I had the extraordinary fortune of attending a Jhourney retreat from February 20th to 27th, 2026, and it gave me the most transformative experience of my life. I felt an ethical responsibility to share it.
What is the Jhourney retreat?
Jhourney was built by Stephen Zerfas and Alex Gruver. It’s an eight-day in-person and online retreat with one goal: getting you into Jhana states.
Jhana refers to a series of progressively deeper meditative states, first described in Buddhist texts over 2,500 years ago. Each state has a distinct quality: the first brings intense euphoria and warmth, the second a radiant, heart-centered joy, the third a quiet and settled contentment, and the fourth a complete stillness. No substances, no special equipment. Just your own mind, pointed in the right direction. Jhourney’s whole approach is built around helping people get there in days rather than years, through experimentation and self-guided exploration supported by experienced facilitators.
I would still do a terrible job of capturing the full picture here, so if you want to learn more, I’d highly recommend visiting their site directly.
My expectations
Honestly, I really didn’t think I would reach Jhana before joining the retreat. That doubt came from a deep distrust of my own capability and confusion around the material. A lot of what they mentioned in the guide didn’t make sense to me conceptually pre-retreat, and I was pretty convinced I wouldn’t even be able to tell if I was in Jhana or not.
What I was excited about instead was the prospect of cultivating self-trust. Since the curriculum is very self-guided and encouraging self-run experimentations, I thought: maybe if I can run experiments well, I might find some real confidence in myself. That alone would have been a huge win.
The other thing I was hoping for was a place to grieve. I had two unwanted abortions due to genetic disorders, and the more recent one was at 26 weeks. I had never let myself grieve properly. Every time those memories surfaced, the pain was too much, so I stayed busy, kept moving, avoided looking back. My hope was that eight days of silence and no work would finally give me the space to sit with it.
TL;DR
I have spent years trying to work on myself: talk therapy (CBT/IFS), clinical ketamine therapy, guided and self-guided psychedelic sessions, the Hoffman Process, silent meditation retreats. Each of them moved the needle in real ways. None of them came close to this.
I’ve long struggled with self-worth, social anxiety, and imposter syndrome. This retreat gave me the most powerful tool I’ve found for working with those parts of myself. I still feel fear and anxiety, sometimes even more acutely than before, because I’m meeting them without the usual protective layers in the way. It still hurts. But now I can sit with those feelings and offer them something I never could before: genuine acceptance, and love. I had tried this in IFS therapy and found it very challenging. In Jhana, it feels completely natural.
The retreat also achieved the goal I had going in: processing grief. After this retreat, the memories no longer arrive like a door slamming shut. I still feel sadness. I still cry. But underneath the sadness, now is something that wasn’t there before: gratitude for having lived through it at all.
Is this for everyone?
As someone who had an extraordinary experience, I found their program to be exceptionally well-curated and thoughtfully designed. But compared to other retreats I’ve attended, like the Hoffman Process, this is a much more self-driven approach, and that could lead to a less satisfying experience for some people.
That said, the self-driven nature is also what made it so meaningful. I gained far more trust in myself precisely because I had many more opportunities to figure things out on my own. A program can hand you resources, but it’s really up to you to explore and experiment after the retreat and Jhourney genuinely encourages that. So now I feel I can make progress on my own by trusting my instincts, which was absolutely unimaginable to me before.
Big mental shift
I used to believe that life is suffering, that suffering makes you capable and strong, and that joy and pleasure were not things I deserved in order to survive this world. This retreat completely flipped that belief. I had no idea what “openhearted feeling” could actually do to a person.
I also used to think meditation was something you grind through to make progress. You sit still, fight with your mind, try to silence your buzzing, restless thoughts. What I learned here was the complete opposite. Just do whatever works for you, and if it feels right, it’s right. So I did all kinds of things: lying down instead of sitting, listening to music, going to the sauna to relax. The very Japanese part of me felt like I was cheating. The facilitators encouraged all of it and it worked phenomenally well. Every tool I used to enjoy the moment and ease my body led me deeper into Jhana. One of the participants even watched an episode of a show they couldn’t stop thinking about, and that helped him tremendously.
Two biggest life learnings
There are two things I learned that I feel are genuinely important, not just for meditation, but for life.
The excitement of pursuing a goal with playfulness
We all have goals. And when we don’t reach them, life feels miserable. Goals are important, but they’re also exhausting, and they create enormous pressure. Startup founder life is exactly this. You want to build a billion-dollar company, and the path is just hardship and grinding. When the goal feels out of reach, you feel demoralized. Founding a company is essentially just finding ways to keep going through those painful stretches. But does it have to feel that way?
What if you treated every challenge as a genuinely fun game to play?
I’d tried to adopt this mindset before and found it hard to sustain. But through this retreat, I learned what playfulness actually feels like from the inside: experimenting, staying curious, enjoying the journey while pursuing a goal rather than white-knuckling toward it. When you have that mindset, the pressure of “I need to achieve this” loosens its grip, and what’s left is pure curiosity. I don’t know how much I can carry this into my real life and I will still feel the pain. But having tasted what this mindset feels like, I’m genuinely more excited for challenges now.
Trust your intuition
This was the big one for me.
I generally have very low trust in myself and second-guess almost every decision I make. But after running so many experiments on my own mind during this retreat and actually reaching Jhana, I now have something I didn’t have before: evidence. I know what I found, I know what I felt, I trust myself to keep finding it.
I also had several sessions where, during Jhana, I worked specifically on self-worth. It worked astonishingly well. I looked back at my life and built a narrative to strengthen my inner foundation, pulling up memories I was proud of, things I had never let myself fully claim. It’s hard to access that kind of clarity in ordinary life. In Jhana, it felt available.
The power of facilitators
The facilitators are the heart of the retreat.
They are genuinely curious, open, and beautifully vulnerable people who are deeply resourceful yet completely relatable. Every question I brought them opened something rather than closing it. Each answer either helped me figure out the next step or gave me confidence in my approach. There were many moments where I felt genuinely seen by them, and those moments made the retreat irreplaceable.
Disclaimer
I’m a complete beginner, and what I experienced as Jhana may not be what longtime practitioners would recognize. I’d genuinely welcome any correction!
Whether it’s technically “real” Jhana by some rigorous standard doesn’t feel like the most important thing to me. The experience I had was real, the grief I processed was real, and that is more than enough. But I don’t want to mislead anyone, so if anything here seems off, please let me know.
My journey to Jhana
I had no clear sense of what each stage felt like at first. Here’s what helped me find my footing:
Repeated experience: The first time you arrive somewhere, it feels like “wait, what was that?” But when you return to the same state, something clicks and you feel certain.
Sticky notes: Every Jhana experience is slightly different. There’s a shared essence to each state, but it’s never identical. Writing notes after each sit and tracking the patterns helped me build my own framework over time.
Hearing others’ experiences: Listening to other participants share at the end of the retreat helped me feel validated. Some people jumped straight to J4 and others never experienced J1. Everyone’s path is different, and the more you hear, the more confident you feel about your own.
What helped me
No rules, just enjoy and relax: The Japanese part of me always wants to follow the rules when there are rules. In most meditation practices I’d tried, I was constantly anxious about whether I was doing it correctly. Jhourney removed that entirely. Lying down is fine. Music is fine. Sauna is fine. The absence of “wrong” created space for everything else.
Music: I cannot overstate how important music was for me. Scaffolding techniques are useful, but music reaches emotional states that deliberate effort alone cannot.
Cold to hot, hot to cold: Physical relaxation turned out to be genuinely essential. Whenever I went from cold weather to the sauna, or from a run to a cold shower, my body would settle into a deeply relaxed state. One of the facilitators mentioned that it’s hard to enter Jhana when you’re stressed. I found the opposite equally true: when your body feels genuinely good, the door opens easily.
Lying down: I started sitting, but sitting for longer than 60 minutes was hard because neck and leg pain would pull me out. Since the whole point is to enjoy and stay relaxed, starting from the most comfortable position was the right call.
Not talking to anyone: I’m a very socially anxious person. Social anxiety normally keeps my brain buzzing. Eight days of no required interaction, no eye contact, no stress about where to sit at meals or what to say, made a real difference.
Not knowing anyone’s progress: If I had known that someone else had already reached Jhana before me, my competitive side would have created pressure. There was no progress-sharing during the retreat, and that felt peaceful in a way I hadn’t expected.
My own notes on each state
J1: A smile erupts from inside and feels like it doesn’t quite fit on your face. Flooding happiness. The urge to move, to dance. Occasionally a trembling sensation, like electricity under the skin.
J2: A smile that does fit your face, actually. This is the state that brings me to tears most often. The feeling of the heart filling up with something warm and expansive. It feels like being a dolphin moving slowly through the ocean. I find this state the easiest to work with emotionally, the best for bringing up difficult things and sitting with them. I learn the most here.
J3: A very subtle smile, just contentment and peace. A feeling like I want to stay here forever, like sitting in a calm zen garden or on a quiet beach. I have the fewest sticky notes for this one and am still developing my sense of it.
J4: No smile. Complete neutrality. When I start hearing my own heartbeat, that’s usually a sign I’ve arrived. The image I return to almost every time: I’m at the bottom of the ocean, rooted, cocooned, completely protected. Thoughts reach me and dissolve before they can form. Not sleep, but something adjacent. Just silence.
My day-to-day journey
The format of the retreat was two guided group sessions each day (morning and evening), four one-on-one interviews with facilitators, three breathwork sessions, and the rest was solo meditation time plus reading materials.
Day 0
I arrived exhausted after a red-eye with no sleep, absolutely ready to be knocked out. The first session was breathwork, and I was certain I’d fall asleep within minutes. It was intense enough to keep me awake for the first 30 minutes, though, and by the end I felt something unexpected: a small flush of euphoria, a flicker of wanting to move, to dance. It lasted maybe thirty seconds. I later understood that was a faint first glimpse of Jhana.
Day 1
The morning group sit is called “Imitation by Expert.” You sit with a facilitator who is in a deep Jhana state and try to tune into whatever they’re radiating.
I fell asleep for the entire session and felt terrible about myself afterward. But that embarrassment sent me frantically scrolling through every track on the MP3 player, searching for something that would help. Not only did I find three Imitation by Expert tracks, but I also stumbled upon a whole collection of beautiful music. That desperate, self-conscious search turned out to be one of the most important things I did all retreat. Those tracks became the scaffolding I used to access every state I entered.
There was a lot of reading that day, and I loved the materials. But a lot of it still didn’t make sense to me conceptually. What does it mean to “relate with feeling”? I started with the thing that felt clearest: Scaffolding, which is essentially a technique for evoking openhearted feeling. I tried everything they suggested:
Mantra: “May I…” didn’t resonate with me at all. “I choose to…” got me a little further, but not far enough to sustain anything.
Smiling: Helpful in theory, but genuinely hard to manufacture a smile when you don’t feel like smiling.
Memories: This worked best. Specific, sensory memories: my wedding, a meaningful moment with a friend, a fun afternoon with my partner.
The theme that unlocked the most was giving love and watching it land. By evening, sitting inside that warmth, I started feeling immense love for my partner and friends, and something shifted. Flooding happiness. A smile that didn’t fit my face. An electrified feeling. I wasn’t completely sure it was J1, it felt a lot more subtle than what the facilitators had described, but something had undeniably happened.
Day 2
The morning session was about forgiveness, and it turned out to be one of the most demanding and ultimately most healing sessions of the retreat.
Forgiving someone I’d held resentment toward came more easily than I expected. But then the prompt changed: ask for forgiveness.
From whom? I sat with that for a long time. And then it hit me, not gently: the baby girl we had to say goodbye to at 26 weeks because of unwanted abortion because of an unfortunate genetic disorder.
I wasn’t in Jhana. I had no buffer. I felt two parts of myself in direct conflict: one that desperately wanted absolution, and another that refused it, that believed guilt was the only appropriate and permanent response to what had happened. The tension was physical. I sobbed until I experienced something like total shutdown.
It was devastating and also the first time I understood, viscerally, what “mental tension” actually means.
That afternoon, I went back to scaffolding. Built myself up carefully: the birthday party I threw for my husband, a letter from a friend, a message of gratitude, the letter that made my mother cry. It worked beautifully. I climbed back into J2, waves of gratitude and love filling my chest until I was in tears again, and then, once I felt stable, I tried the forgiveness prompt one more time.
Same scenario, asking forgiveness from our little girl.
This time, the part that wanted to punish me was quiet. Not gone, just quiet. And in that space, I could talk to her. In my mind, she was sweet and generous. She held nothing against me. I wept more than I had that morning, but this time it felt like something releasing rather than breaking. I let myself revisit memories of the whole pregnancy, things I’d been too afraid to touch because of how painful they were: my partner’s constant gentleness, friends showing up for support, the love that was growing in me for someone I never got to meet. I had never allowed myself to feel grateful for that time. I did then.
I left that sit feeling lighter than I had since then.
Day 3
By Day 3, I could access Jhana reliably and sit for as long as I wanted, often longer than 90 minutes.
The Jhourney team introduced a bunch of different experimentation ideas that we could try, which gave me a structure for exploring different approaches. I ended up trying everything in a single sit, which was somewhat against the spirit of the framework, but it worked surprisingly well.
After experiencing some signs of J1, I went for a walk. I felt genuinely positive about the world and had a lot of thoughts about how Jhana could help me cope with pain and difficulty going forward. I know I’ll still feel those things. But I felt like I could handle them, and I was more excited than afraid. I had been unsure about doing something painful and challenging but after that walk, I felt ready to try again.
After the walking meditation, I sat for 100 minutes and started to hear my heartbeat and soon after, found complete silence.
I was very confused, it was very different from any state that I have experienced. No euphoria, no gratitude, no satisfaction, just stillness. Although it was deeply calming, it left me in deep confusion, and I came out feeling slightly off.
Later that evening, sitting in gratitude and happiness after the group session ended, I had a thought: what if I directed all this love and gratitude toward myself?
I pulled up every memory I was proud of. Hardships I’d survived. Words my partner had said about my strength during the hardest year of my life. Sitting inside those memories, I felt something genuinely new: gratitude for being me. Not pride. Not performance. Something quieter and more solid. I couldn’t stop crying and felt strong sense of self love which was very hard for me to attain.
It’s hard to write that without it sounding small. It was not small.
Day 4
I’d slept badly and arrived at the morning sit running on fumes. I got into Jhana, even while distracted by thoughts about my career and future, and without music. That felt significant to me as it meant this wasn’t just a stimulus-response trick with particular songs. Something had been built into the body.
Afterward, I noticed I wanted to move through the world carefully. Food tasted sharper, sound felt more present. I ate slowly, actually tasting each bite of flavors. I wondered if this was what meditators call afterglow, and it felt less like a side effect and more like a reminder of how much we normally miss.
In my solo sit that afternoon, after about an hour, the same state that I experienced came back. Silence and mental chatter disappeared completely. Thoughts tried to surface and were turned away. Everything felt very quiet. I felt like I was at the bottom of the ocean, rooted, cocooned. I was confused and a little unsettled afterward; I didn’t feel the lasting happiness I’d come to expect.
My facilitator, Tracey told me it sounded like J4. Since I hadn’t felt like I’d clearly moved through J3, I was surprised. But it gave me real curiosity to explore this state further.
Day 5
I started the day with a run, then went outside while still warm. Feeling the falling snow on my body was unexpectedly pleasurable. I walked around listening to “Experience” by Ludovico Einaudi and arrived at the morning group sit already in a genuinely good mood.
I’ve since learned that the state you arrive in matters a lot. You can’t force your way into Jhana from tension. But you can prepare the body for ease, and ease opens the door. Cold to warmth, warmth to cold, physical comfort, music that moves you: these aren’t shortcuts. They’re preparation.
In the group sit, I started from calm contentment and satisfaction, which based on conversations with my facilitator, I began labeling with sticky notes as J3.
This session was also helpful for understanding what it means when your inner parts aren’t aligned. One part of me was excited, wanting to share what I was experiencing with pride. Another part found that arrogant and judged the first. I realized the judgment I felt toward myself was the same as the judgment I sometimes feel toward others when they seem boastful. A clear view of something I’d been carrying for a long time without fully seeing it.
The following sit brought me back to this silent state. This time I could confirm it: the same silence, the same heartbeat, the same feeling of being at the ocean floor. Even breathing felt loud. Still not entirely sure what to make of this state, but I decided to let it be. The facilitators who know it well say the further you go, the more you appreciate it. I believe them.
We also had the last breathwork session. I’d enjoyed the first, been bored by the second, and came in with low expectations.
About halfway through, the person beside me started crying. I looked over and saw facilitators gathering around him to offer support. That scene moved me before I’d even understood why. Then one thought surfaced, sudden and complete: I was never able to tell my daughter I love you.
I sobbed in a way I don’t quite have words for. Sasha, one of the facilitators I had come to trust most during the week (I later learned he was a well-known writer and a central figure in the Jhana world, his substack is very highly rated), came and knelt beside me. I asked for his hand and he held it. Someone else, I think Ada who leads the breathwork sessions, covered my eyes and helped me settle. It was intense. It was one of the most memorable sessions of the retreat.
But what came after was even more memorable. We did a session called Tonglen. I didn’t understand the explanation. I didn’t understand it better after ten minutes of solo guided practice. But the second part was pairing with someone and sharing what you’d been carrying for ten minutes, and that turned out to be one of the most connecting experiences I’ve ever had.
The person across from me shared his story. At some point, tears started running down his face. I felt a rush of compassion and appreciation for the trust he was placing in me. I reached out my hands, he took them, we looked at each other.
Afterward, he found me and said it felt like a soul-to-soul connection and deeply touched him and I felt exactly the same way. We had never spoken before, had nothing obvious in common, and yet that experience connected us in a way that has stayed with me.
Day 6
I’d learned that body conditioning matters a lot for the quality of a sit, so I went for a run outside in about 28°F / -2°C wearing just a sports bra. The cold on my warmed-up body felt bracing and good. Then I tried the sauna for the first time during the retreat, and it was deeply, completely relaxing.
By the time I sat down to meditate, a smile was already on my face without any effort and I felt so much contentment. This sit floated between J2 and J3, and I was able to add a lot more texture to my understanding of each state.
I had my last one-on-one with my facilitator Tracey. I shared about my social anxiety, and she shared her own experience, which made me feel genuinely seen. I also brought up something I’d been quietly anxious about: I had asked about her ethnicity earlier in the week, and I wasn’t sure if that had been inappropriate. She said what matters most is the intention behind the question, and she felt mine came from genuine curiosity. That shifted something in me.
I’ve spent years flinching when people ask about my accent. My Japanese accent is something I’ve been ashamed of, something I tried to get rid of many times and couldn’t. But I realized: most people who ask are just curious and they’re trying to connect. The question that triggers shame in me is usually just someone reaching across a gap.
Later, when a cohort member asked about my accent, I felt nothing but warmth. I could clearly tell he brought it up as a way to connect. I couldn’t see it that way before, but now I can.
In my final sit that evening, I worked on something I’d been circling for a long time. There’s someone I genuinely admire, but my jealousy has always gotten in the way. Admiring him felt like admitting defeat. Inside Jhana, with a foundation of self-worth I’d been quietly building all week, I was finally able to feel real appreciation for him, without resistance, without score-keeping. It felt like setting down something I hadn’t known I was carrying.
Day 7
I woke up at 7 am, ran, had a sauna, and settled into one final morning sit.
J1 arrived like an old friend. The smile that doesn’t quite fit your face. Light flooding the chest. I sat there thinking: this is available to anyone. Right now, somewhere, someone is struggling and has no idea this exists. That you can sit down, close your eyes, and in thirty minutes arrive somewhere that feels better than almost anything else life offers, for free, and on demand.
I left the retreat center with the fullest sense of satisfaction and gratitude I’ve felt in a long time.
Traveling home through New York, I felt my chest begin to tighten. The city was loud, the transit was stressful, I was physically exhausted. By the time I reached the airport, I was afraid the retreat had been a temporary anomaly, that all of it would stay behind those walls.
I put in my earbuds. Canon in D. Slow, deliberate breath, the way I’d learned.
My chest opened. Tears came, not from sadness, just an overwhelming sense of gratitude for everything. I didn’t even know what I was grateful for, my heart had just filled up with gratitude, which brought me a big relief that I can continue this journey even outside of the retreat center.
Day 8
Back home in San Francisco. Cold shower, then meditation. Canon in D again.
I slipped into J1 very naturally, then drifted into J2. At some point the gratitude came flooding back and I started crying again, for no specific reason, just that same fullness. The day went beautifully, and my partner was genuinely surprised at how different I seemed. I’m usually pessimistic and quietly anxious. That morning, I was so happy, energized, and grateful. I usually don’t allow myself to have fun, spending every weekend doing some sort of work, avoiding joy and pleasure at all cost. But this weekend, I went for a long walk with my husband, walked hours without worrying about time or todo items, feeling completely peaceful, which has never happened in my adult life.
My journey is ongoing, and I’m going to track it to see how it holds in everyday life. I’m still a little afraid of falling out of the habit, the way I did with the Hoffman Process after about six months. But what makes this different is that it’s genuinely enjoyable and it impacts my day-to-day happiness in a way I can feel. During meditation, I’m amazed at how beautiful the world looks, to the point where I cry for no particular reason. I feel so much more empathy for the people around me. I feel more contentment, and less like I need to prove myself. I used to be afraid of smiling at strangers on the street in case they didn’t smile back. Now, after meditating, I just want to smile at people hoping everyone is having a good day.
The closest thing I’ve felt to this is psychedelics. That same openness, that same wonder. But psychedelics last a day and carry their own weight (and they give me enormous nausea). This, you can do every morning in thirty to sixty minutes, in your own bedroom, for free, with no physical consequences.
I still can’t believe this exists and almost no one knows about it.
That’s why I’m writing this. I’ll be recording my ongoing journey to show how it evolves and what kind of impact it makes in daily life. My hope is that this sparks curiosity in at least one person and eventually leads them to give it a shot.
I’m also posting my post-retreat progress every week (#JhanaInPublic) to share my progress, learning and probably a lot of struggles, so check out here if you are interested :)
Jhana in Public Week One (Why I’m starting Jhana in Public)
Jhana in Public Week Two (The trap that kills every post-retreat practice)
Jhana in Public Week Three (If you gave up on post-retreat practice, try this)
Jhana in Public Week 4 & 5 (Jhana gets harder when life gets harder)
Jhana in Public Week 7 & 8 (Everyone deserves to experience jhana)
Working with you on retreat was wonderful. Thanks for giving us this reflection.
I got a lot from your article. Thank you for sharing your experiences. I read a book called “Heart Breath Mind” by Leah Lagos. It’s very prescriptive about doing resonance breathing and measuring progress with HRV. As a result I’ve adopted a daily practice of 20 min resonance breathing sessions. What struck me about your article was how memories surface during these sessions. Recollections of past events and situations pop into my mind. I tend to push these to the side and refocus on the breathing but now I may try sitting with those thoughts for a bit and allowing them to resolve.