🧑‍🏫 A Panic Attack for Joy? Unpacking Blissful Jhana States w/ Stephen Zerfas at Jhourney Replay

Okay, let's do this. Hello. Hello. Good morning, everyone. Good afternoon. Hey, Bruno. Oh, hey, Ocean. Hey, Jeff. Hey, Elliot. Hey, Gareth. Erica, Christian, Jennifer, Etta. Lovely to see your faces. So we'll be starting in about a minute or so. In the meantime, if you'd like to share how you're feeling in this moment, in three words in the chat. Share how you're feeling. Three words in the chat.

It.

Sa. Endorphinized. Great word. Okay. Good morning, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for. Thank you for joining what is our first live guest session with Stephen. I'm just gonna pin both of us so you guys can see us. Spotlight. And there we go. Welcome, Stephen. It's an absolute pleasure to have you here.

Thanks, Johnny. I'm excited to be here too. It wasn't that long ago that I was in the shoes of the audience.

Nice. Yeah, yeah. Well, I was trying to think how best to introduce you. You are the co founder of Journey, which is a jhana meditation app. I did one of your guys retreats over the summer and was just extremely impressed by so many aspects. And I think there's a really interesting overlap between what you guys are teaching, the way you guys are teaching it, and what we're exploring here with nervous system mastery. So perhaps, perhaps by way of introduction. Well, actually, I'd be curious for you guys in the audience, how many of you have heard of the word jhana or are vaguely familiar what a jhana state is? Just raise your physical hand or say in the chat. Some people. Okay, so. So. Okay, great. Yeah. Just curious to see what we're working with here. So, Stephen, maybe as a kind of brief introduction, what the heck are the jhanas? And how did you find yourself becoming so obsessed with these altered states?

Yeah, and obsessed is the right word. So the jhanas are altered states of profound bliss and peace that you can learn to enter into with a little bit of meditation practice. And the story for me starts about six years ago. I was going through a really tough time. I was breaking up with a co founder and a girlfriend at the same time. Two different people. I think I went from two jobs and no jobs in a day. If it was. If it was going to hell, it could go to hell. Or if it could go to hell, it was going to hell. And so I went to a ten day silent meditation retreat as a Hail Mary to see if I could find something that would help me navigate the tough time. And things got even worse and got three migraines in eight days. And just when I out of desperation, really. I had to change the technique. And I did so and got lucky and I stumbled into what was just an obviously altered state. Quietly streaming tears of joy and gratitude. Easily the most blissful thing I experienced in over a year in the back of the meditation hall. And I thought, what the heck is this? If this is replicable, this could change everything. This is like my ticket out of my mess. So I did what I thought any engineer would do and I sat on the edge of my bed for an hour a day to see if I could hack myself back into that state. And ended up doing things like rotating the technique every seven days, sort of loosely tracking different personal experiments, and slowly but surely figured out how to make that state happen on demand. And it was life changing. I think the most we can go into details about what it feels like and sort of how the, the all kinds of different things about them. But one of the things that I find most exciting is how you can use altered states to alter traits. So I would, I would do things like drop into a altered state, a bliss piece of some flavor, and then just go looking for the most difficult psychological thing I could come up with. Let the two wash over me. And so the like, like just diving deep into like the death of a loved one sort of breaking through to this like, ease and acceptance of like grief and love are two sides of the same coin. Or doing something similar with a semi traumatic breakup were really profound experiences for me. In addition to the fact that it became easy to stay relaxed and focused at work, I think negative affect and neuroticism on psychometric tests plummeted. So it was really in some ways helping me become the person that I aspire to be, in addition to giving me respite from what was a tough time. So that was where the obsession began. It wasn't until a couple years later when I discovered the term Jhna and realized that a pocket of a pocket of the meditation universe practiced these states regularly and talked about them regularly. And so then it became a question of, well, if thousands of people knew about this, why not millions? And in many ways, that was when the idea for Journey was born. The core idea behind Journey, the company, is there's something fundamentally different about meditation than most other skills. And that is there's. So because it's invisible and non verbal, all this guesswork gets like gunked up the feedback loops. And so the question is, are there ways in which we can get around the guesswork problem and in doing so make them a lot more accessible?

I Love that. So I imagine people's curiosity probably piqued hearing that. One of my favorite definitions of the jhanas, which I think I heard during a retreat, was this idea of, like a panic attack. But for joy, could you briefly speak to what that means and the importance of the feedback loop between attention and emotion?

Totally. This is one of my two favorite ways of talking about the jhanas, and my favorite when talking about folks who've never heard of it before. And the reason it's my favorite is because the idea of a positive feedback loop between attention and emotion is shockingly familiar. Anybody who's experienced anxiety is intimately familiar with how minute 10 into anxious thinking is a whole lot worse than minute one. You can get sweaty palms or not in your throat. And so it turns out that you can effectively start that same sort of positive feedback loop, that spiraling mechanism in a positive direction with a little bit of practice.

And how is your. How has your life changed as a result of consistently practicing jhanas? And I'm thinking of specifically, I remember you sharing a story where I think you were coding at work and you listened to a song that just triggered this jhana state. And you just talked about tears running down your face as you're at work coding. And I thought that was just a really poignant image. So could you just speak to the arc of how has your life shifted? And what are some moments like that that have been present?

Yeah, that's a fun and dramatic story, but I don't want to make it out as if, like all day, every day, I'm just, like, spontaneously thrown into some sort of mystical state. But I. But I actually think so. There's a number of ways in which I think this has been pretty. This has been transformative for me. They all sort of actually bucket into nervous system mastery and my inner landscape and inner world, my inner monologue. I think for a year after I think I. I was regularly in the Jhnas, the number one thing I probably said in my head was like, oh, come here, my dear friend. Instead of like, sort of like turning towards my anxiety or fear or sadness, as opposed to subtly resisting it in ways that I had done for so long. And so let me see if I can sort of more thoroughly enumerate them. One I think is if you know that you can move yourself into, like, a profound state of gratitude, like a visceral state of gratitude, the biggest effect in some ways maybe actually be when you're not doing it in the same way that having a roof overhead or food on the table has a profound effect on the rest of the day. Makes it easier to delay gratification or be selfless or something like that. I think there's an, there's an almost like an insurance effect on like maybe what you might call this is like a. Again I don't want to be like overly dramatize it but something like mood scarcity, like insurance on mood poverty or something like that. The other thing is that I think it and the process of learning to sort of spot like pockets of what we like to call mental tension in the system and then habitually like turn towards embrace and. And we, I'd like to say other spot and release or we like to say it's love and awareness all the way down or awareness and love all the way down. So you have to like learn to spot the tension and turn and find a way to. To dance with or to love.

Love it.

These, this sort of like has brought on this whole new like EQ dimension in a way. There are things that I am familiar with in my own system and I think I also like C and my wife and in others that where I was just completely like illegible over my head, you know, six, seven years ago. And then maybe a couple of the other ways are. I think at some level it like improves discernment and decision making. I don't want to, again, I don't want to make over claims here but if you're able to sort of drop into a place and in doing so had to navigate like different tension in your own system, you sort of are like there's like new information flows that are on the table. There is knowing that you have some sort of visceral reaction against this particular part of a puzzle or problem. A problem becomes a palpable part of the problem solving process. So maybe I'll just name those for now.

Yeah, those are great. And the one that really struck me was how I know. I think for most of us we're kind of subtly striving or aiming towards certain states or making predictions about things that we think will help us to feel good. And if we have reliable access to just a practice that allows us to feel a kind of 10 out of 10 MDMA level of joy, then it almost. I think it changes the criteria about which like how we orient our lives. In some ways at least that's been my experience briefly kind of touching some of these states and just my sense. So one question that I haven't asked you before that I'm really curious about is if you were to deconstruct the specific skills that you think are necessary to cultivate to access Jhana states, what do you think those skills would be? And I feel like this will be a good on ramp into the parallels between what we're exploring here with nervous system mastery.

Yeah. So the way we talk about in our curriculum is that there is. We offer what we call a basic technique. And so you actually can put input for your basic technique, like a simple meta meditation or like a loving kindness meditation. You could also. There's lots of ways in which to move into Jhna. You could do something like a body scan relaxation with a bit more, like, emphasis on certain pleasant feelings and pleasant emotions. So you take this basic technique, and at first, it's really just a matter of finding a way to get the basic technique to work for you. So maybe you end up finding your right visualization or your favorite phrases, and you're just looking for just the subtlest early signal. And so maybe one of my phrases is, may all beings be happy, may all beings be healthy, may all beings be filled with joy and live a life without suffering. And each of those four phrases has a slightly different flavor to it. And if I can, like, really, if I can feel like at a somatic level, this is all. The whole game is played at the level of feeling tones. Then if I can't quite feel the differences between those four phrases, I'm like, okay, I've got some settling to do. I've got some. I'm gonna. I'm gonna take a little bit more relaxation. I'm gonna settle it. And then once I start to feel a little bit of the differences, I'm like, okay, I've got the sort of Kindle in place. And now it's just a. From here, we move into where I think the real game is played, which is in our curriculum. We talk about it being how you relate to an object in your experience versus spotting or changing an object in your experience. So figuring out the right mantras, figuring out which visualization to use or something is really about changing something in your experience. And then the real game is played like, okay, now given this thing in my experience, how do I change how I relate to it? How do I almost, like, bring the telescope into focus? And it's. It's here where we talk a lot about curiosity, enjoyment, and relaxation. Can you.

And.

And. And we almost like to. To suggest students pretend they don't even know what those words mean. Just assume you have to completely relearn what curiosity is. You have to completely relearn what relaxation is and completely re. Relearn like what savoring or delighting is. And for each of these, then the journey becomes, can I sink into it more, open up to it more, let it overwhelm me and play from there?

Yeah, I think that was what really struck me about my experience with Journey was I'd done a lot of meditation retreats before, and generally I'd kind of gone in with this kind of achiever mindset and I was really focusing and honing my concentration. And I developed a very, I'd say, skilled use of focus and attention, but I really wasn't relaxing. And it was almost the complete opposite with my experience with you guys, where it was like, oh, like I've learned to relax in different contexts, but I'd never applied it to meditation. And it was just the. I felt like I went 10 times further with 10 times less effort. And that was like. And that obviously, you know, can be applied to life in so. In so many ways. So could you maybe speak to like. And I feel like that is also an epiphany for a lot of people. Is that how good it can feel when you just learn to really soften and relax and notice that subtle tension that's there that you don't really pay attention to otherwise?

Yeah, it's so tricky, I think, to communicate this particular point in words. I'm reminded of different phrases. One is wisdom or knowledge can be communicated, but wisdom can't. And there's like some. There's some aspect here where it's like, you just have to go, like, run out and experiment or cut your teeth and have, like, have the experience where you see that your effort or your expectation is actually subtly creating attention in the system. And it's that tension then that we want to learn to, like, love and embrace and release. We also, to sort of hit this point of like, the. The potential need for relearning what relaxation means. We sometimes, we like to tell, like, propose this thought experiment of, like, imagine that you are top 20% in the world at something like, you went to. You. You worked hard to get into a good university. You. You worked hard to get good at your particular job in this particular niche. You've worked really hard for years. Our internal mental habits, which are completely invisible to each one of us, so we have no sense for, like, what the distribution looks like across the population. But our internal mental habits are almost no doubt a function of our external incentives and constraints. And so if you work Hard to get to the top of something. You may have built up habits over decades, over years or decades to apply a lot of effort into something and that's yielding you great returns. And in the process you may have made yourself the bottom 10 percentile of knowing or how to relax. And if that's the case, like you really need to relearn what that works. Like this isn't about lifting a weight. This is about finding buried treasure or like, or discovery of figuring out what is it that's in my system that I might find like a totally novel or brand new way of relating to. Hmm, it's tricky at this point.

Yeah, yeah, it's very tricky. So I've been thinking about in my kind of turning over in my own mind the overlap that I see between the nervous system mastery work and accessing jhanas. And I've actually, I went into Canva before this call and I've made a brief chart that I want to run by you just for your thoughts. But before we go there, what do you see as being the overlap between nervous system mastery and the jhanas? Seeing that you've kind of been through this curriculum and you have a sense of the territory.

Yeah. So there's a few things about nervous system mastery that I think are just carry so much overlap. Let me see if I can put them into like a, a package for us. So one is actually on this relaxation point is we something like non sleep, deep rest is I think a terrific way to begin to relate to something like meditation with a tremendous amount of ease and relaxation. A meditation where you're basically looking to get yourself to fall asleep or if not fall asleep, just like be right in that liminal space. I think can do a great number and helping us unlearn habits where we're trying to like stay super razor focused on the breath or something. Secondly, this broader idea that your, your thoughts are a product of your like emotions and physiology is I think somewhat countercultural and so true. It's like in some ways it's almost like one of those like capital S secrets. And then it's like something a few people like know about or appreciate or fully appreciate and yet is deeply valuable and true. And, and so the, the emphasis throughout nervous system mastery on recognizing that you're, you're not going to think your way out of your current like attractor basin wherever you currently find your current mood or current state. Instead what you want to do is like act your way into a new way of thinking. I think so. So instead of Thinking your way into a new way of acting, act your way into a new way of thinking, I think is a profound insight. And then third, I think so many of the different techniques that you talk about in your curriculum, from the, the different sort of like breathing check ins to like making kind of notes in your environment and help you move into that sort of active way into new way of thinking, I think are all great pointers to this broader idea that we talk about a lot of like spotting and releasing mental tension or learning to like fall in love with the feeling that you've been avoiding, which is a popular Joe Hudson line. And there's a way of like learning to A, spot the tension, but then B, realize that so many of us have these habits of like running from it as opposed to turning towards and embracing it. And that I think can make all the difference.

Yeah, I love that. And I think the, the move of having courageous curiosity towards the discomfort and the tension is I think like if I was to distill the entire curriculum into one thing, one move, I think it, I think it would be that. So just for fun, I want to share this visual that I created that is very half baked. And as you can probably tell, it's just like a thought that I'm still forming in my mind. But I've basically been thinking about this kind of spectrum where in any moment we can be either constricted, narrow, disconnected, and these are kind of the reactive states that we talked about in the first part of the curriculum. And then on the other end of the spectrum there's this open, expansive sense of safety, welcoming, relaxed state. And oh, go away, Canva. Okay. And then this kind of maps onto. I added another axis of sympathetic activation versus parasympathetic. So kind of high arousal at the top and then low arousal at the bottom. And then the way that I feel like this maps into jhanas, I'll just go through a few here is this. And so what I view on the, on the left side of this chart where we have low presence, high tension, this is the kind of hyperarousal and hyperarousal that we just covered in week one of the curriculum. And this can show up as like a panic attack, frustration, or at the bottom left corner there's like collapse and shutdown when we're kind of in this contracted state. And then on the other end of the spectrum, and we haven't actually talked about the specific jhanas, but maybe Stephen, you can speak to this a bit as well. But for the first four Jhanas My experience of them was they went from kind of high intensity and high energy to progressively calmer and more still and kind of more parasympathetic and also like lower down in the body, which is where the parasympathetic nerve fibers also tend to be. We have more sympathetic activation in our kind of chest space and then more parasympathetic as we go lower down. So this is kind of the way that I this is like my mental model for the Jhanas and then I'm not sure if you guys can see here, but there's like the kind of normal day window of tolerance, so to speak. And for many people the first time that they go into this very expanded kind of low tension space, it can also be challenging. Like I was speaking to someone, a student this morning who has, when he kind of comes into that level of safety, his body almost has a panic attack because it feels so new and so scary to be that open. So just curious to hear your thoughts on this, Stephen. Like what about this resonates or what might you shift? Feel free to tear it apart because I just came up with it this morning.

Yeah, well I'm going to put a pin into the fear and panic attack sort of thing but this graphic overall, this is basically the graphic that appears in the 2013 Hagerty paper out of UC Davis on mapping the JHNAs instead of high presence, instead of the tension axis, it's valence but it has the same vertical axis. So your morning musings are consistent with that of academics.

Well, that makes my ego feel great. Thank you.

The. And I also think you did a nice job putting on there that sort of like daily window, like the window of experience and that the, the, the Jonas especially those early like the first time in them you we will get remarks of like I did not know this was possible and yet it's familiar. It's like these are like I'm reminded of aspects of like certain memories in childhood or there's certain qualities of this that is familiar and yet like I didn't know especially with some without something like outside, without external stimulus or drugs or something like that. The third thing I'll mention which is interesting is that your choice of words of I think this openness versus closed is a. Is a great pointer and your choice of words on it being sort of high presence and about contraction very similar to this like idea of mental tension that we talk a ton about. Contraction, expansion, tension. And for some I think advanced meditators, they'll Go so far as to wonder whether or not valence, basically pleasure or pain is. Or pleasure or suffering perhaps is in fact like a function of this idea of like, contraction or expansion or attention and release. And so the psychologists will use this axis, a lot of arousal versus valence, and the advanced meditators may use a slightly different axis, but basically the exact point trying to point at the same thing from their perspective, which is arousal versus attention. And you're right, you're sort of putting your own words on the same idea.

Yeah. Interesting. I have so many questions. I think another piece that I really want to dig into because I think it's very practical as well for people listening is your. Your ethos of experimentation, which is very. I'd say there's so much overlap between how I think about the process of nervous system mastery as well. But I love the way that you guys have almost become experts at the. The feedback loops and the process of designing and running experiments that are designed or geared towards accessing jhana states. So could you maybe speak to a little bit about how you think about designing experiments, why you think they're so crucial? And then I can speak to a couple of experiments that I ran during the retreat that I found really helpful.

I'd love that. I'd love that. So, couple thoughts. The first is the two thoughts basically break down, I think, to sort of like, effectiveness and then what I would call agency. So in a world in which feedback loops are all gunked up with guesswork, you can almost like imagining trying to hike home in the mountains, but you only have like 10ft of visibility, piece of fog so bad. In this world, you are not, you do not want to work hard without working smart. It is so much more important to work smart than to work hard. And if you're going to work smart in such a difficult, uncertain environment, you have to be intentional about what machine learning they'll call explore versus exploit trade offs. You'll have to know, okay, I have a little bit of signal over here. Maybe I should invest in going to my favorite restaurant or should I try a new restaurant? Which is. Which of these is going to end up making, like, the best evening. Which of these is going to be the likely way to take me home? Which of these is going to be help me to discover the fact that these jhanas exist out there in my own nervous system. I just have to find my way to slip into them. And so if you were taking, like, if you're being intentional about your explore, exploit trade offs, if you're attempting to work smart versus work hard. This is much more about looking for buried treasure and sampling and being like, okay, what did I learn from that? Than it is like, just get into the gym and make sure you do enough biceps. It's actually nothing. There's no explored at all. It's just. There's no explore at all. It's just like, make sure I lift my weights to get stronger. I think a lot of us approach meditation with an assumption that it's really just about lifting weights. As long as I burn my attention back to the breath over and over and over again, this, like, I'll get calmer or this great thing will happen to me. And so one of the reasons I think experimentation is so valuable is because we often like to say it's not expo. It's not like experience that creates expertise. It's experience plus reflection that equals that creates expertise. And so we really want. Just want to use all the tools we can to work smart rather than work hard. The second thing on agency is that the most important thing, I think, in any learning journey is your motivation. And motivation is also surprisingly valuable. You get good at, or you get motivated and get interested in the things that you're good at. And so it's a little bit of like a gnarly loop that you have to bootstrap. But finding little micro wins. Learning to really get excited and appreciate yourself because of the experiment that you ran or the thing that you tried, rather than really learning about the journey in the long run or the destination in the long run, and really enjoying the journey along the way, I think is another reason why experimentation is so valuable. In some ways, it's like a hack for feeling more motivated, for experiencing more agency. You can always be moving the goalposts to be like, this worked yesterday. Why isn't it working today? And instead of being just thrown into despair, instead being like, that's fascinating. Like, something must have changed, like, Sherlock Holmes, like, put my Sherlock Holmes hat on or like, the game is on. Like, what is it that I'm going to discover here that's going to sort of teach me something new about myself? Those are the two reasons I think we love it.

I love that and I have more to share on that. But one thing just popped in my mind was you shared this idea of, like, being Jhana blocked that I think was also fascinating. And another really good correlation between NSM and this stuff.

Yeah, this happens to me all the time still. I'll like humming along this. I feel like this just happened this Weekend, the end of last week and someone will like something will happen, maybe something will say something and it'll kind of like I'll miss it. Like lodge basically like lodge itself in my subconscious. And then I'll be all, I'll be off center. It'll be hard for me or impossible for me to get in the jhanas and I'll be like what the fuck is going on? And I'll like replay events of a certain. I'll be like, I think there is something there. And then I'll discover I'm, I'm worried about failure. Like I'm, I'm just straight up scared that we're going to fail at work or like that, you know, I have some like unaddressed things, anger or anxiety about this particular trap that I feel like I'm in a certain social dynamic or some other, other dynamic. And this is another reason why we like to say it's, it's spot and release or it's awareness and love all the way down. They have like two wings of a bird that have to be of equal size and strength for flight to take place. Because if it happens underneath my radar and I haven't been able to quite catch it in real time or after the fact turn towards an embrace, there can often be some tension in the system that will just throw me off and jhanas or perhaps other aspects of nervous system ease will not be accessible to me.

Yeah, I think one of the reasons I love that example so much was if one is able to deterministically access the jhanas then that becomes a kind of daily way to assess. Like is there an emotion that I'm avoiding? Like is there something in my experience which I haven't felt in the same way that you might like check your aura score and you get like a, whatever 50 out of 100. It's almost, it seems like the same and I love just the practicality of that.

Yeah, totally. And you know, you don't have to have these high flying weird Jhna things in order to do something like that. You can have your hello bellwethers. But I do think that idea of bellwether is quite valuable. Maybe I'm just particularly slow, but I'm learning the same damn lessons over and over again with my subconscious and it's a little slippery.

I think it's just like the spirals, right? Like the hero's journey over and over again. I want to come back to when you were learning the jhanas. What were some of the Experiments that you ran that were kind of high ROI on your, on your time. Can you just give some examples of types of experiments that might be useful for someone who's starting out on this path?

Yeah, yeah, that's great. So I'll bucket them into, into two things. One is almost like, sort of like changing the conditions in which I'm. Well, forget the buckets, I'll just give you some examples. So one is changing the conditions in which I'm starting to meditate. I found like, very quickly it had significant effect. So if I had taken a cold shower, if I had worked out before, if it was at the like, beginning of the day versus the end of the day, noticing that like, if crazy stuff was going on at work, that would obviously affect my meditation ways. All of these things I think started to reveal. Aha. Like there's, there's ways in which I can put my, I can like, just shift my whole, like, nervous system closer to the, we'll call them like attractor basins in the state space of the nervous system, the jhanas or something, before I even get started. Grass work, I think would be in this category.

NSDR as well.

Nsdr. Yeah, totally. Another is that the, like, techniques in which I was using in meditation I would discover, would, would sort of reveal new things about myself that I'd missed before. So one good example is. Well, actually, I'll tell you what. The very first experiment that I ran that ended up getting me in Jhana was, I was last day of this meditation retreat. I had had three migraines in eight days. I was like, just totally falling apart. And I thought, okay, look, the problem is I'm doing this body scan meditation as a, as I've been instructed. And what's happening, they, they tell me that the most important thing is to be neither, neither have neither aversion nor craving, supposed to have this mysterious middle ground called equanimity, which at first I thought was numbness. And then I figured out, like, that's probably not it, but I was, what was, what was happening is I would hit some sort of like, searing hot pain in my left knee because I've been sitting for an hour straight and I would be averse to it and then I'd be frustrated with myself for being averse and then reverse to that and reverse to that and like we spiral out of control. And so I, I, I took a walk and I was like, okay, look, I'm clearly spiraling downwards in this positive feedback loop. Like, maybe if you like, reverse the inputs, you can get this thing to spiral in the other direction. So I'm just gonna go in there and, like, and. And play this a little extreme, But I'm gonna go to the other side of the spectrum. So if I encounter some sort of pleasant sensation, I'm gonna welcome it like a friend and be like, hey, come with me. Come join me. We're gonna carry on with the bite scan, and if I hit any sort of pain or unpleasantness, I'm just going to hit it with as much, like, kindness and compassion as I can come up with. And this ended up starting exactly the positive feedback loop, Especially, like, at an embodied level, some body scanning, and extending this sort of compassion to myself in this sort of somatic way. This was the first time that I think kickstarted the feedback loop. I kind of missed the core mechanism. So for the months that followed, certainly the weeks that followed, I was doing a lot of cargo culting. I was like, okay, that crazy thing happened when I, like, it was roughly this time of day, and I was doing this meditation first, and then I switched over to this version, and I, like, kind of missed that it was really about, like, spotting and releasing mental tension or, like, this version of, like, recursive self compassion, so to speak. And so then while doing these body scans, I noticed, like, oh, interesting. I think if I have a broader attention, I find it more relaxing. So now I sort of had this, like, idea of almost, like, this shape of attention. So then I started running experiments with the narrowness or the expansiveness of my attention. I also noticed at some point that if I took, like, 45 minutes to do this very slow body scan, I'd be in an unusually relaxed place. Sometimes I would assist with music. That was sort of another experiment. And then as I was coming back up through the body, it would almost be like I could start to sense some sort of, like, almost emotional or energetic aspect to the experience that I hadn't noticed before. Before, I had just been playing at the level of physical sensations, but now I was playing where it was like, this emotional, physical, like, energetic. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting. And then I noticed that they would change depending on where I was focusing in the body. And I was like, whoa, this is a really interesting link between, like, attention and emotion that I. In a new way, it's not about the shape of attention. It's almost about the location of attention and the degree of relaxation. And then it was actually in playing with that that I discovered I could sort of get a little bit of like an ex, like a move towards excitement by passing my attention, coming up through basically the central channel. And then I would play with that and would slowly grow over like 15 minutes. And then at some point it would take on a life of its own. And that was going from probabilistic to deterministic access the first time. And since there's many other ways to get to Johns.

Yeah, there's so much here. And I think there's two things about what you just said that I really want to highlight for people. One is that the way that you're describing your journey with the meditations I think is very different to how most people begin meditation practice, at least where often we're kind of listening to a guided recording and it's very passive. We're almost like consuming the prompts. Whereas what you're describing here is a much more active conversation with the, with your experience and where you're trying something like, what was that like? And then trying something new. And if something feels like it's opening up new territory, you're like trying it again and going further and further. And I think that is a, I mean it comes back to agency, I think, which is, I think a core piece of this. And I think that's in my sense is that part of the reason you're able to get such great results with getting people into Jhanas in such a short space of time is because you're really giving students agency in that way and you are empowering them to run these experiments. The other thing that I wanted to mention is I think there is a danger with kind of the way mindfulness is kind of taught in the west at least, you know, through things like Vipassana, where this idea of equanimity, which there is a. There's obviously a beautiful teaching there as well. But I think the risk is that if we stay equanimous and like neutral to a lot of these emotions and sensations, they don't actually get a chance to, to be seen or to move. And in the long run, I've seen long term meditators almost become emotionally neutered where they're kind of in this very spacious state, but there's actually not that aliveness. And I think the move of, I love your phrase of come here my friend, the move of loving and welcoming that sensation, it really invites it into the experience. And that done in the long run creates just much more aliveness, which I think is like a non trivial risk for people who go deep down the meditation path if they don't have that quality.

I, I am totally with you on that. This is, I sort of hesitate to say this because I, I, I would, I would hate for someone to sort of interpret this as like a, a strong stake in the ground or like a, like an antagonizing statement. I would, I would much. I, I would be in a. And I continue to have like, I think rich conversations with folks who come from a more like modern mindfulness tradition and put a lot of like really like to use the word equanimity right out of the gate in, in my experience, equanimity is something I like to talk about basically after somebody's experienced the fourth genre and not before then. And, and the, the, the reason is because that the way I, the way I finally was like, oh, I get it now. I get what like the, the, the teaching around equanimity and this like balancing between craving and aversion is about is because I've had this palpable experience of a like deep, deep stillness that's like so profound and so healing and so obviously like not my altered state that in this state there is like, you almost need another word. And the closest word you can come up for is equanimity. But it's almost like this feeling. I experience this feeling and now all, now every, everything around the idea of navigating towards equanimity makes sense. Prior to experiencing that feeling, there can, there's such tendency, I think, to think, okay, I need to be, I need to, I need to have that neutral experience. And the only way I know how to have that neutral experience is through all these mental habits which are invisible and impossible to talk about that I've developed over decades that involve suppressing emotion. And one of, one of our like multi time alumni and someone who I consider sort of a, a friend who's sort of been in this field for a long time talks it about or called it like the sweeping it under the rug effect. And until there's like really baked in this like, no, no, no turn towards welcome like a dear lost friend. That's where equanimity is ultimately found. This notion of like not here, not now in its extreme form is actually just sort of perpetuating internal violence.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, Beautiful. Well, I kind of revisited my journal notes before this conversation as well and I wanted to share a few of the prompts that you gave that I think were helpful not only in the context of Jhana meditation, but also outside of life in day to day life. Some of the ones that really Landed for me were both the kind of the Come here my friend, when I notice subtle tension and this could be again, I kind of want to give examples outside of a meditation context, but if I'm drafting an email to someone and I notice some tension in my system, then that kind of come here my friend, and welcoming it and then exploring why am I feeling tension around writing this email or whatever the example is. I think that was a really great one. A really big unlock for me was, and you spoke to this a little bit earlier, but this exploring how I'm doing it as opposed to the what and picking up for myself a kind of subtle change agenda which gets into the work of Steve March and this distinction between self unfoldment versus self improvement. And I think there's such a, such a like trap that I feel like almost everyone falls into at some point where they are going into a practice, be it a meditation or something else with this, with this subtle change agenda of like I want to be in a different state than the state I'm in right now and how that orientation towards your experience is the very resistance that keeps you kind of in that place. So could you speak to that in, in your own experience as well?

Yeah, this is, I think this is a great point, Johnny, and points at a, a really tricky paradox that I think almost intellectually maybe is a proper paradox like without a solution, but it turns out experientially can be navigated fortunately. And it is that it turns out that there's tension inside goals and expectations. And so if we're in some state right now and we want to change that state, we have like a goal or a hope or an expectation or something about changing that state. And that like carries with it tension. And we're blind to that tension that may literally shape the available states we can move into, including maybe spiraling into frustration, including blocking us from Jhna or, or other states. And so this. How do you navigate, how do you get around that? In fact, I think a lot of. You'll hear a lot of meditation instruction which is like you can't optimize or you shouldn't optimize meditation or it can't. It, it should have no, like meditation should have no goal. And I think this is getting actually at that paradox which is uh. But I actually think that's very, that's, that's, that's perhaps useful guidance in some ways, but actually not, but actually not true guidance because there's always a goal to your meditation, whether it's to get A little bit more calm or to become fully enlightened or anything in between. And so I think then the challenge becomes how can I become like intimately familiar with what, where, how. What shape even does that mental tension have in my system? Can I really feel around it? And given that that tension is there, this desire to sort of change my state, how can I then do the spot and release or the become aware and embrace moves in and around and maybe even including that tension itself at some point, I think you can even sort of almost like cascade or reverse up the hierarchy of goals or like the hierarchy of tension to move into a state where you sort of let. Let go of the goal itself. And you'll hear about like the yoga, non meditation and certain like Mahamudra traditions or something. There's ways in which I think you can play that game, but it is a tricky one. Totally.

Yeah. The other prompt that I wanted to mention was. Yeah, this, this one was. Was big for me. It was. Is everything in my experience something that I would give away to a loved one and can I give this state away? And that just broke me at times. Oh, shit. And it was such. I think for me that was a beautiful experiment and pointer to the subtle tension that I wasn't otherwise aware of, that I was just kind of like. What's the word? Almost just like accepting and tolerating. Probably.

Yes. It's so. It's so easy to. To tolerate tension in our experience as opposed to like love or embrace or. Or enjoy. And that's. That's tricky business.

Yeah.

This notion of I. Oh man, I love that line. And we actually, we sort of some. Some of the guided meditations, especially the live ones, um, will guide just sort of like spur the moment. Like sort of what we're kind of feeling live. And so that. That. I think that's actually a line that we haven't repeated since your retreat. And I'm so glad you named that because.

Bring it back.

Yeah, there's. There's something in there that I. That I think is. Is something that I think about a lot, which is. It's sort of like this is. Okay, I'm going to be a little crude and. Or like simplistic and overgeneralized. But I kind of buy the idea that like, the great secret of mystics everywhere isn't obviously it's not sense pleasure that's like, you know, supremely fulfilling. It may not actually even be receiving love that's supremely. That's like so supremely fulfilling. It is in fact, loving like ing with the verb that is like where real valence or like real fulfillment is found. And in. In particularly Catholic, I think, early Christian traditions, they had this idea of, in Greek, agape, which translates maybe most closely to self gift. And there's a way in which you can almost relate to everything in your experience as something that, like, may I give that away? Instead of like, growing into it or sort of trying to. Or even. There's so many different ways you can try to relate to something in your experience. You can sink into it, open up to it, lie down in front of it, surrender in front of it, grow with it, expand with it, go into the middle. Like pick your preposition, basically. And the one around self gift is something that's really stuck with me for years.

Yeah, it's beautiful. I mean, for me, there's a way in which, when I do that move of like giving to an imaginary or my wife or whoever it is, there's a way in which I almost like have to receive it first. And this maybe sounds very abstract, but there's a softening and an opening that happens for me to then give it away. So it feels like receiving and giving at the same time. It's like there's an exchange there. And then the other prompt that again, I think is just profoundly useful for all areas of life is this. Can I do this at a hundredth of the effort? And I mean, I've thought of that. When I'm like, coming up with a marketing strategy, when I'm about to go into a difficult conversation or I feel like it's just such a great prompt. What has that prompt unlocked in your experience? And why do you think it's so effective?

Yeah, the reason we take the second question first, the reason we like that prompt is because it's like a hundredth of the effort. That's radical. This isn't any incremental change. You can't just take the edge off here. You need a whole different strategy, completely different paradigm. If you're going to get even close to something like a hundredth, we're talking two orders of magnitude. That's just so. So the, the I. I think that's a really provocative framing, which is one of the reasons we like it so much in terms of what it's unlike for me, certainly all kinds of experiences. And honestly, like re lessons and. Or like relearnings. The number of times I had to learn the same thing over and over again and meditation is shocking. But the like one, analogies. I remember playing a little bit with my attention, playing with that prompt and then thinking like, okay, if this were like a painting on a canvas and I were how. How gently could I touch the paintbrush to the canvas and still leave paint on it? Like, is there. As opposed to like when I'm what I feel like I'm probably doing right now, which is like hammering everything with my attention. And that is really useful, I think, in navigating some of these gentler and wide open states. I also think so my daughter is seven weeks old and so I'm a new father and figuring it's all disoriented and I'm figuring it out and some days and some hours much more gracefully than others. And there's a. There's an extent to which maybe like, if I'm with. If I'm with my daughter without any expectations about how the next three hours are going to go, like, the worst was when I thought she was gonna go to sleep in 20 minutes. And then three hours later, I'm still trying to calm her. Inconsolable crying and I'm like always wind and like, I had work to do and all this stuff. Whereas if I'm just like, okay, I don't know how this is going to go, but this is time with my daughter crying or not. It's just this like warm, fuzzy time. And there's a lot way less effort in sort of my inner world through that whole experience. So perhaps that's a recent and concrete way in which you can back into a much happier experience by asking myself, what's 100th of the effort?

It sounds like your daughter's becoming a beautiful Jhana teacher just like leveling up the intensity of your practice.

It is shocking how much of the experience is in my own head. The whole thing, from I'm tearing up with love to oh my God, I'm losing my mind. She's just crying or laughing or smiling or like goo gooing as maybe like it's all in my own head.

Yeah, beautiful. So I want to open up questions to the group in a moment. But before we go there, I think another. Another thought that I have, you know, maybe for people listening is that, let's say. Let's say these talks of like accessing mdma, like bliss state. Sounds lovely. But I'm struggling with, unable to fall asleep, maybe having panic attacks, feeling anxious, kind of unprocessed emotions to deal with. How do you see. Do you see a role for playing with jhanas for people who are kind of really struggling in their life right Now?

Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. I loosely think about learning. There's sort of like three strategies to learn the jhanas. And I do think that they, they all require a meaningful amount of time. And if you're in a spot where you just don't have that time right now, then you're probably better off allocating your resources to other things until you think you can invest the time in this. Much the same way if you wanted to run a half marathon or hit certain physical fitness goals or read certain books, certainly doable. There's nothing that precludes you from being able to do any of that, and it's going to take some investment. The three strategies that I think make sense are meditating for an hour more a day and doing so very intentionally and maybe like jotting a few notes to yourself afterwards about what you learned. And treat each one as sort of like an exploratory mission into the unknown in which you're learning about yourself rather than something that you're doing rote, like a chore. The second strategy is to go on retreats and so you can carve out a week or two weeks and just go do this full time and totally immerse yourself in it. And then you come back and you'll probably develop maybe access to jhanas or maybe you'll get close. Your sort of ability to do so in a relatively short sit will sort of return back to baseline, maybe not quite, sort of asymptomatically, like get not quite all the way there. Um, and then you could just be like, you know what? My daily, my day to day is too crazy. I'm just gonna do that on another retreat, you know, next year or in six months. And then the third approach is a bit of a blend where you say, okay, maybe I'll meditate half an hour here and there a couple times a week or something, and then I twice a month on Saturday, I'm just gonna do like six hours. And I, I've seen that work in a couple of cases too. And I think for each person you'll sort of have intuition about which one is, I think, ultimately more exciting for you given your certain constraints. Does that, Let me pause there. Does that answer all of your question?

It does. I have a follow up, but did you want to help? Okay, great. So the other thing that I guess we didn't mention in the intro is you guys have a pretty impressive track record of reliably getting people into jhana states. What is the kind of average duration for let's say a beginner meditator. From zero to Jhana, what is the approximate number of hours and what have you seen to be the common threads or the commonalities between people that are able to effectively access those jhana states?

Yeah, yeah, great question. So we, depending on the retreat model we see between like we see about 2/3 of folks get into jhanas as first timers on a week long retreat with us, about 50% of those folks are in Jhana in the first like four or five days. And these are retreats in which people are meditating between six and ten hours a day. So in that in those kinds of conditions we'll call it like 50% success after 40 hours of practice, give or take. I don't know how that translates to. If you're taking the other strategies, which is like do the occasional day long on your own or like meditate an hour plus a day on your own, it could very well be the case that 40 hours is actually just what like, you know, half the population needs. It may be that these conditions change the speed in terms of the shared qualities that we see of folks who I think are, we'll call them fast responders, quick or reliably in jhana. And one of them is that they just come with a sense of playfulness. And this is actually surprisingly rare I think when it comes to meditation and when it comes to the particularly like this idea that I need to get somewhere, I need to get to a jhana in meditation. But if you come with this like just sort of endless fascination and delight of like every twist and turn is something that I'm learning about myself. And there's sort of like a light hearted sort of cheerfulness in the same way that you can be a light hearted, cheery novice tennis player, sort of like laughing at your mistakes and occasionally enjoying the fact that your shot goes within the square, that I think is very, that's probably actually the number one thing. There are other things that I think are in the bucket, like folks who are sort of like doing a good job of making use of their experiments and sort of building on them. Some folks, I feel like I'm just like a background of doing this and some may be less so. And there's only maybe a little bit of a ramp up. There's a handful of different places where you can get caught, like you can get caught by I think running. Say it again.

That was my next question.

So folks who I think are.

The.

Biggest one I think is we like to say, look we are not here to teach you the Jhanas. We're here to teach you how to learn the Jhanas. And at the, at the end of the day, this is a, like, you're the captain of your own ship. And we're nothing more than like, hopefully an earnest and useful set of advisors. And with. So. So the folks who are out there, like, running their own experiments, playing around in the sandbox and, and they're like, we like to say reflect like a scientist or play. Sorry, Reflect like a scientist, play like a child. If they're really embodying that kind of, that kind of spirit, then I think some folks walk in, it's just like, oh, it's a matter of time. Like, I'm not even sure you need me to be here. Like, this is. You'll be in a great spot. Yeah, there's. There's other sort of specific places, people getting caught sometimes. I think a lot of folks have a tendency to bounce around a lot and, and try all these different meditation techniques because they're looking for some like, fireworks to go off. And really the game is played once you settle on something, like just gets a little slight warmth in your chest, like imagining a puppy or something. Now it's really about how do I sink into it and open up to it and get curious or enjoy and relax more than I ever had before.

Yeah, it's like the explore, exploit, trade off again.

Yeah, totally. We have a list of these in our curriculum and I'm trying to remember them, but those are a couple off the top of my head.

Yeah, that's good. I love the. Reflect like a scientist, play like a child. That's fantastic.

There's one thing related to that, which is that it's super easy and even in this conversation for this, for us to sort of subtly begin thinking of meditation as like a headier cognitive activity because it is something that happens in our head at some level, but it's. It's just not like that. It's like dancing. Like, you can take all the notes in the world, you can study your rear end off and you can march all day long and it's just still not quite dancing like the in. And so finding a way to let yourself get lost in the curiosity of the enjoyment and the relaxation or the giving away of your loving kindness like a virtuoso violinist, like feeling it in your body, the way you're like, is this something that I can receive and give at the same time? Like losing yourself in the music? That's where the Whole game is played. So this, this notion of dancing I think can be useful to remind ourselves that at the end of the day it's not like playing chess with a blindfold. It's like dancing.

Yeah, I love that so much. And what comes to mind is we've recently been talking about polyvagal theory and this idea of ventral vagal and how that state is very associated with play and so kind of bringing. And I mean I view jhanas as what polyvagal people call ventral as just like ventral dialed up to 10. It's like if you double down on that and like recursive ventral, it's like you find yourself in a jhana state reliably is my sense at least it.

Is a fascinating theory. I wondered something like that myself.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I feel like I've been talking a lot. I'd love to hear some of the questions from you guys in the space. Feel free to raise your virtual hand and we'll just kind of go through one by one. Paul, looks like you are up first.

Howdy. Hi Stephen. I was really curious. I saw that you are familiar with Delon Armstrong and he really does. He's really. He really champions Bonte Bim Ramsey's twin style, which I'm a big fan of. I. I love the twin style. Help me get through a hard toxic shame cycle last year. My question is, I'm curious of the type of jhana that you're doing because Bonte Bim la Ramsey has the aware jhanas which are deal with open awareness and you could even do walking around versus PA Oxayada which has these concentrate of jhnas where you go into an amita which is like a signal or a light pattern or a sign for people that don't know. And then you are completely absorbed into this, this Jhna space. So I'm curious what type of Jhna you guys teach or access. Yeah, totally. So the short answer is much more in the style of the open aware and in the style taught by the twin community, Berbea and Brasenton. Although Rebea and Brazington. It's up in the air the extent to which you would call those, you would practice those in open aware format. Certainly not that which is inspired by like the. The Pallock Jhna tradition is inspired actually by like a totally different set of texts like the Sutimonga as opposed to the Suttas. So that's the short answer. And my gift is like sort of 30 second additional context on the Jhnas and sort of the world today. Here's a story it took me a long time to piece this together about like why Jhnas are somewhat unfamiliar in the landscape today and why there's some confusion about what they mean, which is this is the Jhnas actually in many ways cut across time and space. So they appear in Hinduism and pre day Buddhism phenomenologically resemble a lot of states you see in Christian, Sufi, Mormon, mysticism and more. But just from a Buddhist perspective there's a story you can tell in which you say okay, early Buddhist texts talk about the Jhna super frequently and seem to talk about them being very accessible even to the lay folks. Then you fast, you fast forward about six or seven hundred years. I always get my centuries wrong, so don't quote me on that. And you have another text written, the Visidimaga that will make a specific claim that one in a million people will enter the first John in their lifetime. It largely seems in the intervening period religion was institutionalized and so the, the practice of these Jhnas was taken behind the walls of monasteries and sort of the bar continued to rise. And it was also introduced this idea of a visual Nimitta. Then you fast forward another basically millennia, another thousand thousand years or so and there's a democratizing movement that's like take religion back for the people. You don't need these crazy intense states that you can only get into if you're like one in a million in order to access enlightenment. You can go straight there without the Jhnas at all. And you see the emergence of dry insight traditions. This includes Goenka, Upandita, many of the Vipassan traditions actually that influenced the early OGs out here in the west like Jack Kornfield, Cheyenne Salzberg, Joe Goldstein and John Kabat Zinn. And so now in the west predominantly a lot of Vipassana oriented folks will come from this tradition where the Jhnas are not something that you would want to invest in. They may even be a bad thing. They may be a distraction to enlightenment. You have this other school which is Palak and like very intense, highly absorbed, have to have the visual Nimitta. And then you have this relatively recent reemergence like a reinterpretation of the Suttas or earlier texts. And this is where you have Berbea and Twin and other traditions. We have taken almost exclusively our inspiration from that third camp. Gotcha. So I don't need to meditate for 10,000 hours to reach Ajana. No. And the reason why we, why we find ourselves, we ourselves like very secular, don't have a horse in the race on debates around the Jhnas of the different traditions. And I think the fascinating thing here is you have a community of folks that is basically reporting an ability to have an MDMA like experience without MDMA on what amounts to historically hundreds and then it became like dozens of hours of practice. And that's the thing that we think is like whoa, whatever that is, we can call it whatever we want Jhana or not, but like whatever that is, that is super exciting and where we're investing our efforts. Thank you. Sure.

Beautiful. Thank you, Paul. Hey, Trevor.

Hey, Stephen. Hey, Trevor. Hey. So I have a quick question. I'm kind of like been very much doing the traditional meditation path, so kind of like 300 hours on headspace and did a 10 day Vipassana retreat. And I feel very like, like I've been following these straight tracks in a way. And when you start talking about like this, you know, experimental mindset, I'm like, that sounds hard for me because I've been, I just show up and like do the reps. So I'm kind of curious. So two things. One is how I, how I make that shift. But then two, is there a type of meditation that's like very conducive to like build the type of fertile soil if I was gonna go do a journey type retreat someday so that I'm kind of positioning myself for like heading in that type of direction. Yeah. Suggest. Yeah. Yeah. Great question. So the two things, three things actually. One is non sleep, deep rest. We actually had somebody, we who we actually usually tell people, don't prepare, just come up, just, just come with your excitement if you want to prepare, like get yourself stoked and. But somebody insisted and so he did NSDR for an hour a day for the month leading up to the retreat and like six days before he showed up on retreat at his first Jhana. So that's not what happens to everybody who does nsdr and but what I think is it's a great point of there for how just like wonderful that relaxation approach can be and it's great fun and it can sort of begin to sort of reassociate the experience of meditation with something that's just wide open and at ease and like relaxing and playful. So, so nice on your. The system. It's like sleep. The second is a gratitude practice. So actually even writing like a gratitude letter to somebody that you may or may not send every morning can be Like a really one of, one of the top evidence backed interventions in positive psychology. And that can start getting some of those good feels flowing. And then a third I think is loving kindness meditation, of which there's lots of tracks out there that you could find on headspace or calm or something. Okay, and is it, is it bad to have such a structured like using a headspace app for a long period of time or is it neutral or is it just a slower way to get somewhere? Like I even heard Sam Altman on a podcast talk about how he meditates an hour and has done for 10 years, but it's like completely unstructured. Like he just, he sits and then he just notices and. Yeah, curious your thought on that too. It feels way too strong of a word to say it's bad. Like it, it one like if the whole like, I want to question the whole like evaluation framework of like bad, good, like, particularly if it has sort of should language involve in terms of like whether or not it would put yourself in a spot that would be like conducive to having like a really quick success on journey retreat or elsewhere. I think the question is actually much more personal. Like what about this experience is going to make it playful and exciting for me? And if the answer is your guided meditations, then like 100% do that. And if the answer is like throw those out the door because you want a clean slate and you're going to color outside the lines and make a beautiful canvas, then go do that. Cool. Thanks, Stephen. I think I know the answer and then you just help me get there. Thank you. Shabba.

Hey Christian.

Hi, how are you doing? So you mentioned the Catholic tradition in Christian and I'm wondering if there's a way to integrate a Johnny with a more of a, a spiritual connection with God, you know, rather than like. Because I was literally just thinking, you know, what I'd really like to do is spend like an hour a day in my evening in prayer as opposed to kind of broken up a little bit here and there and then you come talking about this and I'm wondering, well, obviously I'm not going to do two hours, but is there a way where some of these principles can be kind of integrated so that it's not just, you know, for me I really enjoy communing with God. And so, you know, is that something that can go along with it or is it just kind of forcing things in a hundred percent? Just go pray like a virtuoso violinist. In fact, like I still, because of my Catholic roots. And because I have such a positive association with the word God, I will frequently, like, blend prayer and meditation and have been delighted by how complimentary the two are. Awesome. Yeah, thanks, that's helpful. Thank you so much. Sure.

Beautiful. I just want to add in that, like, for me, bringing in like a devotional quality was also like my way to access jhana the first time I experienced it. And so whether it's to God, whether. Whether it's to whatever you feel like you can muster a very sincere sense of devotion towards that is like a super highway into Jhana in my experience.

I second that. I had discovered probably the first one or two jhanas through these other various meditation methods and then stumbled on a meditation technique that suggested using a mantra that used the word God. You could replace it with the universe if you wanted to, but I thought God worked great for me. And it was. There was three of them and it was praise God for my life, which was like a kind of above the head, overwhelming, like, kind of surrender, rapture experience. Thank God for my body, mind, which is more like this or gratitude more in the heart space. And then God loves me. And my response, I was just like, God, what else matters? And it was just like so relaxed. I was like in the floor and playing with these mantras. Actually, what revealed to me that this wasn't just one altered state. It was in fact inroads on multiple. And so it was, it was almost in a way through prayer that I discovered the first. Like to differentiate between the first three dhanas. And are you doing that like over an hour time? Like you're going kind of just repeating these mantras or you're following. I think the structure. I think I found on your website, like a stages or something. I. So. So back then, and. And I guess still when I. When I use those, I will just kind of Pulse 1 and also like kind of drop the mantra and sort of watch how it like changes the somatic emotional experience and then it'll kind of like simmer out and then I'll sort of drop it again. And yeah, I would do that for an hour, hour and a half. Sort of just like get lost in the music sort of thing again, kind of going back to that musician analogy. That's awesome. Thank you. Sure.

Thank you, Christian. Hey there, Etta.

I'm almost embarrassed to speak because I feel like you're the formula one driver of meditation, and I'm still wobbling on a bicycle, so forgive me. I've been trying to meditate for 45 years. I'll give you an idea. And I know trying and meditation really shouldn't be in the same. Sent. I have adhd. I don't know if that's anything to do with it, but my mind is never quiet and my body is rarely still. I fidget all the time and I'm so drawn to your journey things. But the idea of doing a 10 hour meditation, I fear that you would evict me after the first 20 minutes for being a disruptive force. So I'm just really intrigued to know what does that mean meditating for 10 minutes? Is it sitting still? Do people go and walk off and do what's right for them? I'm just, I can't begin. It's outside my, my field of experience. Yeah. What's something that you have gotten lost in in like a flow state before flying? I was a commercial pilot when I was younger and I think a combination of being responsible for everybody sitting at the back and just loving it. Yeah, it was all consuming. That's. Yes. So it can be done. Yes. In some ways the journey to Jhna is figuring out how to relate to your experience in a way that's so naturally like fun and enjoyable that you slip into a flow state. So it's, it's, it's like flying in. In. So then we'd be like in. In your case, maybe it's like what would allow me to like have a flying like experience sitting here with my eyes closed or while I'm walking. You can learn these states walking meditation too. And so, you know, getting lost in your. When you're doing a walking meditation, it's still very much an internal experience in a way because maybe you're like dropping, you're kind of pulsing. It's the same technique basically. And so maybe you're like pulsing the mantra as you're walking to the woods. And so you're in the whole woods and the landscape and you're welcoming everything in and you're noticing how the entire experience changes when you pulse your visualization or whatever it is. But I think we have definitely found folks with ADHD have a wonderful time on, on our retreats. And I don't have a great. I don't have a magic answer for you other than I think the key will probably be in letting yourself return to flying as opposed to shoulding your way into something else. That's really insightful. Thank you. It's. I can feel the answer. So thank you very much. Warm to hear it.

Thank you. Edda Bruno.

I'VE been trying to figure out what I'm trying to ask here, but what is your take on the genres being a sort of a. I'll be blunt here, a side attraction in trying to reach Rigba. Now, full disclosure, I'm been into Zochin for probably 12, 13 years because the, the Dojian cuts right to the core of. Well, at least this is what the claim is, right? Yeah, that's right. To the core of, of sitting and meditating and focusing on the breath or on the images. On that at some point they say okay all just, just okay. At some point you need to just drop open your awareness and if the key phrase here, if the causes and conditions, if you're karma is there, at some point Rigba will occur. Right. And what's also being taught is that if, if these alter states appear, you. They're fine, they're great, phenomenal, knock yourself out. But having them as the goal and something that was quite interesting to me when you started, when this whole meeting started was you said you're addicted to the genres or I apologize if I misunderstood. So trying to shoot for that when.

Actually.

Well, the goal would be connecting to Riyama, connecting to Rigba and basically going into Nirvana at the point of death. Yep.

So. Okay, I'll. I'll.

I don't know if my question makes sense. Oh, totally makes a lot of sense. So what you think? Sorry. And I, I love this question because you only ever get this question from somebody who's like invested a lot of time of their own and exploring aspects of this world. So a couple of things. One, just a quick note on like John is an addiction. The jhanas are so non addictive it's almost a bummer. Like you're like. It is about as addictive as laughing so hard you cry with friends or cuddling with a loved one. I actually think they would be more, they would be more popular, more prominent if they were old, a little bit closer, just a splash like scrolling Twitter. But they're not like you're, you're more likely to scroll Twitter the next day than you are even if you just had a jhana that blew your face off. In the same way that like if you laugh so hard you cry with friends, it just doesn't have the. Okay, but back to this point about Rigpa, there's a fascinating dynamic between the moving to the jhanas and then towards cessation. So, so let me, let me back up for like a 30 second sort of context which is very crudely speaking. Okay. I like to think of the development of different wisdom traditions as the development of different psychotechnology trees. So you can look at them as a develop of like, cultural, historical, political phenomena with the development of like very interesting traditions and religious traditions. You can also look at it is like some of the world's smartest people developing algorithms to make ourselves happier. And like. And I think the development of that, the sort of tree, the tech tree of psychotechnology that came out of earlier than later Buddhism has two, especially if you look at like early and later Buddhism, two big branches. One is something like what I might call like the cessation branch, which is like you end up finding nirvana and enlightenment by, by scaling the Jhanas and then dropping into an unconditioned experience in which something about like time, subject and other disappears. And then there's other branch which is move into Rigpa. This like wide open, completely like pure, bright, luminous awareness in which everything is emerging. Kind of like has these effulgent qualities and that is where liberation is found. And they'll debate over which one is better and for various ways. And I kind of see it as like debating whether or not SpaceX vs NASA has better rocket ships. Like, no doubt a valuable debate. And like we're both talking about super powerful, incredible tech. So that's one thing. The second thing is that I actually think this is super complementary. In fact, in certain, I think, Zogchen traditions, they would hold the teaching secret until you've spent 10 years playing in spaces like the Jhanas and then using something like the later Jhanas as a launch pad to then do Zoghaning inquiry or Mahamudra. Like inquiry can be especially potent. My experience is that my experience in the later Jhnas has very much informed and accelerated my inquiry in both the cessation direction and the sort of Zogchen Trek show, drop the sticks, wake up right now direction. And so I have sort of a special place in my heart for blending them all together and also appreciate others who like to stick to their path. Okay, thank you.

Beautiful. Something I just want to chime in briefly is I feel like there's an interesting correlation between accessing Jhana state and being able to do the type of emotional work that we talk about in nsm. And my sense is that the more that we have a secure attachment with life and the less kind of trauma that we're carrying, basically the easier it is for that kind of insight of awakening to occur. And so I feel like there's an interesting dynamic There as well. And to speak to Stephen's point, I think that the Jhanas almost have like an anti addiction quality where if we're able to source that deep felt sense of like I'm okay and I'm good, then then we're less likely to crave addictions from things like Twitter or alcohol or whatever the things are. So I think there's actually like a deep, a deep conversation there as well.

That's a great point.

Just mighty sense. I couldn't help but chime in, but thank you for the question, Bruno.

I love that actually. Johnny, just a quick extension on that. There's, I think Shambila Chandarya is the one who I've seen say this the best online, but there's a model there. I've seen some folks talk about the distinction between awakening and liberation sort of being two different axes. And awakening is realizing your true nature and liberation being working through your conditioning or karma. Sort of pick your language and one route is. And they sort of start independent. But if you, if you have like the more awakening you have, the more like liberation you can do and the more liberated you are, the easier it is to have profound awakenings. And so this creates like a little bit of those different paths through this axis and direct paths, like direct non dual instructions will anchor more on that awakening first, which you then use to liberate things like Western psychotherapy or more indirect paths that involve like cultivating a certain amount of shamata or collectedness arguably are creating more of the like working through the emotional stuff which then allows you to do more awakening.

So yeah, sort of super interesting. I hadn't come across that. Um, well, I've just, I've just noted the time. Um, I want to respect everyone that has to jump off at 12:30. So firstly, thank you, Stephen. This has been frigging incredible. Um, we've had people ask, ask for the transcripts because it's been so densely, densely packed with insights for listeners who are like, okay, I'm intrigued. Where would you recommend be some jumping off points to learn about the Jhanas, to learn about what you're doing with Journey and to just kind of keep going down this rabbit hole.

Yeah, so certainly we would love to see any of you on retreat. We're actually, I think we're sold out at the moment. But just this week we're going to announce two more online retreats by the end of the year in November, December. And then we've been in this like startup mode and so we've been Announcing small batches of retreats, like three months out. But it won't be long before we have like a. A good solid schedule that it'll be easier for us to sign up for. So stay tuned for that on our website. You can sign up at our mailing list and then that way you'll. You'll get notices about retreats on Twitter. We're at johnatech and I'm at Steven Underscore Zurfus. And so you can follow us there and then in terms of sort of learning more about the Jhanas, I think so the tricky thing is the Jhana literature out there right now is just. It's such a convoluted, difficult, and everybody's speaking to their corner of the thing. It took me forever to figure out why there is Dry insight vs John Deet vs John of Light and all this stuff. So it's quite tricky to navigate. If I would had. If I had to point to one or two books, I think the number one would probably be seeing that freeze, which is what you mentioned in the chat, Johnny. That, though, doesn't have great practice descriptions or phenomenological descriptions. So for more practice or phenomenology, I would point to Right Concentration by Lee Brasington, which is. And again, we sort of teach differently than all the above. And then there's another one called Path to Nibbana by David Johnson. That one's a bit more dogmatic and is very particularly like my, you know, sort of the twin way is the best way. But I sort of at this point have a habit of taking everything with a grain of salt and triangulating and appreciating the wisdom that is sometimes found beneath the yelling. So if you, if you found yourself drawn to that, that's a good option too.

Beautiful. Well, for everyone listening, you're muted on my end, Johnny. Oh, interesting. Am I still?

Is that on my end? Can others hear him?

Can you guys hear me?

I can, yeah.

Okay. Maybe it's on your side, Stephen. Testing, testing.

Oh, I can hear you now. Sorry.

That's all good. Well, that. That feels like a great. A great time. I mean, may everyone hear the. The wisdom beneath the yelling. Beautiful place to end on. We will. We'll create a transcript for everyone, Everyone listening. We'll also add the resources that have been mentioned in the. In the notes, in nsm, in the community. Yeah, Just want to say a huge thank you, Stephen and everyone, if you guys would like to unmute and say thank you so much, Stephen. And we were. We'll close with that, so 3, 2, 1. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, y'. All. It's been fun, you guys.

Very soon. Take care.