Jhourney’s Fall 2024 Meditation Retreats

Our online and in-person meditation retreats teach you how to tap into profound joy and wellbeing on command.

Our retreats fill up quickly and past retreats have sold out. Sign up for retreat information to get started now.

What Past Students Are Saying

Fall 2024 Meditation Retreat Dates

• September 30th - October 6th: Choose your own location with our full-time online retreat
• November 12th - November 20th: Join us near Playa Del Carmen, Mexico with our full-time in-person retreat

What do you teach?

Our team has had our minds blown by jhanas & think they should be practiced more widely by both beginning and seasoned meditators alike.

What are the jhanas?

• Extraordinarily pleasurable and non-addictive altered states you can learn to enter on command with meditation practice
• The “opposite of an anxiety loop”. A positive feedback loop between attention and pleasure, leading to greater physiological & neural response
• A method to tap into an innate sense of inner wellbeing that enables inner psychological work

For years, the existence of jhanas has been an “open secret” in some communities of serious meditators. Modern research at Harvard, McGill, and others are validating their existence. We believe these states can be learned more easily than people believe.

“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.”

— Google Deepmind Strategic Advisor

“This is absolutely amazing. The fact that you can build a feedback reward mechanism with dopamine from just sitting down is unbelievable. This is a secret nobody is talking about, and I’ve never felt anything like it. I’m so grateful; I’m a better and happier person.”

– Francisco Lorrain, CTO of Topsort, Former Head of Engineering at Groupon

Results

• About two thirds of our retreat participants have self-reported experiencing a jhana
• For those who experienced a jhana
• Over 60% say it’s the best thing that’s happened in 6 months or more
• 10% say it’s the best thing that’s happened in their lifetime
• 85% of participants rated the program a 9 or a 10 when asked “how likely would you be to recommend this experience to a friend”

Investment

Our online retreats are $1295 or $324/month for four months. In-person retreats start at $2395 and depends on the venue, single vs. double room, etc. We have a limited number of scholarships available — just let us know when you save your spot.

Meditation Retreat Programs and Schedule

For full-time online and in-person retreats:

Participants adhere to silence throughout the week and meditate for 6-10 hours a day (including individual and group sits). We may incorporate tools like biofeedback from our ongoing jhana research, but the focus will be on traditional teaching methods.

Participants are expected to meditate ~8 hours per day. Daily programming will be from 7:30am - 8:30pm Pacific Time. Lectures will be recorded to make attendance easier for remote timezones, but group experiences will need to be attended between 7am - 5pm PT. Online retreats work best with time zones in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. For Asian and other time zones, email us to discuss before booking.

For work-compatible meditation retreats:

We will have full retreat days on both weekends (requiring time off on each Friday). We’ll pair this ~1.5 hours of practice before and after your workday during the week. Please join if you’re excited, open minded, and happy to try something a bit different. Learn meditation conducive to jhanas without taking too much time off work!

Teaching principles

• Engineers, not Dharma Teachers: We’re focused on sharing practical meditation guidance as efficiently as possible, tracking our results, and using every tool we think appropriate for the job. We are not teaching Buddhist Dharma or metaphysics.
• Experimentation, not Dogma: There is no one correct way to learn a skill. We aim to provide you with the context and ideas you need to run your own experiments. We’re inspired by various meditation traditions, breathwork, and our own EEG research.
• Community of Peers: We think experience sharing is a valuable part of the learning process, and at times will structure group discussion instead of traditional lecture or instruction.

Instruction

Participants are expected to join from an environment that allows them to embrace not speaking for the duration of the retreat. Traditionally, silence and sensory reduction in meditation retreats have been instrumental in teaching these states. We ask participants find a way to create these conditions from wherever they’re joining.

We’ll be teaching a secular interpretation of the jhanas inspired by several contemplative traditions (e.g. TWIM, Kemma/Brasington, Thanissaro/Burbea) and western psychology. These traditions focus on making meditation consistently enjoyable, and we’re especially excited to teach these states to meditators who haven’t experienced them before.

Curriculum

Each morning we will have meditation instructions and group sit. The meditation instructions will build on each other over the course of the week.

At night we will have another group meditation followed by learning about a framework which is useful for integrating our meditation experience. These frameworks will help us understand the role of meditation and how to best utilize this practice.

Example Schedule

How You May Benefit

• Unlock the ability to enter into temporary altered states of peace and joy described by many as the best experience of their year
• Experience firsthand how access to altered, joyful states can lead to a felt sense of abundance that makes it easier to let go of reactive habits and cultivate virtuous qualities
• Boost your baseline wellbeing with a sense of fundamental okay-ness that comes from periodically entering into unprecedentedly grateful or relaxed states
• Master your attention, not through fixation & effort, but relaxation and finesse, so that you can enter flow inside and outside of meditation
• Discover how in the right headspace, it’s possible to spot and then permanently adjust mental habits that lead to personality & psychological growth
• Cultivate mastery by activating joy and peace in daily life while walking, off-the-cushion, and in everyday conditions
• Generate more progress in less time by blending insights from multiple meditation traditions, Western positive psychology, and engineering design principles
• Discover that altered states on-command are just the beginning — deeper insights into your own nervous system await; we’ll leave you with ideas to explore next after the course
• A community of practice with other curious, technically-minded explorers

“Why would I have a second piece of chocolate cake when I know I can beat that by 100x in 10 minutes with my eyes closed?”

— Nick Cammarata, AI Safety Researcher & former founder

Is Our Meditation Retreat For You?

A few groups that have benefitted so far:

• Engineers and tech operators who believe meditation or psychedelics can be transformative, but find it challenging to sift through vastly different teachers and techniques.
• Execs and founders who have realized their moment-to-moment mental habits determine wellbeing and performance, and are ready to learn technical relaxation techniques.
• Experienced meditators with a 30+ minute regular practice who have not yet learned to have deterministically blissful experiences when they sit.

This program may not be for you if:

• Buddhist metaphysics is a requirement for your meditation. We’re happy to refer out to teachings that are compatible with this view. We emphasize how these practices can fit into your life with an attitude of flexibility and pragmatism.
• You don’t want to commit ~7-10 days (or two weekends) to meditating ~6+ hours a day.
• You’ve recently experienced trauma or mental health challenges that you think may have a serious adverse impact on your emotional state during the retreat. We’re here — join us when the time is right! You can learn more about our policy and screening process here.

“This experience was the best thing that’s happened to me this year. I had no idea how enjoyable meditation could be.”

– Ruby Yu, founder of YC-backed 10 Lives, formerly at UCSF & Harvard

Meet Your Instructors

Jhourney aims to cut the guesswork out of meditation to democratize access to life-changing states of wellbeing.

Judah Newman

For 6 years, I knew meditation was good for me but it was an internal battle to get myself to meditate. After my first jhanic experience, I began looking forward to meditation.

Since then, I’ve spent hundreds of hours seeking to understand these experiences in depth. Reading everything I can, talking to different teachers, and doing deep personal exploration. It’s a gift that keeps giving — the more I invest, the more I get out of the jhanas.

Teaching others these states has been an incredibly opportunity to condense the years of exploration I have done into something simple, enjoyable and effective.

Stephen Zerfas

In 2018 I broke up with a cofounder and girlfriend at the same time. I went on a meditation retreat, where mental health got so bad I had 3 migraines in 8 days. Just when things couldn’t get any worse, I had an experience that seemed too good to be true. Waves of euphoria moved through me and I quietly cried tears of joy for 60 minutes. It was the most blissful thing that had happened to me in over a year, but the teachers didn’t understand it, and told me to go back to following the breath.

In the months after retreat, I taught myself how to recreate that experience every morning in 15 minutes. The bliss was fun, but I was more excited about the personal growth: it became easy to stay relaxed and focused at work, negative affect and neuroticism plummeted on personality tests, and a fundamental “okayness” increasingly set in. I later discovered advanced meditators call these states “jhanas.”

Alex Gruver

In late 2022, I broke up with my significant other and less than 24 hours later, I was on a bus to the hospital where my mom was in surgery. Even though I was emotionally devastated, the fact that I had learned the jhanas a few weeks earlier let me to continue to find joy with my eyes closed and support the rest of my family.

In the following years, the jhanas have helped me deal with a harsh inner critic and unlock lasting personality change. I’m excited to teach them — consistently accessing the jhanas is the most important skill I’ve ever learned.