I recently attended the in-person Jhourney meditation retreat at Mount Madonna. This post is my writeup of my experience.
It was a really great experience. It was also very challenging. I cried – healthy tears, tears of emotions being processed – as much as I can remember crying in my entire life. Ultimately I found it a valuable, rewarding, experience, although the jhanas themselves were mostly incidental to my experience.
The retreat ran from Sunday to Sunday, with six full days of retreat in between. For me, the first three days were largely uneventful; I would describe them as “mildly positive.” I learned and practiced some techniques and experienced some mildly unusual states, but overall experienced nothing overly notable.
On the fourth day, and into the fifth, various emotions and inner parts exploded into internal tension and despair, and I had a really tough time. I was utterly beset by my inner critic and felt very hopeless and stuck and despairing, for a while.
With the help of a number of really lovely chats with several of the facilitators, I was able to process all the shit that had come up, and, as a result, felt dramatically better and more relaxed and open.
Over the final day, I felt filled with joy and love and equanimity, with greater reserves of calm, greater “resting contentment,” less reactivity, and greater access to my own emotional experiences, than I had experienced in years, perhaps ever.
The first three days
As mentioned, the first three days were uneventful. I attempted the techniques from the Jhourney retreat instructions, and I learned some things. I certainly learned, in a way I hadn’t before, that meditation can be enjoyable – I could sit for 30 minutes easily, and often an hour or longer, without really getting bored or antsy. I experienced a few notable (but relatively subtle) “altered states” through meditation, but certainly never entered a jhana.
It was, however, becoming clear to me that there was stuff going in my pysche below the surface. I had a few concrete clues I could identify, even at the time:
- I kept waking up at 5:30am in the morning with a vague knot of anxiety in my stomach, with no specific story or worry associated with it.
- When I would sit for longer sits – 60 or 90 minutes – I would notice myself gradually becoming more and more detached, and just find it really hard to access any emotions by the end. It mostly wasn’t _un_pleasant, maybe even with a mildly positive valence, but definitely a sensation of being a bit numb and checked out.
- I gradually became aware of a sense of disappointment or frustration that “nothing notable” had happened on retreat; I had the feeling of “I came here expecting something a high-amplitude experience, and when is that going to happen???”
As a slight aside, the latter, especially, was a somewhat interesting journey of mental discovery; I noticed that the feeling started appearing in my mind almost as a joke, or a wry aside – even on days 1 and 2, my mind would offer something to the effect of “man wouldn’t it be funny if you were already feeling anxious about how the retreat is almost over??” Even as this idea popped into my head, I would notice myself “shoving it away” or ignoring it, automatically and before it could even become fully-formed; I found the meditation practice helpful for noticing this pattern, and attempting to reshape it. At first, I couldn’t notice in time to stop the reflexive “shove away,” but I was able to interrupt afterwards and “invite the thought back” and attempt to relate to it differently; with practice, the “shove away” reflex also faded, a bit.
I cried, a little, during two separate sits during those first days, both times while doing forgiveness meditations. It felt good and productive, but also both times I had a sense of the tears and/or corresponding emotional energy not “flowing freely,” but instead being somewhat blocked and incompletely processed. It felt good, nonetheless, and I had a sense of having a lot more left to process.
Day four
Days four and five were when the Big Feelings hit.
Midday on day four, I took a walk and chatted with Matt, one of the lead facilitators for the week. He heard my sense of frustration or disappointment about the experience so far, and skillfully turned the question to: Well, what were you hoping to get out of this retreat? What brought you here? Chasing that thread a bit brought out the first really “freely-flowing” tears of the week, just deeply feeling and accepting a lot of the stresses and frustrations that I’d been dealing with outside the retreat.
At that point, I wasn’t sure if that was it, and that would be the breakthrough I needed, or if there was more to come. It was, it turns out, the latter.
My mood and headspace just steadily spiraled the rest of the day. I think, basically, I now felt deeply in touch with the struggles and tendencies I wanted to work with and improve on, but no better-equipped to actually address them. I spiraled into a deep psychic hole of despair and self-criticism. Reconstructing and putting it into words afterwards, I think I was caught in the midst of a narrative that went something like so:
I had come on retreat hoping it would help me deal with certain emotional and personal challenges I’d been dealing with. Upon coming to the retreat, I had been issued the Jhourney retreat instructions which – I now felt – contained all of the tools of growth and discovery necessary to deal with my challenges. I only needed to take action and implement them. Unfortunately, I was stuck and unable to do so, on account of precisely that same set of issues. The answer to all my problems was within reach – had been literally handed to me – but I was unable to benefit from it because of precisely the same problems that I needed to address.
This sensation was so strong that for a while I felt as though the entire retreat and curriculum had been specifically designed to catch specifically me (well, some class of people with comparable psyches to mine) in specifically this trap.
That night, I decided to get out my phone and give my friend Catherine a call; she’d attended a Jhourney retreat last year and had somewhat-comparable struggles, and I felt optimistic she would relate and/or have something helpful to say.
That call was a great idea. She was very helpful, steadfastly (and correctly, in my judgment) refusing to engage on the object level, and instead saying something like:
I say this with much love and affection but: yep, this is what you went on retreat to find. You went on a meditation retreat to help deal with your shit, and, congratulations, you have found your shit. You’re in it now. Be kind to yourself, and I for one am optimistic you’ll find a productive path out of it.
At the end of that call I still didn’t feel good, but I was also simultaneously giggling somewhat uncontrollably at how ridiculous I was being. Later that evening I ran into Jenny, the other lead facilitator, in the hallway. I must have looked like a bit of a mess because she asked “Are you okay?” or some form that question, which I was promptly completely unable to answer. I did, however, reply with some version of “Well, as my friend just said: I have found the shit, and I am dealing with my shit,” while giggling the whole sentence.
Day five
The turning point
The next morning I took a long hike in the sunshine, which helped a bit. I was still in a rough place mentally, though, and I walked out of the morning one-hour silent group sit, because it just wasn’t working for me. Walking back to my room, I again happened to cross paths with Jenny, and this time, after a bit of conversation, she offered to find time to do a bit of parts work with me later that day, an offer I gladly accepted.
We ended up finding time at noon, and spent at least 45 minutes in a very Jhourney/meditation-flavored IFS session, which was just stunningly powerful and effective for me. It’s difficult to describe the substance and the specific parts and emotions that came up, in part because there’s just not that much content there when described literally; but the depth and range of emotions I was able to feel and process, and the comparative ease of teasing apart my experience into different parts and emotional notes and their relationships, was just absolutely unprecedented for me and felt like a magical and transformative, experience.
After that session I ate lunch and took another hike in the woods; I was mentally and physically moving slowly and delicately and felt like I was slowly re-integrating and re-coalescing into a coherent individual, to which I felt able to bring a lot of tenderness and patience.
Breathwork
That afternoon, we had our final breathwork session, hosted by a local practitioner and teacher from the Santa Cruz area. I decided I would attend and just take it easy, and listen to my body and mind and feel into what felt good. Midway through the breathwork session, I discovered that I was feeling very relaxed and content, and, mostly without any intention or plan, discovered I was mentally hanging out with the intense love and gratitude I felt for a handful of named individuals in my life (including, but not limited to, my wife Kate!). Over time, that experience was much absorbing than the breathwork session, and I stopped following the breathwork practice instructions, and just sank deeper and deeper into that feeling of love and gratitude, and into the feeling of just how good it felt to feel that much love and gratitude.
Triangulating from others’ descriptions and from some conversations afterwards, I’m pretty sure at this point I slipped into a jhana, probably J2.
The experience was really fascinating and hard to talk about. With hindsight, I was definitely in a distinctive altered state, but the actual experience of it was somehow simultaneously all-encompassing and powerful, but simultaneously it felt very continuous and relatively gradual. I had a definite awareness of having crossed some sort of mental “phase change”: there was a sense of the experience of love and gratitude having “stabilized,” such that it was a strong “default,” and a sense that this default was stable and would persist, barring disruption. The analogy my brain offered was something like sitting inside an (unusually thick-walled) soap bubble; there was a sense that I could mentally “push” at the walls and they might shift but would tend to bounce back and resume their rest state, but also that if I pushed too dramatically or made a too-sudden movement, it could all collapse.
As part of the breathwork practice, the facilitators were circulating among the participants, and would periodically offer touch in ways they judged would be supportive – to help someone to relax or to move energy, to physically shift them into a more comfortable position, that sort of thing.
While I was in (presumptive) J2, I felt one of them offer me a hand on my head, gently adjusting the alignment of my neck and spine (I had tweaked one of my neck muscles during the retreat and I’m sure I was somewhat contorted trying to placate it).
This touch turned out to be a really interesting experience for me! First, I noticed a fairly forceful negative reaction to the touch – rendered into words, it would be something like “Hey I’m tripping on pure love and gratitude over here and your hand is cold and distracting and unnecessary. I’m doing just fine, thank you.”
However, instead of jolting me out of my jhanic state, I had the experience of being able to watch that feeling arise, from within the calm and stability of my bubble of love, and both deeply feel it and also choose to not react or sink into that feeling; instead I was able to acknowledge the feeling, but also make the deliberate choice to move or expand the all-encompassing sense of love I was feeling to encompass the touch and the teacher who was offering it, and relax into it; this worked, and I was able to lovingly observe and experience as she helped me realign my neck and feel the release of a small amount of tension I hadn’t noticed my neck was carrying.
Tonglen
That evening, we did one final group session, where we practiced a form of compassion meditation known as “tonglen.” The practice, in short, involves envisioning drawing in suffering on the in-breath – potentially the suffering of a specific individual or group, or of the world more broadly, or many other forms – and then envisioning it being transmuted within you, effortlessly, into a sense of ease and compassion, and then breathing that sense of ease and compassion back out into the world on the out-breath.
We did a short group meditation, and then paired up with a partner, spending 10 minutes in each direction of one partner relating suffering they’d been dealing with recently, and the other one listening silently and compassionately while doing the meditation.
I found it a really fascinating experience. I felt, at that moment, just profoundly content and compassionate and at peace, and felt deeply able to summon the feeling of compassion and care in the face of the idea of someone else’s suffering, or of my partner’s telling of their struggles, and feel empathy for them and sadness but deeply without it “getting to” me in any way. As my partner was relating their story, I experienced feeling so full of love and care and compassion that I felt as if I was grinning like a maniac with how much love I felt – and then felt deeply weird about listening to someone pour their heart out while grinning silently at them (My partner thankfully reported afterwards that they mostly just experienced me as deeply equanimous).
The final day
The final day of retreat was really lovely. I felt, for the first time all week, deeply calm and unhurried, and able to take the day to meditate playfully and with a sense of exploration and curiosity-without-expectation that I more-or-less hadn’t experienced all week. I experienced no more jhanas, and very little particularly unusual, but it was nonetheless a really lovely day.
One story, though, which I think is probably telling about my psyche. Due to some quirks of the schedule, on the last day I ended up with a ~6h block of totally-unscheduled meditation time, which was by far the most all week in a single block. I was excited to meditate for most of the block, with a few specific topics or approaches I wanted to explore or revisit.
Instead, 30 minutes into my first sit, I found myself just hopelessly distracted from meditating, in a way I hadn’t been all week. In particular, it became clear that the thing my brain really, really, really wanted to do was to compose an entire goddamn essay, riffing off the somewhat notorious piece of writing advice, “kill your darlings.” The essay had started unspooling during a hike, but then during this sit I simply could not move off of it.
I tried welcoming in the part of my mind which kept drafting the essay. I tried offering it all the lovingkindness I could muster. I tried sitting quietly with it, just holding space for it. I tried arguing with it. I tried arguing with it with lovingkindness. I tried forgiving it. Nothing worked – the voice in my head just kept. composing. the essay.
So I stopped the sit, sat down at a table in the sun, and wrote down an entire draft of the essay, start to finish, longhand in my notebook. Then, I returned to meditating, and meditated for close to four hours straight, with no more substantial distractions – I shifted a few times, moving to a different spot, or from sitting to lying down, but didn’t substantially exit the “meditating” headspace.
(Here’s the essay, if you want to read even more of my words, today).
The weeks after
I feel very unsure how much lasting effect the retreat has had and will have had. I felt very different for the 24-48h afterwards; I had a very strong sense of “resting contentment” and happiness, and felt that I was feeling my emotions and feelings much more strongly, and also being less reactive about them. I felt a fair amount more assertive and confident about speaking or acting up for myself; much less likely to notice some slight desire or preference, and then just quash it because acting on it seemed too awkward or challenging or overwhelming.
It also felt like the acute, really notable effects, crashed hard into a wall with a return to work and parenting and a normal over-busy life, and my emotional state is almost entirely back to baseline. I’ve definitely retained a bit of the increased sensitivity and awareness and proactiveness, but the difference feels subtle. I feel glad I went, and also, so far, slightly underwhelmed about the lasting impact, relative to how rare and expensive it feels to take a full week away from “default life” and especially Kate and Nick. We will see, though; the lingering effects feel subtle, but also very real and generally positive.
Thoughts on Jhourney
I found the retreat very powerful and valuable, and I’m glad I went. I am, as mentioned, a bit unsure about how much of a lasting effect I’ve been able to bring with me, and also feel a bit confused about what I think about their pedagogy and retreat format.
I have heard reports of people who, more-or-less, experienced a retreat as something like “Go on retreat. Follow instructions. Achieve jhana. Find experience very valuable.” I, personally, cannot imagine having an experience remotely that simple, with the materials and program as presently constituted, but I also find it very hard to tell to what extent that’s a fact about my own psyche and traumas and neuroses, versus a fact about their material and approach.
I will say: arguably the main form of instruction at Jhourney is the “retreat instructions,” a spiral-bound 100-page book participants are issued on arrival, and instructed to read certain sections of by certain points over the first 48h or so (and then recommended to read and revisit all of).
I found the book certainly helpful and to some extent informative, but I also found it essentially impossible not to relate to it as something like “this is a textbook and I am studying for the test.” The book explicitly and repeatedly warns you against that stance, but just by virtue of being a large tome of text, which is very structured and relatively dry, I found it impossible to expunge that part of my mind. I was, of course, self-aware that this was unproductive, and that contradiction was a major contributor to some of my mental spiraling mid-retreat.
Again, this is, in large part, “a me problem,” and something I needed (and still need) to work through. But I also do wonder whether it’s also an unforced error, and another approach might have helped me learn more of the skills and techniques they actually wanted to teach, and done less “shoving my own bullshit at me and grinding my face into it.” But on the third hand, maybe that’s just what I needed, and if they had managed to sidestep it, that would have been ultimately less helpful. I really don’t know.
I do have two more-specific thoughts or ponderings, though.
First, and riffing on the “textbook” analogy: The retreat instructions are very, very, clear that “playfulness” will be on the test, and that you should study up and bring your best sense of play to the final exam. They are not particularly, themselves, playful. I wish the instructions, themselves, had demonstrated more of a sense of play or discovery or lightheartedness, of the kind that’s necessary in this practice, and I really didn’t find them to do so. I’m not completely certain what it would look like for them to do so, but I think it would be worthy experiment.
Then, in a similar vein but more broadly: I wanted more poetry.
I’m thinking, here, of a saying that came up a number of times on retreat: “Before, it sounds like poetry; afterwards, it sounds like a technical manual.” I can’t find the source on a quick search, but it’s intended as a descriptor for a fairly broad class of content – experience reports and instructions, both – about “advanced” meditative states or practices, including the jhanas; all attempts to describe these states or techniques sound very abstract or florid or overly-metaphorical before you’ve experienced them, but once you achieve the described state, they have a tendency to “snap into focus” and you understand precisely what was meant, and sometimes even what you need to do to advance the practice; the florid, preposterous, rhetoric really does just precisely describe whatever you just experienced.
I get the sense that Jhourney is, in some sense, scared of writing or sharing poetry. Their written material aims to sound like a technical manual even before you start. I think there’s a lot of value to that kind of material, but it would be improved by also leaning into the “poetry” aspect, and offering the more abstract-sounding or poetic advice, in order to give participants more directions to triangulate from. Certainly I think I find some amount of that style or approach helpful, and I also find it embodies a “you can’t think your way through this” mindset, which is very helpful since that’s so much my default stance.
