You've decided you want to learn the jhanas. Now what?
Most people approach this without a strategy. They meditate more and hope something shifts. Or they attend a retreat, have a good experience, and then slowly lose access over the following months. Or they practice daily for years and plateau somewhere short of absorption.
Jhana is a skill. Like learning an instrument or a sport, raw hours matter less than how you structure them. Twenty minutes a day for a decade isn't the same stimulus as a week of immersive practice with real-time feedback. Both involve thousands of minutes. Only one reliably produces the skill.
There are three viable strategies for learning jhana. Each is optimized for different constraints and temperaments. None require monastic commitment or thousands of hours. The question is which architecture fits your life.
Is This Right for You?
Before picking a strategy, it's worth checking whether you're in a good position to start.
This is probably a good fit if:
You can feel emotions in your body, not just think about them. Jhana practice works through the body. You don't need to be advanced at this. Just not completely disconnected. A quick test: look at an emotional body map showing where people feel different emotions physically (like this one). If it's roughly intuitive, you're probably ready. If it's completely foreign, somatic work might be a better starting point.
You're willing to feel difficult emotions when they surface. Practice often brings subtle ways in which we’ve been avoiding emotions. Sometimes, substantial practice can bring up big emotions. Learning to turn towards rather than away may sound easy. It’s not. It often feels vulnerable, courageous, and intense. And progress can require a learning curve in learning to embrace rather than resist it.
You're motivated by downstream changes, not just the states themselves. The practitioners who progress fastest care about reduced reactivity, better relationships, clarity under pressure. The pleasant states are real, but they're a byproduct. If you're primarily seeking bliss, it’s easier to subtly avoid a fear of failure around the state, and it’s likelier you'll plateau.
You can approach obstacles with curiosity rather than self-criticism. Getting stuck is part of the process. You don't need to be good at self-compassion yet. You just need to be interested in developing it.
This is probably not the right time if:
You're in acute mental health crisis. Jhana practice can support mental health, but it’s more like an athlete training in good health than recovering from injury. It isn't crisis intervention. Stabilization comes first.
You have certain mental health histories. Intensive practice may carry elevated risk for some conditions. We screen for these, including current substance dependence, history of psychosis or mania, borderline personality disorder or complex-PTSD in the last three years, and others. Full screening criteria are on our retreat policies page.
You're completely disconnected from bodily sensation. Some people have learned to live from the neck up. This isn't a character flaw. It's often protective. But jhana practice requires reestablishing that connection. Somatic therapy may be valuable preparation.
You expect jhana to fix external problems. Jhana changes your internal landscape. It won't save your marriage or fix your company. It may give you more capacity to address those things skillfully. But if you're hoping the states themselves will solve life problems, recalibrate expectations.
The honest uncertainty:
If you've tried meditation before and it didn't work, that's not disqualifying. Most meditation instruction doesn't teach jhana directly. The question is whether you're open to a different method, not whether past methods succeeded.
If you're unsure whether you can feel emotions in your body, that's worth exploring before committing. Try paying attention to physical sensations when you're stressed or moved. If something's there, even faintly, you're probably ready.
Strategy One: Retreat-First
The approach: Attend intensive retreats until you have deterministic access and can reach jhana in under an hour in daily life. Then maintain with lighter practice.
This strategy front-loads the learning. You get the skill first, then figure out maintenance. It's the most common path to reliable access.
Why it works:
Retreat conditions remove the friction that makes daily practice hard. No decisions about when to practice. No competing demands. No willpower required to sit down.
Real-time instruction catches subtle errors that compound over months of solo practice. The difference between "almost jhana" and jhana is often a small adjustment in attention or effort. Without feedback, you can practice that wrong adjustment for years.
Most people who access jhana do so on retreat, not through daily practice alone. Once you have the skill, maintaining it is far easier than building it.
Realistic timeline:
Expect 2-5 weeklong retreats to reach deterministic access if you're relying on retreat alone without much daily practice between. If you have an existing hour-a-day practice, we estimate most people get there in 1-2 retreats.
The milestone you're aiming for: deterministic access (you can enter jhana reliably, not just occasionally) plus under-an-hour access in non-retreat conditions. At that point, you've learned the skill. Everything after is refinement.
What this looks like:
1-3 retreats in year one. Light daily practice between retreats, even 15-30 minutes, to maintain sensitivity. The retreat intensity does the heavy lifting. Daily practice is consolidation.
If it's not working:
If you've done three solid jhana retreats without deterministic access and it's not clear you're close, pause before booking a fourth. Assess what's blocking progress.
Common bottlenecks: difficulty feeling emotions in the body (somatic therapy may help), embedded avoidance patterns (coaching or therapy), or trying too hard. Jhana rewards relaxation, not effort. High performers often muscle their way into tension rather than absorption.
Work on the bottleneck, then return to retreat.
For reference:
Leigh Brasington, one of the most recognized jhana teachers in the West, reports that for his first several years of practice, he couldn't access jhana outside of retreat. He stopped trying until he'd return for another retreat. After 3-5 retreats, off-retreat access became possible.
A note on accessibility:
If a full week feels impossible, Jhourney offers a work-compatible retreat format. Shorter daily practice windows with evening instruction, designed for people who can't fully disconnect. It's a more accessible entry point, and it makes integrating lessons and experiences from meditation with daily life easier.
Strategy Three: Periodic Intensives
The approach: Skip daily practice. Instead, do 1-2 day-long intensive sessions per month. Concentrated depth, spread across time.
This strategy is less common and we have less data on it. But some people do progress better through periodic depth than daily breadth. If daily habit formation has never worked for you, or your schedule is prohibitive, this might be worth trying.
Why it can work:
A full day of practice can accomplish what weeks of fragmented sessions don't. You get past the warmup period that eats the first 20-30 minutes of most sits. You have time for something to actually develop.
It also removes the "I missed a day, now I've failed" psychology that derails so many daily practices.
The honest trade-off:
Without daily practice, sensitivity can fade between sessions. This strategy is probably slower than retreat-first for most people. It may work best as a complement to occasional retreats rather than a replacement.
What this looks like:
One full day per month (6-8 hours of practice) as minimum. Two days per month for faster progress. Light touch-in practice between sessions, like 20-30 minutes 2-3 times per week, to maintain sensitivity. With this strategy, it may be especially important to do micro-meditations throughout the day. Just a minute or two 5-10 times per day, or better yet, hundreds of almost instantaneous glimpses as you do your activities all day long.
Realistic timeline:
Everyone’s timeline will be different, but with 30 minutes three times a week plus two 4-8 hour sits per month, expect ~5 months to jhana access.
If it's not working:
If you've maintained this rhythm for six months without accessing jhana, change something. Either shift strategies (try a retreat) or add structure within this strategy (coaching, somatic work, more reflection between sessions).
For reference:
One of Jhourney's early facilitators didn't maintain a daily practice. He did roughly 30 minutes three times a week, plus 4-8 hour intensives twice monthly. He reached the jhanas in about six months. Prior to that, he was a beginner. He had dabbled with meditation here and there for years totaling 30-50 cumulative lifetime hours.
Choosing Your Strategy
A simple diagnostic:
Can you do a week-long retreat in the next six months? Strategy One is probably your fastest path.
Do you already meditate daily and want to deepen? Strategy Two lets you build on existing habits.
Does "daily practice" feel like a trap you've failed before? Strategy Three removes that failure mode.
The strategies combine.
Many practitioners start retreat-first, then shift to daily practice for maintenance. Others build daily practice first, then use retreats for breakthroughs. Some do periodic intensives until timing works for a retreat.
You don't have to pick one forever. Start somewhere, see what happens, adjust.
What doesn't work:
Twenty minutes a day, unexamined, indefinitely. This is maintenance for a skill you may not have yet.
Attending retreats without integrating between them. The skill builds through the cycle of learning, applying, and returning.
Assuming more minutes equals more progress. Quality matters more than quantity. A curious, alive 30-minute sit with thoughtful reflection and good motivation to return beats a dull two-hour sit.
Waiting for the perfect time to start. There's rarely a perfect time. Pick a strategy that fits your current constraints and begin.
"I Tried Before and It Didn't Work"
If you've attempted meditation before and didn't get the results you wanted, you're in good company. Most people who try meditation plateau. But the plateau is usually a strategy failure, not a personal one.
Common patterns:
Trying too hard. Jhana rewards relaxation, not effort. High performers often muscle their way into tension, not absorption. The instruction "focus harder" is usually counterproductive.
Wrong instructions. Many meditation traditions don't teach jhana directly. You may have been practicing something adjacent for years. Mindfulness of breath, body scanning, noting practice, loving-kindness without absorption. All valuable, none the same as jhana training.
No feedback loop. Solo practice without guidance lets subtle errors compound indefinitely. You might be doing something 95% right, with the remaining 5% preventing access. Without someone to point that out, you just keep doing it. At the very least, you want to actively reflect on each sit and consider what you might do differently next time. On retreat, we like to say, “Reflect like a scientist, play like a child.”
Insufficient dose. Twenty minutes a day for years is a fundamentally different experience than a week of immersive practice. Both involve many hours. Only one reliably produces jhana.
Expecting revelation instead of skill. Jhana develops incrementally, with plateaus and setbacks. It's more like learning an instrument than having an epiphany. If you expected dramatic breakthrough and got gradual progress instead, you might have quit too early.
The reframe:
You probably didn't fail at jhana. You failed at a strategy that wasn't designed to produce jhana. Different strategy, different result.
What Now
Jhana isn't the goal. It's a tool that makes other things easier. The states are interesting. The skills are transformative.
Whatever strategy you choose, the learning compounds. Attention training, emotional fluency, reduced reactivity. These accumulate regardless of which path you take. And they transfer. Better decisions at work. Less reactivity with people you care about. More capacity when things get hard.
The question isn't whether you're capable. The question is which architecture fits your life right now.
Ready for retreat? Explore upcoming retreats →
Need more context? Read: What Is Jhana Meditation? →
