“The jhanas may be the single most important thing on the planet right now. You may think it’s superintelligence or longevity. That’s nothing without wellbeing.”

— Google DeepMind Strategic Advisor

Imagine waves of intrinsic joy and peace flowing through your body, perhaps more intense than you’ve ever experienced before. Imagine if, like having access to running water, you learned to access such states of non-addictive pleasure on demand.

What would you learn about yourself in the process? If peace and joy became accessible like running water, shelter, or food on the table, how would it change you?

Advanced meditators call these states jhanas. The jhanas are a set of non-addictive states of extraordinary bliss and peace. Their benefits go well beyond peak states: the process of learning them is rich with self-discovery and training in nervous system mastery.

Historically, they were believed to require thousands of hours to learn. Today, people are learning them in under a week.

This post explores what the jhanas are, how they feel, and their benefits. We'll also share first-hand experiences of people who’ve consistently entered the jhanas.

Takeaways

• The jhanas are profound states of non-addictive bliss that you can enter through meditation practice.
• They progress from high-energy joy to deep peace.
• Benefits include mental clarity, access to flow states, emotional fluency, reduction from cravings, and cultivating prosocial emotions like gratitude and compassion.

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Hear Stephen introduce the jhanas in depth on Scott Britton’s podcast.

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What are the jhanas?

The jhanas are a set of extraordinarily pleasurable and non-addictive altered states you can learn to enter on demand with meditation practice. They’re sometimes described as the opposite of an anxiety loop.

Anxiety can capture attention, which can lead to more anxiety, which can capture more attention, and so on, leading to a physiological response (e.g. heart rate changes, sweating, in the extreme case a panic attack). Jhana meditators create a similar positive feedback loop between attention and pleasure.

Brain images corroborate these remarkable first-person accounts, and studies suggest jhana meditators are activating pleasure centers in their brain at will and without external stimuli. (Hagerty et al. 2013, DeLosAngeles 2016, Dennison 2019).

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What do the jhanas feel like?

The jhanas are a set of altered, pleasurable states that progress from a high energy ecstasy to a progressively more subtle sense of ease and peace.

Think of it like coming back thirsty from a long hike. You feel ecstasy from drinking your first glass of water and gratitude for the second. Then, you go for a swim and experience contentment before you relax, sleeping under the shade of a tree. Each is the most pleasurable thing you could be doing at that given moment, even as the experience progresses from higher energy (ecstasy) to lower energy (serenity).

1. The first jhana: Like an athlete or a musician slipping into a flow state, scattered thoughts of everyday life are replaced with a deep, easy collectedness around a meditation object, like the feeling of loving-kindness or pleasantness of the breath. Effortless, stable attention allows you to spot new subtlety in joy and happiness, which draws your attention in even more, and the cycle begins. At some point, the cycle takes off, and the joy becomes an intense, ecstatic rapture. Thoughts are still happening, but they’re mostly about the joy and meditative flow.
2. The second jhana: Attention becomes even more effortlessly stable, and thoughts drop off significantly. The intensity of the high-energy joy begins to soften, and a lower energy, softer, more emotional happiness shifts into the foreground. Most describe it as  a deeper, more profound feeling, and use words like loving, warm, grateful, or happy.
3. The third jhana: Distracting thoughts arise only once every few minutes if at all (people debate the frequency), and the rapturous, energetic joy of the first jhana fades out completely. The deep happiness of the second jhana sinks even deeper, and settles into a lower, often wider, feeling of contentment. Attention is even more effortlessly stable, just as the second jhana was more profound and subtle than the first, many report spotting and releasing (or embracing) even subtler tension in the third.
4. The fourth jhana: Attention is so effortlessly stable you may go many minutes without a thought. Everyday analogies begin to breakdown when describing the fourth jhana — many first-timers describe it as a peace more deep, still, and healing than they’ve ever experienced. The transition from the third to the fourth jhana may be like moving from the satisfaction of a holiday dinner at the table to resting on a couch, or cuddling with a loved one while easing into sleep — contentment gives way to an even deeper ease.

While the feelings of each jhana can feel like a full-body experience, meditators report as if the source of the feeling of each progressive jhana moves lower through the body: head, heart, gut, and lower. This association is so strong that a “lower” jhana often refers to a higher number jhana.

Many meditators new to the jhanas express suprise at discovering such profound states can be entered without external stimuli and that they feel so familiar. In some ways, our nervous systems run the arc from excited joy to satisfied peace frequently in day-to-day life, and jhana meditation is just about using attention to amplify what’s already there. Jhana meditators use analogies like falling in love, finding water in the desert, or dancing with friends.

There are four more jhanas. While the first four are dominated by in-the-body sensations, the second four are more out-of-body. The mind even more quiet and still as the sense of body fades far into the background. The later jhanas are characterized by changes to one’s sense of space and self, and they’re associated with even deeper levels of peace and serenity.

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Why learn the jhanas?

The benefits of jhanas extend well beyond bliss and pleasant sensations. Traditionally, meditators don’t practice jhana as an end in itself but for the personality changes and mental habits they bring with time. These changes can be so profound they can dwarf the value of the states themselves. We like to say “Come for the bliss, stay for the personal growth" — peak states are fun and exciting, but the real value is in the skills you learn and who you become along the way.

Happily, these skills are developed well before you enter jhana. Just as a new dancer might attempt unsuccessfully to imitate a professional, but in the process still benefit from exercise, meeting new friends, and developing a lifelong love for music, so too do meditators who don’t enter jhana still benefit from learning jhana meditation.

Some of the main benefits that come with learning the jhanas include:

• Mental clarity and flow states: Training jhanas is an exercise in finessing attention. Rather than effortfully concentrating, you learn to spot and relax mental tension so that your attention eases into stability. Like a dancer moving into a rhythm, you sink deeper into curiosity, enjoyment, and relaxation, eventually slipping into flow states. Learning to dance with your attention, so to speak, makes it easier to remain at ease and focused throughout the day, especially in a world overwhelmed by notifications and distractions.
• Emotional fluency and intuition: Spotting and releasing mental tension, slipping into flow states, and learning to cultivate a feedback loop between attention and emotion can double as EQ training. Many jhana meditators report becoming aware of more subtle emotions, sooner. Some of our students describe the increased emotional resolution as having more access to and better understanding how to make less error-prone use of their intuition.
• Delayed gratification and reduced cravings: Access to internal contentment without reliance on external sources may lead to less attachment to external stimuli or validation, some of which can be associated with compulsive behavior. Many jhana meditators report using jhanas to positively change their relationships to other cravings. One rehab center in Thailand reportedly even uses the jhanas to free clients from addiction. As one of our students put it: “To know there’s this infinite resource within me that’s accessible without external conditions…it’s just crazy. You can’t unsee that.”
• Cultivating prosocial emotions: Many practitioners find that cultivating and acting on loving kindness, compassion, gratitude and other prosocial emotions makes jhanas more accessible, and vice-versa. Research suggests cultivating such emotions is enjoyable, can improve decision-making (e.g. self-control), and can improve relationships (Desteno 2018).  

Speculatively, emerging research suggests jhana access may be related to other wellbeing benefits.

• Access to bliss and peace on demand could improve decision-making by ushering in a ”mentality of abundance.” Behavioral economics research has shown the opposite — a “mentality of scarcity” — can lead to less effective decision-making. (Mullainathan et al. 2000).
• Many meditators report experience in the jhanas like being on an empathogen, which research has shown increases game-theoretic cooperation (Gabay et al. 2019, Gabay et al. 2018).
• The jhanas are simultaneously relaxed and focused states, which like hypnosis and yoga nidra, may increase neuroplasticity. (Huberman 2022)