What is Access Concentration?

What is Access Concentration?

This is the question I want to bring forward in this talk.

I recorded something on this topic many years ago—too many, honestly, to comfortably admit. At the time, I was working on a project that was essentially a secular meditation app. That’s basically been the through-line of my career: building and teaching through these kinds of projects. The app was called Meditate.io, and we had a course titled Concentration Meditation. In it, we aimed to explain the basics of how concentration really works. That course now lives on in The Jhāna Community under the name Concentration 101. It shares some really good foundational ideas, one of which is the concept of Access Concentration. I found this idea so useful in my own Buddhist meditative practice that I really wanted to bring it into a more secular context. There’s a YouTube clip that gives my best simple explanation of what Access Concentration is, and I won’t go too deep here since that recording already exists. That’s the beauty of recording something—you don’t have to keep repeating yourself.

But here’s the short version of how I understand it:

Access Concentration is when the object of your focus—whether it’s the breath, the body, a sound, a visual orb, a mantra, or anything else—moves into the center of your attention. It shifts into the foreground, and everything else fades into the background. That background doesn’t disappear entirely; distractions and thoughts may still be there, but now they’re peripheral. The object of your focus becomes primary.

This shift is important. It’s a turning point in practice when your attention starts to settle and stabilize. Of course, we can fall out of access. Some people think they’re only in access concentration if they maintain it the entire time they’re sitting—but that’s a much deeper, more stable version that usually takes time to develop. Unless you’re a natural at this—and few are—it takes consistent effort.

In any given moment, if your meditation object is the main thing in your attention, you’re in access. And sure, distractions will pull at you—that’s normal. You fall out of access, and then you come back. Return to the breath. Be with it.

At first, the breath might not hold your full attention. Maybe it gets 50%, then 30%, then 20%, then something else pulls at you. It’s a dynamic process. In my experience, concentration becomes more fluid and interactive the deeper you go. But at some point, your focus stabilizes: more than 50% of your attention is on the breath. It begins to draw you in—it has gravity. You want to give it more attention. There’s interest. There’s intimacy.

In the traditional Buddhist framework, this state is called Access Concentration because it’s the doorway into the jhānas. You can’t access the jhānas without first stabilizing in access—at least, according to later Buddhist sources. And here’s a side note for the Buddhist nerds out there: the term Access Concentration doesn’t show up in the earliest teachings. It came later—about a thousand years after the Buddha’s time.

Imagine a thousand years of mostly-male monastics meditating, likely trying to outdo each other, and eventually producing this giant meditation manual called the Visuddhimagga, or The Path of Purification. That’s where we find the term Access Concentration, described in the section on concentration—one of three main sections in the book.

According to that model, you reach Access Concentration just before entering jhāna. The Visuddhimagga describes 40 different objects that can lead to access, though I doubt that list is exhaustive. (Hopefully someone caught that Pokémon reference. I know Buddy did.)

So, what is Access Concentration again?

Another way