concentration, with few distractions, lasting at least 5 minutes continuously. Take your time! If you start feeling sensations of tingling or energy, proceed immediately.
Stage 4: Still the body (1-5 minutes)
Breathe in stilling/relaxing all body parts
Breathe out stilling/relaxing all body parts
PROCEED: Only move to the next stage once you have gone through the entire body and feel a deep sense of calm and relaxation, with no remaining tightness or discomfort.
Stage 5: Breath with the whole body (5–30 minutes)
Focus on breath sensations only
Expand sensations starting from abdomen
Breathe with all sensations at once
PROCEED: Only move to the next stage once you start feeling spontaneous pleasant physical sensations. You’ll know what that means when it happens.
Stage 6: Access concentration (5–30 minutes)
Wait for pleasant physical sensation (bliss/piti)
Drop focus on breath completely, can stay in peripheral attention
Focus entirely on enjoying bliss, not noticing place/strength of sensations
Wait for happy emotions (sukha) to rise
Stay here as long as happiness and bliss stay
PROCEED: Moving to the next stage is no longer in your direct voluntary control. It will either happen or not, depending on a host of factors outside of meditation. To make a focused effort, study the Jhanas and Five Hindrances. You can also begin to practice Vipassana to start your journey into insight meditation.
That’s it! Nothing more to it. Only thing left is the doing of it. Whether you bookmark this post for later, or decide to act on it immediately, I believe the perfect thought to end on is this:
“There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.”
If you have questions or clarifications, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to address them for you.