Jhana Meditation Live: How Anyone Can Achieve Super Wellbeing

Just thinking about the question of suffering seriously is a little bit of a contrarian take in the world right now. And I think that's silly. If we're already taking super longevity and super intelligence seriously, why not take super well-being seriously? We're working to make life-changing meditation accessible to everybody. And we're starting with states known as the jhanas, which are altered states you can learn to enter into with a bit of meditation practice that span the spectrum from bliss to peace. And when you learn to create a feedback loop between attention and emotion, it's a forcing function to learn to navigate your own nervous system with, I think, an unprecedented level of fluency. I'm psyched. I want to see you get into Ajana. Steven, welcome to the show. Thanks, Dan. I'm excited to be here. Excited to have you. For people who don't know you, you are the founder of Journey, which... Actually, how do you describe Journey as a company? I know Journey because I went on one of your meditation retreats, but I know that Journey is bigger than that. So give us the spiel on Journey really quickly. Yeah. So we're, we're working to make life-changing meditation accessible to everybody. And we're starting with states known as the John is, which are. Turns out altered states. You can learn to enter into with a bit of meditation practice that span the spectrum from bliss to peace. And when you learn to effectively create a feedback loop between attention and emotion, It's a forcing function to learn to navigate your own nervous system with, I think, an unprecedented level of fluency. And in a world in which so many of us are optimizing everything from our sleep to our diet to our work performance, it raises the question of why not optimize your nervous system fluency or your relationship with your emotions because that makes everything else easier. And it ultimately makes it easier to be the person you aspire to be. So it's in many ways about helping you get to endogenous altered states as fast as possible. But that's really just the first goal. The real goal is to set you up so that your subconscious works for you, not against you. Wait, say that one more time to set you up. So that your subconscious works for you, not against you. Yeah, I feel that. And, and I have to say, like, I went on one of your week long meditation retreats, and I've been meditating for a long time and done a lot of retreats. And it was by far the best retreat that I've ever been on. Yeah. And it has generated lasting changes in my practice and therefore lasting changes in my life. So I really, I mean, I love everything that you do and I'm really excited to have you here. Love to hear that, Dan. It's a labor of love for the team. Good. You can feel it. So we have a bit of a plan here for this show, which I think will be interesting and new, which is... we're going to, you're going to get into a jhana or at least get as close as you possibly can to being in a jhana and you're going to narrate your internal experience as you do it. Um, then we're going to, you're going to come out of that and we're going to talk about what happened and just talk about your practice. And I'll talk about my practice and sort of share what these states are and how they've affected our lives. And then we're going to move into, I know there's like There's a lot of stuff on your short-term and long-term roadmap that uses AI to help people do this better. And so we're just going to get into this sort of like technology aspect and the future aspect of this. So I'm psyched. Let's start with, I want to see you get into Ajana. Terrific. No pressure. The pressure is part of the fun. A little bit of context and framing for the listeners. Jhanists have historically believed to be states that take thousands of hours of meditation practice to enter. And it's, I think, become apparent that that need not be the case. Our thesis journey is the way, the reason these states often take so long and aren't so widespread is because it's a guesswork problem. That meditation is invisible and nonverbal in a way that learning many skills is not. And so your feedback loops get all gunked up with guesswork. So at Journey, what we do is we have like a really intentional about feedback loops. And so our curriculum and our group sessions are set up to run rapid fire experiments and kind of give you the tools to sort of assess whether or not your experiments are helping you move in a certain direction. And then you'll come in for your interviews and a facilitator was just going to grill you and be like, what did you feel? Where in the body? What did you know? Did it feel like it had a temperature? Was it oscillating? How did it change over time? And use that to pattern match against other students and say, okay, let's co-create an experimentation plan that you're gonna be personally excited about. Go do that, come back, report back, and we'll repeat. So what we're gonna do here is I'm just going to throw a lot of the thinking about your experience out the door and offer, narrate my experience for on the order of like 10 to 20 minutes. I've done this a lot. I did this like every day for many years and still do it very frequently. And so your experience may look different than mine. That's okay. The point is in the same way that better off to watch a professional serve a tennis ball than to try to read a book on how to serve a tennis, that it might prime your intuition a bit. So with that context, I think we can jump into me narrating my experience aloud. I just want to offer a couple additional things, which is, one, we talk a lot about collectedness and conductivity. And so the game that I'm going to be playing here is I'm going to be gently collecting all of my attention and experience around an open-hearted feeling. I might be saying phrases that are all going to be pointing at, like, a kindness or a gratitude or this kind of thing. And the second is we talk about conductivity, and that's like embracing anything that comes up wholeheartedly, ranging from distractions to little pinches of emotional tension, including the pressure that Dan just put on me to try to get on a John Alive on a show. All of these things I'm going to be looking to turn towards and imbue with a sense of compassion or embrace such that nothing is untouched by this kind of compassion kind of thing. Yeah. And to add on to that or maybe put a finer point on it, there are endless numbers of guided meditations on the internet or on Dharma Seat or whatever, which are helpful. And one of the things that I think is so unique about Journey and one of the things I love the most is this thing that you're doing, which is imitate an expert, which is... watch an expert navigate their own internal experience, which is infinitely complex and unique to them. And it's not about necessarily copying them. It's not about necessarily like listening to a guided meditation and following all those instructions, although that can be useful. It is about, um, watching them navigate and then being like, oh, here's one or two tools I can use that maybe I didn't even realize I could use to then navigate myself, my own experience. And I find that to be incredibly valuable and it's super fun to watch. Yeah, that's absolutely right. I think success is you discover something that you didn't know you were allowed to do or you didn't know you could do something, that kind of thing, just because it has a funny shape. You're like, why the hell did he turn left when I was expecting to turn right? Perfect. You're kind of looking for surprise. And doing so, if anybody wants to follow along and meditate as we go, do so in just the most gentle, wide open, letting it wash over your intuition. You're not trying to hang on to every word. You're just letting your subconscious see if it can be like, oh, that's the general flow we're going in. As a side note, and maybe we'll talk about this later, a lot of this idea came from inspiration from the U.S. military. Yeah. Which is not your typical, or maybe depending on how you think about it, like a classic source of meditation wisdom. This is what I love about you is you're just like, you're pulling from the military. But it's like any source that might be good. Like it's like the military over here and like the Buddha over here. And like there's like 50 other places over here. And it's just all in this like unique mishmash that really works well. And I love it. That's right. That's right. The reason the military even got mentioned is because there's some related work that was done with the military on tacit knowledge transfer. And that, I think, is sort of the key word and some of the things that inspired some of this. Okay. Let's get started. So to settle, I like to close my eyes, and I'm going to take a deep breath in. And just relax to let it out. I'm just watching the end of the out breath. Where does it end? And another deep breath in. And just let it all out. I'm settling into these old habits of mine. looking for a sense of what it feels like to come home. Like coming home after a long day at work and dropping the bags on the floor. I'm just going to start dropping any tension in my experience. I've got a racing heart from being on this exciting podcast. I've got a little brain fog from being woken up by my baby in the middle of the night. And I had some anxiety rushing around to prepare to get on this podcast with you all. I'm just going to start welcoming all those experiences like long-lost friends and letting them gently slide in next to me as we come home after a long day at work. Just letting another breath slow the system down. The slower I breathe, the easier I feel. And the slower my thoughts are invited to be. I have two favorite ways of really settling into relaxation or a sense of coming home. before turning to an earnest, open-hearted feeling. The first is to blow my awareness wide open. So vast, so wide, that if an airplane were to hum overhead or the tiniest tremble were to come through the building and the floor below me, I would feel it all instantly. And I'm not reaching for the airplane or for the trembles. I'm just dropping this sense of narrowness that I didn't realize I was carrying. I'm like dropping bags coming home from a long day at work. I'm noticing my anxiety a bit in my head and a little bit in my chest. I'm having periodic stray thoughts about what Dan's experience is right now or somebody listening to this. And each one of these, I'm just brushing with a sense of kindness and reception. welcoming it into this vast mind, completely uncontained, no boundaries, deeply at ease, settling in like a warm hot tub into the sense of coming home. I just noticed I had kind of closed down my awareness while talking and so I let it fall wide open again completely open. More open than I might think is possible. All the talking and thinking is still keeping me up, so I'm gonna do one breath silence to just really settle in. With this much ease and openness, I can get a gentle sense of kindness to anything that might quote unquote distract me. I'm starting to feel a little gratitude and open heartedness already. But before I go all the way into that, I like to take a minute to relax the body too. And so like a warm shower happening in slow motion, I'm going to start at the top of the head. And I'm going to relax every muscle as I go down from head to toe. Finding tension I didn't realize I was carrying. And I'm going to try to do the whole thing from this wide open, vast mind. No boundaries. No containment. And when I narrow, contract, I'm just going to gently open back up. So the top of my head slowly moving down. There is a little sound in the distance and there is a little brain fog or anxiety or sleep sleepiness happening in my head. And all of these just gently brushing with an open hearted welcome. and carrying on this little body scan. The muscles in my forehead, letting them relax, down my ears, the back of my head, all around the eyes. So many ways to relax the muscles around the eyes. I just found another layer in a moment of silence. I'm also realizing I've been running some thought about what I'm gonna say next to you all. I'm just gonna drop that now too. Any fear of making a mistake is gonna be brushed with kindness just the same. Down my cheeks to my jaw. Naming that I was a little scared was really good. Now I can just welcome it. And I'm feeling myself relax in places I didn't realize I was tense. May my fear be welcomed. I'm grateful that it's looking out for me. back to the body scan down to the neck can't you my shirt brushing against my skin and i'm just relaxing muscles i didn't realize for tents both shoulders slump down a little more moving down to the arms the elbow I have some pain from lifting recently. Welcoming that too. Down into my forearms. My hands, which are a little sweaty. Welcoming that too. And the tips of my fingers. Letting the kindness of just brushing everything in my experience start to take on a bit of its own momentum. The pulsing in my hands is brushed almost as soon as I recognize the pulsing. The brush of the cool air on my skin is welcomed with kindness as soon as I recognize the cool air. Still softening in new ways behind the eyes and in the head. experiencing a surge of gratitude for just that fear or sadness that I may mess up here. As gentle as I could possibly be with myself. May I come home. this kindness and this gratitude and this relaxation are in some ways all the same thing. And I'm going to continue on my way down into my chest, relaxing muscles I didn't realize were tense. Touching every bodily sensation with a little relaxing kindness. down into my stomach, which I was holding and I didn't know. Letting it kind of fall open vulnerably, at ease, at peace. Savoring a sense of safety that can be found in the stomach when I just let it be at peace. No sucking it in. Down into the hips, the hamstrings and the quads. I was softening there in ways I didn't realize I was tense. Just a gentle, warm embrace. Grateful for my legs. my ankles, the soles of my feet, and the tips of my toes. And pulling up for a moment and being grateful for this entire thing, the whole body, no precision, just a cloud of sensations, a throbbing of a pulse all the way from the tips of my toes to my upper lips. the gentle in-and-out breath, the shimmering and glimmering of all the tiny vibrations and almost like that noise in the nervous system. You can't tell if those tingles are real or not. The whole thing. Letting it be a cause for gratitude and wonder. A softening. May I come home to it? May it come home to me. I actually dropped my first tear just a moment ago. I, for years, have softly cried while meditating. I don't know when I crossed the threshold, but at some point, the gentle ease and slipping into gratitude, the relief of coming home began welling up. And I just let it. Another thing to brush in my experience. Another thing to welcome, to be part of a great coming home. And now, with this vast, wide open mind, no boundaries, so free and at ease, in this shimmering, glimmering body, I'm going to begin sharing or repeating some of my favorite mantras that spark that a little extra open-hearted feeling. And as I do so, I'm just going to slip in to where they feel most intense in the body. It's like I'm using a metal detector, scanning over all of my experience. And, ah, that's where the open-heartedness is most intense. Can I just sink into that like a hot tub or pretend for a moment as if nothing in the world, nothing else in the world existed? I got wondering if Dan would be pleased with this meditation or not. And so I'm just going to welcome that thought in. And gently brush the underlying fear. The underlying fear or the underlying sadness with a little compassion. May Dan be happy. May anybody listening be at ease. May I be healthy. May I be filled with joy. And live life, live a life without suffering. I got a little sort of anxious or tense about how strange or woo this might sound. What must it seem like for a grown man to be saying these words on a podcast? And that's okay. Just like any other fear or sadness, I'm going to brush that with a little kindness. Welcome it in. Be grateful that somebody is looking out for me, for my image. And let it be another facet of just coming home. I just had a thought about how method actors, professional actors, will step into a part so deeply it will fully consume them. Their tears are genuine. Their laughter is genuine. And yet it doesn't require they change their worldview or betray themselves in some way. And just like that, I'm going to keep falling into these open-hearted mantras. Wouldn't it be nice if all beings were happy? What does it feel like in my body, in the heart space or in the head, if I knew that all beings could be healthy? What does it feel like to wish that they'd be filled with joy? Filled with joy. And that one comes with an extra glimmer or shimmer in the heart. It's hard to say if it's cool or if it's warm, but there's something there ever so subtle. And may all beings live lives without suffering. The peace and relaxation that sort of gently ever so subtly shimmers in my stomach. And like a relaxation of the shoulders. Each of these phrases sort of pulses just the tiniest of feelings. I actually know where to look for them and I'm cheating. They're not yet strong enough for me to recognize if I don't know where to look, but I know the familiar feeling of the opening of my heart in a way, or the softening of my gut, the celebratory joy in the back of my head. And as I say these feelings or say these phrases and the feelings spark just a minute, they fade out. And as they fade out, that too is an invitation to come home. I'm just letting all of these feelings fade away and sinking back into a vast wide open mind. an absolutely wondrous body and the backdrop of coming home may all beings be happy may they be healthy May they be filled with joy. Like an actor crying on stage, imagining them filled, the world filled with joy. And live lives without suffering. Okay. I might suggest we start to bring it to a close here. If I were on my own, I'd go another 40 minutes or something, just continuing to dance with these feelings and sinking further and further into them. That was lovely. That was lovely. Thanks for inviting me to do that, Dan. It's... every time I do that in, in almost any context, you just come out of the other side with a little bit more ease and vividness. Yeah. I'm in like a very different place than when I started. Yeah. Um, Yeah, me too. Slower and at ease. Yeah. I think... I know I just said something to this effect, but there's sort of like that micro game and then there's like the more time-oriented game. And the micro game is just at every single twist and turn, it's amazing how fast we don't brush our experience with kindness. And it's just this infinitely fascinating game of seeing how gentler and gentler you can be, how much more rest and kindness kind of start to look like the same thing. And then with time, it's just like sinking into a hot tub, and it takes on a life of its own. I didn't try to drop a tear, and I wouldn't try in a way for that warmth in my chest to sort of expand to the point where it was a full-body experience. And yet I know from experience that that's how it would play out if we were to go another 30, 40 minutes or whatever. I'm sort of feeling like I would like to narrate what happened for me. Yeah. Tell me. So I think right now I'm. just much lower and slower. And one of the things that I think you do incredibly well that I, I picked up on this retreat is it actually surprised me how much time you spent in this sort of like pre meditation phase of just, coming home and like relaxing every part of my body and like, and I started to notice on this retreat and have taken it through. And I think this is happening now is, as you mentioned, there are all those like little places where I'm tensed up and consciously, physically changing the tension level changes the overall emotional valence of my like body. And there was, there's stuff there. I'm in an office. So like, I'm hearing people debating shit that I have. I love that. And so I was like, so annoyed, um, and sort of like self-conscious a little bit, um, And so you, but you have this like brush it with kindness thing that honestly, just the way that you say it, I know that you can do it. And so I'm doing it. if that makes sense. It's not like you're just saying, yeah, brush up with kindness. You're doing it as you say it. And so I'm just like, I can do it too. In my experience, I thought there was a bit of a shift at some point. I think it was like the beginning of the body scan where I was like, oh, there's all this fear. I didn't realize I was carrying here. And after that, I was like, I think I slowed internally, I slowed down and I wondered if my voice slowed down a bit too. I think it did. And it sort of leaked into me, which is, I love this part of it is like, I am very sensitive to that kind of thing. So it just, maybe I would be like a good hypnotist subject or something, but it just happens for me. And I found in my experience when I'm getting a little bit deeper into it. there's almost like a warm blanket that comes over my head a little bit and I'm like, it just feels like I'm coming up on acid. I don't know. And I end up feeling like a just i'm like energy if that makes sense um and so my physical edges get a little softer and all And it was really, what was really nice is you had started to like sort of say your phrases and it was for the world. And I was like, I'm just so grateful for you. And so I was just like pushing it at you. And then you actually were like, I'm grateful for Dan. Because you were like thinking about what I was thinking. And then I was just like, oh. Now we've got a proper love fest going on. And this is a very common experience for me now, like post-journey retreat. And one thing that is maybe interesting for you is I think that you're opening up. motion it was that was difficult for me it was very difficult for me to do that without trying yes and i think this is like a thing that i had to actually unpack during the retreat and also subsequently is one of the things i love about how you teach is um and why the jhanas are interesting is if you try to get into a jhana you like fail and um uh for people who are meditating you're Optimizer type a like and you're like, oh, I want to let go or whatever and then you just turn that into I'm going to figure out how to let go and be super good at letting go and that doesn't work very well and and I you really unlocked in this retreat. How to actually just enjoy yourself. weirdly and that enjoying yourself is like the sort of key to getting into that state and some of your metaphors about what does it feel like to come home or like relaxing into a hot tub or that kind of thing were helpful. But it's still kind of like I couldn't that kind of like I just opened up thing. It was just like not that available. And the thing that kind of got me. that I was doing as you were talking is, um, I realized that I was already that I was already open. Yeah. Yeah. you know, and that, um, that feeling is like, sometimes you're looking for your glasses and then you realize they're on, they're on. And that moment of like, Oh, I I'm already there is like, that's that for me is like the, Oh, okay. I can like, I can like relax into it. You know, I know, I know what that, I know what that move is. And once you identify it, then you can do it more. And then it's really great. There's so much you said there that is really spot on. And I think you're pointing at one of, and if not the most, one of the most important, if not, and maybe one of the most difficult things to learn when you're, you're playing this game is that it's, it's really about like, can you rest into love and in a way like, and really emphasis on that rest and there's different frames, like just realizing that you are already this. In fact, it's more about subtraction than addition. or that it's about slipping into a hot tub or it's about like, it turns out kindness and relaxation are kind of the same thing. These are all subtly pointing at this thing that we can go our entire lives and I think subtly missing because we have the habit of getting great things done with clenching down, with applied effort, with what we call mental tension. And pointing and beginning to see that mental tension and learning that you can soften it is tricky business, but so freeing when you're able to do it. There's all kinds of different approaches. And I think one of the things that's fun about getting into this space is it is actually a bunch of stuff I want to I also want to put a mental opinion about like why this is valuable beyond just like us having a like a mini love fest for a few minutes like. But. Yeah. you begin to see that like in some ways like every religion has always been two religions. There's like the mystics and the organizers. And the mystics are sort of having these kinds of experiences and developing these sorts of tools to point at this difficult idea of spotting and releasing mental tension or awareness and love all the way down or recursive self-acceptance. It's like those kind of three ways we like to say the same thing on retreat. Uh, and some of this stuff I think is brilliant, but if you don't without the right, I think like clarity or precision of word, it can be really confusing. So like a good example is some meditation teachers will be like meditation can and should not have any goal. It should not. Meditation should have zero goal. And I hear that and I'm like, that is extremely useful and not true. Like you're conflating usefulness with truth. Of course meditation has a goal. How could it not? Like everything you do has a goal. And whether it's to like incrementally relax and take a little edge off your stress or whether it's to become full on enlightened, like there is a goal. The game is how do you relate to that goal with a sense of like play and openness as opposed to desperation or obligation? And how do you, and as it turns out, many of us effectively instantiate goals in our nervous system by making them contracts to be dissatisfied until we get what we want. And I think Naval has a good little couple blurbs on that kind of idea. And so learning to instantiate goals differently… is a huge unlock. Like imagine if you're, if all of your goals were a sense of like love and play, how much more sustainable and probably more effective that would be. Has any great performance come from a place other than play, like other than flow when you're like lost in the soccer field or in the virtuoso musician or, or sort of lost on stage as a CEO. Like that stuff is, I think, can't come from the sort of like self coercive place. And yet, um, we, for various reasons, have sort of like selected for and optimized the hell out of our self-coercion instead of our like self-acceptance. I love this, like kind of what you're saying about play. And I just know for me, the times when as a founder building my company, I was like, I have to like do it. And I do it in the way that, you know, people are going to do it because it's going to be a real company versus the times where I'm like actually just coming from a place of play. The business has has changed dramatically and has grown way quicker as I've just been like, no, no, the core of it is just like me playing and doing things I like. Very counter, very counterintuitive and very. Yeah. actually hard it's weirdly hard to do because people um our default is to be like well play is not serious enough to actually do something real and so you're actually kind of afraid and ashamed of that yeah um so and there's all these like little layers and subtle things where it's like you can even make the decision to to play at the surface level but then there's all these little micro moments where you're actually not doing that So, there's lots of different levels to this game, as you've said. One of the things I want to do right now is talk about pitfalls. And you have one that I think you want to bring up, and I have some that I want to bring up because... I think there are various ways to sort of misinterpret this and how to use it and when to use it and why and all that kind of stuff. And it would have saved me a lot of time myself if someone had said this, some of this stuff to me. Time and blood, sweat and tears and misery, basically. So I think the first, at least for me, the first subtle... way to get this wrong that makes it could even potentially harmful is if you are someone for me, I'll just say for me actually, because I don't know, it's hard to generalize, but for me, I had untreated OCD, which is a horrible, horrible moment by moment, like you're just in hell, like pretty much all the time type of experience for like 10 years. And so if you hear about the jhanas or maybe meditation in general, and then maybe the jhanas in particular, but I think it just applies to lots of different types of meditation practice. You're like, oh, cool. I will use this to get out of that state. And my experience is that that's both, it doesn't work and it can be quite counterproductive. And it has been much better for me. There are definitely times where you can be in, you're like sad or you're upset or whatever. And you can like use this as like a, at least for me, a touchstone or a bolster from which to like go and examine those emotions and like welcome them in. Um, but I think your, your point about like really serious, like taking seriously the like welcoming in of things is, is actually quite important because if you're using it to solve your painful emotions, it's, it's bad, um, or it's not great. And at least for me, there, there are, there's a time where you're experiencing things that are so overwhelming that it is actually like very hard if you're not. really good at this already to actually actively welcome them. Like it would be, it would be kind of ridiculous. It'd be like, yeah, my house is on fire. Great. Like you actually can't do that. You know, maybe you have a little fire in the living room and you might like welcome that. Cause you're like, I've done this before. I've dealt with the living room fire, but if your house is on fire, you go into one of these states at least like you can really uh have your whole experience start to be on fire and it's like it's really it's kind of bad so um yeah yeah so i yeah go for it cool so i think you're pointing a couple things that i that i think are super important the first is uh the the idea of welcoming something that may overwhelm your nervous system and uh that that's a that's a super important thing and it i think We would do a disservice sort of offering a little bit of that like sample imitate an expert like meditation clip without speaking to those limitations. The second is, is this a good idea when real stakes are on the table? Like is it a good idea to lower the stakes for the nervous system and when and why? Like when and how is that the case? So one at a time. First, on welcoming something that would overwhelm the nervous system, this is super important. And there's a couple different things that I think lay out how to work with this. The first is this idea of window of tolerance, which is especially big in things like somatic therapy and in related fields. And the idea is that you don't ever want to be playing with your attention and emotion that gets you to a point of dysregulation, either hyperarousal, which might look like a proper panic attack, or hypoarousal, which might be like a numbness or a strong dissociation. When you're working with something like grade A trauma, folks will have these reactions sort of like associated with these stimuli. And very quickly, if you're playing with grade A trauma, you can end up in that kind of dysregulated place. And always the top priority is to stay inside your window of tolerance. Because if you get outside your window of tolerance, you can, in fact, sort of exacerbate and make things worse. You can re-traumatize yourself. It can also be the case that you're going to inhibit your learning, not enhance your learning. So part of playing this game comes with like figuring out where your guardrails are and learning how to like not go blowing past your guardrails. And there's ways to do that. There's grounding and orientation exercises. There's sort of titration. There's, in fact, pay less attention to the body, pay more attention to sort of the external environment, depending on where are some of the more like kind of triggering and charge cues. And maybe also, at least from my experience, if you are dealing with actual clinically relevant, really tough mental stuff, it's probably better to deal with that. before you start like playing around. And there are ways usually to deal with it, to get to a place where you're feeling, you're obviously going to feel like your full range of emotions, but it's, you're not, for me, I was stuck in everything is fucking horrible all the time. And I needed to deal with that before I could do any of this. Totally, absolutely. And I know you've written, I think, inspiringly and elegantly about your journeys with OCD and like the fact that when you finally got the right medication, the right time, created the base on which you could then like experiment and explore with other things super important yeah there's another piece of this puzzle about the welcoming thing that i think uh gets lost and that is that one very simple framework by which to think about this whole game around what you might call like nervous system fluency uh is uh or or Maybe I don't want to make such a broad claim around nervous system fluency, but the whole game comes down to this idea. But certainly going down the meditation journey, one thing you can think about is this idea of memory reconsolidation, and that being an orienting framework for a lot of what we're doing. The idea of memory reconsolidation is really simple. It's that if you co-activate a prior sort of negative emotional charge associated with a given stimuli, And that a commensurate sense of safety, compassion, connection at the same time that the two can kind of like wash over each other. And then the default charge associated with that stimulus can be rewritten and angled more towards something like the safety or the openness or the emotional fluency, conductive conductivity. So you have two things here. You want to reactivate the emotional charge. Assuming you're inside your window of tolerance, you want to reactivate the challenging emotional charge or feel it live and co-activate a commensurate level of safety, compassion, connection, love, whatever. If you do these two things, you can reset the emotional default. Knowing that you can reset your emotional defaults is, in my mind, one of the most underappreciated secrets in the world. That developing the skill on a per-stimuli basis, per-stimulus basis, resetting your emotional defaults means you have root permissions to hack on your personality. Like what is your personality then? Like a big bag of like stimuli response patterns. And so that thing that has to do with what your mom says to you or your relationship to that difficult thing at work, it turns out that you can – if you can get yourself into the right state and you can co-activate these two things, you can change the defaults and make yourself lighter of being and more aligned with your values over time. I think that's a huge deal. And basically what we're doing when we're doing this emotional conductivity stuff and meditation and leaning into like, you know, like I like to use this analogy of an actor crying on stage, an actor leaning into like an open-hearted feeling You were learning for many folks that challenging part of memory consolidation is having access to the commensurate safety, love or connection to co-activate along with their challenging stuff. A lot of people can get into anxiety loops. No problem. They got that on tap. You can activate anxiety, like not a widespread issue in the world today. But co-activating a sense of safety level connection at the same time to rewrite your emotional defaults to be something that might be more aligned with how you aspire to act is a really big deal. And so that's basically the game we're playing. I think there's other ways of doing this. Like you can argue that this is actually what psychedelics are doing. This is the mechanism by which they work. Is you're getting yourself into a malleable state. You're pulling up a schema. But because of the set and setting and dynamic, you're co-activating and doing memory consolidation. You can also do this in interpersonal dynamics with communities that are maybe sharing emotions or vulnerably so. One of the things that's so wonderful about connecting with loved ones. And meditation gives you a self-sufficient and very fine-tuned and precise way of playing this game. And this is one of the ways you can shape your personality over time. I think that's totally true. I will say another way, another pitfall that that brings up for me, because I'm I think where I took that as a younger man is cool. I don't actually have to, um, make some of the hard decisions that I probably need to make. And I can just like deal with it internally so that I don't have to have any uncomfortable conversations. Yeah. Um, or make big changes in my life to like fix things that are wrong because I can just be blissful all the time. Like, that's cool. Like, let's just do that. And I like where you're going with this. Yeah. And I have actually found that, um, to properly do this, to properly express love to yourself and express love to other people, your actions and your words need to be aligned. because otherwise you're not going to believe yourself. And if you are acting in a way that is not loving towards yourself by putting yourself into lots of situations that you probably shouldn't be in or hiding your emotions from other people and all that kind of stuff, if you're doing all that and you're saying, I love you to yourself, then... Not going to work. Not going to work. You have to like, this sort of like love all the way down thing has to also go love all the way up. So at the grossest level of like your actions, they have to kind of match the more subtle things that you're doing too in order to sort of fully unlock this. And it's not a shortcut to just have everything in your life be. horrible and you just feel good despite all that. Sometimes you actually have to make real hard decisions for yourself. Totally. Totally. And I think this is getting at the second thing that you brought up earlier, which is like, is this a good idea? Is it a good idea to lower the stakes? Do you actually end up sort of just numbing yourself to your problems or not addressing the things that matter most to you? And That in my mind is a thoughtful and well-meaning critique. But as it turns out, like the way the mechanisms work, it doesn't work that way. If you were to – yeah, like – Let's say like not hold a boundary with a loved one, like abandon yourself and you're getting sort of walked over in a relationship or something. And then you go to your room and you spend an hour doing the whole Jonna game and you're like, I love myself. There you may soften the edges around some things that are sort of like internally inconsistent. And yet you're still abandoning yourself. So like you're not loving yourself. It's not going to work. Like the mechanism isn't going to go all the way through. And this is more of a like interpersonal sort of like personal hypothetical. Same thing is true in the professional world. If you like one of the things that I used to get like setting goals for the company. If you have intuition that you really should be going in the other way, or you're thinking about taking the money from the investors, but there's something deep within you that you haven't yet figured out has already pattern matched. That's dangerous. You don't want to do that. Now's not the time to take money. Or actually, I really need the growth capital because we need to be launching this rocket ship now. We're not moving fast enough. Those are going to be embedded in the system, and you're not going to be able to gloss past them into some sort of happy bliss outland. it's going to require reckoning with those seriously. And so one of the ways in which I think, maybe the three biggest ways that I think this game really begins to pay dividends in action has to do with relationships, with building habits, and with improving decision-making. Because the system ends up, I think, being more aligned across the three. So I want to, let's go into, I think we've spent enough time on, on some of the, you know, here, here be dragons warnings. Um, let's, let's go into some of the, you know, you've, you've talked about like personality hacking. Uh, what are some of the ways that you have changed as a result of this practice? Yeah. Uh, that's a great question. So I'm thinking of a couple of stories to sort of capture, um, One that was really big a little over a year ago in the spring of last year was I was really missing how much fear I had about the… Like the, we were at this point, so we started as a neurotech company. We were, had been collecting a bunch of data as a, sorry, as a neurotech company. And we were collecting a bunch of data to see if we could map the, uh, the sort of bio signals that would be, um, needed to create better feedback loops for novices. And we needed to start running retreats in order to collect more data for R and D. And when we started running retreats, that's when they kind of took off on us. And we realized we could build a school rather than a lab. And then that school could be converted into a lab over time. And it would be a bunch of benefits. We would be defaults alive. We would start a movement. We would get more shots on goal. Each shot on goal would be better than the last. And so this retreat pipeline we've spun up, we see is like the first step of something much bigger, like a launch pad into something that works more effectively and for more people. We were some months into running our retreats and I'm still terrified on these retreats. I'm a grown man basically repeating and sometimes crying in front of a room of people about may all beings be happy. How fucking out of touch am I? And these are tech executives. We've had co-founders of some of the world's biggest companies and fastest growing companies come on these retreats. These are all people who I admire in person and on paper and I'm making a fool of myself. And then on top of that, if I make a fool of myself, it's one thing. And then if I don't show them the thing that I find so valuable by the end of the week, like it's just like there is so much fear there. I was blind to this fear. And I was actively like, because of, because of my blindness, we would have these team meetings and we would have our spreadsheets and we'd have, you know, behind the scenes. Okay. Who's this person? What, like, what are the top three hypotheses for what they need fixed for, for what support they need? What have we done so far? What have we learned? Like in my mind, there's just like these kind of perennial questions that we're just like asking for everybody rapid fire in this meeting. And I'm like getting faster and faster and tighter and tighter in my voice. And now I'm, Anybody who's working with me is starting to get afraid. You're doing that now. You're getting faster than talking about it. Exactly. I'm stepping back into the memory. We need some reconsolidation right now. I can do some of that. Yeah. But when I finally, and like, of course, as this is happening, like it's way harder to meditate. And I'm like, I'm playing the game. This is one of the reasons why meditation is such good with day-to-day life is like stuff comes up in day-to-day life. You see it in your meditation because you're like, I don't, what the hell is going on here? Like, I can't relax. I can't open up. Like there's now a game to be played. Like this is the real opportunity. I'm leveling up in the video game, so to speak. And finally, through a few different things, I was like, oh my God, I'm terrified. I'm terrified. come here, terrified Steven. Come here. I will not leave you. And I'm sure I had a little bit of a cry and suddenly can retroactively see all these places I was creating unnecessary friction with a team. And that was certainly hurting our performance and our ability to serve students. And so, uh, from there, I was unable to do an apology that would have been difficult for me a few days before to different team members and run the team meetings in a much more effective way and create a culture that would be much more like culture, eat strategy for breakfast. It would not have been possible if I remained unaware and if I wasn't able to like turn towards it instead of away from it. I feel that deeply. I think, um. The way that it has manifested for me is, first of all, as like someone coming from a very people-pleasery type background. Yeah. I think you can misinterpret a lot of Dharma wisdom as maybe, maybe we can say the Dharma, the Dharma wisdom, which is true of a lot, a lot of religions is treat others as you would like to be treated. And for people pleasers, that's natural. That's like, you just do that automatically. And, and, but to the expense of yourself, which ironically is like not, actually helpful for other people and it's not helpful for you um and so i had to sort of flip that into the people pleaser rule which is um treat yourself as you would treat others um i like that and um i think once you once you start to realize that this is a very helpful practice for like actually being like okay what is actually like loving for myself right now um And once you have that base where you actually start to like or love yourself, you start, at least for me, I started to notice all of these things that about myself that I couldn't see before because it would be too scary that get in the way of your relationships, make you make bad decisions. Like a really simple example for me would be oh wow, this person, I'm actually pretty jealous of them. And I would never have been able to say that before. I would have wrapped it in all these other reasons why I didn't like them. Yeah, because it was too scary to imagine that you would be jealous. Yeah. And that would mean you're a bad person or flawed in some way or something. Exactly. Yeah. And it makes such a difference to be like, oh, I'm jealous. And if you have a close enough relationship with that person to be like, sometimes I get jealous in these situations and that's why I act this way. Yeah. And it just makes everything so much better. So much freedom. So much freedom. It's like, yeah. Both internally and then to have that kind of like – live interpersonal apology. Wow. Yeah. That's, and I think you're also, it also, I was surprised, um, how much of my personality wraps around or wrapped around trying to feel loved. And when you can feel loved just because you are you and you just like go home and meditate and you're like, oh, I feel pretty loved right now. It releases a lot of stuff that you thought was your personality, but it was really just you trying to like feel loved for whatever reason. And that is also, I think, a much like a super important benefit of this practice for me. hugely important. It saves a bunch of energy. It prevents a bunch of like unhelpful patterns or like repeated behaviors, addictions effectively. I think one of the things I was speculating about the other day is in systems thinking, you can like show your socks and flows. And then if you change the arrival of certain information, you can move a system from that. Donna Meadows has got this great chapter in her book about this thinking in systems. And if you change the info flows, you can sort of shift the system into a new equilibrium where there's a bunch of oscillating instead of like a sort of a static equilibrium. And I was musing about how if you don't sort of feel the feeling that you're avoiding, you can get yourself on these oscillating loops like where you are... I think procrastination is like the, is the obvious one that comes to mind. Like time management is pain management sort of thing. Like you're, you're avoiding doing something, you're avoiding doing something. So then you go do it really quick, which makes it more likely you're going to fail. And then you fail. So then you avoid doing it again. Or in these play out constantly in relationship dynamics, like my mom does that one thing. So then I responded this way and it makes it more likely she does this thing in the future. Like, So it saves energy. I think it sort of prevents those kinds of patterns. And then it also gives you so much more latitude and degrees of freedom to navigate tough calls at work or to engage with relationships in a certain way. It just keeps paying dividends. Paul Graham's got a great statement about the value of keeping your identity small in order to give yourself space to think independently. It just shows up everywhere. And I would be remiss if in this podcast, we did not talk about how this all relates to AI. Yes. So let's go. I'm smarter at the moment. Yeah. How do you, how are you thinking about that? I know you have a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes. Yeah. So macro and micro. At the macro level, I think Journey's thesis is effectively super well-being can change Super well-being is as tractable of a problem and as important as something like super longevity and super intelligence. What is super well-being? Like this – so there are folks who will talk about being sort of deep into the meditation path that will say extreme statements. my baseline well-being now, my worst day is better than my best day from a few years ago. Like on like a year-long basis or like many year-long space where you'll see even more extreme quotes. Like I wouldn't trade what I know now and the way I move through the world and this like ease and openness for many years of sort of like a younger or like prior version of myself. That is completely opposite conventional wisdom about the hedonic treadmill. And There's actually, I think, a relatively simple explanation for that. It's that the hedonic treadmill applies in many cases in which you're looking for the wrong thing. If you go ask a billionaire whether it solved their happiness problems, it would be, I think, I was just, who was doing this? Probably Nick. Probably Nick Kamrad on Twitter had a great tweet polling from a billionaire being interviewed or Naval saying being successful is not the same as being happy. You'll discover that when you're there, that that's not what you were looking for. The common trope. In some ways, I think a lot of what we're – like where we're looking for happiness is just a little misguided. It turns out it's – in some ways, it's about more non-doing than doing or more like this conductivity move, this awareness and love all the way down. And I genuinely – in my experience is that it has not just incrementally improved, but I think transformed my baseline happiness. So this is sort of a nod for what's possible with super well-being. I think that's just getting started. That's using, in my mind, very crude tools. Meditation is a sloppy tool relative to the kind of precision that would be possible with things like neurotech and so on. So philosophically... Why be like, what's the point of being smart and old if not happy is sort of like the argument. And I also think it happens to be very tractable given the sort of psychotech that you see prop up across time and space throughout history. And the reports of folks that like I think sound absurd at the surface, but if you really investigate, they genuinely believe they're way, way happier. There's also other things you could play with here. Like there are certain maybe genetic changes. I forget. What's her name? Joe Cameron? You know, I'm talking about the British woman who has like a genetic mutation and says she hasn't felt pain and like… Oh, yeah. I don't know her name, but yeah. So all kinds of – from neurotech to sort of like genetics to like just thinking about the question of suffering seriously. Yeah. is a little bit of a contrarian take in the world right now. And I think that's silly. I think if we're already taking super longevity and super intelligence seriously, why not take super well-being seriously? That's the high level. In terms of what Journey is actually doing and how this ties to AI, we... Now have – like our first product is this retreat that gets the majority of people into these altered states that they will talk about being peak experiences in the order of many months or years or even a lifetime. They frequently will people talk about it as being as like power – like an endogenous version as powerful as psychedelics. And the traits that come with playing this nervous system fluency game to get to Ajana are even more valuable. Like change how you relate to your goals. You have these new tools for navigating relationships, decisions, and habits differently. And then furthermore, when you get to the later stages, even your sense of identity can sort of shift from identifying as something between your ears and behind your eyes to like… the relative ratio of how much of this world simulation is me and that can sort of come with large like de-threatening qualities this is on the deep end of and a lot of people talk about this in non-duality and the like and all these things are rolled together we'll do a part two episode on that yeah that's uh totally worth a part two it's it's uh The claims that advanced meditators make are absolutely absurd and so big if true that super well-being, I think, in some ways is a lot closer than that fancy term might sound like. Okay. All that being said, Journey right now has a product that can make the genres accessible. Genes allow for memory consolidation, self-sufficient, and fluent, which is a huge boon now for you to do personality hacking and starting to improve your well-being and your lightness of being over time. And the question is, like, how do we make this accessible to more people, do it more reliably, and make the impact even deeper? It's one thing to have your first stack experience in JANA. It's another thing to be able to use JANA regularly on a day-to-day basis to sort of make yourself lighter of being. It's another thing to start to see and sort of shift your sense of identity. Like, there's a lot of depth that can be had there, too. Originally, the plan was to use hardware and things like, we were starting with EEG and other biosensors to create like rapid feedback loops that in personalized feedback loops that would allow you to go down all of this path faster. In the couple of years that we've been at this, AI has gotten incredibly good. And basically everything we're doing on retreat can be done reliably by an AI. And so this, what we're doing behind the scenes already is we're like the facilitators are sort of preparing to meet with every student and they're getting hypotheses from AI. And there's other things we can do where it's like, the AI can sort of adjust all the student data. We record everything in Journey because we're constantly running experiments and reflecting ourselves. And you can adjust all the data and begin sort of saying like, hey, we're missing this on this student. Or like it can be a combination of QA plus facilitator training and increasingly takes the things that machines will be very, very good at while letting facilitators specialize in the sort of human-human connection that humans are really good at. All that is happening now and like increasingly being built. I think the thing that I get really excited about in the near term is something like math academy for the jhanas or math academy for like life changing meditation. Where you, especially if we're starting to get to an AI can do like a dyadic guided meditation with you to do like the paired version or the personalized version of the imitate an expert. Like now we're talking about your experience and we're like, hey, let's look at this thing with more conductivity or let's go in this direction. We can get that really dialed in and reliably gets people to jhana without a human in the loop. on the order of like 15, 20, 30 hours or something. You can then also put together like a skill tree the way Math Academy might for how you might get to some sort of future concept. Now you open your app, you've got your skill tree, you know exactly where you are. You've got a superhuman like guide who can engage with you live in meditation and also like, you know, diagnose or go back and forth. Those are the kinds of things that I think are imminently ready to be built. Now that- How do I get it? When app, when test flight. Yeah. So, well, okay, great. Now I can sort of pitch the things that Journey needs from the world. In my mind, it's just so crazy. It's right there to be built, and I cannot build it fast enough. And so there's a couple bottlenecks. The first is engineering. And so we're looking for a world-class engineer to come join us and be part of that. Have you tried Opus 4.5? I have not tried Opus 4 or 5. I was... You must. And I'm excited to do so. I believe that you could build this in like a week in between meetings with Opus 4 or 5. I have built some of this and it is like amazing how fast I can... I was going with... I think I was using Sonnet at the time because I think... Opus 4 or 5 came out last week. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. So I was using whatever was latest before. It was two or three weeks ago that I was doing it. And I'm really torn right now. Honestly, this is something I keep talking about with my co-founder where I'm like, I can almost build this. But I also have a company to run and managing other things. It's not rocket science. We just need someone with great product taste to come in and own the whole thing. It's like... four or five might be good enough, but I just don't have the time. And so I, I've, I've thought about like canceling everything in my schedule for a month and seeing if I can just do it myself. Um, and I might still do that, but anytime we're also, we're also looking for an engineer. If you were listening to this and you want to build this app, Steven, reach out to Steven. Yes, please. We, uh, uh, The thing that the retreat pipeline has offered is this incredible testing ground to get really precise. And so we have a journeying bot and we're running an evals process and we're like looking at transcripts and we're saying, okay, here's how we want to like other changes system and change the front. And you just, this iteration loop is already in place. Like it's just a matter of time. So it's exciting that it feels inevitable at this point. Steven, this is incredible. I think this might be my favorite episode I've ever recorded. Wow, I'm delighted. I've listened to a few of your episodes and I've quite enjoyed them. Thank you so much for doing this. If people are interested in learning more about you or about Journey, where can they find you? Yeah. So, um, I'm on Twitter, um, Steven underscore surface. Uh, and so is journey the company, uh, the handle is at John attack. So J H A N A T E C H. Steven's surface is S T P H E N underscore Z E R F A S. And our website is, uh, www.journeywithanh.io. Um, And those are the main ways to find us. Amazing. We've got to do a part two. That'd be fun. Yeah. There's all kinds of, but we're thinking about a part two curriculum to really get into the later genres and non-duality and identity shifts. And there's so many different ways this could go. It's always fun to talk. So we'll do sometime. Sounds good. Cool. Thanks, Dan. Oh my gosh, folks, you absolutely positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI and I. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard. But instead of gold, it's filled with pure unadulterated knowledge bombs about chat GPT. Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions, insights, and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat, craving for more. It's not just a show. It's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. So do yourself a favor. Hit like, smash subscribe, and strap in for the ride of your life. And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you.