About fifteen years ago, I found myself at a turning point in my meditation practice—a shift many practitioners eventually encounter. I had spent years following a path of transcendence: letting go, releasing, moving beyond. “Not this, not this,” I would say, shedding layers of identity and experience. But eventually, I asked myself: if I let go of everything, what remains? The answer, I discovered, was life itself. And it was time to turn back toward it.
That pivot meant returning to my body, learning how to actually inhabit it—how to feel, sense, and trust it. This wasn’t a problem I could solve with my mind. Instead, I had to listen to the body, to follow its cues rather than override them.
Around the same time, I was intrigued by something my early teacher, Daniel Ingram, was exploring: kasina practice. For those unfamiliar, a kasina is a traditional Buddhist meditation object—typically a simple visual object like a colored circle or orb. The practice involves focusing intently on the orb to develop single-pointed concentration.
Daniel was doing kasina practice using a candle flame, and the altered states he described, especially during long retreats, were mind-blowing. I was a parent then and couldn’t do long retreats, but I got creative: I mocked up a simple blue circle on a black background using my iPhone. At night, with everything dark and quiet, I’d sit and stare at this glowing orb—like it was floating in the void. It was mesmerizing.
Yet, despite how compelling the visual focus was, I found it difficult to reconcile with my embodiment work. The moment I began focusing on the kasina, I felt pulled out of my body—into the head, into abstraction. I realized that while this practice was powerful, I needed a way to bring it back into the body.
That’s when the idea for the Breath Kasina emerged: a digital meditation object synchronized with your own breath. Not something prescriptive—like the breathing GIFs you might see online that guide you to breathe in a certain pattern—but something reflective. A mirror.
Unlike many breath tech tools, which instruct you to breathe a certain way, the Breath Kasina simply shows you your own breath. I don’t want to tell people how they should breathe. After doing all this work to trust my body, I wasn’t about to override it with a top-down idea of the "correct" breath.
Instead, the Breath Kasina offers a way to visually anchor your attention in the rhythm of your body. It synchronizes your awareness between two powerful sense fields: sight and somatic experience. The goal isn’t just to focus—it’s to build embodied concentration. The breath is already a great tool for this, but adding the visual layer deepens the process by engaging more of the sensory field.
In Buddhist terms, awakening begins by deconstructing the centralized sense of identity—like the feeling that “I” am located behind the eyes. But once that deconstruction is seen through, the real work becomes integration: bringing all sense fields together and living as the field of experience. The Breath Kasina supports that move—not just the disidentification, but the reintegration.
So, that’s the background. Within a month of conceiving the idea, I had a working prototype.
The hardware is a small academic-grade breath sensor—a band you strap around your chest or belly. I wear it low on my belly, where I most naturally feel the breath. It measures breath force in Newtons (mass × acceleration) and streams that data via Bluetooth to the app in real time.
Let me walk you through it.
First, I connect the sensor and launch the app. The visual side of the kasina—basic color-based kasinas—is already available as a freemium app at kasina.app. The breath-synced version is still in development.
In traditional kasina practice, there are four colors: red, blue, white, and yellow. I’ve added a custom color option as well. I’ll start with the blue kasina. As I breathe, the orb on screen expands and contracts with my breath. I’ll note my breath aloud:
In… out…
In… out…
In… out…
You can adjust the size of the kasina as well—from a tiny dot to a full-screen orb. At full expansion, the orb envelops your entire field of vision, mimicking the experience of meditative absorption. This is classic jhāna territory: entering into and merging with the object.
You can also change the background and choose different color themes. For example, a red kasina against a dark red background deepens the absorption in the color itself. After 10 minutes, the effect can become quite psychedelic—what I’d call a “technodelic” experience.
The custom color feature lets you find what you resonate with. Something dark and rich? Something cool and calming? It’s up to you.
And that’s the Breath Kasina in a nutshell: a simple, visual meditation tool that reflects your breath back to you. It’s a bridge between the visual pull of digital kasinas and the grounding pull of somatic awareness—an integration of head and body, form and flow.
There’s still time to join this experimental course, and be among the first people to work extensively with the Breath Kasina. During this 10-week guided training we’ll be diving into the process of using the breath kasina to develop embodied concentration.
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