Most meditation advice implies a certain logic: try harder, focus longer, be more disciplined. Progress means grinding through resistance until something eventually gives.
Other meditation advice sounds like the opposite: "Meditation should have no goals." If you're striving for calm, you're not being present.
Both contain something true. And both miss something important.
Meditation obviously has a goal, whether it's calming down, being with yourself, or something deeper. But many of us relate to goals as contracts to be dissatisfied with ourselves until we get what we want. For people stuck in that pattern, "no goals" is useful advice.
Jhana practice takes a different approach. There is absolutely a goal. Bliss or peace, increasingly on-demand—and that's just the start. Wanting that is healthy. It means you're beautifully human. You might even want it so you can show up better for the people you love.
The rub is you can want a jhana, but you can't crave your way into one. So the first task is learning something that turns out to be a great life lesson: how do you hold a goal without striving? How do you release the tension you're carrying toward what you want, while still playing the game?
The answer is eerily familiar. It's something between play and love. Like a musician lost in the music, a child lost in play, or a parent lost in service. The flow states required for jhana are innately human. You've touched them before. You just haven't trained them.
One tech founder I know had meditated daily for a decade. Apps, retreats, the whole progression. He'd touched something like a jhana maybe twice. When he finally learned the method below, he accessed jhanas daily within weeks. His assessment: "I tortured myself for ten years trying harder at the wrong thing."
Nobody told him the obstacle wasn't insufficient effort. It was the effort itself.
What Jhanas Actually Are
If you want the full picture of what jhanas are and why they matter, we wrote about that here. This piece is about how to actually do it.
The short version: jhanas are states of stable, pleasant absorption you can learn to access reliably. They're the most reliable method we know for training the nervous system toward deep calm, joy, and non-reactivity. Not trance, not bliss-chasing. More like training a capacity you carry with you.
They work by shifting how you relate to experience, not what you experience. The states themselves are pleasant. The real value is what they reveal about your own patterns, and how they change your defaults over time.
Why This Works When Other Things Haven't
Two things make jhana practice different from most meditation.
First: clear feedback. If you're practicing correctly, you'll know. You'll find yourself more deeply enjoying experience, more deeply relaxed, more struck by wonder. All three will feel increasingly effortless. If that's not happening, something is off. Either your technique needs adjustment, or there's a subtle emotional block that needs attention.
This sounds obvious, but it solves one of the core problems in meditation: the invisible, nonverbal nature of the activity makes it riddled with guesswork. Most meditation instruction resigns itself to this. The result is that students and teachers implicitly assume the answer to any problem is just more meditation of the same type. People grind out their best guess forever rather than running experiments in their inner world.
Jhana practice gives you a compass. Pleasant absorption is the target. If you're not moving toward it, you change something. If you are, you continue. The feedback loop is tight enough that you can actually learn.
Second: it's designed to feel good. If meditation feels like something you "should" do, like a chore you're dragging yourself through, you're not yet moving in the right direction. That's information. Either technique needs correcting or there's a limiting belief worth examining.
And once you are enjoying practice, motivation stops being a problem. You don't need discipline to do something that feels better than most alternatives.
Two counterintuitive callouts:
- The plateau problem: people assume they already know what "relax" or "enjoy" means. They don't. These are skills with levels. Competitive athletes may know more about relaxation than most meditators, because they've had to learn the specific relaxation that supports peak performance. Jhana practice requires the same precision, just applied internally.
- Concentration comes from relaxation, not the other way around. You relax first, and focus emerges naturally as a side effect.
If you've meditated for years and still feel like you're pushing a boulder uphill, you're probably missing one of these two things: either the feedback loop isn't clear enough to guide you, or the practice isn't enjoyable enough to sustain you.
The Basic Technique
The following instructions are how to get today. You can read this section and immediately meditate. We know students who have used nothing more to get all the way to jhana. But most students discover subtle challenges that are easier overcome with personalized feedback from a skilled facilitator.
Starting: Find a Feeling
Use what we call “scaffolding” to generate an openhearted feeling. Like a memory of someone you love, a simple phrase that invokes a sense of warmth or gratitude, or similar. The scaffolding itself isn't the meditation object. The feeling it generates is.
You're not focusing on the thought. You're focusing on the emotion – especially the embodied signature of the emotion – the thought creates. Think of someone you love, then notice what happens in your chest, head, or gut. That warmth, that subtle expansion. That's your object. Not the person, but what thinking about them does to your body.
Sustaining: Pulse and Glide
Once you have a feeling, the instinct is to grip it. Don't.
Pulse means gently re-invoking the scaffolding for five to thirty seconds. Glide means letting the feeling resonate without effort.
When the feeling starts to dissipate, see if you can really feel into the body and notice the nature of that fade. You may find the fading is an invitation to relax even deeper. When it feels right, pulse again. Don't overthink timing. The biggest mistake is stacking pulses frantically because you're afraid of losing the feeling. The glide is where the magic happens.
Once the pulsing and gliding are reliably resulting in a feeling, see if you can allow the feeling to grow by feeding on itself. Extend gratitude towards gratitude, or joyfully celebrate your joy.
Deepening: Three Questions
When you have a feeling established, there are three questions you can ask:
Can I relax more? (Check for tension you might be adding.)
Can I enjoy this more? (Are you actually receiving, or just observing?)
Can I bring more wonder to this? (Interest without agenda.)
Follow whichever question calls to you. Each opens a different pathway into depth.
One particularly elegant move that blends all three: how would it feel to give the feeling away? This doesn’t mean some complicated visualization. This is a pointer to a subtle way of relating to your experience. Joy is often a byproduct of generosity.
Returning: Distractions as Information
You will get distracted. This is useful, not failure.
When you notice you've wandered: acknowledge what pulled you away, release any tension, mental and physical, that's arisen, and return to the feeling. Welcoming beats forcing.
The Mistakes Everyone Makes
Based on watching over a thousand people learn this method.
These mistakes overlap. If you're stuck, read all four. Most people are making more than one.
Over-Efforting
Practice feels like work. You're making something happen. There's subtle strain in your forehead or jaw. You're concentrating at the experience rather than resting in it.
The cure is easier said than done: try half as hard. Then try half as hard again. There exists a level of non-effort most people have never experienced while remaining alert.
One engineer came to retreat with 500+ hours of meditation practice. By day four, he was demoralized. His facilitator asked: "Imagine explaining to someone that this week was a waste of time." The engineer noticed something unexpected: relief. The moment he stopped needing to succeed, he accessed the deepest peace he'd felt in his life.
Sensation-Hunting
You're scanning the body for "the right feeling." It feels clinical, like a body scan. You're cataloging sensations but not connecting to their emotional quality.
Emotions live in the body, but they're not just sensations. There's a felt quality (warmth, openness, tenderness) that raw sensation-tracking doesn't capture. You're not scanning for a sensation. You're becoming the sensation.
Scaffolding Stops Working
Your scaffolding worked beautifully for days. Then it stops. The memory that used to light you up feels flat. You frantically try new scaffoldings.
The reframe: this is progress, not failure. When you first find working scaffolding, you're riding a novelty bonus. As novelty fades, you're left to figure out how to relate appreciatively without the extra buzz. This is exactly the skill you're trying to build.
Stay with the "dried out" scaffolding. Practice finding enjoyment in subtler territory.
(Note: This applies when scaffolding was working and then flattened. If it never generated much feeling, or if there's tension while you practice, start with "Over-Efforting" or "Sensation-Hunting" above.)
Relaxing Away Instead of Into
Negative emotion arises. You try to relax it away, to make it leave so you can get back to the good stuff.
Relaxing into a feeling means allowing it fully, with less resistance. The emotion doesn't need to disappear. Your war with it does.
This distinction is subtle and usually invisible to the person making it. This is where expert guidance may matter most.
The Deeper Game
Beyond the technique, the jhanas reveal where you're at war with yourself. For most people, jhana practice becomes a forcing function to recognize the faster-than-thought ways they beat themselves, and begin training self-acceptance: learning to extend warmth to the parts of you that resist warmth.
What Progress Looks Like
It's not linear. Some days feel like breakthroughs; the next day might feel like starting over. The trend matters more than any single sit.
Assuming you’re taking a daily practice strategy (see Strategies for Learning the Jhanas for details), you might expect a timeline to be:
Early (first weeks): You can find a feeling reliably. Sits feel restorative rather than effortful. Thirty minutes feels manageable.
Middle (first months): Occasionally, you “slip into flow” or “get lost in the music.” You notice bleed-through into daily life: more patience, less reactivity. Jhana itself may happen. If it does, it will have a distinct type of momentum, magnitude, and afterglow.
Later: Jhana access is reliable on the order of 20-60 minutes depending on how relaxed or stressed you are when you start your meditation. Afterglows may linger between sits, you can subtly move toward jhana throughout the day, and you can make use of jhanas for further personal growth.
Why People Learn This in a Week
Solo practice works. Many people learn jhanas without retreats or teachers. If that's your path, you have what you need to start.
Facilitation compresses the timeline dramatically. The mistakes I described above are largely invisible to the person making them. Facilitators see them immediately because they've seen hundreds of practitioners make the same moves. What takes weeks to figure out alone takes minutes with feedback.
There's also something about having someone else in the room who knows the terrain. Not rescue, just a container for going deeper than you'd likely go alone. And knowing that your weird experience is textbook, that others have been exactly here, removes a surprising amount of friction.
One practitioner had spent six years trying therapy, psychedelics, breathwork, meditation apps. Each produced incremental gains. On retreat, something shifted that she described as "rewiring rather than effortful management." Six months later: "75-80% of the stuff that used to be sticky just evaporated." She didn't become a different person. She stopped fighting herself.
Over 1,200 people have come through Jhourney retreats. 60-70% access jhanas within a week, including those with minimal meditation background.
If you want to try solo first, you have what you need.
If you want to compress the learning curve: Apply for a retreat.
The Invitation
The capacity for these states is already in your nervous system. The question isn't whether you're capable. It's how long the path takes.
Some people figure it out alone. Some prefer guidance. Neither is superior; they're just different speeds.
What we're offering isn't a hack or a secret. It's a method that works, support that compresses, and a container for going deeper than you'd likely go alone.
