So I went down to the beach. "Kinda nice", I thought. The sky had a particularly vibrant blue color, the waves had 'the right size', their roar was pleasant. I started to walk around trying to continue meditating. I focused my awareness on an arising sensation of open heartedness and then I noticed my eyes tearing up ("Huh? I thought"). I looked again at the ocean and then I saw it. It was fucking amazing. So much color and detail: waves within waves, the fractal structure of the foamy crests as they disintegrate back into the ocean. The feeling of the sun on my skin. I felt overwhelmed. As tears ran down my face and lowkey insane grin settled on my face I found myself mumbling "It's... always been like this!!!!" "What the fuck??!" followed by "This is too much!! Too much!!!". The experience seemed to be demanding from me to feel more joy and awe than I was born to feel or something like that. In that precise moment I felt what "painfully beautiful" means for the first time in my life. I had to look away. I calmed a bit. I walked a few steps and looked back. The exact same thing happened. "It's reproducible, hihihihi", and I started laughing. Then I found a log to sit on, calm down, and look back at the ocean. Now it wasn't overwhelming, but "kinda nice" was now "fucking amazing".

You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation, as it involved no substances other than the daily consumption gallo pinto (Costa Rican rice and beans), plantains, and green tea.

In July 2025 I (José Luis, the author of this blog) went to Costa Rica for a seven day retreat organized by Jhourney, a startup that promises to teach people the jhanas, joyful altered mind states that can be, in their words, "life changing". Jhourney did not sponsor this post nor gave me special treatment.

I was convinced to go by the positive experiences some of my friends had at this retreat, in particular some written down in private documents. I hope more of these experiences are made public, as other people will benefit greatly from reading such testimonials as did I. For over 10 years I've been finding interesting things and sharing them with the world in this blog out of some sense of duty. It is surprising to me there are no more testimonials of this or other retreats publicly available!

If between you and the sharing of an experience that could propel others to achieve similar things stands your shame or sense of privacy, do consider where that comes from; what are you really afraid of? Post retreat, it seemed obvious to me (though I was already a consummate blogger) that these things have to be shared with all beings, and I wanted to remind others that, at a tiny cost to themselves, they too can help.

May all readers find what follows fun and useful!

What are the jhanas?

The jhanas are altered states of consciousness described in the Theravada Buddhist tradition but preceding the Buddha, who said he learned them from others who were practicing them before.

There are 8 or 9 jhanas (if cessation counts as a jhana), and this is quite puzzling to me. Why not 120 jhanas or like 3? Why are they discrete like that. Even deep meditation autists like Daniel Ingram who have meditated closer to reality than anyone else to the point where they can see the subcomponents of jhanas still see those as that, subcomponents, but the jhanas are still what they are. This is crazy! They are quantized! Now of course this makes me wonder why is that so. The main thing that comes to mind that might be like jhanas are modes of vibration.

Edit: Ingram does seem to suggest there indeed are other jhanas!

Each state has a vibe to it, describe at the end of this blogpost.

Jhanas can be lighter or deeper (to the point where they are the only thing in awareness). During the retreat I experienced jhana on the lighter end and I suspect if I keep practicing I'll experience deeper jhanas.

Why jhana?

The Jhourney answer is here. My own answer: out of curiosity and hope that I might get a brain update to become even happier, and maybe see things in new interesting ways.

The Buddhist answer: Part of the path to Enlightenment, step 8 in the Eighfold Path. Buddhists warn people not to become jhana junkies (lol), mistaking the jhanas for enlightenment, and to use them as a tool, not as the end of the road. After having jhana'd, I could see why people could mistake the attainment of jhanic states as enlightenment but I personally think there's more to go before one gets to what I understand as a reasonable definition of enlightened or awakened

Who is most likely to jhana

At Jhourney retreats, being a experienced meditator seems to not help much with reaching the first jhanas, though it does help with getting to the formless jhanas. Now I can see why. I myself had been on a prior 3 day retreat with Tucker Peck and done 1hr a day of Do Nothing meditation for a few weeks without getting into a jhana. I was missing one key ingredient, detailed later. But once I had that, it all clicked. Turns out, self-acceptance and a good emotional internal landscape are key to the earlier more embodied jhanas, and I'm quite good at that:

• I like being me, I think I'm quite great!
• I don't endorse hating anyone. Even say Hitler. Hitler is innocent baby hitler in a mechahitler suit. We should feel sad that those atoms ended up that way and forgive them for not understanding. I think everyone is always trying their best all the time deep down at some fundamental level, even if that ends up in fucked up places sometimes.
• I score near zero in the neuroticism component in the Big Five personality system
• I'm a playful curious person that is rarely if ever bored
• I am extremely truth-driven, even if painful or scary I wholeheartedly will choose that over looking away, no matter how uncomfortable

How to Jhana, the jhourney approach

Jhourney's core instruction to jhana is to find:

1. Find something (something jhourney calls 'scaffolding') that evokes an open-hearted sensation (the object of meditation)
2. Focus on that
3. If it goes away, use (1) again.
4. Keep going at it

These scaffolds could be things like a real life memory, a visualization, a mantra, or a smile. This latter is basically the TWIM method, which I had briefly tried but it didn't stick, smiles felt fake in my face and felt also like I was introducing unecessary body tension. Jhourney is generalized TWIM in a way, only that people are allowed to choose whatever works for them most naturally. For me, it was a memory of my girlfriend beind happy. But eventually, once one has more practice, other things may work. Jhourney warns meditators to not switch the scaffolding all the time, becaue the point is not to focus on the scaffolding but rather the sensation it induces.

Where did the Pali go?!

I wrote above 'open hearted sensation'; Jhourney is not a Buddhist retreat and the amount of Pali I encountered was zero. But basically 'open hearted sensation' could be swapped for any of the brahmaviharas. Whereas many methods suggest loving-kindness (metta) to achieve jhana, I entered jhana through empathetic joy (mudita) at remembering how happy my girlfriend was. Though that's not quite it: As does Leigh Brassington, in practice Jhourney seems ok with any pleasant sensation, wherever it arises.

Before getting there one has to develop a reasonable level of what Jhourney calls collectedness. I had never come across that word in a meditation context; they explained it is like concentration but not single pointed. Ok I thought so this is not ekagatta but rather more generically upacara samadhi or perhaps sati or mindfulness; though mindfulness can also mean other things. Turns out that the West doesn't quite have the exact terms one would need to point to what has to point to to guide meditation, so one has to choose between turning into a Pali-chanting corncob or using somewhat novel words, and Jhourney took the latter approach.

More specifically Jhourney asks students to focus on their object of meditation while keeping awareness of everything else, ie there's an explicit instruction against ekagatta. I wonder if this is to avoid students from trying too hard to focus only on the object of meditation, which would be far far harder and not required to reach the jhanic states they teach.

To jhana you have to not want to jhana

It is a deep learning in life that there are things that to get them, you have to not want them. Or rather, crave them. You have to let go of jhana, to be actually ok with not jhanaing during the retreat. The jhanas feel like you get a thumbs up from the universe if you have unblocked the relevant emotional blockages that you are going in the right direction.

How to jhana then? The answer is simple enough: set the intention that you do want to jhana when stepping into the container and once within it, let it go, just allow it to happen. Instead, convince yourself that if you sit for enough hours (I was meditating for more than 8 hours a day) and you approach each moment with curiosity and enjoyment, you will jhana. In turn you can do this either by:

• Noting that people before you did that exact same thing and got results or, if you can't just trust other people or think you have alien brain chemistry then:
• Think of the jhanas as that thumbs up and make your goal to be full-sending every moment of your experience, make the goal to become an enjoyer of things whatever might come. Jhourney calls this 'conductivity' (how much of your experience you are accepting)
  • This was easy for me, someone that has literally 'enjoyer of things' for a Twitter tagline, who honestly believes anything can be enjoyed, and who is never bored.
  • If you are a person prone to boredom, the (attempting of the) jhanas will fix you

This again is something Jhourney emphasizes, in their instruction handbook literally opens with the real value of jhana is not the jhanas themselves; it's making it easier to be the person you aspire to be

Choose your own adventure

As mentioned earlier Jhourney allows each participant to choose their own way to get to jhana. There is a structure to the retreat:

• Two group sits (morning and night) of around 1hr
• 1:1 interviews with facilitators and office hours to get feedback
• Some breathwork sessions
• Some time allocated for reading relevant sections of the manual
• And plenty of solo meditation time

But you can do whatever you want of course; and the retreat format seems to get tweaked from retreat to retreat; we had breathwork facilitated by Jonny Miller who teaches FBR (a subtype of CCB); in an earlier retreat they taught Wim Hof breathing per another participant.

The facilitators were not pushy at all, they were genuinely supportive of my goals and approach, offering helpful tips, or just someone to talk to (it's a silent retreat, and having someone to excitedly talk to about one's experiences is great). At some point after I had achieved J1-3 I had a deep "fuck the jhanas! I'm done! I'm going to just vibe-meditate" moment where I decided to stop using the suggested practice and "do" Do Nothing meditation. That was great, it felt less effortful and more enjoyable and without me "doing anything" it got me up to J7. it felt like chillin' on a mental sofa watching a movie, or lying on grass watching the clouds.

Radical non-self coercion and a holistic view of emotions: key life hacks

If there's something that I did differently in the retreat is to impose myself less upon my mind and my body (weird as that may seem).

If I felt like peeing, I would break the sit and pee, if my head hurted from meditating, I would stop. If I was restless I would just go for a walk. I want to remark that there's a bad and a good way of doing this. These actions felt like I was taking with my whole being as opposed to a "part bored with meditating that wanted to go to the beach". I did pause to mindfully consider if I really wanted to do those things and allowed internal consensus to build up.

Most importantly, I learned to notice that the way I was trying to avoid being distracted was to violently push my thoughts away!. I thought I was being gentle but no! I noticed saying "Present moment!!" upon noticing a distraction, like being angry at the thought that arose or my mind for not being in the present moment. Upon noticing this, I said ok, well these thoughts have good intentions for me, what do they want? So I interacted with those thoughts (I recommend reading Wholeness Work, Core Transformation, or Gendlin's Focusing for more on this), hugged them, forgived them for not understanding that they were distracting me, and getting them to understand that their purpose would be better served by going away for the moment. For example thoughts related about planning for the future (like this blogpost) I said "If you guys interrupt less then I get to go deeper into the jhanas and have more interesting things to say in the blogpost, and you want a good blog post, right?". Good point, and they poof'd away.

Importantly, I trusted that the thoughts would go away but was deeply okay if they came back. I would just lovingly and repeatedly do the same thing until I grew less distracted.

Another thing that I think helped me was to view emotions holistically, ie neither cognitive states nor feelings in the body. Rather an emotion is a state that has many components: dispositions to actions, physiological responses, recurrent thoughts, altered attention, etc.

For example if I let my mind be in J5, without doing much the following happens:

1. My mouth opens as if wanting to say "woaaah"
2. Images of vast blue skies show up in my mind's eye along with a sphere centered in myself expanding
3. A sense that the outbreath is "like this (state)"
4. A sense that everything is possible

These come up without "doing anything". But to truly understand the jhanas one should try to investigate them more directly. Alas, jhourney is mostly focused on getting you to experience the jhanas (Which is already a feat!), not to do insight meditation in the Buddhist world. Jhourney is essentially about "wet" (pleasant) concentration; whereas say the Goenka vipassana ("dry" insight) retreat (which I have not done) are mainly about insight. Insight here being the path that takes you to awakening or enlightenment, which sounds intriguing.

But because jhourney does point students to cultivate curiosity one ends up doing some investigating anyway. "Hmm I wonder what happens if I ask who am I while in J6?" or "Where does my body end?" or "If I imagine a pizza, do i crave it". At some point the felt sense of "is the arm rest of the chair I'm sitting in part of me" was "unclear" which made me go "huh, intriguing". This is quite a lighthearted fun way to get into insight!

The fun thing is that whereas "dry insight" has a reputation of being "hardcore", it may well be that the jhana path to enlightenment may allow one to relax into awakening more joyfully and faster.

Belief changes

Did I change any of my core beliefs by doing this? I don't think so! The content of my beliefs remains unchanged, but the way I experience them has changed. There were things that I believed intellectually but didn't really feel in my bones. For example, if you had asked me over the last 10 years the question "Fundamentally, is everything basically the same thing" I would have said "Yes, it's all some kind of atom-and-awareness type stuff, protopanpsychism or something adjacent is real". I've even written about this here at Nintil, before doing any meditation and without having taken any of the substances that might make one think such thoughts, I got there natty, unassisted. But now I see the truth of it, just like an optical illusion where for an instance you can see it "right" as opposed to the mistaken impression.

I do now think meditation is more powerful than I thought. It delivers. The stuff is real. Yes you can install software upgrades to your brain. Everyone is comparatively depressed compared to the advanced meditators.

Another interesting thing is that I noticed that with meditation the mind becomes pliable in ways one has to watch out for. Before the retreat, if someone had talked about say the truth of astrology I would have felt a very knee-jerky "that's bullshit!" reaction. But now that's gone. Now I'm closer to "huh intriguing, how did this person come to believe this [clearly wrong thing]?". This is similar to the mindset that the Art of Accomplishment's VIEW (Vulnerability, Impartiality, Empathy, Wonder) aims to teach. Fortunately, I don't rely on the knee-jerky reaction to make sense of the world, I have reason and science; however I can see how someone less vigilant than me could fall into a turbo-woo hole if they meditate without solid epistemics. The same is true of psychedelics. But meditation may be riskier because it seems natural, there's no substance involved, and while it's true that you can kill a meditation "trip" immediately and that's less true for psychedelics, the harm may be in not noticing what it's doing to the way you relate to things like truth and morality.

Tips to jhana: what I wished I had known

This will probably work best if you're like me, though I am also incorporating here materials that my recent-past self that was much less embodied would have found useful

• Look into Gendlin's Focusing, Core Transformation, and Wholeness work to understand your emotions better
• Practice Yoga Nidra and the somatic meditations in Somatic Descent, do body scans
• Investigate the nature of your "pushing away thoughts" move to see if there's any coercion. Even if you think there isn't, just consider you might be wrong.
• Lying down is fine for meditation, if you don't fall asleep
• You can run mental experiments within a jhana (how are your intuitions/mental state altered) to test the vibe of the jhana
• You will not necessarily enter jhana at J1
• Setting an intention pre-sit and then letting it go within the sit helps. Think of dancing: you set the intention to dance but once on the dancefloor you are not micromanaging every little move, you allow the dance to happen.
• Chill the fuck out by any means necessary. Visualize being pancake batter spreading onto the floor.

How each day went

I recorded every day in a journal so I can tell you exactly when and how it happened. There was a Day 0 of arrival and a Day 7 of leaving but I'll skip them as not much interesting happened in those.

1. Day 1:
   1. Woke up, still feeling not fully rested. There was a guided meditation that wasn't great. I noticed myself jittery because of the coffee. Oh is this why many meditators abandon coffee and switch to tea? So I resolved to chug green tea for the remainder of the retreat. I noticed thoughts coming (mostly about things I wanted to do, and decided to write them down even if I had to interrupt a sit. I thought that doing this would help me genuinely believe that my good ideas I had wouldn't disappear. Eventually once a handful were written down they ceased somewhat.
   2. I tried various scaffoldings; the smiles felt fake and tense, the mantras ("may all beings be happy") didn't hit [thought latter in the retreat they would], but a memory of my girlfriend being happy did, so I started using that to generate a pleasant sensation to focus on.
   3. I felt very relaxed during the sits and was sitting for 45 min at a time, noting that "still distracted a bit, but hitting more focused moments", but did not reach jhana
2. Day 2
   1. Morning yoga felt great, would recommend pregaming meditation with yoga. It's almost as if... they were developed in combination.
   2. There was a guided forgiveness meditation. This did nothing for me, though I knew it had been really powerful for other people. I really like myself and am not ashamed of being me so I guess that's why.
   3. I started noticing the pleasant sensation more, where it was in my body (heart and radiating through arms) and noticed I could feel it more if I focused my attention on my chest
   4. My journal notes "Coconuts: nature's boobs" with no explanation. I also noted that it seemed fun to watch the label in a teabag fluttering with the wind
   5. I went to the beach for a walk and I had the moment I opened this blogpost with, crying in awe at the beauty of everything. I noted "Unsure why [I cried]? Just beauty?". Here I was trying to act cynical for useful purposes like "well, was I repressing an emotion?" I tend to associate crying with the release of a suppressed (negative emotion).
   6. A mind-blowing breathwork session, took a while to get going. But eventually started crying out of joy just like on the beach. I wrote down what I was thinking and even speaking at times, noting down that "these thoughts are the sorts of thoughts one would think only on drugs" and yet here it was all natty.
      1. Everything is so beautiful
      2. We are all love
      3. No matter what you do, no matter what you say, no matter who you are you'll always be love(d)
   7. I also noted that "cry=laugh"; I noticed some similarity between those those things, as I was cry-laughing. I tried to understand why but didn't quite get it. Is crying what happens when things are worse than you think and you accept it and laughing what happens when things are better than you think and you accept it and.. cry-laughing when things just are and you are hell-yeah them?
      1. Relatedly a friend noted that anger and lust were connected
   8. I noted getting a feeling consistent with what Psychonaut wiki points at for MDMA
      1. "MDMA-like feeling (body warm, like something dropped into my belly)"
   9. That was the first glimpse of jhana! I was like "IS THIS JHANA!!?" at which point it disappeared of course. According to Michael Taft though, it still counts as jhana if you pop out immediately, so I'll then say that my first jhana-adjacent experience was on the second day of the retreat.
3. Day 3
   1. We did an activity called Jhourneying that's like circling but purely emotional; one peron would ask another what was in their expereince (say happiness) and then the other would ask (what's the texture of that?) or whether other things would come up. In a way it's a hybrid between Circling and practices like Gendlin's Focusing.
   2. "Wow it's like being on MDMA". Everyone seemed beautiful, smiley, there is a desire to hug and tell everyone how amazing everything is. But it's a silent retreat. I don't feel frustration about not being able to speak though.
   3. I went on another walk to the beach, got wet from the rain. Didn't feel bad about that, but I think that wasn't that crazy, I would have felt similarly outside of the retreat I think.
   4. I noted "Welcome, not push distractions <3". This is when I realized what I noted earlier about self-coercion
   5. I achieved a sustained and stable J2! I was initially puzzled. Where were the fireworks?? As it turns out I was expecting to enter at J1 (that does have more of those fireworks) but it was J2 where I got at first. I noted
      1. Head very hot, stayed for long, stable, still distractions popping in
      2. There was a "glonk" sensation (like a ball dropping into something and exploding with the feeling of J2 everywhere), in my body, my spine arched, my mouth opened, and then I relaxed into the mat (I was lying down) when I got into J2.
      3. Everything is warm/fuzzy. I asked "what's in my chest?" "people hugging, a party"
   6. I then noted that I transitioned to a calm still state that upon doing some Gendlin it felt like "a calm pond extending everywhere" (J3). This is another jhana I thought? Cool. I went into (that is, I imagined myself going into) the pond and arrived at a place that felt like not much? I noted "solidity, steel, rock". Wtf was that? Was it a jhana? It was stable but it felt like... not like the others. Looking back it was indeed J4.
      1. Note: These all was in my mind's eye, these were not dreams or hallucinations
      2. I noted "All of them stable"
      3. I also noticed I could indeed switch between them
   7. I looked into that solidity sensation and there was a a hint of sense of expansion (J5) but unclear (I did not get to J5 this day, looking back). I drew the following to illustrate what I had seen that day (that starfish thing is supposed to be me lol). Note that the first one is not J1, it was a pre-jhana happy state felt mostly in my chest and arms. I was wondering, where was J1? Was I confused and J2 was really J1?
      1. 
4. Day 4
   1. Went for a walk on the beach, trying to meditate. It was fun to explore the streams, the little rivers flowing into the oceans, the tiny hermit and hole crabs, the jungle, collecting seashells. I handed out some to friends at the retreat and will bring some to my family in Christmas.
   2. I tried saying stuff and... my voice sounded deeper? Or was my perception of sound altered? (I asked later my friend and fellow retreat enjoyer Meida, who indeed confirmed I wasn't going insane, my voice was in fact deeper)
   3. Noted I hadn't bitten the skin around my nails in a while (which I do sometimes). I felt the fingertips which usually triggers a grabby "must bite to make smooth" OCD-like compulsion but that was absent.
   4. 1 hour group sit, no jhana this time. Looks like no deterministic jhana yet!
   5. I went to the beach and cried. I realized I'm like a child collecting cool sea shells for their friends(ie this blog post is like a sea shell I'm gifting to you all). I may be smarter and more thoughtful but the action is coming from the same place. For over a decade seeing young kids having fun had made me tear up a bit, which I had managed to avoid by dissociating or looking away so I never asked why would that make me feel uncomfortable. [This will become more relevant later in the journal]
   6. Then went to the pool; more crying over the fact that I hadn't allowed myself to admit that I loved my parents as much as I actually do. They have done so much for me! I had a great childhood in a beautiful spawning point (the Canary Islands) instead of a trauma-ridden one in some other place, and I felt grateful for that.
      1. Why did I suppress that love, I thought? Why didn't I let myself feel it? Unclear. Maybe I thought it would be cringe or something?
   7. I wrote "may everyone be full of love" on the message board. We may not be able to speak but... write... that we could do :)
   8. Another crying moment: Turns out I am more altruistic than I thought. It does really make me happy to make others happy. "Why did I ever believe otherwise" I thought, amidst tears
      1. In the past I had said "I'm not that altruistic!" in a kind of way that the secretly gay homophobe proclaims loudly to hate the gay; ie there's such thing as rejecting something wholeheartedly or rejecting something that deep down you want or are for some other reason. The book Existential Kink is about this same thing. It had happened to me before with partner dancing (I dont like partner dancing, it seems constrained vs ecstatic dance->not wanting to feel jealousy of those that are good dancers) so I wasn't surprised that I still harbored thing like this.
      2. This one is particularly funny because 10 years ago I wrote a blogpost reneging on my earlier belief in psychological egoism. Turns out there's such thing as believing something and believing something deep in your bones, and those can be different.
   9. I switched to Do Nothing meditation with the intention to practice stillness and maybe get to J5. Did get to J5 for the first time.
   10. I was unsure if I was forcefully imagining what I was feeling (ie as when using a scaffolding) or if the depictions in my mind's eye were rather an interpretation of an existing feeling (Gendlins style). Spent a bunch of time investigating this, learned to tease apart the two, gained confidence that I had in fact reached J5.
   11. Another breathwork session. This time extreme sadness, I cried. I saw how a tiny black marble (which was Gendlin-interpreted to mean 'my self') shattered. "I AM NOT SPECIAL", I noted in all caps. I am just a guy. For a long time though I knew I am just a human being (granted, by many metrics I am in fact quite unique in a good way), but somehow I believed that I am so special that there's qualitatively nothing or nobody like me. That belief died and I grieved it as if one saw a beautiful object collapsing in front of one's eyes. Then I felt relief: That belief was also what had caused me existential loneliness here and there: if I was so special, then indeed no one could truly ever 'get' me, but that seems wrong now. Then I had another mind-eye vision (it was like watching a movie, it just went on its own) of children playing on a beach of shattered marbles putting them together for themselves: ie we all are these things, made out of the same raw material.
       1. "Is this a jhana?" I wondered. I don't remember well enough but I do think this emotional released did prepare me for J6.
   12. At this point I had a 1:1 with the facilitators to tell them what I had been experiencing and to confirm if what I had experienced in the days prior were in fact jhanas and they said that it seemed so; later the invited me to record my experience along with tips for future students, which I did
   13. Tried to sit for 1hr. Felt a "serotonin headache" as I described it (warm head, unpleasant), went for a walk at night. I didn't force myself to meditate. I had a good time sitting on a beach by the beach alone at night.
       1. I noticed a conflict between my desire to hold commitments "I comitted to 1hr sit" and my outer commitment "I am at jhourney to make my life better". Then "Do I honestly believe holding this commitment and pushing through the headache will help me?" "To whom do I owe these commitments? Who is harmed if I stop meditating? Would you tell someone with this headache to keep meditating?" No, so I stopped the sit there. A lot had happened that day, after all, it'd be a good idea to give my brain some rest.
       2. By the beach I noted (these 'notings' through the text are verbatim from my notes, not memories): "I am never alone, no one is ever alone, we are all the same deep down, yeah this sounds weird lol; I guess alone does not mean 'no friends' it means "you are uniquely separate from everyone else". Being unique/special->being alone :) . I smiled as I understood.
       3. That day, looking back I noticed I was probably in something J6 adjacent in that breathwork session, but was too overwhelmed to notice it.
5. Day 5
   1. Walk on the beach. Noticing more detail than I thought there was on the rocks.
   2. Group sit: Definitely reached J6. Rocks and I are the same.
      1. Still could hear the music (that sit had some music in the background), these are definitely not the deep jhanas
   3. In other of the sits I tried to visualize pizza to see if the feeling of craving would arise but it didn't. I timed the time that I went without distractions at one point: 3 minutes.
   4. Did what I called a "gigasit" (1hr30min), longest sit so far. Entered at J5 directly, then was able to move to J6 and around the 1hr mark, J7.
   5. I noticed I was annoyed with my breath a bit, it felt loud, it got quieter as I got deeper into the jhanas, almost stopping for a while. I can swim an Olympic pool in a single breath so I know that I can not breathe for a while and be fine, and that the "no air aaah! " reflex would kick in if needed, so I trusted my body on that.
   6. I felt spontaneous and playful on my next visit to the beach.
   7. Did another sit, entered at J2 and then I tried to see if I could get to J1 and I did. At last! The rave! The euphoria! Happy moments in my life running past my eyes. Shaking and gasping for air at times. I noted it was less intense than what I had felt on the beach a few days earlier though.
      1. I noted "J1 <-> J2 feels like a knob, you can turn up or down the euphoric heat"
   8. I tried to guess/preregister what would be the next insight. No self? Impermanence? Some Nonduality stuff? [Spoiler: I got none of that in the retreat]
   9. Another breathwork sessions, but this one was just relaxing in a very deep way, I noticed I could make my breath be very gentle, like a paper bag with almost no weight. Or: that I could feel my chest less by standing upright in a traditional posture instead of lying down.
      1. A hypothesis: perhaps lying down is best for the first four more embodied jhanas (you want to feel your body more) and sitting is best for the formless ones (you want to feel your body less?)
   10. I remember explaining to some at dinner who said they couldn't feel their feelings how feelings worked. Who would have told me (a person that was mostly dissociated and with a 'I dont have emotions' self-identity for many years) would one day be explaining how sadness works to someone.
   11. J5 feels intriguing, but no drug feels like it, I noted
   12. Fell asleep quickly!
6. Day 6
   1. 1 hour group sit, again in Do Nothing. Intention to spend more time in J4 (which until this point I hadn't spent much time on; Do Nothing would pop me into J5 and I'd go from there). I did spend a bunch of time in J4 (or allowed time to be spent there); I verified it was a proper jhana by switching between J3 and J4. I noted "J4 is flat", "J3 is like a pond".
      1. J6 -> Thought: "You can't save them nor lose them [all beings]. It just is. Go as far as you can"
   2. Went for another walk to the beach. Space felt more spacious, like there's more of it. This is very weird and I don't yet know how to better describe it. The intuition that objects were solid felt weaker.
   3. I made a dam with pebbles and sand in one of the streams on the beach, reminded me of my summers on the beach in Denia (Spain). I had the thought that the boundary between the non-dam and the dam was smaller than I thought, which overcame the "pff that's too much work" that stood between me and my small engineering project. I didn't fully complete it but I did meaningfully altered the course of the small stream. "I don't have to finish everything I start", I thought. "And it's also ok if it ends up being someting else", then I digged around it and the dam became an island.
   4. Then walked for as far as the beach went and past into the next one, then came back.
   5. Another sit, J4->J5->J6
      1. I tried to test how sturdy is the J6 vibe that it's all the same. I was typically thinking of trees and animals there but I was like this is too cutesy and maybe cached thoughts from reading about people describing this stuff.
      2. So I thought of poop and corpses. And indeed it was still there: I could feel kinship with those things. The same feeling you get when you look at a chimp and think "this is kinda like me in a (perhaps eerie) way" I would get with a turd. Intellectually, I already knew this right? It's all atoms and awareness. But only then I got to feel that belief in my bones, like someone who had learned some equation by rote memorization and only later understood why it is the way it is.
         1. It's sad rocks don't get to experience this, I thought (cried a bit)
         2. I'm so lucky to be alive to see what I see and hear what I hear
         3. Thank you all!
         4. The universe didn't change when I was born and it won't change once I'm gone
   6. Another 1hr Do Nothing sit, entered at J5->J6 and after that hints of J7? I wish I had done vipassana or something to understand how to make sense of it. It felt way less emotional than the earlier jhanas. Gendlin's Focusing stopped working. But I remember imagining that if someone were to chop off an arm off me at that moment I wouldn't care in a way (I would still prefer not to, but the fear was gone), even if I died felt ok, but not fully ok probably. I could barely feel my body, breathing slowed down a lot. Sense data (a sound), my elaboration of them (this is a door closing) and valence (nice) seemed to come decoupled, in temporal order. "Is this like dependent origination", I thought? But I only got there once.
   7. Dance party to close off the event, it was really fun to dance, as usual!

What now?

More retreats! More sits! I'm now convinced I want to meditate in some form for the rest of my life, for the same reason I want to keep my body fit. One of the Fetters in Theravada Buddhism is "doubt of the path" (broadly construed) and definitely jhourney did obliterate that one fetter at least for meditation narrowly construed: this shit is real and it's amazing!

What the Jhanas feel like

Here is what I experienced, along with what other people have reported, in their own words. This video of what the Jhanas are supposed to feel like roughly matches my experience.

All the jhanas shared (for me) some properties:

• They are absorbing. Most of my awareness is dominated by the jhana.
• They were self-sustaining states. That is, they feel like they could go on forever in the sense that you could be lying down on a bed forever. But you can end them at will.
• One can shift between them
• It's possible to have thoughts, hear sounds, imagine stuff, as normal while in a jhana. There's an altered mental state comparable to eg what's reported for MDMA.
• They seem to be discrete states. I did not experience something I'd call a J1.5.
• These experiences are roughly aligned with what people have called the "sutta jhanas (as in eg. what TWIM teaches)" or the "soft jhanas"; as opposed to the "hard jhanas" or "Visuddhimagga jhanas" which are more engrossing. Jhourney claims to teach these soft jhanas and they do deliver on that.
• There seems to be some natural ordering to them. The progression happened in the order prescribed, with the lower jhanas happening before the latter formless jhanas.
• It's possible to pop into a jhana directly from non-jhana, no need to go in order. I in fact first got into J2 and it took me a while to get to J1. Later in the retreat I was popping into J4 and J5 straight away without the warm fuzzies of the lower jhanas.
• On their own, they do not make one aware of the three Buddhist marks of existence (sufering, impermanence, no-self) (As Ingram points out). I still feel I have a self, I don't feel like everything is impermanent.

Some of my description may sound too allegorical but it's quite hard to not be; I hope you agree with me that it's easier to get my meaning across if I say "it's like a rave" than if I say "a sense of euphoria". You can go to a rave and be like "ah yes this is what he meant" whereas "a warm buzzy sensation combined with a higher likelihood of wanting to open your mouth to scream wahooo, a desire to jump and open your arms etc" is a hopeless description by contrast.