It’s been 40 days since I attended a Jhana retreat with amazing humans of Jhourney.io and I still haven’t found the perfect word to describe what happened. 

If Vipassana was like learning to walk again, Jhana was like riding a bike with training wheels, then realizing one day you don’t need them anymore.

Before this retreat, I used to do Vipassana meditation. Vipassana taught me how to accept reality as it is. Jhana, on the other hand, was an invitation to go deeper, an altered state where I could change my perception of reality.

What Jhana Felt Like

• Walking out of a steam room (130°F) as if nothing happened.

• Listening to a song without trying to make sense of the lyrics, just feeling it.

• Experiencing joy like a child discovering a new game.

• Thinking without thoughts. Feeling in sensations.

It wasn’t just about “bliss on demand.” It was about rewiring how my brain related to perception.

What is Jhana?

Jhana is a deeply restful and altered state of mind that arises when the mind becomes still, unified, and fully absorbed. It’s a natural part of the mind, something you don’t force, but fall into when the right conditions are created.

In ancient teachings, the Buddha described Jhana as a sequence of meditative states where the mind becomes quieter, more joyful, and more peaceful with each step. These states are not mystical - they are learnable, trainable, and very much a part of human potential.

The experience of Jhana is like slipping into a warm bath of awareness. Your usual thoughts settle. A gentle joy fills the body. Eventually, even joy quiets down, leaving behind a calm, bright mind that feels both empty and full.

Jhana is not an escape, it’s a way to train the mind in how to rest so deeply that it naturally lets go of old tensions and reorganizes itself in healthier ways. It’s a territory where healing, clarity, and insight arise, not by thinking more, but by doing less. Almost close to zero compute done by my mind.

The retreat I attended was a container for learning this—through rest, playfulness, guidance, and the subtle art of tuning into sensations rather than thoughts.

Insights That Shifted Me

• Happiness: My brain has the capacity to generate pleasurable sensations - peace, joy, contentment - without needing anything external to trigger them.

• Perception delta: Stress = mismatch between reality and expectation. Jhana shrinks this gap.

• Memories are editable: Like computer files. When recalled in Jhana, they become soft, plastic, open to change and whatever I feel during this state kind of gets mapped to the memory. Later long after when I remember this same memory I feel the newly mapped feeling. After I learned this, we can also reverse it. Like before storing memories, we get the chance to change the perception and that's how it gets stored. 

• Backlog processing: Jhana helped me clear out old unprocessed stress. The more aligned my perception became with reality, the more restful I felt.

 What Helped Me Enter Jhana

• Feeling bliss is not my North Star, understanding that the most natural state is restful, Rest (zero compute) is my North Star

• As The Mind Illuminated puts it, your mind isn’t run by one CEO - it’s more like a group of under-19 cats trying to run a company. No wonder things get chaotic

• Giving internal names to various parts of my brain

• Breathwork for faster undivided attention

• Compassion. Brushing it over every sensation, especially the unpleasant ones.

• Welcoming all distractions as a part of my awareness, in fact thanking them to expand my awareness.

• Peers and guides who made the journey playful and easier.

• Unlearning the idea that posture or stillness is mandatory. I could move and still stay with my sensations.

Questions That Guided Me

• “Which part of the brain is leading the experience right now?”

• “How am I relating to this sensation?”

• "Is a smile available?"

• “Am I trying too hard?”

• “Can I enjoy this moment a little more?”

• “Do my thoughts want to meditate?”

Meeting the Hungry mind in Jhana

Inside me, there’s a restless part I call the Hungry mind
It’s the part that craves more - more rewards, more validation, more stimulation, more money, everything more.
More productivity. More meaning. More everything.
It’s curious and energetic, but it’s also scattered, unsatisfied, and often in control.

Before Jhana, I used to either obey it or fight it.
But during Jhana, something shifted.
I wasn’t trying to silence the Hungry mind.
Instead, I invited it in.

I gave it something better than stimulation - Sensation.
I let it explore memories, emotions, stories. not to solve them, but to feel them.
Fully. Deeply.
It was like giving a hyperactive child a paintbrush and letting it play on a canvas made of awareness.

Jhana taught me:
The Hungry Mind doesn’t need to be tamed.
It needs to be understood, included, and lovingly guided.

When it gets to play inside a restful mind, it becomes an artist instead of a critic.

And that’s where change happens, not through force, but through internal harmony.

Neural Annealing

During Jhana, I began feeling something strange - like rapid, fluid shifts inside my head. It wasn’t painful, but it felt real, as if my brain was reconfiguring itself in fast, wave-like pulses. I didn’t have a name for it back then.

Later, I came across the concept of neural annealing - a process where intense mental activation followed by deep rest allows the brain to reorganize its structure. It’s similar to how metal is heated until it's malleable, then slowly cooled to lock in a stronger, more stable shape. The heat makes it soft, and the cooling gives it form.

Once I understood it, I began intentionally leveraging those states to soften old patterns and rewire how I think and feel.

Jhana and High Agency

One of the most surprising aftereffects of Jhana was how much clearer my inner voice became. Not the loud, impulsive thoughts, but the quiet one underneath. The one that knows.

It’s as if the noise dial in my brain got turned down, and what remained was a high-fidelity signal of intuition. Decisions I used to overthink became obvious. Paths that felt uncertain started to feel obvious, not because I calculated better, but because I listened better.

Jhana gave me a tool to come back to that stillness. Again and again. And from that stillness, I noticed something shift:
My agency increased. Not because I became more disciplined but because I became more aligned. I wasn’t fighting my mind to act. I was following the part of me that already knew what to do. 

Real agency doesn’t feel like force. It feels like flow.

If you’ve ever wondered how to trust your gut, or how to stop second-guessing every step, you may not need more logic. It becomes energy-expensive to train our mental models with logic in real-time, just like how it needs a lot of energy to train an AI model. But Jhanas makes it so energy-inexpensive and efficient to train our model and unlocks the ability to fine-tune it in real-time. 

How I Integrated Jhana Into Daily Life

Coming out of the retreat, I didn’t want Jhana to be just a peak experience. I wanted it to become a way of living.

Here’s how I’ve started integrating it:

I no longer think meditation has to be 1 hour, eyes closed, back straight. Sometimes, I sit for 5-10 minutes while sipping coffee, walking in a park, or listening to music.
The key is: Can I rest into sensation, not chase thought?

When I feel overwhelmed, instead of solving the overwhelm, I tune into how it feels in my body. I ask, “What’s the sensation of this moment?” and just stay there.
That alone reduces the chaos. I call it thinking in sensations.

Earlier, I saw rest as a break from productivity. Now, I see deep rest as a way to align and rewire my mind. Like letting the brain update its software in silence.

The taste of food, the light of morning, the breath between sentences - there’s so much bliss hiding in daily life. Even the sound of the traffic, waiting for someone doesn’t feel like noise but an opportunity to truly rest and savor it.
The more I align my perception with sensation, the more “jhanic” daily life becomes.

• Forgive the reaction

• Brush compassion on the sensation

• Welcome the distraction
  This 3-step dance brings me back into harmony fast.

But not every day is jhanic. Some days, in the middle of the grind, I miss my sits - and I can clearly feel the difference. The mind gets noisier, heavier, less clear. It’s not dramatic at first, but it’s a slippery slope.

Miss one day, and you slide a little. Miss two or three, and you start forgetting what stillness felt like. Reactions creep back in. The backlog builds. And if I don’t pause, I slowly start becoming someone I thought I’d already outgrown.

That’s why, when it piles up, I sit longer - 70 to 80 minutes. It’s not a rule. It’s just how I reset. And every time I do, that clarity returns, like the fog lifting.

Final Reflection: Surrender Is the Door

To truly rest, you must surrender - completely. No mental tasks. No effort. Just presence. Zero compute.

The concept of praying/ surrendering to God, which is also a perception in our minds, suddenly became an amazing strategy to deep rest.

That’s the paradox of Jhana:
It begins when the “I” stops trying to meditate and instead… lets the brain do what it knows best.
Most of the motivation to do something is feel a particular sensation which is manufactured by our very brain itself. The moment I realised that jhanas take me to the factory floor, my motivation to do something started coming from a place of abundance. To give and not to take. Full of love and compassion. 

The OG quote hits so hard
"Pain is inevitable, sufferings is optional" - Buddha

Gratitude

To Viraj. To the Jhourney team. To Stephen and Lindsay.

To the sensations that became my language.

Thank you for reading!