We teach meditative states most people never knew were possible. In a week.
Joined November 2023
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Jhourney retweeted
i hadn’t really ever meditated before (lol I’m in the first picture) but so grateful to have been able to attend this!! a few thoughts, learnings and prompts:
1️⃣ the day consisted of 4-5 different meditations and a one hour breath work session.
2️⃣ my fav was the forgiveness meditation.
who do you want to be forgiven by, who do you want to forgive, and how should you forgive yourself?
I personally struggled the most with the third one. I forgive super easily but a lot of the times it’s done by putting the blame on myself, so how do I forgive myself for doing that to the past me?
3️⃣ the final prompt to share was — if you’re able to ask a guru some question, what would your question be and to whom?
immediately I felt that the guru can only be ME 🤔 ~
and the question I kept digging into was “will I be successful” or “will things work out for me?” to feeling like that was too vague, ofc I will be successful, but in what way?
and so ultimately I landed on “will I make a positive impact on the entire world?”
TY again for the @jhanatech and @JoinEdgeCity folks for organizing this for us ~
Inside a jhana full-day retreat with @jhanatech at @EdgeEsmeralda.
The state they're scaffolding the room into: focused calm, bliss, a noticeable change in how the mind organises itself.
Jhourney retweeted
What if jhanas, the deep absorption states traditionally taught over years, were reachable in a weekend? 🧘
@jhanatech is bringing two days of meditation to @EdgeEsmeralda 2026: a workshop on June 6 and a full-day retreat on June 13.
Full breakdown ↓
Jhourney retweeted
3 months after my @jhanatech retreat, honest check-in on what changed:
- my baseline happiness substantially higher
- meditation feels like coming home, not a chore
- the urge to prove myself got quieter
- anxiety feels less like an enemy, more like a friend
Full reflection 👇
Jhourney retweeted
One of my fellow Jhourney retreatants said that the only bad thing about how amazing his experience was, was the grief of having spent 25 years meditating without trying it this way.
Jhourney retweeted
If you're trying to make super wellbeing accessible at scale, I think there are a limited number of "shots on goal":
- genetic engineering
- neurotech
- custom psychedelics
- making the world's wisdom traditions more reliable, accessible, and appealing
Most techno-optimists would name the first three if asked. I think the fourth is the most tractable and most overlooked.
Jhourney retweeted
Excited to announce our jhana retreat in the UK: Oct 26-Nov 2 at The Vedanta (Lincolnshire)!
Spend a week meditating at an Elizabethan estate on 75 acres of woodlands, meadows, and lakes. No experience required.
Our weeklong curriculum incorporates everything we've learned after teaching dozens of retreats and 1k+ students. We offer an instruction booklet, group sessions, guided meditations, and 1:1 facilitator support to help you learn the jhanas effectively.
Get details and apply at: jhourney.io
Jhourney retweeted
One interpretation of the @jhanatech instructions is that the took all the corrective guidance meditation teachers usually give when students crash out mid-retreat (relax, find some joy, move with curiosity) and just made those the instructions from the beginning.
Jhourney retweeted
Huge shoutout to my wife @mai_on_chain for being the highlight of the most recent @jhanatech newsletter :)
I've only seen Stephen write literally four posts all year, so it's insanely cool to see Mai be the spotlight for one of those four 😍
Jhourney retweeted
1/ Back at the end of January, I completed a jhana meditation retreat with Jhourney (@jhanatech). It was huge in helping me manage some chronic pain that I experience and processing really challenging emotions and experiences. I'm really grateful for the experience.
Jhourney retweeted
Do your part to mainstream the Jhanas by submitting an entry into the 2026 Jhana Visualization Competition! Submit your replications of these beautiful states of consciousness for science and a chance to win $1000!
fwiw: I don't think 'mindfulness' will be the default meditation entry point in five years' time. Jhanas are absurdly more compelling + beneficial for almost everyone (training emotional fluidity, embodiment + unclenching)
But I also doubt jhana will go mainstream unless it goes through something of a re-brand. (friends outside of the inner-work echo chamber squint when I say the word and I think 'jh' is unfortunately a barrier)
My guess is it will follow a similar trajectory to yoga nidra which @hubermanlab rebranded as NSDR, and it then exploded in popularity
Likely there will be some meaningful research on jhanas states → they'll create a scientific technical-sounding acronym like 'BASE' (Bliss Attractor State Emergence), and @jhanatech by then will hopefully have cracked an accessible entry point for teaching jhana-access.
Jhourney retweeted
The trap that kills every post-retreat practice isn't when you feel bad. it's when you feel good.
When the retreat feels like it "solved" you, you stop practicing. and by the time old patterns resurface, the practice is already gone.
Learned this the hard way after Hoffman. almost let it happen again.
wrote about why this happens + strategies to avoid it in week 2 of #JhanaInPublic 👇
Jhourney retweeted
Somehow missed that Susan Blackmore got to the "report on a jhana retreat" about 10 years before the rest of us did.
Fun to see this pattern again: She's been a Zen practitioner for ~30 years, & upon her first tango with jhana, learns that 'oh! meditation can feel different!'
Jhourney retweeted
I went on a Jhourney retreat to learn jhana meditation, which apparently can unlock some of the most blissful states known to humanity. Link to my report below.
Jhourney retweeted
Last week, I joined the @jhanatech retreat and had one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. I genuinely didn’t realize the mind was capable of this depth, or that meditation could feel this powerful and life-changing.
Jhourney is an eight-day retreat (both in-person and online) with a clear goal: helping you enter jhana states.
TL;DR
I’ve spent years working on myself: CBT and IFS therapy, clinical ketamine therapy, the Hoffman Process, silent meditation retreats. All of them helped in real ways. None of them affected me like this did.
I’ve struggled for a long time with self-worth, social anxiety, and imposter syndrome. This retreat gave me the most practical and reliable tool I’ve found for working with those parts of myself.
I feel an ethical responsibility to share about this experience, so I wrote a long Substack post documenting what happened and what I learned. I hope it reaches anyone who is struggling with similar things, searching for something deeper, or simply curious about what meditation can unlock.
Substack link in reply 🙂
Jhourney retweeted
While doing practices that increase openheartedness (eg metta, gratitude), you typically intend to grow collectedness on those sensations.
When there are blocks to that growth, typical instruction is to point the practice towards that block. It can work, but it also can reinforce non-acceptance of those blocks which reduces conductivity, or overall okayness with what's present
When that happens, I find it's more helpful to shift into an "acknowledgment" practice. This can be done at various levels of conceptual scaffolding, from simply "hanging out" in curiosity with the stuckness to a somatic dialogue practice like Core Transformation, IFS, Sedona Method, EK.
The trap here is getting caught up "in" the emotional stuff rather than returning to the process-level openhearted practice that deepens collectedness.
With skill, one can directly point a laser beam of attention onto those stuck sensations and the "acknowledgement" happens subperceptually, immediately dissolving tension into more okayness!
(excerpt from the @jhanatech retreat handbook)
The typical way I've mostly seen brahmavihara practice taught is to overlay these wholesome qualities on your experience, and that if you're not feeling the metta, for example, to then send more metta, or have metta for the fact that you're not feeling metta. That has a place, but a downside of that approach is it can be reinforcing you to not listen to your emotional state and what wants to show up now; to not listen to yourself, but defer to someone else telling you how you should feel. Easy pitfall.
Jhourney retweeted
I got a lot out of my Jhourney jhana retreat, highly recommended. A friend reports the online version works too, but surely in-person is more fun!
Alysa Liu is a perfect example of joy co-existing with high performance. There are many parallels between competitive sports and intensive meditation, and one is how the way you relate to goals/outcomes can affect your effectiveness in actually achieving those goals.
If you fixate too hard on the outcome like "I must win Olympic gold" or "I must get into jhana by the end of retreat," it can be harder to achieve them, because the fear and vigilance prevent you from being fully present in the activity. The pressure is heavy. It becomes harder to pay attention to the immediate feedback loops, to adjust dynamically and improve.
On the other hand, joy-maxxing while gently holding a certain level of structure and a clear understanding of good technique can get you very far. There's a lightness and openness to it. You can sink into the feeling of gliding over the ice, or in meditation the delight of loving-kindness washing over you. You can enjoy the process and journey instead of just the end point.
Liu's cheerful and relaxed orientation (just have fun, don't care if I get a medal) does not excuse her from training hard like all her competitors and listening to her coach. But it's the thing that allows her to crush it *because* she's not coming from a place of emotional scarcity.
She says she stays up late, isn't on a diet, and prioritizes hanging out with her friends. Surprising and counterintuitive, but it's exactly her self-care and lack of vigilance that help her perform at her best.
Analogous to how on retreat we encourage people to change their posture for comfort during long sits, take naps early on retreat if their bodies need rest, or take breaks from meditation to process emotions if things get overwhelming. This freedom is encouraged, but counterbalanced by an instruction booklet explaining the meditation technique in detail and scheduled meetings with facilitators to keep you on track.
The point is, relaxing expectations and pressure around outcomes is sometimes the very thing we need to achieve them. We've seen many instances of people struggling the entire week trying to get into jhana, only to give up on the last day or when they get home, and slip into jhana.
Pure flow and enjoyment, doing it for the love of the game, and letting the results come naturally.
Jhourney retweeted
I've said it before but I'll say it again since it is consistently one of the biggest unlocks I hear about from students on @jhanatech retreats:
YOU ARE ALLOWED TO LIE DOWN WHEN MEDITATING.
Especially if you have body pain or tension that makes a lot of sitting difficult.
Jhourney retweeted
if i rank every product review i've heard in the past few years by how unhinged the enthusiasm is, the top 30 are all claude code and jhourney
i cant even think of the next thing after that because the gap is so big
Just finished my first @jhanatech retreat. People say stuff was transformative like "it changed the way I look at B2B SaaS" but this was transformative as in it literally transformed my body and nervous system. I cannot recommend anything more highly. I will post so much more.