Dhyana Through The Body – Re-evaluating Dhyana

“Quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states… one suffuses, fills, and permeates one’s entire body with rapture and pleasure born of seclusion, so that there is no part of one’s whole body that is not pervaded by it.” AN 5.28

On this retreat, we’ll be offering embodied approaches to dhyāna (jhāna) that people have found to be helpful and effective. This may well involve questioning both our own views and approaches, and a good deal of what the tradition has to say about dhyāna.

Dhyāna is far more than samatha, or mental calm. Recognising the liberative potential of the first dhyāna was the key to the Buddhas own awakening and he taught dhyana as inseparable from insight. Only later tradition came to regard the dhyānas as ‘just’ highly concentrated states.

The dhyānas are, rather, states of deep, embodied mental unity, integrated with awareness of the foundations of mindfulness (satipaṭṭhāna) and the factors of awakening (bojjhaṅgā).

In practice, the most useful question is: ‘what, in our experience, is actually helpful?’ We have found that by becoming alive to the energetic immediacy of body experience, resources for entering dhyana can be discovered as already present – just waiting to be noticed. We’ll explore this in direct experience by delving into the relation between body and breath as well as between body, awareness and insight.