Anapanasati Breath Awareness Jhanas – NEW!

Self-Paced Home Meditation Retreat

This home retreat includes material for an 11 to 14-day self-paced meditation retreat.

Jhāna (absorption) concentration is the highest level of meditative concentration possible. In jhāna our awareness and consciousness completely and seamlessly merge into, and with, the meditative object as a function of the source, the Absolute. Steeping our consciousness and awareness in a quality of the Absolute purifies the mind while attuning us to deeper intimacy with the Absolute.

What’s Included

• Enough material for an 11 to 14-day home retreat.
• 20 retreat videos including guided meditations, dharma talks, and questions & answers.
• Complete recording of the retreat. Over 18 hours of content.
• Reference material for preparation.
• Two handouts.
• 720p HD Video – Zoom-quality recordings.

The recordings are from Mugen’s 2026 “Practicing the Jhanas” retreat, which was hosted both online and in-person. The original retreat was 14 days long. Most days included two group meetings per day. Sundays were dark days, so there are some days of the retreat with no recordings.

Were you to arrive in this moment at my Theravada teacher’s monastery, you would be given the meditation practice called ānāpānasati. In Pali this means “breath awareness” meditation. It is a form of meditative concentration. We undertake breath awareness meditation to begin collecting our attention and learning to consciously direct awareness to the meditative object of the breath. When we practice concentration meditation, we can potentially reach the deepest part of the third level of absorption, also called jhāna.

Every meditation contains the first two levels of meditative concentration: 1) momentary concentration (asking where awareness is in this moment or breath) and 2) access concentration (where awareness is beginning to access the deeper levels of concentration; experiences of joy and bliss along with mind-light phenomena occur, evidencing deepening meditative concentration).

Each level of absorption in concentration meditation practice is a very particular slice of the Absolute, the source of all reality. We are slowly and deliberately contacting and abiding in a very particular quality of the Absolute in each jhāna as well as in each jhāna factor I will describe.

Each quality of the Absolute we abide with meditatively is its own expression of Awakeness. For this reason, understanding the jhāna process reveals and attunes our consciousness to a particular expression of the Absolute. This understanding activates and supports this expression to more fully land in our consciousness. As these expressions of Awakeness find a home in our consciousness, we are activating our true nature.

— Stephen Mugen Snyder, Roshi, Living Awakeness

Talks from this retreat are not available on YouTube, but you can find related example content on this playlist.

Stephen Mugen Snyder, Roshi is a senior meditation teacher in the Buddhist Theravada and Zen traditions.  He is the author of Demystifying Awakening, Buddha’s Heart, Liberating the Self, and co-author of Practicing the Jhanas. He works with students worldwide as well as leading online and in-person retreats in the U.S., the U.K., and Europe.

Course Outline

Prerequisites

This retreat is suitable for intermediate and advanced meditators and practitioners. For beginners, we recommend only signing up if you are capable of sitting at least 45 minutes two times per day.

We recommend learning breath awareness meditation before signing up for this retreat. Signing-up for the Practicing the Jhanas Self-Paced Course is one option.

Investment

Sliding scale:

• $398 – Subsidized
• $498 – Sustaining
• $598 – Supporting

Students who are part of a mentoring program receive a $100 discount from above prices (coupon code is found within your mentoring course on a page called “Discounts”).

Scholarships are available to support your participation.

Please review our Cancellation Policy.