learn · 2026-09-19 · 4 min read
Which of the 112 Vigyan Bhairav Tantra techniques a beginner can actually do
The Vigyan Bhairav Tantra is a dialogue. Devi asks Shiva the largest questions there are (what is reality, what is consciousness, where is liberation), and Shiva doesn't answer with a philosophy. He answers with a hundred and twelve techniques. Try this. And this. And this.
I've made all 112 into guided meditations, voiced by Ishta Devata Shiva: a short introduction and a fifteen-minute sitting for each, two hundred and twenty-four tracks, forty-four hours. It's the largest single thing I've made, and on the old site it was the most chosen: more than half of everyone who took a course by donation took this one. Making the whole course, one doorway at a time, taught me something the text itself doesn't say: which of the hundred and twelve a beginner can actually walk through today, which open only to a trained mind, and what the difference is.
The text isn't a ladder. The techniques aren't steps; each is a complete doorway in itself, and a person who goes all the way through one of them needs none of the others. That's why the course isn't organised as first this, then that. But it's also why a beginner, given all hundred and twelve at once, tends to walk through none of them. A hundred and twelve open doors is a corridor, not a practice.
So the course does the one thing the text doesn't: it says where to start.
The first twelve techniques are breath techniques. Attention to the two breaths; the turn of the breath; the fusing of in-breath and out-breath; the pause; the point between the eyebrows; the gap between two breaths. Then, still through the breath, the ones that use it to go further: over dreams and death itself; know the knower; lie down as dead; stop the doors of the senses; weightless.
That order isn't mine. It's the numbering the 112 are best known by, and it opens with the breath, as the Sanskrit text does. But I'd have chosen it anyway, because a beginner arrives with one instrument that already works, and it's the breath. A person who's never sat can be told feel the turn of the breath and can feel it within a minute. There's no belief to adopt and no skill to acquire first. The doorway is right there, and it's the same doorway the Buddha's ānāpānasati, attention to the breath, uses: the technique every Vipassana course opens with, and the one I spent my own first years on.
This is also why, on toUnknown, the first five sittings of this course are open to anyone with an account. Not as a sample. Because they're the five a beginner can genuinely do, and they're meant to be done, not previewed.
The ones a beginner can do
Anything that takes the breath, the body sitting still or a plain sensation as its doorway. In the first sittings, four of them.
The two breaths, and the turn between them: the in-breath ends, and before the out-breath begins there's a turn. Attention rests there. It's technique one, and the one I'd give anyone on their first day. Then the pause: after the out-breath, before the next in-breath, the breath stops of its own accord for a moment. Not held, stopped. Attention rests in the stop, and beginners find it within a sitting or two.
The point between the eyebrows is simpler still, a point and attention on it, and one of the fastest routes to a quiet mind that I know. And lying down as if dead: the body still, the breath allowed, the whole thing let go of. Beginners find this easy, and often the deepest of the early ones, because there's nothing to achieve in it.
What these share: the doorway is a physical fact you can find in under a minute, and the instruction is to stay with it. No concentration is required in advance; the technique builds the concentration as you do it.
The ones that have to wait
Some of the hundred and twelve presuppose a mind that can already hold one object steadily for the length of a sitting. Know the knower (attention turned back onto attention itself) is a doorway only if attention can be held still enough to be turned. Stop the doors of the senses asks for a withdrawal that a scattered mind can't perform; it'll spend the fifteen minutes noticing the doors are still open. Weightless, and the techniques later in the text that work with light, sound, space and the dissolving of the body, ask you to observe something subtle, and subtle things are invisible to a mind that's still coarse.
A beginner who tries these first isn't failing. They're trying to look through a lens that hasn't been ground yet. The technique is fine; the instrument isn't ready. I made all hundred and twelve available because a practitioner will want them, and because the text is whole and should be taught whole. But the introductions say plainly, for each one, what it presupposes, and the honest advice for anyone new is to stay with the breath doorways until they open, which takes weeks, not days. Then the rest of the text stops being a corridor and becomes a map.
One more thing, because the word puts people off. Tantra, in this text, isn't what the word has come to mean. The Vigyan Bhairav Tantra is a practical science of consciousness: precise inner methods, meant to be experienced rather than studied. There's nothing in it to believe. Shiva doesn't ask Devi to accept anything; he asks her to try something and see. That's the same spirit as the Vipassana I came from, and it's why a Vipassana practitioner can teach this text without contradiction: both are methods, both are tested in your own experience, and both begin with the breath.
Start with the breath. Stay there longer than you want to.
Start the 112 techniquesMore from Learn
