Stephen Zerfas

What does neuroscience say about jhana? A review of the research from 2013 to 2025—what the studies show, what they don't, and what we still can't claim.

Jhana is a skill, and like learning any skill, your learning strategy matters more than effort. Here are three strategies for learning—retreat-first, daily practice, or periodic intensives—each optimized for different lifestyles.

Learn how to practice jhana using the technique we've seen lead 60-70% of meditators into jhana on retreat, the common mistakes, and why facilitation compresses the timeline. Most meditation plateaus aren't effort problems; they're feedback problems. If you're not seeing signs of progress, it's time to switch things up, not power through.

Jhanas are deep meditative states most people never knew existed—and they're learnable in days, not decades. What they are, why they matter, and how to train them.

Learn about our “super secret” master plan and longterm vision on superwellbeing.

Peak meditative states can unlock life-changing experiences. However, like all transformative practices, they come with potential risks, including adverse effects. This post is a deeper look at meditation safety, our specific protocols to mitigate risks, and what we've observed so far.

We’re innovating to make life-changing meditation accessible to everyone. Let’s look at the results so far, discuss risks with traditional approaches, and how we’ve designed our retreats to minimize these risks.

Our vision of accessible, life-changing meditation involves two things: groundbreaking tech and world-class instruction. We made great progress on both in 2023.

Meditation instruction often says to have “no goal” or drop notions of “improvement”. At Jhourney we couldn’t disagree more with these statements. There is always a goal to meditation.

Recap of progress and plans at the end of H1 2023.

Why aren’t the jhanas more popular? A combination of historical accident and difficulty to learn.

We collected 40 hours of biodata over the course of a weeklong silent jhana retreat.