Opinion

I did a jhana meditation retreat (in 2024) with Jhourney and it was okay.

​I wrote this in 2024 and lightly edited it in April 2026. It doesn’t substantively incorporate any post-2024 information, but Jhourney has continued to grow and seems to have a positive reputation in Berkeley circles, so I thought I’d post this as a slice of my experience at an earlier, virtual version of retreats they are still running today. I have not changed my mind on anything substantive, except where footnoted, and I stand behind my conclusions. It is not a strong general argument about jhanas, but rather a personal report about my experience at one retreat.—I attended a May 2024 Jhourney work-compatible virtual retreat, and left with a sense of uncertainty and many open questions.Jhourney is a company that runs meditation retreats with the explicit goal of getting attendees to “tap into profound joy and wellbeing on command” through a state of altered consciousness called a jhana, all “100x faster” than the usual hundred+ hours of meditation. See Asterisk for more in-depth descriptions of the phenomenon.At the time of my retreat, Jhourney’s website said[1]:”70% of our retreat participants have self-reported experiencing a jhana*For those who experienced a jhana70% say it’s the best thing that’s happened in 6 months or more15% say it’s the best thing that’s happened in their life.”Big if true!One concern is that jhanas can act as an internal source of pleasure that weakens engagement with the world. Patrick LaVictoire phrased this concern in response to a Jhourney testimonial quote[2] on a private Facebook thread in a rationalist group recruiting people to investigate jhanas:I want everyone working in AI barred from jhanas until such time as they ensure humanity doesn’t end. Anyone else is free to wirehead before then.I’m … reminded of the story I recently read of some AI researchers who were worried they were contributing to existential risk. Then they went out to the desert and did acid together, and when they came back they were just as productive but they no longer worried about causing the end of humanity.I want the most consequential people in history to be thinking exclusively about samsara and their effects on the physical world. Once the world is safe, they have my permission to seek wellbeing and delight without optimizing for their effects on humanity.In pursuit of discovering if Jhourney’s meditation retreats are worthwhile (or, the best thing ever) or likely to lead to loss of motivation to engage in the world, my friend Raj funded me attending their May 2024 work-compatible virtual meditation retreat, which he also attended.[3] We had these rough questions set out in advance:is Jhourney’s retreat experience awesome?what do jhanas feel like, granularly?could jhanas decrease engagement in the world and concern for others’ wellbeing?Here’s what I think, after spending 10 days putting the bulk of my attention into the virtual retreat, and then 3 months ruminating on it:[4]1: is Jhourney’s retreat experience awesome?I think the retreat programming was pretty good. The content was interesting, easily digestible, and immediately practicable. The facilitators managed to be extremely accessible (which is genuinely impressive over Zoom) seemed to truly care about us as participants, and were good at connecting the retreat content to my experience and suggesting things to try or next steps.However, the ‘work-compatible’ term as applied to the retreat was a stretch for me. Practically, Jhourney was another major responsibility on top of my normal workload. In order to make room for 4-5 hours of meditation, discussion, and reading per day, I cut socialization, my hobbies, my reading habit, going to the gym, and all the time I have reserved for slack. This left me very tired after the retreat ended.During the retreat period, I meditated for 1-4 hours a day without much trouble. This habit didn’t stick after the retreat ended. I had made too many compromises to fit that much meditation time, and didn’t want to keep making them when meditation had mostly been mildly nice rather than life-changing and blissful. A facilitator also made it very clear that you could not reasonably expect to make progress in your meditation practice without putting in two hours a day of practice, with an hour being maintenance and less than that declining.Two hours a day is a lot of time to dedicate when the benefits had for me, so far, been so mild. An hour of cardio, or art, or talking on the phone to my friends had much more immediate positive effect and two hours of focused time is enough to move the needle on some meaningful real project. I was not and am not sold on the cumulative, incremental benefits of meditation when it requires that much investment.However, the retreat wasn’t pointless. I still had the two important personal realizations (see §2). I also gained a skill of dropping into meditative awareness of my internal state in any context (on BART, in line at the grocery store, at parties, waiting in traffic), which gave me more grounding and a better ability to manage stress.[5]2: what do jhanas feel like, granularly?I think I might have achieved first jhana? But not super sure. Hard to answer this as such.However, jhanic meditation I can describe, for me: it’s kinda nice? Like a lesser version of a warm bath, or a cup of my favorite tea, or standing on a mountain and seeing a vista, except effortful, time-consuming, and lacking the tangibleness of baths and tea and mountains.The way you got there was to do meditation techniques oriented around cultivating joy and ease, with the goal being to create a recursive loop of feeling good because you are feeling good. At some point, strange mental states arise from your recursive loop, called jhanas.Once you’re in first jhana, the other jhanas can be reached through a linear process of letting go: of releasing tension for first jhana and feeling euphoria, then of letting go of high energy for second jhana and feeling contentment, and so on, through eight increasingly interesting-seeming states.It was indeed possible to cultivate enjoyment and ease, and not that hard, but this didn’t lead to much for me within the retreat. Enjoyment and ease are okay, they feel fine, but I realized that there’s a layer of endorsement backing the positive emotions that I enjoy feeling, and conjured emotions didn’t have it. Some deep part of my psychology was pretty sure that positive emotions are meant to relate to real, true things in the world; things about me and my behavior and about how the world reacted back; or about something beautiful and real that I am responding to. Generating the positivity in my head did not engage with the world; it was just with me.I did have an important realization: when going through life, I experience many kinds of emotions. When I have felt positive emotions, I have generally sought to hold onto them and been afraid they would go away. When I have felt negative emotions, I have typically braced against them and wished they would go away. Both of these orientations have a clutching, graspy nature. It is possible to relate entirely differently, and accept and lean into positive emotions, even ‘savor’ them. It is possible to do the same for negative emotions.The immediate, practical implication of this is that, when feeling something positive, I could amplify it and feel more positive. And negative emotions could be accepted and felt, and would stop feeling bad, because they were almost all trying to help me.[6]Another important realization from focusing deeply on positive feelings: all emotions usually have some kind of secondary, and even tertiary emotion to them. I might be feeling happy that I’m with my friends, and on a second-order, feeling anxious that I am feeling happy because I expect this feeling to be scarce, and on a third-order, feeling frustrated that I am feeling anxious about feeling happy, because this is undercutting the happiness. Or, I might be feeling angry on a first level, and feeling satisfied on a second level because I think the anger is justified.[7]It was hard to consistently maintain the enjoyment -> ease -> enjoyment loop though. The retreat was relatively short and I was interested in the greater wellbeing, agency, and freedom that I’d been told was the intended outcome. I was aware that this feeling of goal-orientation and self-pressure was counterintuitive to feeling enjoyment and ease, but couldn’t reliably relax it, in the same way as it’s hard to not think about elephants if you’re told not to think of elephants. As such, I spent a lot of time focusing on the guided meditations, performing the instructions, feeling what I imagine were the intended results, but feeling them faintly; or triggering a positive, good feeling, meditating on it, and then staying in a faintly pleasant plateau of positive feelings without ever leaving it, before eventually getting tired and dropping out.I don’t think this is entirely Jhourney’s fault. During the retreat, the facilitators and content focused almost entirely on practicing and refining the techniques, and didn’t talk too much about jhanas until the end.[8]I even found, and reckoned with my Protestant work ethic—a deeply felt sense that unearned positive emotions were cheating. To explain, something in me felt that when I tried to feel good, that meant there was no need for action and motion in the world. If I didn’t act and move, that would lead to stagnation and pain for me. I argued with this part that happiness did not need to be transactional and that motivating myself only through negative emotions was probably shortening my lifespan and biasing my judgment, and that feeling bad made it harder to act than feeling good.And after I did, maybe there was a moment where I briefly dipped into first jhana — a moment where it first felt like I was on the precipice of something, radiating joy in all directions. Where I felt like my whole body was spinning, falling pleasantly, which generated excitement, which mixed with the joy, which made it more intense. I had to keep reminding myself not to tense up though; and just when it felt like I was about to fall into something, or be subsumed by something larger, the bell rang, and the experience stopped.But for the briefest time, I was holding the sun inside myself; and my interior was a place where positive, bright happiness became incandescent, boundless joy. So, not at all useless or a waste of time, but also neither the best thing that ever happened to me nor the best thing that happened in the last 6 months. I got some useful introspective techniques and some evidence that the underlying phenomena are real. I did not get a decisive personal transformation, or enough steps on the road there to convince me it was worth walking to. 3: could jhanas decrease engagement in the world and concern for others’ wellbeing?Well, I did not escape craving outcomes in the world[9], and cannot be a first-person case study of this question; though I did get some weak evidence:There was a moment on the penultimate day where a facilitator said something I’d paraphrase as, “being able to sit down and summon transcendental happiness calls into question if pursuing happiness is worth doing and does weird, potentially undesirable things to your motivation structure.” The same facilitator also said that he had no life, or hobbies, and meditated constantly.When I asked about this, the reaction of other attendees seemed to me to be more socially reassuring than curious.However, while I like having a life and hobbies, one person who meditates constantly doesn’t provide conclusive evidence for anything because I don’t know what the meditation supplanted. Did they replace a rich, meaningful life with meditation, or go from something darker to something lighter? Spending > two hours a day deliberately feeling good emotions could be an extremely reasonable counterfactual for many people in the world. This concern is unresolved for me, though I have no decisive evidence.The picture I got, the picture it seemed like I was meant to get, from the attendees who had meditated a lot, from what the facilitators pointed to, was that meditation—jhanic or otherwise—is a series of steps towards a different self. With jhanas, you get a better self, hopefully; an agentic self living in picture-perfect HD with more energy and less aggravation; one that can meet its own needs internally, where all experiences you encounter in the world are fundamentally workable and tractable; and you don’t need to satiate or self-coerce with social media, pornography, drugs, negative emotions, or using people or experience instrumentally because you have real joy on tap whenever you want by way of a recursive feedback loop of feeling good about feeling good.Hopefully, you don’t need to spend 2 hours a day forever to maintain that self.And then it was overAnd I took away …a sense that goal-orientation was interfering with my ability to feel good, with no idea what to do about that[10]a somewhat healthier (or at least, more interesting) way of relating to negative emotions,a bemused wonder at how much time and investment (2 hours a day!) it would take to achieve something that seemed cool and that I had failed to get to with 10 partial days of effort,and the impression that there is something real about jhanas, that there is some set of phenomena that many people experience the same way, and that resemble powerful psychedelic drugs and may interact with motivation: possibly in ways that affect your drive to engage with the world; possibly in ways that drastically improve the texture of your experience of life.So, a good use of (someone else’s) $500.^this is from 2024 and I didn’t get a snapshot of the webpage, but you can see the copy quoted in this ACX comment for corroboration.^Shamil Chandaria, described on Jhourney’s website as “Oxford neuroscientist, ex-DeepMind”: “The jhanas may be the single most important thing on the planet right now. You may think it’s superintelligence or longevity. That’s nothing without wellbeing.”^I think not having made any financial investment in receiving an outcome made me feel more neutral and less invested from the start, since I was less susceptible to having a sunk money cost. However, from the future, I can see that it clearly gave me an investigative/analytical frame that I took with me.^… and then another two years not taking further action.^This seems to have faded over two years of time, without a meditation practice to sustain it.^I think this was also the core analytical insight I got from Existential Kink by Carolyn Elliot, which I remember people in my bay area circles being excited about in late 2022, but which insight I apparently hadn’t emotionally integrated in 2024. The Jhourney retreat did make it stick for me.^This also stuck, though I’m less skilled at remembering to reach for it.^However, looking back from 2026 at my day-to-day notes, I do notice two things: 1) that the OTHER STUDENTS CONSTANTLY TALKED ABOUT GETTING TO JHANA and what it was like. 2) that Jhourney’s marketing copy about jhanas was pretty hype and exciting. I can imagine that maybe this had something to do with the internal pressure 2024!me experienced towards goal orientation.^helllooooo samsara, my old friend^2026!me is pretty sure goals are good, but also that they can reasonably be localized to parts of your life that are suitable for goal-orientation, which may exclude your happiness-feeling architecture.Discuss ​Read More

​I wrote this in 2024 and lightly edited it in April 2026. It doesn’t substantively incorporate any post-2024 information, but Jhourney has continued to grow and seems to have a positive reputation in Berkeley circles, so I thought I’d post this as a slice of my experience at an earlier, virtual version of retreats they are still running today. I have not changed my mind on anything substantive, except where footnoted, and I stand behind my conclusions. It is not a strong general argument about jhanas, but rather a personal report about my experience at one retreat.—I attended a May 2024 Jhourney work-compatible virtual retreat, and left with a sense of uncertainty and many open questions.Jhourney is a company that runs meditation retreats with the explicit goal of getting attendees to “tap into profound joy and wellbeing on command” through a state of altered consciousness called a jhana, all “100x faster” than the usual hundred+ hours of meditation. See Asterisk for more in-depth descriptions of the phenomenon.At the time of my retreat, Jhourney’s website said[1]:”70% of our retreat participants have self-reported experiencing a jhana*For those who experienced a jhana70% say it’s the best thing that’s happened in 6 months or more15% say it’s the best thing that’s happened in their life.”Big if true!One concern is that jhanas can act as an internal source of pleasure that weakens engagement with the world. Patrick LaVictoire phrased this concern in response to a Jhourney testimonial quote[2] on a private Facebook thread in a rationalist group recruiting people to investigate jhanas:I want everyone working in AI barred from jhanas until such time as they ensure humanity doesn’t end. Anyone else is free to wirehead before then.I’m … reminded of the story I recently read of some AI researchers who were worried they were contributing to existential risk. Then they went out to the desert and did acid together, and when they came back they were just as productive but they no longer worried about causing the end of humanity.I want the most consequential people in history to be thinking exclusively about samsara and their effects on the physical world. Once the world is safe, they have my permission to seek wellbeing and delight without optimizing for their effects on humanity.In pursuit of discovering if Jhourney’s meditation retreats are worthwhile (or, the best thing ever) or likely to lead to loss of motivation to engage in the world, my friend Raj funded me attending their May 2024 work-compatible virtual meditation retreat, which he also attended.[3] We had these rough questions set out in advance:is Jhourney’s retreat experience awesome?what do jhanas feel like, granularly?could jhanas decrease engagement in the world and concern for others’ wellbeing?Here’s what I think, after spending 10 days putting the bulk of my attention into the virtual retreat, and then 3 months ruminating on it:[4]1: is Jhourney’s retreat experience awesome?I think the retreat programming was pretty good. The content was interesting, easily digestible, and immediately practicable. The facilitators managed to be extremely accessible (which is genuinely impressive over Zoom) seemed to truly care about us as participants, and were good at connecting the retreat content to my experience and suggesting things to try or next steps.However, the ‘work-compatible’ term as applied to the retreat was a stretch for me. Practically, Jhourney was another major responsibility on top of my normal workload. In order to make room for 4-5 hours of meditation, discussion, and reading per day, I cut socialization, my hobbies, my reading habit, going to the gym, and all the time I have reserved for slack. This left me very tired after the retreat ended.During the retreat period, I meditated for 1-4 hours a day without much trouble. This habit didn’t stick after the retreat ended. I had made too many compromises to fit that much meditation time, and didn’t want to keep making them when meditation had mostly been mildly nice rather than life-changing and blissful. A facilitator also made it very clear that you could not reasonably expect to make progress in your meditation practice without putting in two hours a day of practice, with an hour being maintenance and less than that declining.Two hours a day is a lot of time to dedicate when the benefits had for me, so far, been so mild. An hour of cardio, or art, or talking on the phone to my friends had much more immediate positive effect and two hours of focused time is enough to move the needle on some meaningful real project. I was not and am not sold on the cumulative, incremental benefits of meditation when it requires that much investment.However, the retreat wasn’t pointless. I still had the two important personal realizations (see §2). I also gained a skill of dropping into meditative awareness of my internal state in any context (on BART, in line at the grocery store, at parties, waiting in traffic), which gave me more grounding and a better ability to manage stress.[5]2: what do jhanas feel like, granularly?I think I might have achieved first jhana? But not super sure. Hard to answer this as such.However, jhanic meditation I can describe, for me: it’s kinda nice? Like a lesser version of a warm bath, or a cup of my favorite tea, or standing on a mountain and seeing a vista, except effortful, time-consuming, and lacking the tangibleness of baths and tea and mountains.The way you got there was to do meditation techniques oriented around cultivating joy and ease, with the goal being to create a recursive loop of feeling good because you are feeling good. At some point, strange mental states arise from your recursive loop, called jhanas.Once you’re in first jhana, the other jhanas can be reached through a linear process of letting go: of releasing tension for first jhana and feeling euphoria, then of letting go of high energy for second jhana and feeling contentment, and so on, through eight increasingly interesting-seeming states.It was indeed possible to cultivate enjoyment and ease, and not that hard, but this didn’t lead to much for me within the retreat. Enjoyment and ease are okay, they feel fine, but I realized that there’s a layer of endorsement backing the positive emotions that I enjoy feeling, and conjured emotions didn’t have it. Some deep part of my psychology was pretty sure that positive emotions are meant to relate to real, true things in the world; things about me and my behavior and about how the world reacted back; or about something beautiful and real that I am responding to. Generating the positivity in my head did not engage with the world; it was just with me.I did have an important realization: when going through life, I experience many kinds of emotions. When I have felt positive emotions, I have generally sought to hold onto them and been afraid they would go away. When I have felt negative emotions, I have typically braced against them and wished they would go away. Both of these orientations have a clutching, graspy nature. It is possible to relate entirely differently, and accept and lean into positive emotions, even ‘savor’ them. It is possible to do the same for negative emotions.The immediate, practical implication of this is that, when feeling something positive, I could amplify it and feel more positive. And negative emotions could be accepted and felt, and would stop feeling bad, because they were almost all trying to help me.[6]Another important realization from focusing deeply on positive feelings: all emotions usually have some kind of secondary, and even tertiary emotion to them. I might be feeling happy that I’m with my friends, and on a second-order, feeling anxious that I am feeling happy because I expect this feeling to be scarce, and on a third-order, feeling frustrated that I am feeling anxious about feeling happy, because this is undercutting the happiness. Or, I might be feeling angry on a first level, and feeling satisfied on a second level because I think the anger is justified.[7]It was hard to consistently maintain the enjoyment -> ease -> enjoyment loop though. The retreat was relatively short and I was interested in the greater wellbeing, agency, and freedom that I’d been told was the intended outcome. I was aware that this feeling of goal-orientation and self-pressure was counterintuitive to feeling enjoyment and ease, but couldn’t reliably relax it, in the same way as it’s hard to not think about elephants if you’re told not to think of elephants. As such, I spent a lot of time focusing on the guided meditations, performing the instructions, feeling what I imagine were the intended results, but feeling them faintly; or triggering a positive, good feeling, meditating on it, and then staying in a faintly pleasant plateau of positive feelings without ever leaving it, before eventually getting tired and dropping out.I don’t think this is entirely Jhourney’s fault. During the retreat, the facilitators and content focused almost entirely on practicing and refining the techniques, and didn’t talk too much about jhanas until the end.[8]I even found, and reckoned with my Protestant work ethic—a deeply felt sense that unearned positive emotions were cheating. To explain, something in me felt that when I tried to feel good, that meant there was no need for action and motion in the world. If I didn’t act and move, that would lead to stagnation and pain for me. I argued with this part that happiness did not need to be transactional and that motivating myself only through negative emotions was probably shortening my lifespan and biasing my judgment, and that feeling bad made it harder to act than feeling good.And after I did, maybe there was a moment where I briefly dipped into first jhana — a moment where it first felt like I was on the precipice of something, radiating joy in all directions. Where I felt like my whole body was spinning, falling pleasantly, which generated excitement, which mixed with the joy, which made it more intense. I had to keep reminding myself not to tense up though; and just when it felt like I was about to fall into something, or be subsumed by something larger, the bell rang, and the experience stopped.But for the briefest time, I was holding the sun inside myself; and my interior was a place where positive, bright happiness became incandescent, boundless joy. So, not at all useless or a waste of time, but also neither the best thing that ever happened to me nor the best thing that happened in the last 6 months. I got some useful introspective techniques and some evidence that the underlying phenomena are real. I did not get a decisive personal transformation, or enough steps on the road there to convince me it was worth walking to. 3: could jhanas decrease engagement in the world and concern for others’ wellbeing?Well, I did not escape craving outcomes in the world[9], and cannot be a first-person case study of this question; though I did get some weak evidence:There was a moment on the penultimate day where a facilitator said something I’d paraphrase as, “being able to sit down and summon transcendental happiness calls into question if pursuing happiness is worth doing and does weird, potentially undesirable things to your motivation structure.” The same facilitator also said that he had no life, or hobbies, and meditated constantly.When I asked about this, the reaction of other attendees seemed to me to be more socially reassuring than curious.However, while I like having a life and hobbies, one person who meditates constantly doesn’t provide conclusive evidence for anything because I don’t know what the meditation supplanted. Did they replace a rich, meaningful life with meditation, or go from something darker to something lighter? Spending > two hours a day deliberately feeling good emotions could be an extremely reasonable counterfactual for many people in the world. This concern is unresolved for me, though I have no decisive evidence.The picture I got, the picture it seemed like I was meant to get, from the attendees who had meditated a lot, from what the facilitators pointed to, was that meditation—jhanic or otherwise—is a series of steps towards a different self. With jhanas, you get a better self, hopefully; an agentic self living in picture-perfect HD with more energy and less aggravation; one that can meet its own needs internally, where all experiences you encounter in the world are fundamentally workable and tractable; and you don’t need to satiate or self-coerce with social media, pornography, drugs, negative emotions, or using people or experience instrumentally because you have real joy on tap whenever you want by way of a recursive feedback loop of feeling good about feeling good.Hopefully, you don’t need to spend 2 hours a day forever to maintain that self.And then it was overAnd I took away …a sense that goal-orientation was interfering with my ability to feel good, with no idea what to do about that[10]a somewhat healthier (or at least, more interesting) way of relating to negative emotions,a bemused wonder at how much time and investment (2 hours a day!) it would take to achieve something that seemed cool and that I had failed to get to with 10 partial days of effort,and the impression that there is something real about jhanas, that there is some set of phenomena that many people experience the same way, and that resemble powerful psychedelic drugs and may interact with motivation: possibly in ways that affect your drive to engage with the world; possibly in ways that drastically improve the texture of your experience of life.So, a good use of (someone else’s) $500.^this is from 2024 and I didn’t get a snapshot of the webpage, but you can see the copy quoted in this ACX comment for corroboration.^Shamil Chandaria, described on Jhourney’s website as “Oxford neuroscientist, ex-DeepMind”: “The jhanas may be the single most important thing on the planet right now. You may think it’s superintelligence or longevity. That’s nothing without wellbeing.”^I think not having made any financial investment in receiving an outcome made me feel more neutral and less invested from the start, since I was less susceptible to having a sunk money cost. However, from the future, I can see that it clearly gave me an investigative/analytical frame that I took with me.^… and then another two years not taking further action.^This seems to have faded over two years of time, without a meditation practice to sustain it.^I think this was also the core analytical insight I got from Existential Kink by Carolyn Elliot, which I remember people in my bay area circles being excited about in late 2022, but which insight I apparently hadn’t emotionally integrated in 2024. The Jhourney retreat did make it stick for me.^This also stuck, though I’m less skilled at remembering to reach for it.^However, looking back from 2026 at my day-to-day notes, I do notice two things: 1) that the OTHER STUDENTS CONSTANTLY TALKED ABOUT GETTING TO JHANA and what it was like. 2) that Jhourney’s marketing copy about jhanas was pretty hype and exciting. I can imagine that maybe this had something to do with the internal pressure 2024!me experienced towards goal orientation.^helllooooo samsara, my old friend^2026!me is pretty sure goals are good, but also that they can reasonably be localized to parts of your life that are suitable for goal-orientation, which may exclude your happiness-feeling architecture.Discuss ​Read More

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