What are the jhanas and how are they practiced? A guide to achieving bliss on demand with deep meditation
“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.
Hear Stephen introduce the jhanas in depth on Scott Britton’s podcast.
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).
An fMRI scan of an experienced jhana practitioner’s brain color-coded by activity in jhana compared to baseline. Blue indicates deactivation and red indicates activation. Most of the brain shows deactivation, which might correspond with a "quiet," absorbed mind. Some of the activated regions are known to play key roles in pleasure and reward circuitry (e.g. the nucleus accumbens). (Hagerty et al. 2013).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
| Emotional Quality | Location | Oasis Metaphor | Clubbing Metaphor | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jhana 1 | Delight, Glee, Rapture, Euphoria | Head | Seeing the Oasis | Ecstatically dancing |
| Jhana 2 | Happiness, Love, Gratitude | Heart | Entering the Oasis | Fresh air with friends |
| Jhana 3 | Assurance, Satisfication, Contentment | Abdomen | Swimming at the Oasis | At the beach watching the sun come up |
| Jhana 4 | Peaceful, Luminous, Stillness, Equality | Base of spine or below / pervading all-around | Resting in the shade at the Oasis | Crawling into bed |
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.
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)
Ready to begin your jhana practice and achieve bliss on demand?
With our Jhana Retreat, you can access the everlasting bliss of the Jhanas
People's experiences with the jhanas
If the jhanas are such extraordinary experiences, you may be wondering if they’re too good to be true. Here are a few accounts from practitioners:
One month ago I went on a @jhanatech retreat. This was true the first day back, and remains true today: I think it was a pivot point in my life
— Jake Eaton (@jkeatn) June 20, 2024
I wrote about it here https://t.co/R0ssax8bL3 pic.twitter.com/SxzHEyDbOx
Ever since my @jhanatech retreat a couple weeks ago, any time I either sit or go dancing, I eventually get to a place where I find a profound and infinite sense of love for the universe. Im kinda shocked because I am not even trying!
— Archana Burra (@archanaburra) June 9, 2024
I've been reading @nickcammarata musings like this for a few years now and have loved this perspective, with some genuine buy-in, but I don't think I really got it until last week after attending a @jhanatech retreat and getting taste of jhana 1 (and 2 and 3) myself.
— Jeffrey Seely (@jeffreyseely) June 17, 2024
I get it… https://t.co/4hupOylMzr
I am still in the Jhourney jhana retreat so don’t wanna say too much too soon but feeling good for no reason is fucking crazy
— Vil (@WoohkaStylie) February 12, 2024
How are the jhanas becoming more accessible?
Today, awareness and mindfulness practice isn’t just on the rise among advanced meditators. The jhanas have captured the attention of rationalists and tech-focused pockets of Twitter and the blogosphere— Nadia Asparouhova, LessWrong, Scott Alexander to name a few.
With thousands of existing jhana meditators now practicing in the West, we have an opportunity to better understand the jhanas, and help people learn them faster, more reliably, and to greater effect. The more people are in jhana, the easier it will be to identify existing meditators who are experiencing the jhanas and identify their unique habits, iterate on different teaching methods and track results, and combine insights from modern clinical and ancient wisdom.
Accessing the jhanas with the help of neuroscience
One particularly promising way to make the jhanas more accessible is by using biosensors and neurotech interventions to eliminate the guesswork required to learn these states.
At Jhourney, we see each retreat not just as an opportunity to get more people into jhana, but as an opportunity to learn. Stephen Zerfas, Co-founder at Jhourney, shares how the retreat team at Jhourney is incorporating neuroscience into their work:
“Our retreats offer real-world testing environments for emerging neurotechnology to improve access to the jhanas, such as by using tFUS (Transcranial Focused Ultrasound Neuromodulation) or other neurostimulation, recording and analyzing nervous system activity using EEG other tools that would allow for the development of biofeedback. We see our retreats as a research and development pipeline, and we'll partner with other companies and universities to test their technology and continue to make life-changing meditation more legible to science.
We’ve already collected likely the largest EEG dataset of people experiencing the jhanas, and we have qualitative studies with a university partner underway. Scientific understanding of the jhanas will help more people access them, and more people accessing the jhanas will make scientific research easier, creating a virtuous cycle.”
How is Jhourney revolutionizing jhana meditation?
Historically, experiencing the jhanas was thought to require thousands of hours of practice. We use an innovative approach to teach them in a week.
Core to our approach is an obsession with minimizing guesswork. When learning most skills, as wide ranging as swimming to astrophysics, we often have the luxury of quick, accurate, personalized feedback. The nonverbal, invisible, and solo nature of meditation, means often much time lapses between having an experience and talking to a teacher, and when you do, much is lost in translation.
At Jhourney, we think the best way to address guesswork is to be as intentional about experimentation as possible. We combine guesswork-minimizing tools like personalized guidance from experienced instructors, structured reflection, positive deviance, and personal experimentation plans. We like to say, “We do NOT want to teach you the jhanas. We want to teach you how to learn the jhanas.” As remarkable as the jhanas are, we know that for students who fall in love with the process, experiencing the jhanas is just a matter of time, and they’ll find their newfound traits even more valuable than the states.
If that sounds exciting to you, we’d love to learn with you on the next retreat.
Learn how to access bliss, joy, and equanimity in a week
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