First off just to note the word nibana sometimes in saying script known as nirvana is not a place, it's not a location, it is a verb that means extinguishing, cooling down, putting out a fire, blowing out, actually the word, the etymology of the word is literally to blow out something like a candle.

And in Buddhism it's associated with blowing out the fires of

craving hatred of craving, hatred, self-fixation, so forth that add needless suffering to our lives.

It doesn't put out the necessary emotional pains that we can't get through life

without experiencing. It's not possible to live without feeling at times loneliness, sadness, anger, fear, all those are

universal emotions but as the Buddha noted in the second noble truth, a lot of our suffering is a reaction to life that is based on this idea that somehow we can figure out a way to live without experiencing any suffering

and that actually adds so much more suffering into the mix.

So this these practices are about cooling down,

establishing a new relationship with our experience

so that we can be with life in a profoundly different way.

So, Somedy is essentially tranquility, but it's associated with concentration meditation.

Concentration meditation practices are pretty much what you would think they are from the word concentration.

You select an object and you keep it in awareness and even if other objects or sensations or thoughts or body feelings or whatever

come up you keep your focused attention on the object that you've selected.

So generally the way it works is that we select an object that's very pleasant. It would be kind of pointless and stupid to

focus your attention on the least comfortable sensation in your body unless you were trying to establish discomfort.

And, or you might start by focusing your awareness on a sensation that is ongoing, like the breath or just

a body sensation in a certain area that's neutral. Now if you choose a neutral object there's some benefits for that which is

one, neutral objects don't tend to activate your midbrain, your amygdala, your

hypothelmus, excuse me. So it actually decreases the amount of

reactivity, agitation, the release of stress hormones like

cortisol by keeping your awareness on an ongoing neutral sensation like for example

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