Biting Into The Mango: Doing Jhana Practice With Ayya Khema - Inquiring Mind

Jhanas are a technique for invoking altered states of consciousness through sustained concentration, which can then relax our brains to perceive the world more clearly — it could really be that simple.

Three Wisdom Tools To take this journey inward, we’re going to engage the three prajnas, or “wisdom tools,” of hearing, contemplating, and meditating.6 Hearing, or reading, about something leads to contemplating upon it, which leads to meditating on it. By reading and thinking about this material, you will be engaging the first two wisdom tools. In

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Stephen Zerfas, cofounder of Jhourney, a company that aims to help more people experience jhanas, describes them as “the opposite of a panic attack.” Instead of an escalating anxiety loop, jhanas are an escalating pleasure loop, the intensity of which is comparable — depending on whom you ask — to an orgasm, an MDMA-induced cuddle puddle, or the th... See more

The basic technique was finding a “meditation object” — something or someone that sparked a pleasant sensation — then trying to intensify and heighten that sensation. But we were told to experiment, because certain techniques were likely to work better for some than others. This, too, was a marked departure from the typical dogma of meditation retr... See more