I started imagining the possibility of a Breath Kasina long before I was able to build it, some 10 or 12 years ago. I was thinking about building this because at the time, I was doing two forms of practice.
On the one hand, I was doing Kasina practice. I was working with visual objects as described in the early Buddhist tradition. I found it quite helpful to just mock up a quick one in Adobe Photoshop and put it on my iPhone. That was a lot easier than physically constructing them, which is what the early Buddhist tradition suggests: you’re supposed to make your own, go get some berries, smoosh them up, take the dye, do the whole thing.
For my first Kasina, I actually painted it and then cut out a circular object out of a canvas. And it worked fine. But it was a lot easier, especially at night when everyone was asleep, to pull up my iPhone, pull up this little image and just make sure the phone didn’t turn off. I’d sit there for sometimes 30 or 40 minutes and take this visual orb as my meditation object. It would float in dark space, which was my favorite time to do it, at night. I loved that practice. I had a lot of interesting things happen doing it.
A lot of people I know who work with visual objects find it really compelling, either working with a visual orb, which is basically just a simple circle, or something like a candle flame. My first meditation teacher, Daniel Ingram, loves teaching the Fire Kasina.
Regardless of the object, many people get traction using visual meditation objects because, I think, in part, we're so visual. That seems like the obvious thing. We spend a lot of our processing power on the visual field. From what I can tell from cognitive science, the visual sensory field has the highest bandwidth in the human perceptual system.
And on top of that, we’re modern people. We spend a lot of time on screens already, most of us, staring at things. Our phones are designed to keep us staring at them. We're highly conditioned, at this point, to get absorbed in the visual field.
Most of the time, that’s considered a bad thing from the point of view of meditation instructions. If you’re getting basic instructions on being with the breath, for instance, and you get absorbed in the visual field, you typically lose track of your breathing. You lose track of your body.
And this is exactly what I was finding when I did the Kasina practice. Although I was getting into these really cool states and getting absorbed in the visual field, it was at the cost of losing my body.
The other practice I was doing at the time was called Somatic Meditation—or Embodiment Meditation. I was doing a lot of that and finding it really important and necessary, having been disembodied for so long. Not totally, maybe 90% disembodied. I lived in the top 10% of my head. So I was learning to work, especially with the teachings of Reggie Ray, where he brings a somatic lens to the Vajrayana Buddhist teachings.
I found it really helpful to just drop attention into and through the body, to learn how to release all the sort of cognitive tension of holding.
But again, as soon as I started working with the visual Kasina, I’d lose a lot of the embodiment I’d been developing in the other practice. And I thought at a certain point, “This is really frustrating. I have these two practices that are going in two different directions. How do I link them? How do I be embodied and also be concentrated on, say, a visual object?”
Thus occurred to me: the Breath Kasina. This theoretical, imaginal object, a visual orb synchronized with my breathing.
I thought, “If I could just have something like that, it would help me connect the visual field with the somatic experience of breathing. It would be much harder to lose the felt sense of my body if the visual object I was taking as my meditation subject was changing with my breath—because it would remind me I’m breathing.” So that was the basic idea.
Then, earlier this year, I realized I could actually do that pretty easily using some vibe-coding tools. I had a clear sense of what I wanted to build, so I was able to get a working prototype up very quickly, and thus, the Breath Kasina was born.
One thing I want to share about this that’s surprisingly unique: I looked around at the breath tech space, and what I saw was that there are very few, or almost no, technologies out there that simply mirror your breath back to you. Almost everything in this space right now is what I’d call entrainment technology. They try to entrain you into a particular state. It’s a top-down approach, like: “Okay, I want you to breathe 4-8-4. Four seconds on the inhale, hold for eight seconds, exhale for four.” There are all these different pranayama patterns of breathing.
You’ve probably seen this online, there’s an animated circle and and it says, “Breathe in, hold, Breathe out, hold, etc.” Okay, this is different. The Breath Kasina simply mirrors your breath back to you as it is, rather than trying to get you entrained into a particular state.
What I find really helpful about this, as an experienced practitioner–and I’m really building this for other experienced practitioners, initially—is that it doesn’t try to get you into a particular state. It just reflects back how your breath is right now. It gives you some additional feedback on that from a visual perspective.
In terms of this experimental group, I’m really hoping that as we dive deeper into the Breath Kasina, we can explore two things:
One is the basic, kind of theoretical teachings around this new meditation object. Obviously, these teachings will be emergent, by the very nature of the fact that this is a new meditation object. I’ve only been working with it for the past couple of months myself, so I’m still learning a lot. But I already know there are things that would be really helpful to explore and talk about when working with this object—both in terms of working with a visual meditation object and working with the breath.
Then: How do we link the two together? How do we bring the somatic and visual together? The purpose of the Breath Kasina is really to develop embodied concentration. That’s how I understand it: embodied presence.
Do Breath Kasina on Retreat
Join me outside of Lisbon, Portugal at the beginning of 2026 for a 10-day intensive jhāna retreat. There, we’ll be exploring The Flavors of Jhāna, and working with the Breath Kasina as one of our meditative aids.
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