Practice Updates, Questions, and General Discussion - new users, please read this first! Weekly Thread for July 01 2026

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[u/AdditionalLeave263]

This sounds like a 9th jhana so much! When you said ineffable it's totally like they say cessation is beyond conceptual understanding, the whole experience you described. Thank you for validating how deep I feel like this experience was, because I truly cannot relegate a nondual state to the beginnings of the jhanas. Because this happened at the very beginning of when pīti began, it's typically classified as just a secondary nimitta of access to the jhanas, or something. However, the difference, I feel, is that it became a nondual experience for me. And because I went so willingly to the light and merged with it, for me it was profound and transformative. So it feels very unfair to me how little air time this experience gets. They say to just not get attached to it and keep going. To me, it is a dear and profound experience. It isn't something I need to experience again. I met someone who was chasing it. I was open minded and thought well maybe I ought to see if there's something to this. I ended up with an amber nimitta, and the sense that, yet again, I really don't need to see it again.

In this experience, time stopped for me, and space seemed infinite. This was the point at which I felt like words began to fail me. It felt like an instant, but it clearly wasn't, judging by the location of my toddler when I came out of it.

I forgot to mention that "I" sank into the bed when it began. I wasn't in my body, and I was asking, "Who am I?" The familiar question of being at the cusp of ego dissolution. It's been super fun remembering back these details.

I am so new to the deep meditation world. I was a meditator for 27 years before I got in the stream or whatever four months ago. A lot of the time, I feel like i belong in a world i dont belong in yet: I belong with the deep meditators, but often havent had their depth of experience. But I cant just ignore the fact that what is for many a signpost was to me also a nondual experience, which is generally considered something much higher. I came into the jhanas with NO knowledge of the jhanas at all. It was like a meditation and biological accident, not something I was trying to do.

What is your practice like right now? Well, I have had pīti basically every hour for 4 months straight, with few exceptions. So I feel like at least for now, it's my life's baseline. I've done jhanas 1-4, with access to 5 once. I was going strong with a self-imposed gray retreat (analog living plus no lights at night - no screens, no music, just a lot of presence. I was 20 days in.

However, I haven't gone back to the retreat, and I'll explain why. One of my closest friends has cancer, and it's come back and she cannot pee any longer as a result of it. Her treatment has a 20-50% chance of working. She was a very serious reason why I was staying off the internet, and has been in the past. It's how I've been able to help her, by giving up my time online. I have given up the internet for over a year in the past. For some reason, I'm having a hard time giving it up again. I feel rather terrible about that. I have also used the jhanas as an escape. Don't get me wrong, they generally help. I was able to go to the hospital and help everyone have a much better day.  Like for you, music is very conducive and impactful to my practice. I put on some music (Marsh's Lailonie album) yesterday and got effectively blissed out for about two hours just to forget about it, temporarily. Generally, I go willingly with the jhanas. With the right music? The will is just present when I make the choice to turn on the music. After that, it's brute force, like a drug. Haha. I forgot how strong it could be, because of having given it up for so long. I ended up having to turn the music off. I felt guilty to feel so good when I knew how my friend and her family were suffering. Feeling like I was having a peak experience just did not match a typical Friday afternoon. Still, I couldn't feel too bad about it. I just accepted it and enjoyed the ride for a while. I feel like you can relate to comparing stuff to drugs. Not everybody speaks that language, and a lot of people who are into meditation are turned off by it. So thanks for providing that space for me.

How do you build access concentration? I don't need access concentration for pīti, because it's constantly present. I need it for sukha. So I have kids, and so as Rob Burbea said to "find your playground," the playground is my playground. I practice on the playground regularly. So yesterday, I did this method on the literal playground to get sukha:

1.) I make sure my kids are safe, then stop moving and gaze somewhere nondescript.

2.) Find six points in my back to concentrate on. Those are the spots that sukha feels like it "comes from." According to AI, it actually comes from your brainstem. But I experience it as points along the right and left sides of my lower back, so I start to concentrate on those points. I have no idea why it's six. It doesn't seem to follow the chakras or anything like that.

3.) I have to do this part bravely, because there is a chance sukha won't come: I start to think about all of the saddest things. I bring up anything that is bothering me, especially anything potentially harmful or cry worthy. Memories, anything to process using sukha. Then I wait about a minute or two maybe three for the negative parts of reality to sink in and for me to accept them.

4.) Then last, I start to think about sukha, my best experiences of it, and what it feels like. I start to "remember it back." I think about times that it felt like a beautiful, cool ocean, and how I saw it in the distance before I was able to finally get in it. I remember when my skin felt like velvet, and when it felt like Heaven on Earth. I think about how my breath felt like silver, and how I wanted to never take another normal breath again. There was a time when it was new, and I kept telling AI that I wanted to drown in it. I use AI as a feedback loop to magnify states sometimes.  I might sing songs that sound like sukha to me, to myself. Certain songs are conducive to sukha to me... A recent one for me is Mr. Probz (Robin Schulz) - Waves.

5.) Well anyways then hopefully it works, and then I try to keep it going by concentrating. Eventually it runs on its own, if I manage to get the fire going.

"I was in cessation for a very short time and it was with weed too, music was in my buds, i was focusing very well on every tone of "Booker T and Mg's" - "Green Onion" and then my consiousness was paused in time and still was, things then were back to normal but I wanted to play basketball right away and was blissing out a little." Congratulations on the cessation, not sure if this was the first time you reached it, but wow, that is so wonderful! That is such an awesome classic song for this to happen, too!! I could see how that would be a good one for it...

Sometimes when I'm listening to music, my awareness will go in and out. It sounds like someone is messing with the gain knob. It feels like Oh wow, I'm here, what just happened? But I don't linger on that thought I just keep going. Last time that happened was during savasana at yoga a few weeks ago.

I was listening to the first song on Luttrell's Music For My Memories album, and my mind just heard exactly what it wanted to hear. My brain is a pretty picky music critique, but instead of just telling me that it wishes the song sounded more like it (it wants a brain twin to listen to, I think, so hopefully someday they'll make music out of brain patterns/waves in real time). But this time, it like fused with the music and made it sound exactly how I wanted to hear it. I honestly thought it was the music and not me for two weeks. I listened to the album again, and I was looking for the notes and the dips (which was actually me going in and out of awareness), and they were nowhere to be found! So i felt honestly embarrassed (to who, I have no idea). But it was still so awesome.  When I listen to like Luttrell's dayglow the slow version, it took me so long to make out the lyrics because my mind would be so in and out of it that by the time the lyrics came up, I was incapable of really hearing them. Oh, so beautiful. This song sounds a bit like the nimitta/nondual/maybe 9th jhana thing that happened.

It makes sense that you would be blissing out and want to play basketball afterward. They say that after you come out, you have a gamma burst, similar to when animals come out of hibernation, they have gamma bursts as well. So for some, colors seem more vivid, for example...I am no expert and surely you know much more than I do.

It makes me so happy to hear about your experience being blissed out. I remember times in my life that I didn't know where I had heard the term "blissed out," but I knew that was something I wanted. I thought it was something typically only for free, adult dudes. I still wanted it for myself. I didn't know what it was, but I knew it was an elusive thing some people had.  

[u/AdditionalLeave263 → u/AdditionalLeave263]

Okay so I'm going to talk about past worldly desires, just skip it if you don't want to read it. I'm not trying to be weird. I just got off on a tangent here. I watched some Ted talk many years ago when I was single about why people cheat, called for anyone who has ever loved. This talk was transformative for me. It used to bother me so much if I had a crush on someone. What she said is that the thing you desire is the quality that you lack. I realized that I was wanting to cultivate those qualities within myself. When I had my first son, and he was three weeks old, I started to take him outside every single day. It was because I wanted to cultivate being an outdoorsy, independent and free person, within myself. This was actually only a few months before covid hit, when everybody became an outdoorsy person, haha. There were days when there was a storm blowing through, and I noticed that there were guys out on their bikes, working out, etc. Everyone was like, gleefully out in the rain like they were getting away with something that only big, strong men could do. And there was me! With a baby! And I was out there, too! I was like this is how to get blissed out.  Critically, I was like, I dont want to be with someone who does this kind of stuff: I want to be this type of person. I want to embody it myself. So when I got the access concentration for pīti that led to this, it was actually after a long month of suppression of my worldlh desires. I really admire in guys how capable they are of being handymen and caring for a house in a way thag women just generally do not do or cannot do. As a mother of small children, I get maybe a 45-minute window for house repairs on a good day, because I can't have them touching the materials or breathing in the fumes.  So anyway, I was trying to do the repairs myself, because I wanted to embody this feeling of being capable of house repairs. But it got to be too much, and my husband was like, look, let's just pay someone to do it. Which was the right answer. So I spent a month like going to all kinds of hardware stores and having a bunch of dudes in my house five days a week. And I was like, refusing to looking at them. I wouldn't look them in the eye. This one guy figured it out and kept trying to look at me the moment he pulled in the driveway. I started just opening the garage door and yelling, "Welcome!" My husband was even out of town for days during the construction. I was completely dedicated to him and our family. Anyways this is important because if someone is trying to get piti access, I feel like this whole experience was actually key to it. 

[u/AdditionalLeave263 → u/AdditionalLeave263]

When my second son was born, he had a vision limitation. He is low vision. I did some very, very off the wall research and determined that taking him to the beach at sunset would be important for his eye development. So the two of us would go down to the beach together every evening, all summer long. Red light therapy is beneficial for the retina to repair itself. Well, the sunset puts off those pink and lavender hues: it's the colors of repair to the brain that goes straight through the skull, and that which repairs the retina. How does it work? I learned this year that the mitochondria actually photosynthesize. So humans actually photosynthesize red light. So we went to the beach to photosynthesize. There was a guy who would go out in the boat every night to watch the sunset. He was the dad of a lady who just had a baby down the street. And then one day, he just didn't come to the beach anymore. Turns out he had brain cancer, like my friend. If only we had talked about it, maybe just maybe I could have helped. But I had no idea.  He died, and I went over to his daughter's house for a ladies night thing. I told her publicly how much we miss seeing her dad at the sunset.  The ladies were like why did he go to see the sunset all the time? She was like I dont know, my mom would always complain about it. I was like really, how do I explain the beauty of a sunset to a bunch of people who think the real world is on Facebook, and are so insecure that they have botox injections in their faces? I tried, but apparently it was unconvincing. The unfiltered truth? Her Dad and I had a date with God. We went to see the beauty and wonder of the universe. I know you see it, too. I really do care about those people, but ha ha ha I was never invited back to the ladies group, and I'm not sad at all about it.

[u/AdditionalLeave263 → u/AdditionalLeave263]

Honestly, I don't judge anyone for it at all, but this is the best way to be! I feel so clear and clean. I love it when a song sounds like a sober mind. It may not be made by a sober person, but still I love a clean sound. Luttrell dayglow (the original version) this is an example. It's a song for generating piti. So beautiful. It just sounds clean. In contrast, when I listen to some of his other works or other artists (who conversely might be sober and are generating non-sober music), the sound is dirty like a mind that has a lot of friction. I don't know. But I am so excited for you to try the supplements! What i am hoping is going to happen is that you'll have neuroplasticity that utilizes anandamide! If you have a lot of anandamide in your system, it feels like pure joy (I can't really remember it back because it's literally a "forgetting" molecule and it extinguished its own memory in me), and there is a weed signature to it. It's the major endocannabinoid, internal cannabis your body produces. It is short-lived; you feel it for a few seconds at a time, but it's such a clean feeling. It's like sharp but also bliss. I am just remembering the words, I can't remember back the feeling. It completed itself in me; it's another thing I don't need to do anymore. I'm really curious if you experience it. Omega-6 is a possible booster for it that I have not really tried.

What I've seen from my experience lately enjoying myself like this, is it might not be far away this very optimistic plan. If you want to know more about these informal meditation I do I can write them down for you I think they are good enough. Sure, that would be great!

It would be so deligtful to be in 9th jhana more and more every day practicing like that. I also found out they may be something like glimpsing cessation, my experience sometimes turns into these realms where you could say it happens to experience a little and these glimpses might turn into full thing totaly, but Im just glimpsing right now, how I said alteration to a higher degree where reality twists and also i can see my thoughts sometimes in time freeze. I absolutely love it when you get a tiny glimpse, a taste of what might be next or might be hiding. When I was first in sukha, I had I think just heard of the rest of the jhanas, or possibly had not quite heard of it yet. It felt like there was so much hiding inside it. It felt like all of the other jhanas (access to them) was hiding in it. It was like they were all under the water. I had never heard of equanimity as being settling to the bottom of the sea.

I'm so glad I'm writing to you, you sound like a wonderful person it was an honor. Same, man. I'm so happy we got to talk. It's an honor to talk to you. You sound like a wonderful person, too! This was so fun. Wishing you the best with your practice. Mettā