$1,295 is quite a steep price. Even with the $200 referral code discount, $1,095 is still a steep price.
What is the interactive or personalized aspect of the online "retreats"? Why couldn’t they be delivered as video on-demand (like a YouTube playlist), audio on-demand (like a podcast), or an app like Headspace or 10% Happier?
From some poking around, I found that Jhourney has been doing retreats for at least 2 years, and possibly longer. It’s hard to believe that the following could be true:
-That around 40% of participants have a transformative experience (about 66% of participants say they experienced a jhana and about 60% of that 66% say it was the best thing to happen to them in at least the past six months).
-That the people who have a transformative experience also have some sort of lasting, sustainable improvement to their lives long-term.
-That Jhourney’s way of teaching meditation is so much different from and better than other ways of teaching meditation that have been broadly accessible for years — such as apps like Headspace or any number of meditation teachers or retreats that exist seemingly in (or near) every major city in North America — that it produces transformative experiences and sustained life improvement at a much higher rate.
This might be more believable if Jhourney had just developed this program and tried it out for the first time. But, as I said, they have been doing retreats for at least 2 years. It seems dubious the results could be this good without making more of a splash.
It also stokes the fires of my skepticism that this allegedly transformative knowledge is kept behind a $1,295 paywall. If Jhourney’s house blend of jhana meditation makes you more altruistic, why wouldn’t the people who work at Jhourney try to share it widely with the world? That’s what I would do if I had developed a meditation program that I thought was really producing these sorts of results.
Maybe I would still need to charge something for it rather than make it completely free. A 1-year Headspace subscription costs $70. Maybe something in that ballpark.
Jhourney reminds me of Transcendental Meditation (TM), which charges $1,400 for meditation instruction that — from what I hear — is not very differentiated from what you can get for free or cheap. TM also makes extreme claims about the kinds of results it produces for people.
My impression of TM is that it’s basically a scam. They are secretive, charge an inordinate amount of money, don’t seem to produce better results than what you can get from Headspace or your typical local meditation teacher, and make claims about the benefits of the practice that far exceed the actual benefits.
I’m inclined to believe that Jhourney is similar. People do have transformative experiences — with meditation, with spiritual retreats, with pilgrimages like the Camino de Santiago (or secular walks like the Pacific Coast Trail), with religion, with psychedelics, with therapy, with all sorts of things — but that’s different from what Jhourney seems to be claiming. Again, what I’m specifically skeptical of is:
-That a high percentage of people (e.g. 40%) will have a transformative experience.
-That this transformative experience or impression of having a transformative experience will lead to positive long-term life changes.
-That the percentage of people who experience something transformative, the magnitude of the transformative experience, or the long-term effects marks a radical departure from the experiences people have been having for decades in North America with meditation, psychedelics, and therapy.
In addition to meditation and the other normal things, I have tried all kinds of weird things like nootropics, hypnosis/hypnotherapy, and binaural beats. I am open to trying weird things. Another way to put it is that I’m sort of an "easy mark" for self-help fads.
So, when I read this post I was tempted to believe that Jhourney had invented a non-pharmacological version of the Limitless pill. But, for the reasons I just gave, Jhourney’s narrative doesn’t add up for me.
When they release the $70 app, maybe I’ll try it then.
Fair and understandable criticisms. Some quick responses:
1) I've attempted to share resources and pointers that I hope can get people similar benefits for free without signing up for a retreat (like Rob Burbea's retreat videos, Nadia Asparouhova's write-up with meditation instructions, and other content). Since I found most of these after my Jhourney retreat I can't speak from experience about their effectiveness. I'd be excited for more people to experiment and share what does and doesn't work for them, and for people with more experience to share what's worked for them (on the meditation front, emotion processing, and more). I also don't intend to suggest that Jhourney has access to insights that are only discoverable by doing one of their retreats. They do seem to be taking the prospect that jhanas can be accessed quickly much more seriously than many others, and have encouraging results.
2) As I mentioned, my experience appears to have been somewhat of an outlier, and I don't have a great understanding as to why. Insofar as whatever worked for me can help others, I aim to share. That said, Twitter discourse about jhanas and Jhourney seems to match my impression, other unaffiliated people have discussed Jhourney retreats seeming to generate many outlier positive experiences.
3) It doesn't surprise me at all that there's low-hanging fruit on the mindfulness front. Buddhist texts are very poorly (anti-helpfully) translated. There has not been that much serious exploration, optimization pressure, and investment into improving and democratizing mindfulness education and wellbeing. This extends beyond mindfulness. Why did it take as long as it did for GLP-1 medications to become widespread? Many self-help interventions are incentivized against actually fixing people's problems (e.g. therapists stop getting paid if they permanently fix your problems). There are other orgs that seem to generate very positive experiences working in related areas, like Art of Accomplishment content and courses for processing emotions, making better decisions, and better connecting with others.
4) I don't know Jhourney's team well and don't want to speak on their behalf (but I do think they're well-intentioned). I've found their official and staff Twitter accounts share the most relevant instructions they provide on retreat - e.g. they publicly discusscultivating positivity likely being more effective for accessing jhanas, forgiveness meditation (which I'm realizing I should add to the main post) and guided recordings, and many other insights.
My impression is that expected donations/fees for week-long meditation retreats is often in the $1000+ range (though granted this is for in-person retreats, and I haven't explored this in detail). We did have daily personalized instruction, and staff were available on-call throughout our retreat. Given how quickly Jhourney's retreats sell out, from a profit-maximizing perspective it seems like they could be charging more. I also don't know what they do with their profits. I wouldn't be surprised if they donated a decent amount, or spent it in ways they think make sense on altruistic grounds. They say in their blog post about their plans that they aspire to change the lives of tens of millions with the following steps:
Build a school to demonstrate that it's possible to transform wellbeing with meditation
Invest the money and attention from the school into technology to accelerate that process
Sorry for the very late reply to an ancient thread. Just want to point out one small thing that is not helping your case:
Many self-help interventions are incentivized against actually fixing people's problems (e.g. therapists stop getting paid if they permanently fix your problems).
This is a typical pseudoscience/fake medicine line. The doctors and pharma companies want you to be sick! That's their business model!
Doesn't add up.
[Edited on Nov. 22, 2025 at 10:15 PM to add: think about the incentives of the researchers who came up with cognitive behavioural therapy or who tested its efficacy. Think about the incentives of the clinical psychology professors or other instructors who teach therapists how to apply techniques like CBT. What are they incentivized to do? Are they incentivized, in any plausible way, to develop of teach techniques that don't work? Skeptical, iconoclastic, anti-establishment hunches like these about science or medicine typically start to look implausible very quickly when you start to look at them more closely.]
What is the interactive or personalized aspect of the online “retreats”? Why couldn’t they be delivered as video on-demand (like a YouTube playlist), audio on-demand (like a podcast), or an app like Headspace or 10% Happier?
I mean, Jhourney is far from the only organisation that offers online retreats. Established meditation centres like Gaia House, Plum Village and DeconstructingYourself—to name but a few—all offer retreats online (as well as in person).
If Jhourney’s house blend of jhana meditation makes you more altruistic, why wouldn’t the people who work at Jhourney try to share it widely with the world? That’s what I would do if I had developed a meditation program that I thought was really producing these sorts of results.
Jhourney’s initial product is a meditation retreat. In the past ~12 months, we’ve created a modern school for learning how to have joyful meditative experiences. We teach in a week what was previously thought to require hundreds or thousands of hours of practice. […]
While this is great progress, we see meditation retreats as just a stepping stone to building a bigger movement. We’re not simply a retreats company aspiring to teach thousands of people meditation. We’re an applied research company aspiring to change the lives of tens of millions.
[…]
From here, we’ll build a lab to research ways to make it easier and faster, inspiring more people to join the cause. Eventually, we’ll develop novel deeptech for wellbeing that goes beyond meditation retreats.
I personally wouldn’t bet on the neurotech approach working; however, I’m inclined to believe that Jhourney is making a sincere effort to share their findings with the world.
It also stokes the fires of my skepticism that this allegedly transformative knowledge is kept behind a $1,295 paywall.
I agree that it’s reasonable to be skeptical of paywalled content—there are all kinds of scams out there. But in Jhourney’s case, I expect they are putting their operating income towards their research lab. Note also that they offer need-based scholarships.
COI note: I attended an online Jhourney retreat last year.
Do those other meditation centres make similarly extreme claims about the benefits of their programs? If so, I would be skeptical of them for the same reasons. If not, then the comparison is inapt.
If I had developed a meditation program that I really thought did what Jhourney is claiming their meditation program does, I would not be approaching it this way. I would try to make the knowledge as widely accessible as I could as quickly as possible. Jhourney has been doing retreats for over two years. What's the hold up?
Transcendental Meditation (TM)'s stated justification for their secrecy and high prices is that TM requires careful, in-person, one-on-one instruction. What's Jhourney's justification for not making instructional videos or audio recordings that anyone can buy for, say, $70?
Could it be just commercial self-interest? But, in that case, why hasn't the jhana meditation encouraged them to prize altruism more? Isn't that supposed to be one of the effects?
I'm willing to make some allowance for personal self-interest and for the self-interest of the business, of course. But selling $70 instructional materials to millions of people would be a good business. And the Nobel Peace Prize comes with both a $1 million cash prize and a lot of fame and acclaim. Similarly, the Templeton Prize comes with $1.4 million in cash and some prestige. There are other ways to capitalize on fame and esteem, such as through speaking engagements. So, sharing a radical breakthrough in jhana meditation with the world has strong business incentives and strong personal self-interest incentives. Why not do it?
The simplest explanation is that they don't actually have the "product" they're claiming to have. Or, to put it another way, the "product" they have is not as differentiated from other meditation programs as they're claiming and does not reliably produce the benefits they're claiming it reliably produces.
Do those other meditation centres make similarly extreme claims about the benefits of their programs? If so, I would be skeptical of them for the same reasons. If not, then the comparison is inapt.
Why would the comparison be inapt?
A load-bearing piece of your argument (insofar as I’ve understood it) is that most of the benefit of Jhourney’s teachings—if Jhourney is legit—can be conferred through non-interactive means (e.g., YouTube uploads). I am pointing out that your claim goes against conventional wisdom in this space: these other meditation centres believe (presumably), much like Jhourney does, that their teachings can’t be conferred well non-interactively. I’m not sure why the strength of claimed benefits would come into it?
(I will probably drop out of this thread now; I feel a bit weird about taking on this role of defending Jhourney’s position.)
Sorry, this is an incredibly late reply in a (by Internet standards) ancient comment thread.
My point is about differentiation. If Jhourney is saying their work confers benefits on approximately the same level as the many meditation centres you can find all over the place, then I have no qualms with that claim. If Jhourney, or someone else, is saying that Jhourney's work confers benefits far, far higher than any or almost any other meditation centre or retreat on Earth, then I'm skeptical about that.
Transcendental Meditation or TM is an organization that claims far, far higher benefits from its techniques than other forms of meditation, insists on in-person teaching, and charges a very high fee. It's viewed by some people as essentially a scam and some people as a sort of luxury product that is not particularly differentiated from the commodity product.
I'm not saying Jhourney is like Transcendental Meditation, I'm just noting that similar claims have been made in the area of meditation before with a clear financial self-interest to make these claims, and the claims have not been borne out. So, there is a certain standard of evidence a company like Jhourney has to rise above, a certain level of warranted skepticism it has to overcome.
Do they offer refunds for people who do not have great experiences? I think this would make sense to attract more people if the results really were as good as suggested by the above.
On the topic of shame and guilt, I really want to recommend what the emotions researcher Brené Brown says about the topic. The best, quickest way to understand what she has to say about shame and guilt is to watch her two TED Talks in release order.
The first talk, on vulnerability, only lightly touches on shame, but it provides context for the second talk, without which the second talk will make less sense.
The second talk, on shame, explicitly gets into shame and guilt, the differences between them, and the difference between their effects on behaviour.
Here's the core distinction, which she gives in the second talk:
The thing to understand about shame is, it's not guilt. Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is "I am bad." Guilt is "I did something bad." ... There's a huge difference between shame and guilt.
And here's what you need to know. Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders.
And here's what you even need to know more. Guilt, inversely correlated with those things. The ability to hold something we've done or failed to do up against who we want to be is incredibly adaptive. It's uncomfortable, but it's adaptive.
I think there's probably such a thing as maladaptive guilt too. I vaguely remember Brené Brown briefly talking about this somewhere. If you feel guilt about something that's not your fault and you can't control, or if your guilt is way out of proportion to what you did wrong, then maybe those could be cases where guilt is maladaptive.
But most of the time people are saying "guilt" when what they're talking about it shame — a focus on self. So, most of the problems people have with "guilt" can actually be attributed to shame.
Further resources beyond the TED Talks:
-Brené Brown's book I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't), about shame and shame resilience
-Brené Brown's audio program The Power of Vulnerability (you can find it on Audible), in which shame and shame resilience are a major topic
-A more textbook-style book that Brené Brown recommends (and which I've only read a bit of but which seems good), Shame and Guilt by June Price Tangney and Ronda L. Dearing, if you are interested in a more quantitative or more academic dive into the research
Another Jhourney attendee, Nadia Asparouhova, has done a writeup of her experiences with some instructions for hopefully achieving the jhanas, which seems potentially helpful; the instructions are nicely succinct and concrete.
Nadia later worked with Jhourney to write the most extensive report yet (tweetstorm summary) on how jhanas improve the well-being of meditators, including claims like "2x more likely to report changes in lifestyle (84% vs. 41%), 1.5x more likely to report changes in thoughts + beliefs (92% vs. 59%), more kindness, awareness of pleasure, and reduced cravings". I find Nadia's claims somewhat more believable because, to quote her:
I am not a meditator. (Even after experiencing the jhanas, I still have no desire to develop a meditation practice.) Nor am I a “spiritual seeker” of the sort you might find at Burning Man or a Vipassana retreat. ...
If you’re raising an eyebrow right now, I must once again stress that I, too, did not believe this was a thing. I arrived at the retreat feeling rather silly for being there. I left astonished, and perplexed, as to why barely anyone has studied the jhanas at all. ...
I am less interested in making the argument that everyone should try the jhanas. But it seems to me that if people can access these experiences with relatively little mental effort – and to do so legally, for free – more ought to know that such a thing exists. At the very least, shouldn’t there be more than three published studies about it?
How long does the happiness continue when you're not meditating? A range of times would be helpful
Initially the afterglow would last 30 minutes to a few hours. Over time it's gotten closer to a default state unless various stressors (usually work-related) build up and I don't spend enough time processing them. I've been trading off higher mindfulness to get more work done and am not sure if I'm making the right trade-offs, but I expect it'll become clearer over time as I get more data on how my productivity varies with my mindfulness level.
How long does it take you to get into the state each time?
When my mindfulness levels are high it can be almost instantaneous and persist outside of meditation. When it's not, I can still usually get to a fairly strong jhana within 30 minutes.
How many hours of meditation did you have to do before you could reliably achieve the state?
In my case maybe 5-8 hours of meditation on retreat before the earlier jhanas felt easy to straightforwardly access? I did get lucky experiencing a jhana quite early on during my retreat. I also found cold showers and listening to my favorite music pre-meditation made getting into a jhana much faster.
What percentage of the time when you try to get into the state do you succeed?
You speak of the difference between jhana and breath practice. Is it mainly just the object of concentration (i.e. the breath vs creating a whole body positive feeling)? Or is it more than that?
I intended to distinguish upregulated breathing/controlled hyperventilation like the linked video from (any kind of) meditation with the intention of getting into jhanas.
I also was on a plateau with breath-work meditation (although it did bring good benefits). And different people resonate differently to different meditation techniques, so it's worth trying a lot of them. This one sounds very promising.
I won't be able to attend this one, but I could do the one after the summer. Do they have a "stay notified for future session" link?
Thanks! You can fill out this form to get notified about future retreats. Their in-person retreats might well be worth doing as well if you're able to, and generate similar results according to their survey. They're more expensive and require taking more time off work. But given their track record I wouldn't be surprised if it was worth the money and time. I have a friend who has done an in-person and online retreat with them and preferred the in-person one.
That said, I have a hard time imagining my experience being as positive doing the retreat in person, largely because I got a lot of value out of feeling comfortable expressing my emotions however felt natural (and crying in particular). I would not have felt comfortable potentially disrupting others while meditating in the same room.
And strong +1 to trying things. I wish I had read Romeo Steven's meditation FAQ (and the rest of his blog) years ago, and this excerpt in particular.
There needs to be some sort of guiding principle on when to keep going and when to try something different. The answer, from surveys and measurements taken during longer term practice intensives, seems to be about 30 hours of practice. If a practice hasn't shown some sort of tangible, legible benefit in your thinking process, emotional stability, or skillful behavior in the world it very very likely isn't the practice for you right now. This doesn't mean it is a bad practice or that others might not derive great benefit from it. This also doesn't mean it might not be useful to you in the future. But it isn't the practice for you right now. Granted, there are exceptions to every rule, and some people get something out of gritting their teeth and sticking with a practice for a long time. But I strongly suspect they could have had an easier time trying other things. 30 hours might sound like a long time, but its just a month of practice at one hour per day. This caps how much of a time waste any given technique is. In the beginning it is very likely that you can get away with less: two weeks of practice time should show some results. If you try lots of things for two weeks each and nothing works you may need to resort to the longer standard of 30 hours.
Jhourney recommends approaching meditation like a scientist outside of sessions (e.g. considering experiments and variables to isolate), but with child-like playfulness while meditating. I've found that approach quite helpful. It led to an impromptu experiment to listen to music to amplify positive emotions while meditating, which IIRC preceded my first jhana of the retreat.
Thanks for writing this up, I stumbled upon this recently and have found it to be a really great resource! I appreciate the level of detail you went into both with your personal reflections and all the content you linked.
One of my yoga instructors does guided breath-work similar to the one you linked in the post, I've been going pretty regularly with a few friends and it's been an extremely positive experience. Seeing you refer to it as a "lower-commitment test" made the rest of the article extremely motivating for me as I had gotten so much just from 5-10 minutes per week :)
TLDR: Significant, lasting benefits from meditation can be experienced quite quickly (within a few hours speaking from personal experience). I'd strongly consider giving jhana meditation a shot. My online Jhourney retreat was easily the best week of my life, and many others have had similarly positive experiences. Many (EA) friends have also sustainably increased their wellbeing and productivity after doing jhana meditation - both through Jhourney retreats and on their own (I share some resources on how you can explore it below).
Disclaimer: I wanted to get this post out quickly since a work-compatible, remote meditation retreat I’d strongly recommend is starting soon (Thursday May 15th), and likely won’t be run again online for four months. Many of the benefits and insights I discuss are based on personal experience, and not backed up in the post with statistics/science (though I presume this is possible in most cases). I plan to write a more well-researched piece in the future.
Summary
The jhanas are a set of non-addictive states of extraordinary bliss and peace, typically accessed through meditation. Upregulated breathwork like this seems to yield positive results within less time (per session - e.g. see this study where they compared the effects of meditation vs different types of breathwork for 5 minutes per day for a month). That said, the peaks appear to be less pronounced, and the changes less long-lasting. There’s an upcoming work-compatible Jhourney retreat (which takes a data-driven, secular approach to jhana meditation) starting next week (May 15).
I was told that Jhourney plans to host more in-person retreats over the summer, but won’t have more remote full-time and work-compatible retreats until after the summer. Here’s the registration link. DM me if you’d like a discount code. I have no financial incentives to get people to sign up and have no affiliation with Jhourney (though I will be volunteering with them for their upcoming retreat). They didn’t ask or pay me to write this.
I’d also encourage readers to explore (jhana) meditation on their own (I recommend this Rob Burbea retreat) and related topics (e.g. secular Buddhism, understanding the brain and nervous system, how emotions influence our cognition and decision-making, predictive processing, etc). I share more content recommendations below.
I think the above reviews over-emphasize the value of experiencing jhanas and under-emphasize the many other benefits of meditation discussed below
Instead of focusing attention on the breath, they recommend cultivating a positive emotion in the mind and body (e.g. joy, compassion, love, peace), and embracing all feelings and thoughts.
Six years of on-and-off breath-focused meditation targeted at improving concentration by focusing on the breath brought me frustratingly little progress. I saw clearer benefits from <2 hours of jhana meditation. If you’ve tried breath-focused meditation and haven’t gotten much out of it, I’d still strongly consider jhana meditation.
Large, sustained positive changes can happen quite quickly.
Another Jhourney retreat participant experienced all the jhanas and cessation/awakening over two retreats within ~20 hours). I had a similar experience on my first retreat (though I haven’t yet had a cessation/awakening experience), and hypothesize about why my experience may have been particularly positive below. You can read a report on 61 Jhourney retreat attendees’ experiences here. They acknowledge the analysis is subject to response bias which likely inflates numbers, but I also would guess their instruction has improved since releasing the report as they’ve gathered more data.
I’ve written about the most salient personal benefits that have persisted >1 month post-retreat below. Experiencing jhanas, learning how to do so reliably, and accompanying practices (e.g. insight meditation, emotion processing) is often reported to cause:
Reduced physical and emotional suffering, and increased fulfillment, energy, relaxation, joy, and peace.
Equanimity or emotional relaxation, lack of push-pull, or amelioration of the compulsive aspect to attractions and aversions
Increased productivity
Reduced cravings and impulses to engage in unendorsed stimulating behaviors (like watching YouTube, eating junk food, scrolling through social media)
Reduced procrastination, avoidance of aversive sensations, and occurrence of ugh fields
Heightened determination (stability of intent) and concentration (stability of attention)
Increased self awareness and knowledge (of your core values, how your mind works, etc), often caused by heightened sensory clarity and mindfulness
Increased compassion and a stronger inclinations towards altruistic thoughts and behavior.
Downsides:
Heightened sensitivity to emotions and physical sensations can initially feel overwhelming. In my experience, with practices like core transformation/internal family systems processing and other therapy, gratitude journaling, practicing loving kindness + compassion, and positive behavior change, the heightened sensitivity quickly (within 2 weeks) became very clearly net-positive.
It is probably helpful to be in a retreat setting to have the space to handle heightened sensitivity if you have a lot of difficult emotions to process like I did.
I think meditation tends to increase open-mindedness. Without sufficiently rigorous epistemics, this can make it easier to develop beliefs that lead to worse predictions. On the flip side, most people have tons of questionable conscious and unconscious beliefs that meditation can help us assess with increased clarity and equanimity.
People should also do their own research and exercise caution and consult relevant medical professionals before attempting to use meditation to address severe trauma, mental illness, etc.
Recommendations:
Try out jhana meditation on your own, and explore related content. I recommend Rob Burbea’s jhana retreat videos. I have a list of other recommendations below.
Consider signing up for a Jhourney retreat. Message me if you want a discount code to get $200 off (I have no financial referral incentive).
If you want to first try a lower-commitment test, try out this breathwork activity (to see that surprisingly pleasant somatic/mental states are possible without much time and no substances). I'd also recommend trying meditation after a breathwork session. I often start meditation sessions with breathwork now.
A friend’s reaction after trying breathwork (sober):
Benefits of jhana meditation that have lasted over a month post-retreat:
Grokking and leveraging the malleability of perception for increased wellbeing and reduced suffering.
Examples of the malleability of perception:
After an unpleasant conversation, it might be natural to feel stressed or frustrated, ruminating about how the conversation could have gone better. One could just as easily feel relief and gratitude that the conversation has ended, and relish the learning opportunity to improve their communication skills moving forward. Meditation can help automatically turn the former response into the latter.
I experienced what I’d consider a very unpleasant itch in normal experience as very pleasurable while in a jhana. This made me realize that classifying the pleasantness of the itch was something my mind had influence over, and was not an inherent property of the physical sensation.
Of course, the above examples generalize quite broadly.
Thanks to heightened sensory clarity (which I didn't have before accessing jhanas), I have a much clearer understanding of what goes on in my mind. In particular:
how my mind compresses, classifies (as positive/neutral/negative), and identifies with certain sensory data (especially thoughts, which seem much more personal and in our control and lead to much stronger identification than e.g. visual data).
This identification feels like a (by default) unpleasant "clenching" sensation, usually in my head, and causes a contraction of my awareness and attention (and causes fixation, rumination, etc). Relatedly, see this thread about the Buddhist concepts of tanha and dukkha, and how sensory clarity and concentration/tranquility helps us notice them.
how the above influences emotions and how they manifest in the body and mind
how these emotions, and resistance to them, influence the thoughts that arise and actions I take.
Reading Romeo Stevens' blog post (mis)Translating the Buddha helped contextualize many experiences and insights from meditation, and gave me a much greater appreciation of the extent to which many elements of Buddhism are more like first-person experiential science instead of faith-based/unscientific doctrine. I found Shinzen Young's table below (page 58 of this PDF, which I also recommend) helpful for identifying useful insights within Buddhism.
I've learned what happens when I (un)consciously resist feeling emotions and physical sensations - unnecessary, counterproductive suffering, and inadvertently amplifying whatever I'm trying to resist.
Embracing all sensations has quickly reaped benefits. I've made shockingly fast progress on previously debilitating phobias, irrational fears (e.g. excessive fear of judgment, which prevented me from writing up this post earlier), and not letting shame/guilt/anxiety dictate my actions.
I've learned how to better relax my nervous system, so (the somatic/energetic manifestations of) emotions can move with less resistance through my body, and so related thoughts arise in conscious experience more quickly (to acknowledge, embrace, question, process, etc).
Pain is not the unit of effort.Suffering is not the unit of caring. I have a much stronger intuitive understanding of how much more effective positive behavior motivation is compared to negative/avoidance-based motivation(which prompted helpful exploration). I've realized that in ~all cases, persistent "negative" emotions, while they serve a useful purpose, are better served by positive emotions.
Motivating the behavior and thinking I wish to see in myself by feeling compassion and love is much more effective and enjoyable than feeling guilt (which mostly causes avoidance around whatever is associated with punishment).
I can believe it's plausible that humanity might go extinct (or that tons of sentient animals are being tortured all the time, or take your pick) without feeling stress or despair. In fact, feeling stressed about these probably isn't helpful for me or the world. Not feeling stressed doesn't mean I don't care. What matters is the actions I take.
The above has led to cohesion among inner parts, resulting in (delightfully empowering) self-confidence and trust. Interestingly, my interest in improving my calibration has increased as a corollary of enjoying how good it feels to trust myself and wanting to lean into it further.
My inner dialogue is much kinder by default, and I have easy access to self-love akin to having a crush on myself (minus the physical attraction) that previously seemed unimaginable.
My inner voice has become so pleasant that usually the bar for doing things other than being with my thoughts has become quite high (surpassing ~all avoidant behavior I previously engaged in). My inner critic is much quieter, and I don’t believe it like I used to. This has come without e.g. changes in my perception of myself relative to others - comparisons mostly feel unnecessarily isolating.
Nick Cammarata has some fascinating Twitter threads about how valuable self-love is and how good it can feel (along with tons of other great tweets about meditation, jhanas, processing feelings, and more). FWIW, I have not tried MDMA (which Nick discusses in one of the threads).
Productivity benefits
I’ve come to better understand that my impulses for avoidant (and more broadly unendorsed) behavior likely stem from resistance to unpleasant emotions, thoughts, and physical sensations. This understanding has caused me to embrace and process these feelings instead of avoiding them by procrastinating. Over time, this has significantly reduced the frequency and strength of these avoidant impulses, and led to me spending my time much better.
Increased concentration: 6 years of on-and-off breath-focused meditation targeted at improving concentration by focusing on the breath brought me little progress (Stages 1-4 in The Mind Illuminated). Just 2 hoursof jhana meditation gave me access to a level of concentration (perhaps more helpfully translated as tranquility) I’d previously never experienced. Within 5 days of my Jhourney retreat, I got to Stage 9/10 consistently, inside and outside meditation. This has mostly persisted while not processing aversive emotions - though I have spent a lot of time (that I likely would have otherwise spent engaging in avoidant behavior) on this post retreat. I think this has been quite helpful for making continued progress.
More altruistically inclined thoughts and actions by default
This has mostly come from experimenting with expanding awareness and (my perception’s) boundaries of the “self”. One deep meditation session exploring infinite consciousness (Jhana 6) almost fully eradicated my previously persistent cravings to eat meat.
This is something I’ve wanted for a long time, and I don’t expect this change for people who wouldn’t want it.
Shifting attention from my head to my heart/solar plexus and gut naturally leads to less self-focused, and more altruistic and pleasant thoughts and impulses. I don’t have a great sense of why yet, but I expect there are good explanations online. It’s easier to naturally operate from an impartial, compassionate, scope-sensitive universe/multiverse/whatever-wide perspective, rather than focusing on myself (which naturally generates more self-focused behavior and thoughts, and tends to be much more unpleasant).
Clearer thinking
My experience has given me greater appreciation of, access to, and influence over subconscious processing and insights.
I appreciate how different it feels to know and believing things intellectually vs. deep down/subconsciously. I have a better (albeit still very weak) understanding of what it takes to turn conscious beliefs into subconscious beliefs - lots of patience, trusting my gut, and being OK with not having control over this process.
I have a much better sense of when my conscious and subconscious processing do not seem to be on the same page. This usually means I'm suppressing emotions that are trying to communicate something important, and the main signal is physical tension.
Greater emotional sensitivity and clarity has made it easier to understand:
how avoidance of aversive emotions clouds my judgment and decision-making, and exacerbates cognitive biases and motivated reasoning.
how to think more clearly to achieve my goals, and have my predictions better reflect reality (largely by doing less prediction and paying more attention to incoming sensory data instead).
My favorite meditation/dharma teacher is Rob Burbea, and this quote of his is one of the main reasons his instruction resonates with me:
“The concern that emptiness [in reference to the malleability/non-objectivity of perception] implies a kind of moral nihilism, an attitude that ‘we can do whatever we want because everything is empty’, and that following this path we will not care for the plight of others and the world, we can also test through our own practice. But we will find that as insight into these teachings deepens, we become, as a matter of course, more easily moved to concern for the world, and more sensitive to ethics and the consequences of our actions. Opening to voidness should definitely not lead to a lack of care, to indifference, cold aloofness, or a closing of the heart. If I find that my practice is somehow making me less compassionate, less generous, less caring about ethics, then something is wrong in my understanding or at the very least out of balance in my approach, and I need to modify how I am practising. Generally speaking, and although it may at first seem paradoxical, as we travel this meditative journey into emptiness we find that the more we taste the voidness of all things, the more loving-kindness, compassion, generosity, and deep care for the world open naturally as a consequence.”
I recommend checking out his jhana retreat videos, this Reddit post compiling highlights from them, and his talk transcripts. I particularly enjoyed The Meditator as Revolutionary. Rob Burbea’s retreat might be a good alternative to doing a Jhourney retreat. I only found these after doing my retreat so I can’t speak from experience.
Hypotheses for why I had an outlier positive retreat:
Hopefully some of these can help others get more out of jhana meditation
I caught up on sleep debt before the retreat started. My best sessions happened lying down, largely because that made it easier to relax.
I was in my own room for all my meditation, which made me more comfortable expressing emotions as they arose (many of my best sessions early on involved cathartic, sometimes audible, crying).
Confidence in my abilities due to early breakthroughs led to success spirals. I think self-doubt (e.g. worrying about whether you’re doing things right, or if you’re in/close to a jhana) often significantly hinders progress. Excitement to experiment and trusting myself (over meditation instructions I didn’t think would work well for me) paid dividends.
(As I imagine is the case for many EAs) I've internalized the arbitrariness of self/other distinctions - e.g. internalizing my wellbeing/suffering not being any more important than others’ and attempting to act accordingly, which I think naturally inclines one towards EA conclusions.
I can easily feel strong compassion and love for others (which I would also expect to be the case for many EAs).
Relevant quote from Rob Burbea: “The openness of heart... easily outweighs ... focus or concentration, in terms of its significance for jhāna practice… samādhi [~concentration + tranquility] is more dependent on open-heartedness than focus… samādhi is really about increasing subtlety and refinement.”
I have experienced emotions unusually strongly my whole life. This probably contributed to how quickly I was able to experience jhanas. On the flipside, concentration has always been a challenge, and made other meditation difficult.
I’m happy to share my personal retreat reflection with more details and the modified meditation instructions I use if you’re interested (feel free to DM). And feel free to share your experience with meditation and related topics in the comments. :)
I used AI to fix transcription errors, rerrarange the ideas, and suggest tweaks to the title and some sentences.
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* Kairos is directly a spinout of CEA and now handles most support for university AI safety groups. Basically everyone I've found who knows them is really excited about what they do
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In case it helps, I enhanced the audio of Rob Burbea's jhana retreat, which you can find here. :)