introduction to Buddhist meditation

a short video course in Buddhist meditation

as practiced in a thriving Australian community following the early Buddhist teachings

The appeal of this approach

Accessibility: The emphasis on comfort and simple instructions makes it approachable for beginners.
Emphasis on Letting Go: The core message of letting go resonates with people seeking to reduce stress and mental chatter.
Positive and Uplifting Tone: Ajahn Brahm’s teachings are known for their warmth and humor, making meditation practice more engaging.
Body Scan: the body scan establishes initial mindfulness by focusing on different body parts and their sensations.
The Beautiful Breath: The core technique involves focusing on the breath, appreciating its beauty, and maintaining continuous awareness of it.
Letting Go of the Breath: Eventually, the focus shifts from the breath itself to the experience of beauty arising from meditation.

An introduction to this approach by Ajahn Brahmali

Meditation is a gradual process that requires skillful effort and the creation of conducive conditions. Ajahn Brahmali describes five stages one predictably experiences in their practice.

Session 1: Introduction to meditation

Session 1 -Introduction to Meditation

00:00 Introduction
00:30 Mindfulness and Buddhism
02:11 Why meditate?
03:59 What is mindfulness?
06:08 Time, place, and posture
16:30 Are you ready?
19:13 Stress reduction and relaxation
20:32 Guided meditation

The 1st stage is ‘Present-Moment Awareness’

In this beginning stage stage of meditation keep your attention right in the present moment, to the point where you don’t even know what day it is or what time it is.

Morning? Afternoon? –don’t know. All you know is what moment it is right now.

During meditation you become someone who has no history. If we abandon all that history, we are equal and free. We free ourselves of some of the concerns, perception, and thoughts that limit us that stop us from developing the peace born of letting go.

Do not linger in the past. Do not keep carrying around coffins full of dead moments. If you do, you weigh yourself down with heavy burdens that do not really belong to you.

When you let go of the past you will be free in the present moment.

We direct our attention to what is going on right now in the present moment. What ever is happening now is our only concern.

What has happened in the past, what might happen in the future are simply not our business at this time. To the best we can, we pay attention only to what is coming in through the senses right now.

For example, we may hear the sound of a bird, or feel the caress of the breeze, or the pressure of our seat.

Be Brief— At this stage it’s alright to give these fleeting meditation objects a name or label, but only very briefly. If we hear the sound of a bird, we may want to silently say to ourselves ‘bird’ or ‘chirp’ (or whatever we wish).

But again we must do so briefly so that we can move on to the next object that comes to our senses. It’s only that bird right now that we want to be aware of.

We’re not interested in ‘birds in general’, ‘birds that we have known’, or other birds in that that bird’s family. For if we dwell on the bird, we will miss the next object to come in through the senses.

Be Gentle– Once you’ve tried this meditation, you can see for yourself, that it is not as easy as it appears. The mind tends not to keep inner commentary simple and in the present moment. It likes to proliferate thought and to wander into the past, into the future (or even into a ‘fantasy land’ that has nothing to do with anything much at all).

The idea is to be alert and in the present moment only. However that takes skill born of patient practice. So when the mind starts to wander and to chatter away, don’t be upset with yourself, that’s simply what the untrained mind tends to do!

Sometimes just being aware of the wandering is enough in itself for the mind to return to the present.

The goal of this meditation: beautiful silence, stillness, and clarity of mind pregnant with the most profound insights. You have let go of the first burden that stops deep meditation. Now you should proceed to the even more beautiful and truthful silence of the mind.

Session 2: Silent Present-Moment Awareness

Session 2 -Present-Moment Awareness

00:00 Introduction/Recap
00:48 Meditation routine
02:27 Bad meditations
05:58 Dealing with pain
09:15 Right attitude
15:47 Get into the flow
19:29 Enjoying meditation
21:36 Guided meditation

The 2nd stage is ‘Silent Present-Moment Awareness’

At stage two, we drop the naming; we drop the labeling. At stage one, we were very close to being right in the present moment, but not exactly there. We were just a little name or label away. Now we are really in the present moment, ‘spot on’.

At this stage when we hear the sound of a bird, we don’t comment to ourselves. We just know it. Of course that is now true of anything else that comes in through the senses. If we feel the caress of the breeze, the pressure of our seat, we just know it, but silently.

There is a pleasantness in inner silence, a pleasantness that we can’t even begin to appreciate when all we know is the busy mind: chattering, chattering, chattering all the time. Now you can notice that silence, even if it’s only for a brief moment. Enjoy it!

If the mind wanders, it may be enough, as in the previous stage, just to know that and to allow the mind to come back to the silent present moment.

However, if it keeps on wandering, then gently bring it back to Silent Present- Moment Awareness, just as a mother would take a little child by the hand who has wandered into an unsafe place and gently lead it back to a safe one.

Be patient, be kind to your mind; this is a gentle practice. Again, remember the mind is not accustomed to being trained in this fashion. Usually it goes pretty much where it feels like going and thinks what ever it feels like thinking.

Another useful technique for developing inner silence is recognizing the space between our thoughts, or between periods of inner chatter.

Attend closely with sharp mindfulness when one thought ends and before another thought b begins – there!

That is silent awareness!

It may be only momentary at first, but as you recognize that fleeting silence you become accustomed to it. And as you become accustomed to it, the silence lasts longer.

You begin to enjoy the silence, once you have found it at last, and that is why it grows. But remember, silence is SHY. If silence hears you talking about her, she vanishes immediately!

Session 3: Breath meditation

Session 3 -Breath Meditation

00:00 Introduction/Recap
00:11 The meditation of the Buddha
01:52 Mindfulness first
04:28 Waiting for the breath
06:49 No control
08:39 The evolution of breath meditation
12:25 Befriending the breath
14:32 Giving rise to joy
21:10 Guided meditation

The 3rd stage is ‘Silent Present-Moment Awareness of the Breath’

If you want to go further, then instead of being silently aware of whatever comes into the mind, we choose silent present-moment awareness of just one thing. That one thing can be the experience of breathing, the idea of loving-kindness (metta), a colored circle visualized in the mind (kasina), or several other less common focal points for awareness.

Choosing to fix one’s attention on one thing is letting go of diversity and moving to its opposite, unity. As the mind begins to unify and sustain attention on just one thing, the experience of peace, bliss, and power increases significantly.

Here we discover that the diversity of consciousness is another heavy burden. It is like having six telephones ringing at the same time. Letting go of this diversity and permitting only one telephone ring is such a relief that it generates bliss. The understanding that diversity is a heavy burden is crucial to being able to focus on the breath.

If you have developed silent awareness of the present moment carefully for long periods of time, then you will find it quite easy to turn that awareness onto the breath and follow that breath from moment to moment without interruption.

This is because the two major obstacles to breath meditation have already been overcome. The first of these two obstacles is the mind’s tendency to go off into the past or future, and the second obstacle is inner speech.

It often happens that meditators start breath meditation when their minds are still jumping around between past and future, and when awareness is being drowned out by inner commentary.

Without proper preparation they find breath meditation difficult, even impossible, and give up in frustration. They give up because they did not start at the right place.

If you find it difficult to attend to your breath, this is a sign that you rushed the first two stages. Go back to the preliminary exercises. Careful patience is the fastest way!

When you focus on the breath, you focus on the experience of the breath happening now. You experience what the breath is doing, whether it is going in, going out, or is in between. It is best not to locate the breath anywhere. If you locate the breath at the tip of your nose, then it becomes ‘nose awareness’, not breath awareness.

Just ask yourself right now:

‘Am I breathing in or breathing out? How do I know?’

There! The experience that tells you what the breath is doing, that is what you focus on. Let go of the concern about where this experience is located. Just focus on the experience itself.

When you know the breath is going in or going out for about one hundred breaths in a row, not missing one, and then you have achieved what I call this third stage of meditation, which involves sustained attention on the breath. This again is more peaceful and joyful than the previous stage.

To go deeper, you aim next for full sustained attention on the breath.

Session 4: Overcoming obstacles

Session 4: Overcoming obstacles

00:00 Introduction/Recap
00:30 Knowing yourself
03:32 Setting up the mind
06:22 The sensory world and thinking
09:54 Overcoming ill will
14:45 Overcoming tiredness
19:11 Overcoming restlessness
20:47 Overcoming doubt
22:41 Guided meditation

The Five Hindrances

The five hindrances are obstacles that you will meet in your meditation and that you should learn to overcome. They stand between you and enlightenment. When you know them, you have a good chance of overcoming them.

If you have not yet achieved the jhanas, it means you have not fully understood these five hindrances. If you have gotten into such deep states, then you have overcome the hindrances. It is as simple as that.

The Buddha named the five hindrances as follows: sensory desire (kama-cchanda), ill will (vyapda), sloth and torpor (thina-middha), restlessness and remorse (uddhacca-kukkuca), and doubt (vicikiccha).

and it is the major obstacle preventing one from entering deep meditation. The pali word kama means anything pertaining to the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Chanda means to delight in or agree with. Together the compound kamma-cchanda means ‘delight, interest, and involvement with the world of the five senses’.

When we are meditating and hear a sound, why can’t we simply ignore it? Ajahn Chah said ‘It is not the noise that disturbs you, it is you who disturb the noise’ Kama-cchanda was the mind getting involved with the sound. It is similar with pain. You will notice that when the five senses disappear so does your body. Letting go of one means letting go of the other.

Abandoning of kamma-cchanda in meditation is done little by little. You start by choosing a comfortable, quiet place in which to meditate. When you first close your eyes you will be unable to feel much of your body. It takes a few minutes to become sensitive to your bodily feelings. Thus the final adjustments to your body posture are made a few minutes after closing your eyes.

Begin with present-moment awareness. Most if not all of our past and future is occupied by the affairs of our five senses. Our memories are of physical sensations, tastes, sounds, smells, or sights. Through achieving present-moment awareness we cut off much of kama-cchanda.

The next stage of meditation is silent present-moment awareness in which you abandon all thought. An aspect of kama-cchanda is called kama-vitakka meaning thinking about the five-sense world. Few meditators realize that noting bodily sensations, for example thinking to oneself ‘breath going in’ or ‘hearing a sound’ is also part of kama-vitakka and a hindrance to progress.

In silent present-moment awareness, it is as if the world of five senses is now confined in a cage, unable to roam or create mischief. Next your focus on the physical sensation of the breath paying no attention to other sensations in your body. The breath becomes the stepping stone from the world of the five senses over to the realm of the mind.

When you succeed in full sustained attention on the breath, you will notice the absence of any sounds. You never recognize the moment that hearing stops because its nature is to fade away gradually. Such a fading, like physical death, is a process, not an event. At the end of a sitting, you also notice that your body has disappeared, that you cannot feel your hands, nor receive any messages from your legs. All that you knew was the feeling of the breath.

Soon the breath disappears and the awesome Nimitta fills your mind. It is only at this stage that you have fully abandoned kama-cchanda, your involvement with the world of the five senses. For when the Nimitta is established all five senses are extinguished and your body is out of range. The first and major hindrance has now been overcome and it is blissful. You are at the door of the jhanas.

and is usually understood as anger toward another person but it is more likely toward yourself or even toward the meditation object.

Ill will toward yourself can manifest as not allowing yourself to bliss out, become peaceful or become successful in meditation. There are many people who have very deep guilt complexes. This is mostly a Western trait because of the way that many of us have been brought up.

To overcome this hindrance, do some loving-kindness meditation. Say to yourself ‘the door to my heart is open to all of me. I allow myself happiness. I allow myself peace. ‘

A beautiful ethic of Buddhism is that there is nothing, absolutely nothing you cannot forgive in Buddhism. You can forgive everything. Your forgiveness is healing and solves old problems. Ill will toward yourself may be the main reason why your meditation is not successful.

If you start the meditation with ill will toward meditation or the meditation object of breath, doing it but not liking it, then it’s not going to work. You are putting a hindrance in front of yourself.

Meditation is like a dear old friend that you want to spend time with. You’re willing to drop everything else. Program yourself to delight in this meditation. Think ‘WOW Beautiful! All I’ve got to do is just sit and do nothing else.

I just need to sit here and be with my good old friend, my breath’ if you can do that you’ve abandoned the hindrance of ill will, and you’ve developed the opposite—loving-kindness toward your breath. When you have loving-kindness toward the meditation object, you do not need much effort to hold it. You just love it so much that it becomes effortless to be with.

The most profound and effective way of overcoming sloth and torpor is to make peace with the dullness and stop fighting it. The Buddha advocated investigation, not fighting.

Dullness in meditation is the result of a tired mind, usually one that has been overworking. Fighting that dullness makes you even more exhausted. The two halves of the mind are the knower and the doer. The knower is the passive half that simply receives information.

The doer is the active half that responds with evaluating, thinking, and controlling. When you have a busy lifestyle, the doer consumes most of your mental energy thus starving the knower half. When the knower is starved of mental energy, you experience dullness. Make peace not war with sloth and torpor, then your mental energy will be freed to flow into the knower and your sloth and torpor will naturally disappear.

Another method for overcoming sloth and torpor is to give more value to awareness. When the path of meditation comes to a fork in the road, choose the path to bright awareness, not the path to sloth and torpor.

Sometimes sloth and torpor is the result of ill will toward the sitting. Instead, put joy into sittings, making them fun and then sloth and torpor rarely will come.

… (uddhacca-kukkucca) and is very subtle.

Remorse is the result of hurtful things that you may have said or done bad conduct. Forgiveness. Letting go of the past, is what overcomes remorse.

Restlessness in meditation is always a sign of not finding joy in what’s here. We do not appreciate the sheer pleasure of contentment; do not acknowledge the sheer pleasure of doing nothing. We have a faultfinding mind rater than a mind that appreciates what’s already there.

Whether we find joy or not depends on the way we train our perception. It’s within our power to change the way we look at things. In meditation we can see the breath as dull and routine, or we can see it as very beautiful and unique. If we look upon the breath as something of great value, then we won’t get restless.

Contentment is the opposite of a faultfinding mind. You should develop the perception of contentment with whatever you have, wherever you are as much as you can. Learn to be content with the present moment.

Forget about jhanas; just be content to be here and now, in this moment. As that contentment deepens, it will actually give rise to jhanas.

Even if you have an ache in the body and don’t feel well, you can change your perception and regard that as something quite fascinating, even beautiful. See if you can be content with the ache or pain. It is possible to be content with even severe pain.

If you can do that, the worst part of the pain disappears along with the restlessness. The restlessness that accompanies pain is probably the worst part. Get rid of restlessness through contentment, and you can even have fun with pain.

There is a simile that the Buddha used. Restlessness is like having a tyrannical master always telling you ‘Go and get this’ ‘Go and do that’ ‘that’s not right’ and never giving you a moment of rest. That tyrant is the faultfinding mind. Subdue this tyrant through contentment.

After you’ve overcome the more general forms of restlessness, a very refined form often occurs at the deeper stages of meditation. The first time you see a Nimitta, because of restlessness, you just cannot leave it alone. You mess around with it. You get excited, you want something more.

Restlessness is one of the hindrances that can easily destroy the Nimitta. You’ve already arrived. You don’t have to do any more. Just leave it alone. Be content with it and it will develop by itself.

That’s what contentment is –complete nondoing, just sitting there watching a Nimitta blossom into a jhana. That’s the way to get into jhanas. If the Nimitta comes and goes, that’s a sign of restlessness in the mind. If you can sustain attention effortlessly, restlessness has been overcome.

Doubt can be toward the teaching, the teacher or toward yourself. As you experience the beautiful results of meditation, allow them to strengthen your confidence that meditation is worthwhile. If teachers lead by example, put your confidence in them.

Give yourself encouragement and have confidence that you can achieve whatever you want. The only people who fail are those who give up. Don’t question what you experience during meditation, think about that afterward the sitting is over.

Meditators fail overcome the hindrances because they look for them in the wrong place. The hindrances source is the doer, their result is lack of progress and their workshop is the space between the mind and its meditation object.

Session 5: Other meditations

Session 5 – Other meditations

00:00 Introduction/Recap
00:54 Walking meditation
08:47 Loving kindness
14:37 Long term supports
17:52 Summary
20:46 Guided meditation

Where this path leads

In this short course, Ajahn Brahamali limits the teaching to the beginning stages of this approach, presented as five stages. Just to keep things in perspective, the fifth stage, described below, takes one to the “doorway to the jhanas.”

A doorway into very deep practice and transformative insights.

Here are his descriptions of the last two beginning stages of practice.

The 4th stage is ‘Full Sustained Attention on the Breath’

The fourth stage occurs when your attention expands to take in every single moment of the breath. You know the in-breath at the very first moment, when the first sensation of inbreathing arises. Then you observe as those sensations develop gradually through the whole course of one in-breath, no missing even a moment of the in –breath.

When that in-breath finishes, you know that moment. You see in your mind that last movement of the in-breath. You then see the next moment as a pause between breaths, and then many more moments of pause until the out-breath begins.

You see the first moment of out breathing and each subsequent sensation as the out-breath evolves, until the out-breath disappears when its function is complete. All this is done in silence and in the present moment.

You experience every part of each in-breath and out-breath continuously for many hundred breaths in a row. That is why this stage is called full sustained attention on the breath.

You cannot reach this stage through force, through building or gripping. You can attain this degree of stillness only by letting go of everything in the entire universe except for this momentary experience of the breath happening silently.

Actually ‘you’ do not reach this stage, the mind does. The mind does the work itself. The mind recognizes this stage to be a very peaceful and pleasant place to abide, just being alone with the breath. This is where the doer, the major part of one’s ego starts to disappear.

One finds that progress happens effortlessly at this stage of meditation. We just have to get out of the way, let go, and watch it all happen. The mind will automatically incline, if we only let it, toward this very simple, peaceful, and delicious unity of being alone with one thing, just being with the breath in each and every moment. This is the unity of mind the unity in the moment the unity in stillness.

The fourth stage is what I call the ‘springboard’ of meditation, because from it one may dive into the blissful states. When we simply maintain this unity of consciousness by not interfering, the breath will begin to disappear. The breath appears to fade away as the mind focuses instead on what is at the center of the experience of breath, which is awesome peace, freedom, and bliss.

At this stage, he introduces the term ‘beautiful breath.’ Here the mind recognizes that this peaceful breath is extraordinarily beautiful. We are aware of this beautiful breath continuously, moment after moment, with no break in the chain of experience. We are aware only of the beautiful breath, without effort and for a very long time.

When the breath disappears, all that is left is ‘the beautiful’. Disembodied beauty becomes the sole object of the mind. The mind is now taking the mind as its own object. We are no longer aware of the breath, body, thought, sound, or outside world. All that we are aware of is beauty, peace, bliss, light, or whatever our perception will later call it.

We are experiencing only beauty, continuously, effortlessly, and with nothing being beautiful! We have long ago let go of descriptions and assessments. Here the mind is so still that it cannot say anything. One is just beginning to experience the first flowering of bliss in the mind. That bliss will develop, grow, and become very firm and strong. And then one may enter into those states of meditation called the jhanas.

The 5th stage is ‘Full Sustained Attention on the Beautiful Breath’

Often this stage flows naturally and seamlessly from the previous stage. When one’s full attention rests easily and continuously on the experience of breathing with nothing interrupting the even flow of awareness, the breath calms down. It changes from a coarse, ordinary breath to a very smooth and peaceful ‘beautiful breath’. The mind recognizes this beautiful breath and delights in it. It experiences a deepening contentment. It is happy just to be watching this beautiful breath, and it does not need to be forced.

‘You’ do not do anything at this stage. If you try to do something at this stage, you will disturb the whole process. The beauty will be lost. From this stage of meditation on, the ‘doer’ has to disappear. You are just a knower, passively observing.

A helpful trick at this stage is to break the inner silence for a moment and gently say to yourself ‘calm’. That is all. At this stage of the meditation, the mind is usually so sensitive that just a little nudge causes it to follow the instruction obediently. The breath calms down and the beautiful breath emerges.

When we are passively observing the beautiful breath in the moment, the perception of ‘in’ (breath) or ‘out’ (breath) or the beginning, middle, or end of breath should be allowed to disappear. All that remains will be the experience of the beautiful breath happening now.

The mind is not concerned with what part of its cycle the breath is in or where in the body it occurs. Here we are simplifying the object of meditation. We are experiencing breath in the moment, stripped of all unnecessary details. We are moving beyond the duality of ‘in’ and ‘out’ and are just aware of a beautiful breath that appears smooth and continuous, hardly changing at all.

Do absolutely nothing and see how smooth, beautiful, and timeless the breath can be. See how calm you can allow it to be. Take time to savor the sweetness of the beautiful breath—ever calmer, ever sweeter. Soon the breath will disappear, not when you want it to, but when there is enough calm, leaving only the sign of ‘the beautiful’.

Ajahm Brahm describes the path of deep practice after one has stepped through this doorway to the jhanas in his remarkable book: Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond: A Meditator’s Handbook.

Putting it all together

Ajahn Brahm: Four Ways of Letting Go

Ajahn Brahm putting it all together as we wrap up this tintroductory course, with this talk on the four ways of letting go- at the core his apprach to meditaion practice.

Peace is the Highest Happiness

from the video- “You don’t strive to get rid of pain – you let go of striving. You let go of craving. And a wonderful thing happens when the craving disappears – pain is. Happiness is. Suffering is. But underneath it all is peace…

Methods of Relaxation; Handling Unwholesome Thoughts; Powerful Force of Kindness

Great overview of tips and tricks of the meditative path. One YouTube commenter remarked- “I love the combination of Buddhist monk and stand-up comedian.”

Non-Self (Anatta)

Pithy observation on the human will and the unfolding of understanding. Key insights to deepen your meditation practice.

The Importance of Meditation

Excellent overview of how he teaches meditation, delivered to a packed lecture hall in Sri Lanka. One commenter on the video put it well: “… hands down the most clarifying and useful thing I have ever heard said about meditation.”

Guided meditations led by Ajahn Brahm

Here are a few guided sessions for you to explore. You can click on the small cogwheel to the far right for more options.