Evidence

Real practitioner conversations demonstrating how SATI identifies patterns and guides practice over time, plus performance metrics and honest limitations.

Practitioner Conversations

The following are anonymized excerpts from practitioner sessions. Each shows the initial presentation, detected patterns, and outcomes where available.

Practitioner A — Progress Fixation → First Access

1PRACTITIONER A — 4 months experience, daily practice
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3
4Session 1:
5"Every time I try to relax into the breath, my mind keeps checking
6if I'm doing it right. Like there's a part of me watching and
7evaluating constantly. The pleasant sensations come but then I
8notice I'm noticing them and they vanish."
9
10Detected: progress-fixation (67%), grasping-pleasure (58%)
11Strategy: SUGGEST
12
13Response guided toward: releasing the "watcher," allowing experience
14without commentary, body-based anchoring.
15
16───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
17
18Session 3 (1 week later):
19"Something shifted. I stopped trying to track where I was and just
20stayed with the pleasantness in my chest. It grew and spread to my
21whole body. Stayed for maybe 2 minutes before I got excited and
22lost it. But that's the longest yet."
23
24Detected: grasping-pleasure (42%), on-track signals detected
25Strategy: ENCOURAGE
26
27Outcome: First sustained access. Practitioner reported consistent
28access in 3 of next 5 sits.

Practitioner B — Fear of Depth → Breakthrough

1PRACTITIONER B — 2 months experience, 5x/week practice
2━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
3
4Session 1:
5"I can get to a pleasant state pretty reliably now but I can't seem
6to go deeper. It's like there's a ceiling. When the pleasure gets
7more intense I feel myself pulling back somehow."
8
9Detected: fear-of-depth (71%), premature-exit (54%)
10Strategy: CLARIFY — asked about the nature of the pulling back
11
12───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
13
14Session 2:
15"You asked what happens when I pull back. It's like... if I let go
16completely I don't know what will happen to 'me'. There's a fear of
17losing control or losing myself somehow."
18
19Detected: fear-of-depth (78%), insufficient-surrender (61%)
20Strategy: SUGGEST
21
22Response guided toward: normalizing the fear, small experiments with
23surrender, trust-building through incremental letting go.
24
25───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
26
27Session 5 (2 weeks later):
28"I finally let the intensity take me. It was like falling but safe.
29Everything got very still and bright. I think I understand now why
30you kept saying it requires trust."
31
32Detected: No antipatterns, strong on-track signals
33Strategy: ENCOURAGE
34
35Outcome: Breakthrough after working through fear. Practitioner noted
36this was the first time they'd allowed full absorption.

Practitioner C — Post-Retreat Adjustment

1PRACTITIONER C — 8 months experience, retreat + daily practice
2━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
3
4Session 1:
5"I had good access on retreat but now I'm home and can't find it
6anymore. I'm doing everything the same but nothing happens. Starting
7to wonder if the retreat experience was even real."
8
9Detected: expectation-mismatch (73%), doubt-spirals (68%)
10Strategy: ADVISE
11
12Response addressed: different conditions at home vs retreat, the
13trap of trying to recreate past experiences, working with doubt.
14
15───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
16
17Session 4 (3 weeks later):
18"Stopped trying to get back to 'retreat mind' and just worked with
19what's here. The access is different—shorter, less intense—but it's
20there. I think I was comparing too much."
21
22Detected: No antipatterns detected
23Strategy: ENCOURAGE
24
25Outcome: Adapted expectations to home practice context. Practitioner
26reported sustainable daily access at a moderate level.

Practitioner D — Concentration → Pleasure-Based Transition

1PRACTITIONER D — 6 weeks experience, new to jhana practice
2━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
3
4Session 1:
5"I've been meditating for years but just started trying jhana
6practice. I focus on the breath at my nostrils and try to notice
7any pleasant sensations. Sometimes there's a little tingle but
8nothing like what I've read about. Am I doing something wrong?"
9
10Detected: over-focusing-physical (64%), over-efforting (52%)
11Strategy: SUGGEST
12
13Response guided toward: broadening attention, emotional component
14of pleasantness, reducing concentration intensity.
15
16───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
17
18Session 2:
19"Tried being less focused on physical sensations specifically. Found
20a kind of contentment feeling that was already there when I stopped
21looking so hard. Is that what I should be working with?"
22
23Detected: No antipatterns, on-track signals (contentment recognition)
24Strategy: ENCOURAGE
25
26Response confirmed direction, suggested staying with contentment.
27
28───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
29
30Session 6 (1 month later):
31"The contentment grows reliably now when I give it attention without
32grabbing. Had a sit yesterday where it filled my whole body for
33several minutes. I think I understand the 'positive feedback loop'
34idea now—attention feeds the feeling, feeling draws attention."
35
36Detected: No antipatterns, strong on-track signals
37Strategy: ENCOURAGE
38
39Outcome: Successful transition from concentration-style meditation
40to pleasure-based jhana approach. 6 weeks from start to reliable access.

Practitioner E — Irregular Practice Adaptation

1PRACTITIONER E — 3 months experience, inconsistent practice
2━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
3
4Session 1:
5"I get frustrated because I can only practice 2-3 times a week and
6it feels like I'm always starting over. Just when I start to get
7somewhere, life gets busy and I lose it."
8
9Detected: session-structure (71%), expectation-mismatch (53%)
10Strategy: ADVISE
11
12Response addressed: realistic expectations for irregular practice,
13building from where you are each session, avoiding the "starting
14over" framing.
15
16───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
17
18Session 3:
19"Still only practicing a few times a week but I stopped thinking of
20it as 'starting over' each time. Treating each sit as complete in
21itself. Less frustration, and weirdly, more progress."
22
23Detected: No antipatterns
24Strategy: ENCOURAGE
25
26Outcome: Reframed relationship with irregular practice. While not
27achieving deep jhana, reported consistent pleasant states and
28reduced practice-related stress. Success case for realistic
29expectations over forcing a schedule.

Performance Metrics

System Metrics (as of latest evaluation)

1Classification Performance (n=127 interactions)
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3
4Metric                          Value
5───────────────────────────────────────
6Top-1 Accuracy                  64%
7Top-3 Accuracy                  89%
8Mean Calibrated Confidence      0.52
9Confidence-Accuracy Correlation 0.71
10False Positive Rate             23%
11Mean Response Latency           1.8s
12───────────────────────────────────────
13
14Strategy Distribution
15───────────────────────────────────────
16ADVISE    (high confidence)     18%
17SUGGEST   (moderate)            41%
18CLARIFY   (low confidence)      29%
19ENCOURAGE (on-track)            12%

Interpreting the Numbers

64% top-1 accuracy means the single most likely pattern was correct about two-thirds of the time. This is why we surface multiple hypotheses rather than committing to one.
89% top-3 accuracy means the correct pattern was almost always in our top three guesses—supporting the multi-hypothesis approach.
0.71 correlation between confidence and accuracy indicates calibration is working: when the system is confident, it's more likely to be right.
41% SUGGEST strategy reflects appropriate uncertainty—the system is hedging when it should.

Limitations

What This System Cannot Do

1Known Limitations
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3
41. ARTICULATION GAP
5   Practitioners often can't describe what's actually happening.
6   The system can only work with what's expressed, not the full
7   internal experience. Subtle antipatterns may be missed entirely.
8
92. PATTERN OVERLAP
10   Many antipatterns share surface indicators. "Trying too hard"
11   could indicate over-efforting, grasping, forcing transitions,
12   or several others. Disambiguation is imperfect.
13
143. FALSE CONFIDENCE
15   Despite calibration, the system occasionally shows high
16   confidence for ambiguous cases. The 23% false positive rate
17   means roughly 1 in 4 high-confidence detections may be wrong.
18
194. CONTEXT BLINDNESS
20   Each message is classified somewhat independently. The system
21   has limited ability to track subtle shifts across a conversation
22   or recognize when earlier advice isn't working.
23
245. CULTURAL BIAS
25   The antipattern framework and language patterns are derived from
26   English-speaking Western practitioners. Expressions of meditative
27   experience vary significantly across cultures.
28
296. NO PHYSICAL OBSERVATION
30   A human teacher can observe posture, breathing, facial micro-
31   expressions. This system has only text, missing embodied cues
32   that often reveal what words don't.
33
347. VALIDATION CEILING
35   We can measure whether practitioners report improvement, but we
36   cannot independently verify the quality of their meditative
37   states. Self-report has known limitations.

The fundamental hypothesis: Significant parts of jhana attainment are algorithmic and can be systematized. The goal is to identify these teachable patterns and scale access massively—returning contemplative practice to the many, not gatekeeping it for the few. Even where human teachers remain valuable, the algorithmic foundation can reach practitioners who would otherwise have no guidance at all.