for quite a few weeks now iv been doing samatha meditation and iv made little progress. I have so much free time on my hand, so much that im wanting to spend hours a day in meditation, But i want to be able to reach jhana and stay in it for hours. Right now i just need help getting in it. What iv found quite irritating is that sometimes i have come so close, and every else other time when i meditate it feels like im doing it right but like 30 + minutes later i still don't feel like im getting anywhere close to entering jhana, usually on those very few days when it felt like i was getting close to it it only took 5 minutes and i felt it. But other times I sit and focus wondering why i am not getting into it. Could be many reasons, although i heard masturbation can very much screw your progress up badly (Correct me if im wrong on that). If that also is true then that could be why, because i meditate for like maybe 3 days and i hit a point where i feel like im getting close to jhana, but then i do tend to masturbate and like a day later Its like i have to start over again.

But please, any advice or information would be nice, not sure on what it is though but it be really nice to be able to reach jhana.

Also, after 20 minutes my neck starts to cramp in meditation when i keep my head slightly pointed downwards. Any advice on that? because most meditators have to keep their head slightly bent. Unless its something i get used to overtime.

Hi vic, 

Welcome to the forum. 



So to be clear the first suffusive mental state resultant from training in mental stabilization, first jhana, is when the mind extends its ability to stay with an object.

So a first question to ask oneself when doing this training is:
"Do I truly feel it is worthwhile to let all narratives go immediately when they arise in my mind for the duration of these minutes of stabliziation training?"

When I can really see that, yes, whatever narratives (dispersed musings, innovation, fears, pursuits, sadness, questions, etc..) come up in my mind, thoughts and feelings, are not worth continuing during this moment of training, I just drop the story that comes up by returning attention to the breath.

It is like knowing:
"When I am doing jogging training, I suspend cake-baking training. They are incompatible to do during the same training time, and I need the jogging training for this time period."


(If you remember, however, the a burner on the stove top is "On", that's a practical narrative to acknowledge and break for, but all other narratives can be let go as the attention goes back to the object. I'm sure that's obvious, but just to say it =) 

Also, you can set up a time frame for the first few minutes with a notebook beside you: if you get a great idea then or a reminder or something, then write it down. When that period passes, no more letting narrative thinking happen. I heard from Venerable Analayo that he was doing that, I thinkk in 2012. He mentioned he had a morning exercise routine before sitting and he would allow himself to make notes ater exercise and at the state of sitting for just a few minutes. (I, too, if I exercise am ideogenic directly after exercise.) I heard this from him directly while practicing in a small group. So that's an aid, if you need it.

Next, what object of training for mental stabilization works for you? There are dozens of objects and if you go to Wikipedia "kasina" I think you will find objects listed that are deemed apt for meditational training. 

For me, attention to the inhalation and the exhalation (ānāpānsati) have been what I have used for the past four years. (This training opens one up for all other styles, and I presume that is the case for anyone starting well in another training-- that good training in one style will allow the trainee to drop into a new style relatively easier because one is already trained).

The breath is always with me and, on top of it, bringing attention to the breath can open the whole brain's availability to the training. If one is operating from fight-flight-or-freeze, these "negative" mental states lock a person's thinking-and-acting inclinations into the brainstem and/or amygdala, simplistically speaking, so a person develops those "negative" mental states-- this is how meditation can be quite negative for some people at some times.

And, lastly, the breath has been used for a long time, including by the person called a buddha. So I have personal experienctial conviction in breath as object for mental training. You may find a different object works for you.

Once you've confirmed that, yes, you will abandon narrative thoughts for the minutes you set to practice and once you pick your object for mental stabilization, you just bring attention back again and again to the object in a friendly way (with metta). If the mind is angry here or at all negatively critical here, again the brainstem and amgydala become operant and one is developing fight-flight-freeze not developing whole mind stabilization, which can enter single-pointedness and many other aspects of jhana (mental stabilization) training.

Best wishes,
Katy

Edit: indent formatting issues

Also, vic, in case it needs to be said, no matter what thoughts come to mind, they are okay. 

I say this because it is common for people to have thoughts that we may think of as scary, offensive, shameful and so on. We make think, "Guh! I am that???" but these are just thoughts, associations, ideas coming up from all sorts of sources. If we house them as stress, we create a stress. We can just let every single thought come and go unjudged and not add to them a stress narrative.

What matters is we are just sitting and attending to the object we've chosen and letting any arising thoughts and feeling that arise-- we let them pass by returning attention to our object. That is one's only action; we've already decided that this is the time to practice attention to the chosen object.

Thanks for that, but i understand the fact that i should keep bringing back my attention to the object when it wonders, but by doing this. Does this count as practicing my concentration as well? because as i heard that the best way is when your concentration is able to be held on that object for a long period of time without any thought interupting (Which i suppose takes quite some skill).. And is that what we aim for? to concentrate longer without as many thought interuptions?... Its the level i want to reach, to be able to hold my attention for a very long time. Any exercises for that? or just meditation an exercise for that at the same time?

Yes, this is how concentration develops.

It's just like if you want to do an sustained "endo" on a bicycle's front wheel, then you keep bringing your body back to the bike and balance point.

Sometimes the mind is on easy terrain (let's say you slept well and timed other life activities in some beneficial way and your mind was kind to itself and free of remorse or negative criticisms)--> then the training that day is easy.

Just like a bike endo-- some days the terrain, the tire, the airpressure are all right for the sustained endo. 

The sustained bike endo (suffusive jhana) arises from the iterative balance practice (bringing attention back again and again to the object). 

One doesn't know when suffusive jhana will happen, but one knows one is getting better, just like improvement with an endo is apparent and one definitely knows pleasure as the results of training start to happen.

We are not advised to waste time and ruin our minds with negative criticizing our natural and preliminary imbalance (the natural mind wanderings).  We just say, "Hey, great, you're trying. Good job. Keep trying. Another moment of sincere training: check!"

One day, you will know jhana is there, happens.

o it is the training which gives rise to the jhana (mental stabilization). We don't magically force jhana to happen out of the blue (this would defy the law of cause-and-effect), nor do we force out any thoughts-- this force reifies them and makes and deepens a new distrataction from the object we've chosen as training buddy.

Just like we cannot force imbalance to just stop when we are new to the bike endo, we don't force any mental thoughts to stop. We just resume our training each time we lose balance. We return our attention to the object we've chosen. 


So good job and keep trying and keep experimenting with what makes for good conditions of your training.

Thats alot .. But i always did question what makes my progress go high and then the next day it goes back to being worse.. 1 day it feels like im getting close, then the next day it feels like i get no where O_o.. I also heard when you try and reach jhana in meditation and if you are trying hard to reach it you are doing a bad thing, because you are having thoughts of "I want to reach it, i really do want to be in that level" and you start to get thoughts like that. WHich are distractions. so i guess im asking is.. Are wants, worry, or any emotion of any sort count as a distraction?

Katy: These are excellent instructions. Have you written out your instructions/jhana practice in a more formal way elsewhere.

Bill

That's very normal.  Just like on the bike endo training thoughts like, 

"I want to balance, I want to balance, I want to balance!" "Gah!! I can't get this! I want to balaaance!"

But by day five, or the twentieth hour, or whatever-- voila, some balance.

These thoughts ("I want to balance!" "I want jhana") do not help balance, but these thoughts can show you've picked a hobby for which you have persistance. They are not bad. They are just thoughts. And it is very normal at the outset of training to be flooded with thoughts, especially because we hope to attain some thought-free state.

That can happen, but the first step is being unreactive and receptive to thoughts.

Just like one must be unreactive and receptive to the bike, balance, gravity when endo training. 

And we cannot compare ourselves to anyone. We just work with our conditions in a given moment.

So one resumes the practice, returning to the object of attention. Kindly, gently, glad for the chance to practice (e.g., glad for the bike and the sunny day in which to train on the bike).

I have a yoga practice which keeps my body tension generally low. Some people swim, run, walk, tai chi, hot bath, cold shower, etc, to allow for body tension deflating. It's normal when striving to develop mental and physical tension and decompressing one can help decompress the other.

Useful?

Good luck =]

Hi Bill, 

Phew, I'm glad it's useful to you. 

I have no formal write-up. One reason I like this site so much is it allows us all to practice whatever we're working on. So thanks for letting me practice explaining my training in anapansati : )

O.K. Cool. I found it useful.

very helpful thanks.. one last thing, what do you believe one can obtain when being in jhana long enough?

Hi vic,

I like katy's advice.  I just wanted to add that, even when you aren't practicing, if you make it a habit to refuse to indulge desires, this will jumpstart your ability to concentrate.  For example, if you watch yourself, you'll notice the whole day long you're pushed and pulled by wanting.  Maybe you're at work and you wonder what time it is because you want to go home - when this happens, see if you can feel a pull or a push, a compulsion to look at the clock or mentally try to make time go by faster with tension.  You can drop this tension.

Another example, maybe you feel the desire to watch TV or check the forum here.  Take a moment to drop the desire before you go do it, or even go against your compulsion and simply don't do the thing you want to.  This is the essence of concentration practice, so making it a habit during the day will extend your practice.

Maybe it's confusing to say "drop" the desire.  What I mean is, don't look to gratify it.  Leave yourself unfulfilled and then forget the whole mass of sensations that push or pull.  When a push happens, don't push back (you can't push it away), just yeild, be unsatisfied and let go of the effort to fix anything.

Jhana hapens when there is no compulsion, the mind feels like there is nothing it needs to do.  Maybe you've read a lot about the pleasures of jhana, or you've felt the beginnings of piti and have become excited.  This is perfectly fine, don't try to stop being excited, that's impossible.  Instead, realize that your excitement and compulsion are not going to be fulfilled.  Jhana is not gratification, it's the rest that comes from droping the need for gratification.  It's the wanting itself that is causing frustration or difficulty, not the fact that you aren't getting what you want.  So when you practice not getting what you want, you evetually give up wanting - then jhana arises.

Put another way - when you feel excited, don't wait to gratify it and don't wait for it to go away, just go back to your meditation object.  Concentration isn't an active power where you are holding your mind down - it's a soft power, where you are allowing yourself to completely forget about things that push and pull you away.  Craving is wanting to have something that isn't present in your experience, aversion is trying to remove something you don't enjoy in your current experience.  Between the two there is a pleasant, comfortable, quiet stillness that doesn't need anything.

Remember, no matter how far you've been pushed or pulled by wanting, you don't need to go anywhere else or fix anything, you just need to get yourself to stop moving.  So jhana isn't about going anywhere mentally, it's about coming to a stop mentally.  This is the good news!  There is no failure, just accumulated success.

oh i see .. But, i heard to much relxation isn't the best idea when concentrating and when it comes to reaching jhana, but you really need to give it as much attention as you can and put quite a bit of effort into focusing on that object. Not to much either but just enough, that you have to keep a fine balence between effort and relaxtion, Like don't get to relaxed and don't put tooo much effort to the point where it strains your own brain.. Is this true?

I offer a sutta answer that is true for me from my little experience: there are many phenomena one perceives with mental concentration, some of those things are useful, some things can be distracting fascinations.  The sutta says one can have as many experiences as there are leaves in a forest, but only four are useful: the four truths of the buddhism.

So I'm not just sutta-parroting: I don't "believe", rather I've seen for myself that some funky stuff happens and some of it feels as real as my ten digits right now typing. Some of that funky stuff has set me off on craving for months. Really, if your brain-on-meditation presented you with the experience of going into Godhood and it's so blissful it looks like death by bliss-explosion is going to happen, there's a natural desire to have that again-- at least for me. I didn't overtly say, "I want that again" (I didn't even think that sort of thing really happened; I thought you need to be a believer for those things to occur; I didn't even know how to desire something like that), but there was afterwards a nagging subtle craving for that sort of epic bliss-peace-welcome.

If you practice a lot of jhana funky stuff comes up. Then one learns quickly or little by little to let it go just like thoughts/feelings.


But what's useful? (My departure from the sutta "four leaves" here is not a negation of them. It's just my reply to us):

1. Calming down the mind (attention to breathing helps lower high-dudgeon emotion; see Dan Goleman's "Breath Buddies" video (< 2 minutes) on George Lucas' Edutopia Foundation Channel;

2. Reliable understanding of conditions of being a living-surviving-dying being

3. Insight into cause and effect in everything, starting at mind;

4. Re-training the mind to act according to reliable understanding and therefore reliable peace of wind (and the mind retraining itself with the validity of other thoughts having been pulled out from under it, so to speak).

So while I am waaaaaay far away from "Oh-yeah-no-more-work-for-me-to-do-here" (aka: no perfect practice here), I see that one does obtain what the Mahayana traditions call "two wings": wisdom (a reliable trustworthy understanding of conditions of being alive-surviving-being dying) and compassion (also reliable, trustworthy understanding for being alive-surviving-being dying).

This helps one look at the binary choice of action made in every moment and orient to a reliable view: a reliable understanding you can see for yourself, which needs no teacher (though a good one(s) helps), which hold up over time and conditions.  


Why are you interested in jhana?

Even if you don't share that reason(s) here for your jhana study, it's important to know for yourself, just like knowing the desire, "I want jhana" is important to know: mind is the forerunner (dhammapada opening lines) and it's important to see what its setting up for us to experience next so we have a reliable say in would that thought moving into action be one reliably free from generating dukkha. 

I am about to experience an unskillful work outcome if I don't get back to it.  = O


____
Edit x1 typos, clarification

Well i am open to telling people my reasons for certain things but not right where everyone can see lel.. Secondly, funky stuff? what do you mean by "Funky stuff"???

Okay, this is your practice (and this is not the best practice in the world nor the best practice for everyone; such comparisons would be ridiculous, though buddhisms shares notions of supremacy in its liturgies like other traditions) you would see for yourself.

You find a model that you like and go with it; it may not be a buddhist science of mind model, no problem. You can change it if you do not experience a reliable understanding useful to your well-being within conditioned existence.

One funky thing that happened was that out-of-the-blue bliss-explosion I mentioned above. Another is waking paralysis: where in meditation "I" become aware that breathing is not happening (or perceptibly happening) and I cannot make anything restart, that the body re-starts itself (this can cause a lot of alarm but also helps one see what is one effect of dying) or it won't (then something very calming happens)-- this doesn't happen much at all, and the perception being part of the experience of a another life (whale or big diving fish) and also the perception of a so-called past life (just a guy dying seated against a wall or rock with hairs on right thigh glistening in light and thought of "It's not that hard" and being very thirsty-- the last thought seemed to have been a person practicing meditative austerities) and I'm totally willing to also call these experiences by the secular term: hallucination. ***

I don't care what it's called. My mind perceives such things to have happened and was moved to see the usefulness in them and what could be unuseful in them-- like perseverating on these mental phenomena too long (grasping, craving-- bluh).

My point to you would be, this is interesting stuff-- can be distracting foolishness-- and I am absolutely not interested in it.  It was useful in that I could see I was looking for jazzy things to happen in meditation (after these funky things would happen just out of nowhere during a regular ol' breathing practice) and in life, like a great movie coming to town, a special job to have (mind hunting for a thrill something special, the "next thing" to break up perceived monotony or meaningless ness), and it was useful in that it gave me a direct-experience source of compassion for other animal life and dying and the limits of my volition-- the sense of not being able to breath nor re-start own life is pretty hard to forget

Somehow causality also became pretty clear for me in jhana. An untrained mind is hunting for non-stop gratifications and these can be subtle and innocent (like a sunny day in the park) or gross and destructive, unchecked cancers.***

I just have a different appreciation of living. I don't think it's perceptible to anyone and it wouldn't be-- a person doesn't get inflated in this practice, but deflates in fact a lot of unreliable mental pursuits. I'm a bit more focused on doing what can be done and trying to be skillful about it. (There are a lot of people living such practical, intentional lives from many traditions and who can go unnoticed.)


Go try this or something else for yourself and share what you find, if it helps. : ]

_______
edit x1: typos...
edit x2: in purple
edit x3: most of it is "calm abiding" and seeing thoughts/concepts come up like bubbles from a sea floor and non-ceptually understanding them and how it is they come up, their connection to feelings in the body, the impulse to move/act from them.. there's a ton of calm there, too, when all arisings are not special nor provocative, nor shaking the attentive mind. Then it's lunch time, work time, life goes on. etc. It's a luxury by many standards to be aware of and to have any such practice (prayer, meditation, coming together with friends, etc)

And the practice-- any concentration practice, I would extrapolate-- affects creativity.

As it's sometimes said, a kind mind matters.

C'est tout.  Say toot. ;)

Hey katy, is this bliss explosion you talk about the reason you believe concentration practice can be addicting and corrupting?  I'm wondering if you succeeded in getting it once you chased after it?  The exact same thing happened to me, a mindblowing explosion of piti from nowhere and then a number of hours of complete perfection.  I had no trouble repeating it after a bit of practice and it became a regular feature of meditation for me for a while - sometimes showing up many times during the day.  Like I said in the other thread, any desire I had for it was naturally replaced by a desire for equanimity over time.  Perhaps your viewpoint is simply the result of not having attained it regularly and becoming dissolutioned with the effort to attain it?  This isn't a challenge or anything, I'm just trying to understand your viewpoint.

EDIT: I definately started thinking in a "godlike" way for a while, haha, but that just turned into stress as well and was dropped in favor of a more balanced state of mind - or rather, I saw there was a more subtle way of being and moved on to that.

Pour aujourd'hui ;)

Great thread by the way, very useful.

That happened nearly twenty years ago. Someone taught me basic yoga with breathing and told me nothing else. Why should they? Their point was to help my back injury.

Anyway, craving for that was not overt. That bliss even happened, I was blown away by it for several months ("What was that???"), tried to re-create the experience for the next several years, but didn't talk about it for about five years and then thereafter tentatively for another five. I do not come from a background that had this exposure to such phenomena and I had no idea how to place it in reality. So year after year that kind of experience just sits in the back of the mind, "Why did that happen? Will it happen again? If Godhood is like that why isn't life like that?" That's the sort of nagging craving that perks up on dull Sunday mornings sort of thing. Then when I practiced jhana started about 4.5 years ago I knew right away that third jhana has the body components of that earlier bliss experience and that the letting go of everything from a mind in third jhana is the cause of entering fourth jhana: where just peace and quiet happen, seeing thoughts and non-concept well up or sometimes funny things, seeing the mind and observer even go away to some pure experiencing without gap of observer, but it's just mental phenomena, not inherently helpful or more true than the next thing. Not special. Just sitting with the breath, in and out, that's always useful and calms the person down at least.

So craving happened subtley in jhana training: I would experience the magnetism of first jhana to the object (the mind locked in concentration to its object, having a feeling like bonding to it-- if the object was not of me, then it was like a bridge was made with the object blurring boundaries or just "being bridge". What I'm writing here is just reporting on perceptions, a range of mental activity, nothing special). And when nothing was happening in my life or my sitting practice was dull or I was grumpy, my mind would go recall "funky practice moments" and say "How did that happen? Will that happen again?" And so I would sit again starting in that keen interest, then getting fed up, letting go and just sitting (shikantaza, in zen). Most useful, just sitting: inhale, exhale with a mind that's been trained to be friendly to itself. It takes me time to learn all this and it continues.

And then as you suggest, it was in complete letting go that useful peace happens and funky things are no different than looking at shadows made by trees leaves on the wall in sunlight from the window. It's just mental nature and sometimes it's very clearly useful and sometimes it's like theatre and sometime it's just cool calm stillness. Nothing special. That letting go culiminated out of the blue in sotapanna one morning in 2012-- which stirred me up for several months again  What is this? What is this? Why did that happen? Just from sitting with the breath in ānāpānasati training stages.

It is as you note: the key is to keep fully letting go. Sit with no expectation. One can try to take that from the cushion to life. That's a point of the training. Not cool disassociation, but attention with receptivity, learning what's useful, what's not, what's skillful, what's not in current conditions.  

But indeed that "What happened?" desire and the friendly framework of ānāpānasati is what often motivates a person to practice and it did sustain me to re-enter the practice over and over again. Daniel sometimes quotes a Theravadan sutta from called the "One good craving" I think. He could say which one it is, but it is about the desire to proceed with meditative stabilization and meditative study. Naturally one will keep putting those desires in check-- one knows the desire shackles the mind-- so there is actually a useful cycle there: I desire to have jhana (what was that last time???), I sit, I have head pain from the desire, I'm frustrated, I'm tired, letting go, voila, just breathing, voila the training (like a moment of balance on the bike in an endo) shows an effect of sustained ability to stay at the object, stay in a jhana (concentrated state).

Yes, equanmity is the big plain space in the mind, it is also the natural launching place for funky things or not much at all. The person has to come to terms with their experience as it is versus the narratives around experience. It is very natural for narratives to pop up as one gets used to the training. Exactly like the bike endo, natural excitment at a sustained endo can knock one off balance. Natural excitment of mental stabilization training (jhana of ānāpānasati) knocks one right out of jhana. It's a normal training cycle.


It's been interesting to follow your account elsewhere of your training experiences, NT. 


And if someone's whole practice log was just "Breathed in, breathed out"... wow. Things as they are. But I'm not making a better-worse heirarchy here. Comparison here is nincompoopery


________
Amending: Also, I said upthread that jhana practice will lead to experiencing sometimes "funky things". I cannot possibly assert that across the board for everyone. I'd like to just say then such unfamiliar mental phenomena may occur during a concentration practice of any sort, including breathing meditation as in ānāpānasati.

So jhana is useful for developing subtle gratifications from subtle pleasure: this gratification steals from no one. It allows the mind to have pleasure while it is releasing gross pleasures.

And this mental stabilization training in positive mental state through to equanimity (and I call shikantaza an equanimity practice, though it may not be broken down into training stages like ānāpānasati) can definitely show that every single thought has a consequence and a further consequence if it goes into action. The mental training can give one a strong basis for developing sense of conscientiousness, generosity, non-greed, fear of ill-will, which a theist may develop from naturally directing their minds to humility and non-judgement and which a secular humanist may have through intellect and empathy.

I mean, these are just things that come to my mind from my study. Much of this community and loads of people outside of this specific community practice mental stabilization techniques: Goenka body scanning, vipassana, kasina, prayer, ecological problem-solving, slow inclusive politics... So there's a lot of patient stabilization training experience out there from many practice points and every single person has to practice for themselves. And it's helpful to have good company.

Into the pool!

I always like your posts katy.  If I remember correctly, you were the first person to welcome me here - you said you didn't mind my adversarial stance.

I'm having a lot of success with a shikantaza type practice, so your posts are very encouraging.

Is this all jhana is usually useful for? just feeling that great bliss and pleasure?

It is useful for seeing the mind and its mental creations and its lungings, deflating cravings particularly surfeit ones, learning that everything that comes into being seems to go out of being no matter how fascintating, and seeing things as they are, starting with seeing the nature of mind and perception and how mind contacts its objects through the senses.

So anapanasati training can deflate distracting mental restlessness and grasping while keeping the mind in a positive training environment until suffusive equanimity. It can be a pleasant abiding and restful.

It can also be distracting, stressful to see pass away, and cause annoyance and a sense of "This is stupid, I can't do this, why would anyone do this?"

Some people do not find this practice useful and  may dedicate themselves more completley to obviously practical activities, like food security, disease mitgation, equal rights, fair governance, perservation of nature and oceans... But if one needs to stabilize the mind for calm, clear attention while going through stresses of being alive-surviving-dying and to study mind and conditions of existing, breathing meditation training with suffusive mental stabilization (jhana) can be a useful part in that. 

If it were the end-all be-all for everyone, well, this confab wouldn't be happening. 

I can't add anything more, vic. Best wishes.

Actually one more thing, vic:

One can look at the end result one is interested in developing and ask,
"What are the means to that end? How do I get there?"
and then ask before undertaking that means,
"Are the means and end a reliable form of happiness with benefit or harm to others near, around and far from me?"

That's what comes up for me to ask you finally in the context of this meditative forum you entered yesterday. 


A tip: if you take up jhana training, ethical discipline is known to be useful. Remorse can make for a strong hindrance to mental stabilization training, such as incessant regret or castigation for a willful meanness or greed-- but it's also natural to make mistakes and these can raise one's sincere effort in the training for calm abiding and insight, too.

They say through jhana one gets these things called siddhis, is this true to some extent?

Nothing in my newbie practice suggests there is normal and supernormal. To me, there are mental perceptions and then developing discernment about how the mind can be reliable 'ease' or a reliable 'happiness' in the condition of an apparent cosmos saturated with beings born-surviving(sometimes brutally or promoting brutality)-and-dying, including this one.

interesting... btw. You seem pretty smart when it comes to meditation, how long you been experienced in it? and how much a day do you spend in jhana?

"Sorry, Charlie" but that's a narrative about a stranger you're meeting online, an embellishment your mind is creating. I'm a normal person who puts problems in motion for myself every day. Gah.

: )

The past three years I took several retreat opportunties for practice. This year I have new obligations that limit retreats and I prefer a behavioral practice of minding my moment to moment thought-actions, apologizing when I've been an ass. Jhana practice also can happen in shorter spells once it's a habit-- just like practicing the bike endo used as analogy at the beginning. It's not special, but like learning to read and write: basically useful.

At the real risk of sounding preachy here: perhaps just do your own practice; no one has the prescription for someone else and how long to retreat, when to retreat, if to retreat, how to practice, what to practice. Each person has, in buddhist speak, "previous supporting conditions" and then one puts in motions certain causes intending certain effects. If you decide you like this field of study, see about finding teachers and peer teachers here. I benefit from Bhikkhu Bodhi's classes hosted online by Chuang Yen. Again, a bit preachy: Do whatever it takes to be accountable to the effort in your offline experiece of life and any practice. It's easy in typing online to "go-narrative", speculative, fantastical. 

There are lots of experienced people on this site and elsewhere. And you can learn to what you're attracted and perhaps inevitably start there.

And, vic, I learn all the time from people who say they are just starting out. Whoever is candid about their practice and study, that's usually a valuable "teacher" to me. Daniel put in motion a useful community here and a lot of people contribute, share their practice. Thanks for contributing yours so far.