Our online and in-person meditation retreats teach you how to tap into profound joy and wellbeing on command.
We’re planning a few meditation retreats from March through August. Sign up to get started!
What Past Students Are Saying
What do you teach?
Our team has had our minds blown by jhanas & think they should be practiced more widely.
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 described as “MDMA therapy without the drugs”
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
- 70% of our retreat participants have self-reported experiencing a jhana
- For those who experienced a jhana
- 70% say it’s the best thing that’s happened in 6 months or more
- 15% say it’s the best thing that’s happened in their life
- 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”
Spring and Summer 2024 Meditation Retreat Dates
March 15th - 24th(Online, Work-Compatible) - Full CapacityApril 6th - 14th(Online, Full-time) - Full CapacityApril 26th - May 5th(Online, Work-Compatible) - Full Capacity, Waitlist Full- May 20th - 27th (In Person, Applegate Jesuit Retreat Center near Sacramento)- On Waitlist
- June 21st - June 30th (Online, Full Time)
- July 26th - August 4th (Online, Work-Compatible)
- August 16th - August 25th (Online, Work-Compatible)
Price:
Online retreat cost is $800 in the spring, $1,100 for summer. In-person retreat cost starts at $1600 and depends on the center, single vs. double room, etc.
Meditation Retreat Programs and Schedule:
For full-time online and in-person weeklong retreats: Participants will follow a traditional schedule and adhere to silence throughout the week, meditating for 6-10 hours a day individually and in groups plus attending teacher interviews. We may incorporate tools like biofeedback from our ongoing jhana research, but the focus will be on traditional teaching methods.
Daily programming will be from 7:30am - 8:30pm Pacific Time. Lectures will be recorded to make attendance easier for remote timezones, but interviews and group experiences will need to be attended between 7am - 4pm PT. Participants will be expected to meditate ~8 hours per day. For work-compatible 10 day meditation retreats:
We will have full retreat days on both weekends (requiring time off on each Friday). We’ll pair this with an intention for ~1.5 hours of practice before and after your work day 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 the TWIM community, Leigh Brasington, and Rob Burbea. 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.
Morning Meditation Instruction | Evening Framework | |
Day 1 | Pleasant Emotional Sensation | Jhanas 1 - 4 |
Day 2 | Relaxation | Common Anti-patterns |
Day 3 | Forgiveness | Jhanas 5 - 8 |
Day 4 | Expansion | Components of Success |
Day 5 | Relational or Finding Flow | The Full Range of Emotions |
Day 6 | Body Energy or Verbal Content | The Modular Theory of Mind |
Day 7 | Using Tension as Feedback | The Meditation Landscape |
How You May Benefit
- Unlock the ability to enter into temporary altered states of peace and joy at levels sometimes called “psychedelic without the drugs”
- 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 awareness 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, over time, 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 & tech operators who believe meditation or psychedelics can be transformative, but find it challenging to sift through vastly different teachers and techniques.
- Execs & 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 practice. We’re happy to refer out to teachings and teachers that are compatible with this view.
- You don’t think it will be possible 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!
“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 is a meditation education and neurotech company that aims to better understand & democratize access to life-changing states of wellbeing.
Judah Newman
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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 peace became the backdrop to every day.
I later discovered advanced meditators call these states “jhanas.” I cofounded Jhourney, a neurotech company using ML, biofeedback, and novel teaching methods to make jhanas accessible to more people, faster.
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.