Our Approach to Innovation
Conventional wisdom is that meditation is like eating vegetables: it’s good for you, but it’s incremental and often unpleasant. Meditation can bring peak experiences and transform your wellbeing, but only if you dedicate years of your life to living in a cave.
We started Jhourney because we think that’s wrong: meditation can be deeply enjoyable and quickly transformative. We’re on a journey to make extraordinary peak meditative experiences and lasting personal growth accessible to everyone.
This requires innovation. So we’re doing things differently, and we’re getting results. Let’s look at the results so far, discuss risks with traditional approaches, and how we’ve designed our retreats to minimize these risks.
Life-Changing Results
We’re excited by our results. In February, we announced that our initial retreats saw ~70% of novices experiencing jhanas, and even those that didn't are often highly satisfied (NPS 80). In the four months since, we’ve more than tripled the number of participants while maintaining these results.
Here’s a sample from hundreds of quotes from our retreat surveys and testimonials:
“Probably one of the nicest things that's ever happened to me, like up there with beautiful events like marriage.” – September retreatant
“This is the best retreat I’ve done in 50 years of meditating” – March retreatant
“This retreat was one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself” – March retreatant
“Halfway into the retreat…my mind exploding into indescribable beauty, followed by nothingness, that exceeded the intensity of some psychedelic experiences” – March retreatant
“My best MDMA experience, where I felt my sense of self-judgment melt away, was in-line with the contentment and peace that I could access in my practice later in retreat.” – February retreatant
“Intense, ecstatic, overwhelming joy followed by a state of smooth, symmetrical, cool bliss one morning. the afterglow lasted the remainder of the day. mood easily top 1% days of my life.” – February retreatant
“The rest was so deep it was like a weeklong vacation compressed into an hour” – March retreatant
Quotes also reflect that this is about more than altered states. As we like to say, “Come for the bliss, stay for the personal growth.”
“I just realized since your retreat my inner critic has been gone. Like completely gone. F*%$ing wild.” – October retreatant email a month later
“I…should convince all my internet friends to do a Jhourney Jhana retreat. Possible most EV [expected value] thing you can engage in in your LIFE (other than getting married, having kids, etc.)” – January retreatant
“To know there’s this infinite resource within me that’s accessible without external conditions…it’s just crazy. You can’t unsee that.” – September retreatant
“You are bringing the heart back into psychology.” – May retreatant and clinical psychologist
“What you are doing here could be the answer I’ve been looking for. I’m going to cry thinking about what this could mean for people.” – May retreatant and another clinical psychologist
These quotes have moved our team to tears – there’s nothing more rewarding than helping retreatants become the people they aspire to be.
Pioneering New Techniques
We’ve embraced an evidence-based approach incorporating learnings from top teachers. Our instructor team has spent years developing relationships with a dozen teachers from various jhana traditions, including well-known figures like Leigh Brasington (who appeared on our podcast). These teachers have provided invaluable feedback, including spending days on retreat with us and providing feedback on our individualized sessions with students.[1]
The mission of making the jhanas accessible is electrifying for us and the teachers supporting us. Just as Transcendental Meditation and mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) reached millions more people in their secularized forms, we’re applying the same approach to the jhanas.
After hundreds of interviews with students and feedback from experts, we began developing our own exercises, cataloging common antipatterns, and improving instruction.[2] On retreat, we reflect and innovate daily, and customize practice recommendations to each participant.
The Risks of High Dose Meditation
While meditation is exceedingly safe and negative experiences are rare, challenging sessions can occur, similar to difficult moments in therapy. The severity of these experiences depends on the context. For someone meditating 20 minutes a day using an app, these challenges are unlikely. However, for a monk on a year-long solo retreat without social support, the risks are much higher.
Unfortunately, the status quo at many retreats does little to address safety:
Guru effects – Many meditation retreats play into guru effects and similar social dynamics that encourage suspending one’s own critical thinking and putting unwavering trust in an expert.
Failure to solicit feedback – Many meditation teachers do not solicit feedback, and if they do, it’s not anonymous.[3]
Untracked base rates – Many teachers do not track the rates of challenging sessions or other lingering negative effects, making it difficult to determine the safest techniques and teachers.
Ad hoc response plans – If something does go awry on retreat, it’s not guaranteed that a given teacher has a protocol in place to address it. Sometimes students receive instructions to double-down on meditation when they should instead seek other kinds of support.
No personalized tracking – Many retreats focus on large group sits with little individualized coaching to track and support each person’s experience.
Unrecognized biasing – Students on retreat can be highly suggestible, so emphasizing meditation’s challenges or negative experiences can create self-fulfilling prophecies. Some teachers inadvertently amplify this effect by using alarming messaging, which may create more distressing experiences.
Our Innovations in Safety
We’re not only innovating to make the jhanas more accessible – we’re also innovating to reduce the rare, but important risks from meditation, which are often overlooked in the mainstream meditation discussion.
Here are some of the ways we’re innovating to ensure safety:
Resisting guru effects: We emphasize that participants run their own experiments and take instructors' advice as just one input, not a holy word that must be followed. Students take full ownership of their experiences, following their curiosity, relaxation, and enjoyment. We intentionally have multiple instructors share their experiences to provide diverse perspectives.
Interviewing teachers on safety: We’ve incorporated insights from top meditation teachers to design for safety. As an example: every teacher we spoke with agreed that loving-kindness meditation is one of the safest meditation techniques.
Balancing silence with social contact: Many teachers agree that social contact reduces risks of negative experiences,[4] though some believe silence is necessary for achieving the jhanas. This is an example of our evidence-based approach we take to all our teaching – we’ve experimented with silence vs. facilitated talking and found that peer-to-peer discussions may help people experience the jhanas while also increasing safety.
Monitoring mental health: We implement pre-screening based on established exclusion criteria, monitor attendees daily, and have a crisis response plan. Our approach is informed by the best research in the field of adverse effects from meditation and our team of trusted experts, including meditation teachers, therapists, clinical psychologists, and psychiatrists.
Continuous Improvement
We’re proud that many of our hundreds of students report life-changing experiences.
But we’re not stopping here. We’re constantly learning from our results, the latest research, our team of experts, and feedback from participants. If you’re a teacher committed to safety, we’d love to connect, learn about your experiences, and share our latest learnings so we can continue to improve life-changing meditation for everyone!
“It may sound hyperbolic, but jhanas are the closest thing to magic that I’ve experienced in my adult life.”
Footnotes
[1] To return the favor, we refer our alumni to these teachers for further training when it seems like a good fit. Since jhanas are complementary to so many other practices, we’ve also built relationships with teachers in other, non-jhana traditions by attending or inviting them on our retreats. We refer alumni to them too.
[2] Our instructor team continues to deepen our own practice too. We’ve spent thousands of hours on dozens of retreats, and are constantly reading and synthesizing takeaways for each other. Continuous improvement allows us to serve novices more efficiently and to serve more advanced students more comprehensively.
[3] We made this mistake ourselves! We went several months without realizing we were creating an inadvertent barrier to feedback by not providing highly visible, anonymous ways to do so.
[4] Mental health experts also advocate for social contact. For example, see Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing by David Treleaven.
