50-minute sit. A few ideas that came to me:

• That my back should be straight.
• That I shouldn't clench my jaws.
• That I should keep my attention on the kasina (whether it be a candle flame or my breath) in a more fluid way than I have been, allowing for my eyes to take in different areas/aspects of the kasina at different points along the sit.
• May have hit 1st jhana, as I noticed three factors (that supposedly belong to it): concentration, effort, and a somewhat pleasant/good/positive feeling.

This is good stuff... keep it up

Just a small but IMPORTANT tip: consistent practice is more important than the length of each sit....

I would agree with points 1-3.

The fourth point: this is tough. According to Tina Rasmussen and Stephen Snyder (http://www.amazon.com/Practicing-Jhanas-Traditional-Concentration-Meditation/dp/159030733X), first jhana is much more intense than reality, and you should notice the shift. Also according to these authors/practitioners, your nimitta has to merge with the point of focus. The nimitta is the white light you'll begin to see as your concentration deepens. After enough experience you'll be able to judge whether or not it was first jhana.

You'll find as time goes on that there are multiple theories on the qualification of jhana. I would suggest to read the book above. This gave me the guidance I needed to accurately judge my experiences between jhana and non-jhana (yet still frickin' awesome) experiences.

Seems like you know what you're doing though!
Thanks for your commitment
Travis

A good way to stay relaxed with concentration is to realize that you don't have to force yourself to see the object, since sight is always automatically functioning.  You just need stay present with the stream of sight that's already happening.  When you're lost in thought, you are still looking at the object, so the goal is to stay undistracted, not to look harder or something of that nature.

Also, if you don't worry about posture or movements, or even itching your nose, and just stay with the sense of sight while those things happen, then they won't be distractions.

Good luck!

I would say I'm fairly consistent with my practice. I pretty much sit for 50 minutes once a day. Every now and then, I might go without meditating for a day or two, but I never seem to not meditate for more than 2-3 days in a row (I start going "crazy" and feeling very off-balance energetically).

When I sat tonight, I was trying to stabilize a mind/overall energetic state that felt super out-of-whack. Before I sat, I was overly sensitive, and feeling extremely restless (consequence of a somewhat crazy, stress-inducing day, I'm thinking).

So, my sit started out in a not-so-normal way, or at least in a way that I'm not used to. I think I spent the first 20-25 minutes simply trying to stabilize my attention.

At one point, possibly around the 40-minute mark, I felt as though I could effortlessly stay with the kasina (candle flame). Mind felt quiet, and my thoughts were, "You're in a good space, extend it." It kind of felt like I was locked into a groove. My attention gently took in the flickering flame -- effort did not need to be applied. I naturally seemed to crave that stability.

One insight for me was to not obsess over defining exactly what constitutes the kasina. In the past -- for a very long time, in fact -- when using a visual kasina like a flame, I would fixate over defining its boundaries. For instance, "The wick + flame + the reflection of the flame against the glass jar housing the candle." I would do this because right after sitting down, I would try to find out what felt the most "natural" to look at -- sometimes my mind would naturally rest upon the whole candle, including the base, and not just the flame itself.

However, as my concentration would deepen, sometimes my mind would shift to a different facet of the candle (e.g. flame + wick, and not the base anymore). Given my inherent tendency to declare "units of measurement" to myself that I could rely on under various circumstances (e.g. while traveling), I would try and settle upon a combination that seemed to produce the most "locked-in" feeling, and use that as a foundation for subsequent sits.

Over time, this proved to be a fool's errand -- the baseline kept shifting, and I could never settle on exactly what constituted the kasina, for me. Sometimes it was the flame just by itself that produced the most locked-in feeling, and sometimes it was the flame along with its reflection against the glass.

So, I decided to chuck that whole approach out the window (after literally YEARS), and methodically steer my mind away from any thinking that had to do with "defining the boundaries" of the kasina.

Tonight's sit reinforced the above as I avoided defining the kasina. I think the temptation was particularly strong -- I guess old habits do die hard -- because I was so desperate to stabilize my mind. Perhaps during particularly stressful times that's my conditioned go-to, and it's something I have to work against.

Anyway -- after averting my attention from trying to map out an area of the candle to focus on, I experienced concentration where the overall experience "flame" was the object (this doesn't mean my attention was diffuse). It's as though discursive thought burnt itself out, and something deeper -- the "heart," perhaps -- went for that which truly was the kasina all along.

I forget where I read this, but once I did a Google search on concentration, and came across a website that was maintained by a practitioner who said something along the lines of "perceiving and contemplating the flame, not looking at it and going 'Oooh, what a pretty flame!' and thinking you're concentrated because you're applying your attention so actively."

Then he went on about what he meant by "perceiving and contemplating." My point is, I think I've begun to get what he meant (in my own way), ever since dropping the whole notion that I need to "map out" just what comprises my kasina. So, the way it is now for me is that I sit down, and there's a flame in front of me, housed inside a glass jar. I don't think too much about it, but just try to "take in" that experience. I simply sit with it. Over time (like it happened tonight) my attention naturally falls into a "feedback loop" with some aspect of the candle (could be just the flame by itself, could be the flame + wick). However, I try not to obsess over exactly what it is that is generating the pleasant feeling. Rather, I try to pay attention to the feeling itself, and try to stabilize it. The flame gently abides as an anchor for my attention.

Anyway -- the above is very long-winded, but that's what I've noticed myself thinking about in relation to concentration practice. I'm hyper-analytical about these things, but in my experience sometiems you just have to think these things to death before you can move on and settle upon a more or less "natural" way of going about it.

Not Tao -- I really get what you're saying! Thanks!

This is the problem I keep running into with the breath. I'll sit and determine to focus on the breath. I'll try to focus on the rising and falling of my abdomen, but when I do that, my attention seems to want to focus more on the breath coming in and out of my nostrils. So I'll focus on that, but then I can't even decide whether I want to focus on the feeling of breath against my upper lip, or the rims of the nostrils, or the tip of my nose, or the bridge, or that strip of cartilage dividing the nostrils, or even right back down to the abdomen again. Sometimes my attention wants to shift down the feeling my breath in my throat, or up inside my head.

Do you think it would be more beneficial to just take the idea of "breath" in itself as an overall object, focusing primarily on the coming in and going out regardless of where on the body it seems to be?

Some Tibetian practices use sky gazing as a concentration practice. The sky doesn't really have boundaries, so there's nothing you can pin down or really focus on. I think that, when the mind "locks in" as you said, it's taking seeing, itself, as the object of meditation. I'll bet that you feel like you can see the whole candle at once when this happens, right? So the kasina isn't a target so much as something to draw the attention. When we're lost in thought, it's a bit like being blind, so as long as the candle is in your field of attention, and you feel like you can actually see it, you know you are here-and-now rather than in your head.

This is something I just realized recently too, haha. It's made it much easier to practice open awareness. You can tap into the clarity that the "locking in" creates instantly if you just allow "nowness" to happen and remove yourself from your imagination. It might take a while to lock in still, but it seems to speed up the process.

Sounds like you're doing well though.