TLDR: Significant, lasting benefits from meditation can be experienced quite quickly (within a few hours speaking from personal experience). I'd strongly consider giving jhana meditation and Jhourney retreats a shot. My online Jhourney retreat was easily the best week of my life, and many others have had similarly positive experiences. Many (EA) friends have also sustainably increased their wellbeing and productivity after doing a Jhourney retreat. 

Disclaimer: I wanted to get this post out quickly since a work-compatible, remote meditation retreat I’d strongly recommend is starting soon (Thursday May 15th), and likely won’t be run again online for four months. Many of the benefits and insights I discuss are based on personal experience, and not backed up in the post with statistics/science (though I presume this is possible in ~all cases). I plan to write a more well-researched piece in the future. 

Summary

The jhanas are a set of non-addictive states of extraordinary bliss and peace, typically accessed through meditation (though upregulated breathwork like this may yield quicker results initially). There’s an upcoming work-compatible Jhourney retreat (which takes a data-driven, secular approach to jhana meditation) starting next week (May 15). 

I was told that Jhourney plans to host more in-person retreats over the summer, but won’t have more remote full-time and work-compatible retreats until after the summer. Here’s the registration link. DM me if you’d like a discount code. I have no financial incentives to get people to sign up and have no affiliation with Jhourney. They didn’t ask or pay me to write this. 

I’d also encourage readers to explore (jhana) meditation on their own (I recommend this Rob Burbea retreat) and related topics (e.g. secular Buddhism, understanding the brain and nervous system, how emotions influence our cognition and decision-making, predictive processing, etc). I share more content recommendations below.

Jhourney’s (data-driven, secular) approach to jhana meditation reliably produces transformative experiences.

• Their retreat reviews are (unbelievably) glowing.
  • I think the above reviews over-emphasize the value of experiencing jhanas and under-emphasize the many other benefits of meditation discussed below
• Instead of focusing attention on the breath, they recommend cultivating a positive emotion in the mind and body (e.g. joy, compassion, love, peace), and embracing all feelings and thoughts.
• Likelihood of experiencing jhanas is not correlated with prior meditation experience, and results are similar for online vs. in-person retreats.
• Six years of on-and-off breath-focused meditation targeted at improving concentration by focusing on the breath brought me frustratingly little progress. I saw clearer benefits from <2 hours of jhana meditation. If you’ve tried breath-focused meditation and haven’t gotten much out of it, I’d still strongly consider jhana meditation. 

Large, sustained positive changes can happen quite quickly. 

• Another Jhourney retreat participant experienced all the jhanas and cessation/awakening over two retreats within ~20 hours). I had a similar experience on my first retreat (though I haven’t yet had a cessation/awakening experience), and hypothesize about why my experience may have been particularly positive below. You can read a report on 61 Jhourney retreat attendees’ experiences here. They acknowledge the analysis is subject to response bias which likely inflates numbers, but I also would guess their instruction has improved since releasing the report as they’ve gathered more data. 

People often report significant, lasting benefits to jhana meditation. 

• I’ve written about the most salient personal benefits that have persisted >1 month post-retreat below. Experiencing jhanas, learning how to do so reliably, and accompanying practices (e.g. insight meditation, emotion processing) is often reported to cause:
  • Reduced physical and emotional suffering, and increased fulfillment, energy, relaxation, joy, and peace.
  • Equanimity or emotional relaxation, lack of push-pull, or amelioration of the compulsive aspect to attractions and aversions
  • Increased productivity
    • Reduced cravings and impulses to engage in unendorsed stimulating behaviors (like watching YouTube, eating junk food, scrolling through social media)
    • Reduced procrastination, avoidance of aversive sensations, and occurrence of ugh fields
    • Heightened determination (stability of intent) and concentration (stability of attention)
  • Increased self awareness and knowledge (of your core values, how your mind works, etc), often caused by heightened sensory clarity and mindfulness
  • Increased compassion and a stronger inclinations towards altruistic thoughts and behavior.

Downsides: 

Heightened sensitivity to emotions and physical sensations can initially feel overwhelming. In my experience, with practices like core transformation/internal family systems processing and other therapy, gratitude journaling, practicing loving kindness + compassion, and positive behavior change, the heightened sensitivity quickly (within 2 weeks) became very clearly net-positive. 

• It is probably helpful to be in a retreat setting to have the space to handle heightened sensitivity if you have a lot of difficult emotions to process like I did.
• I think meditation tends to increase open-mindedness. Without sufficiently rigorous epistemics, this can make it easier to develop beliefs that lead to worse predictions. On the flip side, most people have tons of questionable conscious and unconscious beliefs that meditation can help  us assess with increased clarity and equanimity.
• People should also do their own research and exercise caution and consult relevant medical professionals before attempting to use meditation to address severe trauma, mental illness, etc.

Recommendations:

• Consider signing up for a Jhourney retreat. Message me if you want a discount code to get $200 off (I have no financial referral incentive).
• If you want to first try a lower-commitment test, try out this breathwork activity (to see that surprisingly pleasant somatic/mental states are possible without much time and no substances).
  • A friend’s reaction after trying breathwork (sober):
  • 
• Try out jhana meditation outside on your own, and explore related content. I recommend Rob Burbea’s jhana retreat videos. I have a list of other recommendations below. 

Benefits of jhana meditation that have lasted over a month post-retreat:

• Grokking and leveraging the malleability of perception for increased wellbeing and reduced suffering.
  • Examples of the malleability of perception:
    • After an unpleasant conversation, it might be natural to feel stressed or frustrated, ruminating about how the conversation could have gone better. One could just as easily feel relief and gratitude that the conversation has ended, and relish the learning opportunity to improve their communication skills moving forward. Meditation can help automatically turn the former response into the latter.
    • I experienced what I’d consider a very unpleasant itch in normal experience as very pleasurable while in a jhana. This made me realize that classifying the pleasantness of the itch was something my mind had influence over, and was not an inherent property of the physical sensation.
    • Of course, the above examples generalize quite broadly.
  • Thanks to heightened sensory clarity (which I didn't have before accessing jhanas), I have a much clearer understanding of what goes on in my mind. In particular:
    • how my mind compresses, classifies (as positive/neutral/negative), and identifies with certain sensory data (especially thoughts, which seem much more personal and in our control and lead to much stronger identification than e.g. visual data).
      • This identification feels like a (by default) unpleasant "clenching" sensation, usually in my head, and causes a contraction of my awareness and attention (and causes fixation, rumination, etc). Relatedly, see this thread about the Buddhist concepts of tanha and dukkha, and how sensory clarity and concentration/tranquility helps us notice them.
    • how the above influences emotions and how they manifest in the body and mind
    • how these emotions, and resistance to them, influence the thoughts that arise and actions I take.
    • Reading Romeo Stevens' blog post (mis)Translating the Buddha helped contextualize many experiences and insights from meditation, and gave me a much greater appreciation of the extent to which many elements of Buddhism are more like first-person experiential science instead of faith-based/unscientific doctrine. I found Shinzen Young's table below (page 58 of this PDF, which I also recommend) helpful for identifying useful insights within Buddhism.

    • 

  • I've learned what happens when I (un)consciously resist feeling emotions and physical sensations - unnecessary, counterproductive suffering, and inadvertently amplifying whatever I'm trying to resist.
    • Embracing all sensations has quickly reaped benefits. I've made shockingly fast progress on previously debilitating phobias,  irrational fears (e.g. excessive fear of judgment, which prevented me from writing up this post earlier), and not letting shame/guilt/anxiety dictate my actions.
    • I've learned how to better relax my nervous system, so (the somatic/energetic manifestations of) emotions can move with less resistance through my body, and so related thoughts arise in conscious experience more quickly (to acknowledge, embrace, question, process, etc).
  • Pain is not the unit of effort. Suffering is not the unit of caring. I have a much stronger intuitive understanding of how much more effective positive behavior motivation is compared to negative/avoidance-based motivation (which prompted helpful exploration). I've realized that in ~all cases, persistent "negative" emotions, while they serve a useful purpose, are better served by positive emotions.
    • Motivating the behavior and thinking I wish to see in myself by feeling compassion and love is much more effective and enjoyable than feeling guilt (which mostly causes avoidance around whatever is associated with punishment).
    • I can believe it's plausible that humanity might go extinct (or that tons of sentient animals are being tortured all the time, or take your pick) without feeling stress or despair. In fact, feeling stressed about these probably isn't helpful for me or the world. Not feeling stressed doesn't mean I don't care. What matters is the actions I take.
  • The above has led to cohesion among inner parts, resulting in (delightfully empowering) self-confidence and trust. Interestingly, my interest in improving my calibration has increased as a corollary of enjoying how good it feels to trust myself and wanting to lean into it further.
  • My inner dialogue is much kinder by default, and I have easy access to self-love akin to having a crush on myself (minus the physical attraction) that previously seemed unimaginable.
    • My inner voice has become so pleasant that usually the bar for doing things other than being with my thoughts has become quite high (surpassing ~all avoidant behavior I previously engaged in). My inner critic is much quieter, and I don’t believe it like I used to. This has come without e.g. changes in my perception of myself relative to others - comparisons mostly feel unnecessarily isolating.
    • Nick Cammarata has some fascinating Twitter threads about how valuable self-love is and how good it can feel (along with tons of other great tweets about meditation, jhanas, processing feelings, and more). FWIW, I have not tried MDMA (which Nick discusses in one of the threads).
• Productivity benefits
  • I’ve come to better understand that my impulses for avoidant (and more broadly unendorsed) behavior likely stem from resistance to unpleasant emotions, thoughts, and physical sensations. This understanding has caused me to embrace and process these feelings instead of avoiding them by procrastinating. Over time, this has significantly reduced the frequency and strength of these avoidant impulses, and led to me spending my time much better.
  • Increased concentration: 6 years of on-and-off breath-focused meditation targeted at improving concentration by focusing on the breath brought me little progress (Stages 1-4 in The Mind Illuminated). Just 2 hours of jhana meditation gave me access to a level of concentration (perhaps more helpfully translated as tranquility) I’d previously never experienced. Within 5 days of my Jhourney retreat, I got to Stage 9/10 consistently, inside and outside meditation. This has mostly persisted while not processing aversive emotions - though I have spent a lot of time (that I likely would have otherwise spent engaging in avoidant behavior) on this post retreat. I think this has been quite helpful for making continued progress.
• More altruistically inclined thoughts and actions by default
  • This has mostly come from experimenting with expanding awareness and (my perception’s) boundaries of the “self”. One deep meditation session exploring infinite consciousness (Jhana 6) almost fully eradicated my previously persistent cravings to eat meat.
    • This is something I’ve wanted for a long time, and I don’t expect this change for people who wouldn’t want it.
  • Shifting attention from my head to my heart/solar plexus and gut naturally leads to less self-focused, and more altruistic and pleasant thoughts and impulses. I don’t have a great sense of why yet, but I expect there are good explanations online. It’s easier to naturally operate from an impartial, compassionate, scope-sensitive universe/multiverse/whatever-wide perspective, rather than focusing on myself (which naturally generates more self-focused behavior and thoughts, and tends to be much more unpleasant).
• Clearer thinking
  • My experience has given me greater appreciation of, access to, and influence over subconscious processing and insights.
    • Subconsious processing often outperforms discursive thought for problem solving, and benefits from improved mood, reduced stress and sufficient sleep (unverified source).
    • I appreciate how different it feels to know and believing things intellectually vs. deep down/subconsciously. I have a better (albeit still very weak) understanding of what it takes to turn conscious beliefs into subconscious beliefs - lots of patience, trusting my gut, and being OK with not having control over this process.
    • I have a much better sense of when my conscious and subconscious processing do not seem to be on the same page. This usually means I'm suppressing emotions that are trying to communicate something important, and the main signal is physical tension.
  • Greater emotional sensitivity and clarity has made it easier to understand:
    • how avoidance of aversive emotions clouds my judgment and decision-making, and exacerbates cognitive biases and motivated reasoning.
    • how to think more clearly to achieve my goals, and have my predictions better reflect reality (largely by doing less prediction and paying more attention to incoming sensory data instead). 

Additional Content Recommendations

• I’ve enjoyed reading LessWrong/rationalist content about meditation, and more (I’ve enjoyed Seeing that Frees, Opening the Heart of Compassion, and Awake: It’s Your Turn). On processing emotions, I’ve enjoyed the Art of Accomplishment content, and this episode in particular.
• My favorite meditation/dharma teacher is Rob Burbea, and this quote of his is one of the main reasons his instruction resonates with me:
  • “The concern that emptiness [in reference to the malleability/non-objectivity of perception] implies a kind of moral nihilism, an attitude that ‘we can do whatever we want because everything is empty’, and that following this path we will not care for the plight of others and the world, we can also test through our own practice. But we will find that as insight into these teachings deepens, we become, as a matter of course, more easily moved to concern for the world, and more sensitive to ethics and the consequences of our actions. Opening to voidness should definitely not lead to a lack of care, to indifference, cold aloofness, or a closing of the heart. If I find that my practice is somehow making me less compassionate, less generous, less caring about ethics, then something is wrong in my understanding or at the very least out of balance in my approach, and I need to modify how I am practising. Generally speaking, and although it may at first seem paradoxical, as we travel this meditative journey into emptiness we find that the more we taste the voidness of all things, the more loving-kindness, compassion, generosity, and deep care for the world open naturally as a consequence.”
  • I recommend checking out his jhana retreat videos, this Reddit post compiling highlights from them, and his talk transcripts. I particularly enjoyed The Meditator as Revolutionary. Rob Burbea’s retreat might be a good alternative to doing a Jhourney retreat. I only found these after doing my retreat so I can’t speak from experience. 

Hypotheses for why I had an outlier positive  retreat:

Hopefully some of these can help others get more out of jhana meditation

• I caught up on sleep debt before the retreat started. My best sessions happened lying down, largely because that made it easier to relax.
• I was in my own room for all my meditation, which made me more comfortable expressing emotions as they arose (many of my best sessions early on involved cathartic, sometimes audible, crying).
• Confidence in my abilities due to early breakthroughs led to success spirals. I think self-doubt (e.g. worrying about whether you’re doing things right, or if you’re in/close to a jhana) often significantly hinders progress. Excitement to experiment and trusting myself (over meditation instructions I didn’t think would work well for me) paid dividends.
• (As I imagine is the case for many EAs) I've internalized the arbitrariness of self/other distinctions - e.g. internalizing my wellbeing/suffering not being any more important than others’ and attempting to act accordingly, which I think naturally inclines one towards EA conclusions.
• I can easily feel strong compassion and love for others (which I would also expect to be the case for many EAs).
  • Relevant quote from Rob Burbea: “The openness of heart... easily outweighs ... focus or concentration, in terms of its significance for jhāna practice… samādhi [~concentration + tranquility] is more dependent on open-heartedness than focus… samādhi is really about increasing subtlety and refinement.”
• I have experienced emotions unusually strongly my whole life. This probably contributed to how quickly I was able to experience jhanas. On the flipside, concentration has always been a challenge, and made other meditation difficult. 

I’m happy to share my personal retreat reflection with more details and the modified meditation instructions I use if you’re interested (feel free to DM). And feel free to share your experience with meditation and related topics in the comments. :)