hr:after { content: "𓃰" !important; line-height: 1.5; } In March 2025, I went on a Jhourney meditation retreat that was one of the most profound experiences of my life, and deeply reshaped how I related to myself. If you had told my pre-retreat self that this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’d done some meditation before—including a 10-day vipassana retreat—and while it didn’t do nothing, I was underwhelmed. I felt pretty resistant to spending that much time staring at the inside of my head: it seemed really hard to actually trust anything I learned that way, because it was such a complicated system. And besides, my brain seemed to work fine the way it was. I’d read some writing by serious meditators who seemed to be having a different experience, filled with insights and bliss, but it wasn’t one that I felt particularly drawn to. That much navel-gazing and wireheading felt self-indulgent, and anyway they seemed weird enough that whatever they were doing probably wouldn’t work for me. Then, in a moment of life imitating Bay Area House Party, we got Jhourney, a meditation retreat startup promising to speedrun you to the bliss part (tagline at the time: “Life-changing meditative bliss used to take thousands of hours to learn. We teach it in a week.”) When I heard them strongly recommended not only by the serious meditators I’d been reading, but also by a couple more hard-nosed coworkers, I decided to see what the hype was about. Jhourney teaches a style of meditation nominally focused on altered states called jhanas. Jhanas are blissful-feeling states that you can “relax into” if you release enough of what you might call tension or clenching or tanha, and then focus on an enjoyable open-hearted sensation like smiling, a joyful memory, or feeling care for a loved one. If done right, you can start a feedback loop of enjoying the enjoyment, and end up in a state of deeply absorbed euphoria. I say Jhourney is nominally focused on that because the jhanas are actually kind of a Trojan horse for improving your life and relationships, which somehow doesn’t sell as well as wireheading. Jhourney’s unofficial motto is “come for the bliss, stay for the personal growth.” The growth happens because a lot of the tension you’re trying to release in jhana meditation is downstream of repressed or “stuck” feelings, either small ones (“I don’t want to be hearing that sound over there” leading to micro-clenching the head and neck) or big ones (“I can’t let myself feel this sadness or I’ll cry and that would be shameful” leading to tensing the various face and chest muscles that would otherwise be helping you cry). In order to get into jhana states, a lot of people (like me!) end up having to work on untangling knots of emotional clenching, and this usually leads to a lot of growth. My first experience of my Jhourney retreat was showing up and being handed an 80-page handbook of meditation instructions. This already blew my mind a little, because I had never read anything about spirituality or emotions that I considered good. The “best” stuff I’d read about the mind was vapid pop-psychology, padding out truisms with engaging fluff until the result somehow became a marketable book. The rest was indistinguishable from astrology—it was never clear enough that I could tell whether it applied to me, which meant it didn’t seem to make falsifiable predictions. As for spiritual writing, it mostly felt like word-association mumbo-jumbo, with authors throwing around words that had the right vibes but that I wasn’t sure they themselves even really understood. Heck, the previous meditation retreat I’d been on had included watching an hour-long recording of the now-dead founder talking about how he could sense quantum vibrations. The Jhourney handbook didn’t have these problems, because it was written by software engineers. It was epistemically conservative and shockingly lucid, completely mumbo- and jumbo-free. To help with the inherently fuzzy language, they explained everything from multiple angles. They gave clear gears-level explanations of why they thought things worked the way they did. They even took a detour to explain their teaching philosophy so that students were oriented about why they were doing what they were doing. It was masterful pedagogy. Between the written instructions and the teachings from live meditation sessions, pretty soon I could get to a point that felt like the “on-ramp” to a jhana. But every time I got there, I would get stressed and “grabby” about what to do next, and “fall off” the ramp. By the time I got to day 4 of the retreat, I was feeling really frustrated about this, in a way that was starting to loop on itself. I was frustrated that I couldn’t reach jhana, and frustrated that the frustration was making things harder. I tried Jhourney’s recommended way of working with negative emotions, which was a self-compassion meditation. But no matter how much I tried, it didn’t really resonate; I couldn’t cultivate any emotional experience of self-compassion. In fact, I realized I couldn’t remember ever having had a real emotional experience of receiving compassion, and that that was probably kind of fucked up. A bunch of my friends were on the same retreat. Since I had no access to self-compassion, of course I used this realization to start worrying that they would judge me for having a hard time meditating because I was fucked up, adding even more layers to the feedback loop of doom. Days 4–6 were pretty bad. Every day Jhourney gave us a survey of “how was your day on a scale of 1-10 with 5 as a normal day?” I rated day 6 a 1.5. (To their credit, Jhourney knew this meant I needed extra help and offered lots of 1:1 time with different facilitators, although none of it made that much difference.) At this point, in one of my desperate attempts to think myself out of my feelings pickle, I started thinking a lot about the metaphor of the elephant and the rider. The idea is that people usually identify with everything that happens in their mind, but this is actually a confusion; it’s more accurate to think of “you,” the conscious part, as a small human rider perched atop a large lumbering elephant that often does its own thing. The only things that are actually in the rider’s action space are things like “say words to the elephant,” “visualize mental images to the elephant,” “direct attention to a particular aspect of experience,” etc. Everything else—including all emotions and many thoughts—is the elephant’s job. In this frame, the fact that the self-compassion meditation wasn’t working for me wasn’t really “my” fault. Whether the emotional experience of self-compassion happened was up to the elephant, and the only thing “I” (the rider) could do was to keep gently saying the words or doing the technique or whatever, and wait for the elephant to steer, at its own pace. Around that point I decided to give up on the Jhourney curriculum and just do whatever seemed like it would feel nice.1 I broke the rule of silence to ask for some reassurance from a close friend who was also on the retreat. When I got back to meditating, I made up a technique for myself where I imagined sending love and compassion to the elephant instead of to “myself.” This turned out to be a cheat code: I immediately felt an outpouring of warmth, and the reassuring things I was telling myself started to emotionally resonate. I really wish I could describe better what happened after that, but unfortunately it was a while ago and involved a lot of subtle mental movements, plus it’s hard to track what’s happening while a chunk of your psyche is liquefying. I remember a sort of sense of “going inside” the feeling of compassion and love for the elephant, having it take up more and more of my attention, and feel more and more deep, rich and meaningful. Then some kind of rush of energy and a full-body frisson that I’ve learned often happens when my brain has rearranged itself.2 When I got up and walked outside, I gradually noticed that the world felt pretty different. I realized that I’d always carried a “refrigerator hum” of subtle body tension that was now gone. Walking around the retreat center looking at the views felt amazing, like I could have spent days just melting into the landscape. The Lipton peppermint tea at the hot drink station tasted unreasonably good. I would sometimes tear up with joy or gratitude for no reason. I felt much deeper care and connection with my friends. Maybe that makes it sound a little gooey and impersonal, like I took a drug that replaced my normal self with a puddle of love or something. The actual experience was the opposite; somehow it felt like this was all happening because it was easier to be myself. The care and connection wasn’t coming from some foreign love puddle; it came out because a bunch of psychic gunk had sloughed off and made it easier for the real essence of Ben-ness to shine through. And then I used my newfound mastery of emotions and self-compassion to live happily ever after flailed around trying to integrate everything back into normal life. One of the big changes I noticed after the retreat was that my emotions got 2–3× more intense. I think this was net positive in the end, but it made coming back to work hard—I had a stressful role managing a large team, and I also needed to catch up from a week of being incommunicado, which was extra stressful. And it wasn’t exactly helpful that suddenly, if someone was annoying on Slack, it would sometimes make me want to shoot flames out my ears. Over the next couple weeks, the intensity settled back down and the changes in my moment-to-moment experience went maybe 80% of the way back to normal (e.g., I stopped spontaneously tearing up in normal circumstances). Some of them stayed, though: A lot of my shame/cringe reflex turned into a self-compassion reflex. I used to get super embarrassed by minor mistakes (things like, I don’t know, forgetting to lock a public bathroom door and having someone walk in). Now those things come with a very clear sense of “gosh, what a normal-person type of mistake that millions of other people have also made, it probably didn’t even register for the other person.” I became much more easily moved by art. I went from being moved to tears by a poem or piece of music maybe once a year to once a week. I stayed much more aware of my more subtle emotional responses. I remember listening to some instrumental folk music I’d probably listened to 100 times before, suddenly noticing that the melody felt deeply nostalgic and then realizing that was two levels further out on the feelings wheel than I’d ever felt for music. I still felt much less of a need to be distracted or stimulated than before. I used to listen to podcasts at 2× speed whenever I wasn’t fully focused on a task (e.g. if I was doing chores or walking). Now I have no desire to do this, and when I do listen to podcasts, 2× speed feels unpleasant. Similarly, I started to dislike a lot of restaurant food, and to really enjoy very simple home-cooked meals that I would have considered too bland before. Friends continued to mention that my body language was different. One noted: “more upright posture, more open shoulders, more fluid and gentle.” Another described me as “‘leaving less,’ as in, spending less time ‘out of the room’ in interactions.” These were great changes, but even better, a bunch of mindset and relational shifts also stuck around. Mindset-wise, I guess I’d just say I got feelings-pilled. If you’d asked me what the deal with emotions was before the retreat, I probably would have said something like: Positive emotions are nice, although you shouldn’t let them distract you too much from your long-term goals. Painful emotions are responses to stimuli that are part of our evolutionary inheritance, but are largely maladaptive today because we’re in an environment so different from where they arose. Assuming you have good enough self-control not to act out on them, their main effect is to make you dumber, which you should mitigate by not engaging with whatever makes you emotional until you’ve chilled out. My new view is more like the following (this is still an oversimplified strawman and reality is a lot messier): All emotions are important and beautiful components of unconscious/intuitive cognition.3 However, they sometimes create impulses to do things that aren’t actually good ideas. In the process of socializing ourselves not to follow those impulses, we’ve been trained to try to make the emotions themselves go away in painful ways, by repressing them or clenching up around them. Unintuitively, repression and clenching actually cause the emotions to “stick around” in some sort of partially metabolized state, which has negative side-effects, like anxiety, thought-looping, numbness, blind spots, impaired reasoning, bringing up secondary emotions as defenses, etc. A different way of working with these emotions, that’s better for you in the long term, is to figure out how to welcome and accept them. This eventually leads to them feeling less bad, and giving you more impulses that are good ideas and fewer bad ones. But it’s not as simple as “just stop repressing.” Welcoming emotions requires fully feeling them; if they’re strong, that can be too overwhelming to work unless you have a deep felt sense of safety. That safety can be provided in many different ways, e.g. a therapist, friends, some kinds of meditation, etc. If you don’t have access to enough safety, repressing or clenching temporarily might be your best option. The main thing that changed my view here was spending days at the retreat paying close attention to my own emotional experience. For example, near the beginning of the retreat, one of the facilitators claimed that thought-looping was usually a sign of a stuck or repressed emotion. I was really skeptical, but then I had several very clear experiences of thought-looping around something, going off to a private place to cry about it, and immediately stopping the thought spiral and relating to it differently.4 Similarly, I’d ended a long-term relationship right before the retreat, which I’d felt a lot of internal conflict and self-doubt about. My therapist had often told me things like “if you felt enough of your feelings you’d feel clear about this decision,” which sounded crazy to me at the time (uh, it’s a really hard call and there are a lot of tradeoffs that I don’t know how to weigh!). But on the last day of the retreat I noticed that I felt much clearer that a lot of the things I didn’t like about that relationship were real and important, and felt much more confident in my choice to end it. Of course, I’d already heard plenty of people say things like “you can’t make this kind of decision logically, you have to listen to your heart,” but I never really understood what they were talking about. In retrospect, I just didn’t have the ability to do the “listen to your heart” internal move, because the pipes were clogged by too much repressed gunk. I wish those soundbites had included a second sentence like “of course listening to your heart can be much easier said than done, so if it feels hard or unclear for you, here are some first steps to get started with, and be prepared for it to take you many hours (or years) to figure out what your heart is trying to say.” This new mindset really shifted the way I related to my emotions. While I still often experience them as painful, it’s much less than I used to, and now I start from the assumption that they’re not “actually” painful or bad, and that the best thing to do with them is to figure out how to accept them, welcome them, and find the wisdom or beauty in them. Overall this feels a lot better—when I run into something stressful or hard, instead of just flailing around not knowing what to do about it, it feels more like I have some kind of sense of direction or overall orientation, which is really comforting and grounding. I also noticed that a lot of these ways of thinking about emotional difficulty within myself were also useful metaphors for thinking about emotional dynamics between people. Just like resisting your own emotions is a common coping strategy but ultimately doesn’t work very well, resisting other people’s emotions is also a really common but damaging pattern, which I would guess is very involved in a lot of (most?) relational damage. For example, I realized that a big part of the root problem of the relationship that I had just ended was that both of us were missing the capacity to accept a bunch of each other’s emotions, which was something I hadn’t been able to articulate clearly at the time. I now think practices explicitly focused on welcoming each other’s emotions are a really valuable tool for nurturing relationships over time. In fact, I started to notice that a lot of sticky problems—both in my personal life, but also the type that I ran into as a manager—were partly downstream of people resisting emotions of one type or another. Alice is hard to communicate with, because she frequently monologues about unimportant details, because she wants to prove she understands everything, because she has a bunch of stuck fear/resentment about not being taken seriously. Bob and Clara have a persistent disagreement about strategy, because Clara doesn’t care enough about Bob’s opinion to engage, because Bob was cruel to her once; Clara never complained because she’s avoiding the feeling of having been hurt by it. Dave’s team is underperforming but Erin, the exec sponsor, doesn’t want to manage him out, because she’s scared of the conflict and of making Dave’s reports, who like him, angry. Of course, just because a problem is caused by stuck emotions doesn’t mean that unsticking them is the best way to solve it; but it was still a really useful lens to view what was going on. The other shift that stuck around was in my relationships. I made a huge improvement in my friendships, which a few different things contributed to: I felt a lot clearer about what I wanted from close friendships—mainly, a strong felt sense of safety and care—and that this felt like a big missing piece in my life. I also started getting better at feeling those. With a lot of my shame reflex dissolved, I felt generally safer with people overall—my intuitive predictions about how they’d respond to things I did felt more positive. I also got a lot better at noticing and appreciating the different ways people expressed care for me. Because I felt generally safer, I also got more willing to take risks or be vulnerable, which helped build closeness faster. A friend reflected that I seemed more courageous. This also meant that my “friend type” changed—I cared more about emotional connection and less about intellectual connection. Luckily, even though I live in a really heady milieu, I was still able to find a lot of big-hearted people and gradually build up a set of close friends who are wonderful at both. So far, this is the change I’m the happiest about. My dating life changed a bunch as well: I started being able to feel much more strongly attracted to people. For example, later that year, I got a crush on someone that was stronger than any crush I’d had in high school. I had a run of anxious-attachment-ish experiences, which I’d never had before, although they got way milder over time.5 The extra safety and courage I mentioned above were helpful in dating too: I got much more comfortable with communicating tricky things or being in weird situations (e.g. ones outside the standard script of “meet someone on an app, go on some dates, become exclusive”). A friend commented that it seemed like I had more degrees of freedom. These changes have been really wonderful overall, but also kind of intense. Becoming much more emotionally aware solved a bunch of my problems, like wanting deeper friendships or not understanding why my relationship was unsatisfying. But it turns out winning that boss fight just made all the enemies level up. My old problems got replaced with horrible new problems, like that sometimes my newly deep friends and I would have conflicts, or that I would be more into the person I was dating than they were into me. The part of my life where I feel the most mixed about the impact is work. About six months after my retreat, I got a pretty bad case of burnout and left my role managing a big team for a significantly less ambitious IC role. I don’t think the retreat was the main cause of my burnout—the main cause was that I didn’t have enough background in the area I was managing to have the type of impact that I wanted to, with a side helping of some difficult working relationships. But it turns out my new psyche had also gotten worse at repressing or avoiding emotion, and that made everything harder. I think of repression as the emotional equivalent of technical debt or deferred maintenance: a way of avoiding an immediate cost, in this case feeling uncomfortable feelings, in exchange for paying a higher cost later to clean it up.6 My role exposed me to a constant stream of low-grade painful things, like people being disappointed or annoyed at me, me being disappointed or annoyed at other people, projects not going well, office snacks being replaced with worse snacks, and so on. With less ability to avoid or repress, I had to feel more of them fully as they came up, and that was really draining. It also required enough time and attention that I had to defer a bunch of maintenance on my personal life. Even now that I feel like my energy levels have mostly recovered, I’m still not sure whether I want to go back to the center of the vortex. It’s not just that I would have to start deferring maintenance again; I’m also much more aware of a lot of maintenance I’d already deferred and really want to clean up—things like investing in friendships, like I mentioned above. If I were only working toward my personal growth and happiness, I’d say this change was clearly good. My life feels much richer and more whole, and taking a less ambitious role forced me to release some layers of ego attachment to having a “shiny” job or career, which was deeply freeing. But… I also care a lot about my impact on the world, and I think the next few years will probably be a critical period where my work could be especially high-leverage. From that perspective, it’s sad to feel resistant to maxing out on work right now. I feel pretty unsure about what to take away from all this. Here are some disconnected reflections. I would never have said that I had a problem with self-compassion or self-esteem before doing this retreat, because I was able to say the right self-compassionate words when I directly asked myself things. But from my point of view afterwards, it’s clear that I did have a big self-compassion problem; even though I could say the words, I wasn’t really feeling them or acting like they were true. Having the actual embodied experience and habits of self-compassion is the closest I’ve come in real life to The Vitamin.7 Jhourney is doing something really cool and is way better than most/all other meditation retreats on several axes (amount of support available, pedagogical excellence). That said, you probably shouldn’t expect to have this life-changing of an experience; I would guess I had something like a 95th-percentile-plus outcome in terms of long-term effects. I still think it’s awesome as an introduction to both meditation and embodied emotional awareness. I feel like I got really lucky on timing: if the retreat had ended one day earlier, I don’t think I would have gotten to the life-changing part. That freaks me out a lot. At first I concluded from this that I should get super into meditation. Then I did two more retreats (another Jhourney retreat and a Dustin DiPerna introduction to mahamudra retreat) and neither one of them had nearly as large of an effect. The second Jhourney retreat was really helpful in reinforcing my daily practice, and I do think a daily meditation practice was helpful in stabilizing the changes that became permanent, but I’m not even totally sure about that. Jhanas are definitely real. Also, it was kind of wild hearing somebody tell me something that sounded totally fake (“achieve bliss on demand using nothing but your brain”) and then back it up with an 80-page engineering manual and meticulous data on success rates. Overall this made me much more likely to believe that various other types of “woo” phenomena are real, at least in the sense that people are accurately describing their experiences. (I still believe the universe runs on physics, but a lot of woo things have physics-compatible explanations, especially if you buy that people’s intuitions can sometimes do spooky things.) I described this as “chang[ing] my personality” in the title, but I don’t want to oversell the magnitude. I do have a lot of conversations where someone asks me “so how come you’re so <like X>” and I tell them “I did this weird meditation retreat a couple years ago.” But also, there are a lot of different aspects of personality, and even though a bunch of those completely changed for me, most of them are still the same, so I’m still very similar to my past self in an absolute sense. What flags should tip you off that you should maybe be staring into your emotions more? Here are some things that I think might be clues (a lot of which described me, in retrospect): You often get stressed and stuck in thought loops You’re easily annoyed or frustrated You have too much scarcity mindset—you often worry this is the best job or relationship or whatever that you’ll ever have, in a way that’s not justified by the fundamentals You seek out a lot of distraction or stimulation; it’s not very enjoyable to just exist in the present You feel a lot of internal conflict or uncertainty about what you want There are parts of yourself that you really don’t like or wish were different You feel some missing depth, richness, or meaning in your life but can’t put your finger exactly on what I’m also just left with a lot of questions: Was this set of experiences… good? I’m really confident that it will be good for my own long-term life happiness. But the timing meant that I feel less willing to sign up for intense work during what might be one of the most critical periods for humanity, which feels bad even if the change was positive. I feel kind of unsure how to balance these. My shoulder Jeremy Bentham says I should have just kept playing push-pin. My shoulder, uh… deva? says if I follow my heart my impact on the world will be higher, even if it’s less predictable or legible. I don’t really feel like I buy either of these. It seemed like before this I was in a personality attractor basin with a lot of numbing and repression. How exactly did this happen, and more importantly, how can I/we avoid having it happen to as many people in the future? I have some sort of fuzzy leads on this (e.g. when I was young it was really easy to make me cry so I got picked on a lot in school), but not a particularly complete picture (e.g.: does this happen to everyone who has that experience? If not, what makes the difference?) Mechanistically, what did the elephant meditation do? Why did it work so suddenly and create such a lasting shift? (Was that in fact what was responsible for most of the lasting shift? How much of it was instead about what I learned at a cognitive level?) Is the glowy, “easier to be the essence of Ben” state that I ended up in right afterwards something that can be stabilized (or have aspects stabilized)? If so, how? More generally—where do I go from here? I’m convinced that doing the right type of introspection or meditation type thing for a week can unlock amazing things, and it feels like there are more amazing things out there to unlock, but I wish I had a better way of navigating towards them than semi-randomly trying things. A draft reader asked what I would tell my past self, or someone like me, about this arc. Ultimately, I’d boil it down to: There are probably a bunch of feelings that you’re refusing to welcome into your experience, and this is probably involved in a bunch of the things that are unsatisfying about your life and relationships. You can improve this by gradually, in a safe context, paying loving attention to the uncomfortable parts, from a place of wanting to know and care for yourself rather than to fix yourself. When that’s hard, remember that it’s not your fault. You’re just the rider; elephants gonna elephant. Let it go where it needs to and keep loving it as best you can. Thanks to Alex Allain, Catherine Olsson, Elena Lake, Jess Ocean, Rahul Dalal, and Sasha Chapin for feedback on a draft of this post. Ironically, Jhourney more or less recommends doing this in various parts of the handbook, but I was too into following rules to follow the part of the rules where they told me to stop following the rules. I don’t think this strictly qualifies as a jhana by Jhourney’s rubric, because it wasn’t stable and self-sustaining, but it otherwise felt close to how they describe first jhana. I do mean all, even ones that our culture really doesn’t like—for example, anger is a sign that something you care about is threatened and needs protecting, and fully welcoming it can help bring clarity about what exactly needs protecting and how. If you’re curious to learn more about the beautiful and constructive aspects of negative emotions, I recommend the book The Language of Emotions, Joe Hudson’s podcast (search for the emotion you’re interested in), or here are some specific articles summarizing his views on anger, fear, and shame. It was a lot easier to see this clearly on the retreat than in normal life: doing lots of meditation both made it easier to notice my own thought processes, and also faster to “unstick” or welcome the underlying emotions. I’m not totally sure what was up with this; I think it partly had to do with calibrating to the new level of attraction I could feel. Like tech debt or deferred maintenance, sometimes repression or avoidance can be the right strategy, if you’ll have more resources to deal with the problem later! “My deepest darkest fantasy is that I collapse on the street and I am rushed to the hospital. They perform a bunch of tests and find out I am severely deficient in some kind of vitamin. Then I start taking the vitamin and I become the happiest cleverest person alive because all my problems were caused by this one deficiency.”

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