Life in HD: An investigation of the jhanas’ impact on Jhourney retreat attendees
The jhanas are a series of eight altered meditative states that have attracted growing attention from media, researchers, and the public. They are part of a new wave of “advanced meditation,” as some call it, which promises access to a range of unusual subjective experiences – from the euphoric, to psychedelic, to voluntary loss of consciousness – all of which are unlocked solely through sustained concentration.
Many jhana practitioners report benefits – feeling more calm and joyful; detachment from cravings; improved outlook and relationships – that mirror what’s been reported about psychedelics, MDMA, and ketamine therapy. Unlike drug therapies, the jhanas are also free and legal to practice.
“Since the retreat I am able to be more present throughout the day - I appreciate the world around me, savor pleasant sensations, and feel grateful.”
But advanced meditation is new to researchers, and is still understudied. To our knowledge, no one has yet studied the impact of these experiences on meditators in a structured way, partly because it is challenging to recruit enough subjects who are able to reliably enter these states.
Jhourney is currently the only retreat company that teaches these techniques in a pragmatic, results-oriented way to people of all meditation backgrounds. This puts us in a unique and privileged position to be able to study and document the impact of these techniques on meditators.
We decided to ask our retreat alumni to tell us about how the jhanas have impacted their lives, using a Google Form survey (n=61) and a handful of followup interviews (n=10). We asked them what it felt like to access these states, how their lives changed after the retreat (if at all), and how they practice today.
Key findings
The jhanas are strongly altered states that are phenomenologically comparable to psychedelics. Because they are self-induced, and practitioners remain highly aware throughout, some people find that the benefits of these states are easier to integrate back into their lives afterwards.
Most people seem to gravitate towards deeper jhanic states that offer calm and equanimous, rather than euphoric, sensations – in contrast to media coverage of the jhanas that focuses on the euphoric aspects.
Accessing more than one jhana, as well as cultivating deterministic access, correlates to a higher propensity for people to view their impact as “transformative.”
Though our samples are small, those who accessed the jhanas while on retreat were twice as likely to report changes in their relationships and lifestyle, and 1.5 times more likely to report changes in their thoughts and beliefs compared to those who did not.
Benefits reported by alumni include feeling kinder, calmer, and more empathetic to others, as well as more aware of pleasurable emotions and moments.
“Easy access to unconditioned positive emotions has been a game changer.”
Even one-time jhana access is often described as “transformative,” but some acute benefits of, and access to, the jhanas can decay over time, especially given the daily stressors of life. The initial retreat “afterglow”– a state where subjective effects are especially strong – tended to fade after a few days to weeks. Despite this, most (77%) who accessed the jhanas for the first time on retreat still described it as transformative, because they were able to identify enduring benefits from the experiences they did have (see below).
People relate to the jhanas in different ways, which is partly determined by ease of access and how far they progressed. The primary categories that we heard were: as a benchmark that helped them understand how pleasurable states actually feel; as a tool for altering their mental states; as a safety net, where knowing they can access positive emotions gives them confidence to explore deeper personal challenges; and as a profound and enduring perception shift, marked by a deepened clarity, which fundamentally altered their relationship to reality itself.
Accessing the jhanas often makes people want to meditate more, including non-meditators, because they are associated with fun and pleasurable emotions. Those who accessed the jhanas for the first time on retreat were nearly eight times as likely to report meditating more often now, compared to those who did not. This could mean that the jhanas are a useful on-ramp to other types of meditation.
Prior meditation experience doesn’t seem to affect benefits gained from the jhanas, which further makes the case for the jhanas’ therapeutic potential.
There were a small number of negative changes reported (6.5% of respondents, or n=4), nearly all from those who did not access jhanas on retreat. These included uncovering new emotions or insights about themselves (such as anger or increased sensitivity), or feeling disappointment about not having accessed the jhanas. In addition, some people expressed frustration at not being able to access the jhanas in their post-retreat lives. We suggest that special attention should be paid to those who do not access jhanas on retreat, as well as setting appropriate expectations and offering support for those who may find the jhanas more difficult to access after the retreat.
Our sample was small and self-selected; we encourage others to further investigate and validate our claims. Nevertheless, our insights give us confidence that we are only at the beginning of understanding the full benefits of the jhanas. We hope this report can serve as a jumping off point for jhana researchers and practitioners, and to help inform others’ agendas and program design.
About the author
Nadia Asparouhova is a writer and researcher who first wrote about the jhanas for Asterisk. Her work has been supported by Emergent Ventures, Schmidt Futures, Ford Foundation, Ethereum Foundation, and others. She is the author of Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software (Stripe Press) and Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure (Ford Foundation).