Week 1 (4/22/26)
Satipaṭṭhāna Home Practice Session 1: April 22, 2026
Please click here to download a PDF of this Home Practice and the resources.
I spent some time looking at different translations of the Sutta for our use, and I settled on the one by Anālayo, who I mentioned in class as the scholar-monk who has written several books about this sutta. I recently updated this version to make the language more gender friendly, replacing ‘Monks’ with ‘Yogis’ and ‘he’ with ‘one’. In the conversion process, some formatting was affected, mostly in the loss of diacritical marks for Satipaṭṭhāna. The sutta is in the PDF resource file.
In addition to the translation itself, I am sending you the external link below to the whole book, Satipaṭṭhāna, the Direct Path to Realization, by the scholar-monk Anālayo, which may be too much information! – but it is a good reference. You are not required to read it. This version is the available PDF for free distribution. You are free to download it if you want it or just save the link for later, but be warned that a 300-page book as a PDF is a bit awkward to use.
satipatthana_direct-path_analayo_free-distribution
I will send snippets from this book as we use them.
Sitting Practice:
Try to practice the first section of the sutta, which, as we said, is the same as the first tetrad of the Ānāpānasati Sutta on Mindfulness of Breathing. Here is a short summary of the instructions we used for now.
- Find a quiet place to practice where you won’t be disturbed.
- Take an upright but relaxed posture, using a chair, a cushion, or a bench. Close your eyes if that’s comfortable for you and get a sense of arriving in this space by feeling the body as a whole. Then we will pay attention to the breathing in some different areas.
- In class we used a ‘map’ to bring our attention to these different areas of the body: (1) Below the navel, (2) above the navel and below the sternum, (3) the center of the chest, (4) the throat, and (5) the head at the nose or nasal cavities.
- Spend a few minutes in each area. Feel the actual sensations of breathing as you inhale and exhale. Measure the length of the inhale from its beginning until the end, counting “1,2,3,4,5,6…”
- Let 90 % of your attention be on the sensations of the breath, and 10% be on the counting.
- Adjust the speed of your counting so that a typical inhale is from 5 to 10 counts long. Do the same with the exhale, counting from the beginning of the exhale until the end. Notice the pause between the end of one breath and the beginning of the next inhale, but don’t count until the next inhale starts. At first, the counts may be the same for each cycle of inhale and exhale, because we will often unconsciously try to control the breath. But as we relax, the breath will start to vary. Some inhales may be just 5 counts. Other inhales may be 7 or 8 counts. We don’t care how long each breath is. We just want to pay close enough attention to notice a natural variation. Some breaths are longer, and some are shorter.
- The counting uses the linguistic part of our brain to gather the attention around the breathing and helps ‘seclude’ us from our day-to-day thinking.
After a few minutes in each of the five locations in this map, please drop the counting and consider transitioning to silently saying a meditation word or phrase with each inhale and exhale. Some common ones that are used are:
- “In” and “Out”
- Inhaling, arriving home to the present moment” (which becomes abbreviated to “Arriving”)
- Exhaling, I know it is a wonderful moment” (which becomes abbreviated to “Wonderful moment”)
- “Buddho”, which is a version of “Buddha”. Buddho means “The one who knows” and is used by saying “Bud” on the inhale and “dho” on the exhale.
This covers the first two steps which are:
- “The yogi breathes in knowing “breathing in long”; the yogi breathes out, knowing “breathing out long.”
- “The yogi breathes in knowing “breathing in short”; the yogi breathes out, knowing “breathing out short.”
The next two steps are:
- “The yogi breathes in, sensitive to the whole body; the yogi breathes out, sensitive to the whole body.”
- “The yogi breathes in, calming the body formations; the yogi breathes out, calming the body formations.” Formations here are anything that makes up the physical body: muscles, bone, connective tissue, organs, blood vessels, etc.
We have already started to do this by bringing attention to different body locations on our map. See if you can get a sense of being aware of more of the body at once. Let the breathing show you where there is tightness in the body. The awareness itself will encourage the body to relax without forcing anything to happen. Enjoy this practice. Smile. Each inhale is a moment of nourishment, and each exhale is a letting go. Finish up with a sense of being present to the whole body, relaxed. Don’t struggle.
The end point of this first practice is to allow the body to relax and the breath energy to flow, while we begin to calm the mind, coming to what is called “full body breath awareness”.
Walking Practice:
For this practice, walk at a normal speed. Use the Thich Nhat Hanh method of counting how many steps for an inhalation and how many for an exhalation. Just as in the sitting, you can drop the counting whenever you want and just be present with the walking.
- Check in with some or all of the Four Foundations throughout the day, by just occasionally pausing to ask, “How is my body now?”, “How are my reactions (feeling tone) to this moment; am I liking or not liking it?”, “How is my awareness (mind) focused or distracted, sharp or dull, narrow or spacious, colored by a mood or not?” and what mind-states, thoughts and emotions (contents of mind, or phenomena) are coming and going?