My Jhourney Retreat Experience
A grateful account
I recently attended a week-long meditation retreat hosted by Jhourney.
During that week, I laughed more than I had in the previous three months, cried more than I had in the previous three years, and made substantial progress on pernicious mental knots that have resisted years of my efforts to loosen them.
I went in 30% wary that the retreat’s subject matter was basically fake, and left feeling like I’d discovered something life-changing.
The Jhanas
The Jhourney value prop is basically this: there are crazy states you can get your brain into simply by meditating the right way. These are called the Jhanas, numbered one through eight. The states range from a euphoric, drug-like high (the first jhana), to an almost-complete cessation of experience (the eighth).
These states were discovered thousands of years ago, and come with a lot of dogmatic baggage. In particular, the belief that it takes hundreds or thousands of hours of practice to reach them.
Jhourney cleaves the jhanas from their dogma and attempts to teach them to you in a week. Turns out, this totally works, and two-thirds of their attendees reach at least one jhana during a retreat.
Arrival
I arrived at the retreat center and was immediately asked if I wanted to surrender my phone. Oh my goodness yes.
I was handed a 120-page manual titled Retreat Instructions. I flipped to the first page and was shocked to see the text “Version 5.5.2”.
“This is the kind of meditation retreat where the instruction manual uses semantic versioning” is a vibe that would continue throughout the week.
My first jhana
For the first two days, our job was to read large chunks of the Retreat Instructions (insanely well-written, btw), show up for guided group sessions, and fill the remaining time with solo meditation.
The basic technique for jhana meditation is borderline annoyingly simple:
Bring to mind an openhearted feeling.
Pay attention to it.
Once it fades, repeat.
The promise is that eventually, this loop becomes self-sustaining, the openhearted feeling grows massively all on its own, and you’re launched into a jhanic state (usually the first one).
After two full days of practicing this technique, I experienced a few moments where it felt like Something Was Happening: the openhearted feeling was starting to grow on its own.
The first time, it scared me a bit, and I clamped down mentally and stopped it. I kept practicing, but it didn’t happen again that day.
The second time, I wanted the feeling and tried hard to make it grow. This also stopped it immediately. The jhanas do not seem to respond well to being wanted.
The third time, I was walking in the woods around the retreat center. I looked up at a particularly beautiful tree, and the feeling grew in me once more. This time, I relaxed into it and simply tried to savor the experience. Suddenly, a surge of energy and sensation moved from my stomach to my chest to my throat, and I started laughing hysterically.
I could not believe how beautiful the tree was. I could not believe how much joy was coursing through me. I could not believe how lucky I was to be walking on a trail in the New England woods in fall.
I laughed at the beauty and absurdity of life. I laughed because it was the only way my body could off-gas this much euphoria.
The experience was of something happening to me, rather than me doing something.
I stood in one location, slowly moving my vision between various parts of the woods, laughing at each new sight, for fifteen minutes. Everything I looked at was so impossibly beautiful.
Physically, there was a strong sensation of some sort of energy in my chest. Pressure isn’t quite the right word. Presence, maybe? Warmth? It reminded me a bit of the physical sensations after a good cry.
Mentally, I felt like I’d taken a cocktail of MDMA, psilocybin, and THC.
After fifteen minutes, the feeling subsided slightly, and I began to walk again. Every few moments, I’d feel into my chest and ask myself “is that feeling still there?” Each time it was, and the sensation of it would start another laughing jag.
Eventually, my thoughts turned to a painful past relationship, and to loneliness and struggle. I wept at how hard it had been, but in a way that was still suffused with the joy and beauty of the state I’d reached. I imagined holding a younger version of myself in my arms and comforting him. It felt healing.
I spent several more hours walking the woods, alternating laughing and crying, almost constantly in awe at the beauty around me.
For the rest of the evening, a light version of the feeling in my chest remained, and feeling into it would reliably trigger at least some soft giggles.
That night I slept wonderfully.
Later, a retreat facilitator confirmed it: I’d experienced the first jhana.
The path runs deeper
The rest of the retreat was a near-continuous series of peak experiences:
Dropping into a deeper jhana (likely the third), and experiencing near-bulletproof contentment for hours. I’d see or hear things that would usually pull me into judgement or rumination and simply…not do that.
A forgiveness meditation where–for perhaps the first time–I related to a terrible experience a decade ago with a sense of gratitude for what it had taught me.
A breathwork session where an imagined tender interaction with 85 year-old me felt like it loosened several substantial fears that my mind had clamped around.
After being encouraged to run experiments, I decided to test my fears around what would happen if I disturbed my fellow meditators by making noise (a frequent worry for me during the retreat). I scream-yelled during a very quiet moment in the meditation hall, startling a ton of people. I smiled guiltily, resisted the urge to apologize, and watched my physical and emotional reactions play out as if I were a scientific observer. (Once I knew I was capable of this, future quiet moments made me slightly scared I’d do it again, Call of the Void-style.)
Discovering a way to relax my mind and body such that my pelvic floor released and triggered orgasm-like sensations and electricity shooting down my limbs. (Not that uncommon, apparently.)
After a powerful group meditation, hearing a fellow attendee share that that had been the first time in his life he’d felt gratitude for being born.
Moments where it felt like my awareness had spread so wide that it barely seemed centered on my body anymore.
Early on, I realized I was having outlier experiences at such a fast rate that I needed to write hourly timestamps in my journal instead of just the date.
Experience design
It was a real treat to go through something that has clearly been designed with so much care.
There are many examples of the Jhourney team having thought deeply about the experience of attendees, but I’ll share just one that I think gives you the flavor.
Each night, after our evening group session, we were asked to reflect on our day in a journal provided to us by the team. The pages asked how many hours you’d meditated that day, which sit was your best, what you’d thought of the group sessions that day, a series of numerical ratings on how you thought the retreat was going, and several open-ended reflections.
The journals were collected and shared with your assigned facilitator, who would read the journal overnight, take notes, and come to the next day’s one-on-one with concrete suggestions.
This practice gave me a chance to reflect on my day, recall things I’d learned, flag things I was struggling with, provide suggestions for improving the retreat (which were sometimes implemented immediately!), efficiently update my facilitator, give him asynchronous time to think of the best advice for me, and allow for a productive one-on-one the next day.
And thus…
Jhourney: an extremely short review
The jhanas are real.
Jhourney does a fantastic job of teaching them.
I hope you go.
Loved reading this, Ben. So glad you discovered new things about yourself and enjoyed the journey :)