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Join the dozens of curious meditators, analytical minds, and founders that have learned to tap into profound joy and wellbeing on command
We will have five weeklong winter retreats across December, January, and February in both online & in-person formats. Apply below to get started!
What Past Students Are Saying
What do you teach?
As founders, weāve (Alex & Stephen) both had our minds blown by jhana meditation, and we think it should be practiced way more widely. What are the jhanas?
- Extraordinarily pleasurable and non-addictive altered states you can learn to enter on command with meditation practice
- The āopposite of an anxiety loopā, in that thereās a positive feedback loop between attention and pleasure, leading to greater physiological & neurochemical responses
- A method to tap into an innate sense of inner wellbeing that some describe as enabling āMDMA therapy without the drugsā
For years, the existence of jhanas has been an āopen secretā in some communities of serious meditators. Modern research at Harvard, McGill, and others are validating their existence. At Jhourney, we believe these states can be learned more accessibly than people believe.
āThe jhanas may be the single most important thing on the planet right now. You may think itās superintelligence or longevity. Thatās nothing without wellbeing.ā
ā Google Deepmind Strategic Advisor
āThis 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 Iāve never felt anything like it. Iām so grateful; Iām a better and happier person.ā
ā Francisco Lorrain, CTO of Topsort, Former Head of Engineering at Groupon
About the Retreat
- Jhourney retreats offer unique and unparalleled opportunities. Drawing inspiration from a diverse array of traditions, we have distilled the essence, discarding any elements that might cause confusion. Additionally, we integrate potent techniques not commonly employed in traditional meditation retreats.
- The amount of support you get on a Jhourney retreat is unparalleled. You will receive 1-1 support every day and have multiple 1-1 guided meditation sessions.
Teaching principles:
- Engineers, not Dharma Teachers: Weāre 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 Dharma, including morality or metaphysics. (We can connect you to those who are should you want.)
- Non-Dogmatic Experimentation: 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.
- 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 Dharma talks.
Price:
Online retreat cost is $800. Comparable online programs are offered at $1500-2000. The in-person retreat will be $2300. We donāt want money to be an issue, so if those are still too steep for you to attend, drop us a note in the application and weāll see what we can do!
Dates:
- December 9-17th, 2023 (Online)
- January 13-20th, 2024 (Online)
- January 21-28th, 2024 (Online)
- February 9-18th, 2024 (Online, weekends + around work retreat)
- February 19-27th, 2024 (In Person, Applegate Jesuit Center near Sacramento, CA)
Schedule:
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 9am - 4pm PT. Participants will be expected to meditate ~8 hours per day. Our February 9-18th online retreat is designed around your work week. We will have full retreat days on the two weekends, and an intention for about 1.5hours of practice before and after your work day. This is a first in its kind experiment to see if we can teach jhanas in a schedule that is nonconventional but accessible. Please join if youāre excited, open minded, and happy to try something a bit different. Learn jhanas without taking time off work!
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 have been instrumental in teaching these states. We ask participants find a way to create these conditions from wherever theyāre joining.
Weāll be teaching a secular interpretation of the jhanas inspired by the teachings of Bhante Vimalaramsi, Leigh Brasington, and Rob Burbea. These traditions focus on making meditation consistently enjoyable, and weāre especially excited to teach these states to meditators who havenāt 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 Buddhist Landscape |
How You May Benefit
- Unlock the ability to enter into temporary altered states of peace and joy at levels sometimes called āpsychedelic without the drugsā
- 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, itās 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 ā deeper insights into your own nervous system await; weāll leave you with ideas to explore next after the course
- A community of practice with other curious, technically-minded explorers
āWhy 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?ā
ā Nick Cammarata, AI Safety Researcher & former founder
Is This Retreat For You?
In our experience, a few groups of people have gotten the most benefit:
- Enthusiastic meditators who are already committing meaningful time to meditation, but have not yet learned to enter into altered states on command
- Analytical minds, like engineers and tech operators, who have gotten very good in some domain before, believe meditation or psychedelics can be transformative, but find it difficult to know where to invest and challenging to sift through vastly different teachers and techniques.
- Execs & Founders who have realized their moment-to-moment mental habits are upstream of wellbeing and performance, are willing to make an intensive investment, and see that āwhat got them here wonāt get them thereā as it comes to their psychological landscape
āThis experience was the best thing thatās happened to me this year. I had no idea how enjoyable meditation could be.ā
ā Ruby Yu, founder of YC-backed 10 Lives, formerly at UCSF & Harvard
Meet Your Instructors
Jhourney is a neurotech company that aims to better understand & democratize access to life-changing states of wellbeing.
Stephen Zerfas, Co-founder & Meditation Coach
In 2018, I was breaking 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 couldnāt get any worse, I had an experience that seemed too good to be true ā crying tears of joy for 60 minutes. It was the most blissful thing that had happened to me in over a year, but the teachers didnāt 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 10 minutes. The bliss was fun, but I was more excited about the personality change: it became easy to stay relaxed and focused at work, and my negative affect and neuroticism plummeted on personality tests, and a fundamental peace became the backdrop to every day.
In the years since, Iāve helped dozens of others get to these states. I also cofounded Jhourney, a neurotech company using ML and biofeedback to make these states accessible to more people, faster.
Alex Gruver, Co-founder & Meditation Coach
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. Iām incredibly excited to help teach them.
Consistently accessing the Jhanas is the most important skill Iāve ever learned.
Judah Newman, Meditation Coach
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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, Iāve spent hundreds of hours seeking to understand these experiences in depth. Reading everything I can, talking to different teachers, and doing deep personal exploration. Itās a gift that keeps giving ā 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.