Attaining A Jhana Live: How Anyone Can Achieve Super Wellbeing

Stephen guides himself into a jhana state while narrating every step of his internal experience. He demonstrates the core techniques: vast open awareness, full-body relaxation scan, welcoming fear and anxiety with compassion, and using gratitude mantras to spark open-hearted feelings. This 20-minute segment shows the actual mechanics of entering altered states through attention and emotion feedback loops.

• •Opening awareness wide enough to feel an airplane overhead or floor trembles—dropping narrowness like bags after work
• •Body scan technique: relaxing every muscle from head to toe while maintaining vast awareness, finding tension you didn't know you were carrying
• •Welcoming difficult emotions (fear of making mistakes, anxiety about the podcast) with kindness rather than suppression
• •Using mantras like 'may all beings be happy' as a metal detector to find where open-heartedness feels most intense in the body
• •The practice naturally produces tears and physical warmth—genuine emotional responses, not forced performance

Stephen and Dan debrief the meditation, revealing how the practice works. Key insight: kindness and relaxation are the same thing. The conversation explores how trying to meditate creates the very tension that prevents success, and how recognizing you're 'already open' is the unlock. Dan describes feeling like 'coming up on acid' with softened physical edges.

• •The micro-game is infinitely fascinating: seeing how much faster we fail to brush experience with kindness than we realize
• •Physical tension changes emotional valence—consciously relaxing muscles shifts your entire state
• •The 'trying' paradox: optimizers turn 'letting go' into 'being super good at letting go,' which fails completely
• •Breakthrough moment: realizing you're already open, like looking for glasses that are already on your face
• •Slowing down vocally during meditation creates a contagious effect for listeners practicing alongside

Stephen explains memory reconsolidation as the core mechanism behind meditation's transformative effects. By co-activating negative emotional charge with commensurate safety/compassion, you can rewrite emotional defaults on a per-stimulus basis. This gives you 'root permissions to hack your personality'—changing stimulus-response patterns that define who you are.

• •Memory reconsolidation requires co-activating: (1) prior negative charge and (2) equal safety/compassion/connection
• •Most people can access anxiety easily; the skill gap is generating commensurate safety and love on demand
• •This is likely the mechanism behind psychedelics, therapy, and vulnerable community sharing—all create malleable states
• •Your personality is largely a bag of stimulus-response patterns; resetting emotional defaults changes who you are
• •Meditation provides self-sufficient, fine-tuned precision for this process compared to other methods

Dan and Stephen address serious warnings about meditation practice. Key dangers: using meditation to escape rather than process difficult emotions, attempting to welcome overwhelming trauma without proper support, and using bliss states to avoid making necessary life changes. The window of tolerance concept is crucial—going outside it can retraumatize rather than heal.

• •Don't use meditation to escape clinical mental health issues—treat OCD, severe depression, etc. with proper medical care first
• •Window of tolerance: never push into hyperarousal (panic) or hypoarousal (dissociation) during practice
• •If your house is on fire, welcoming the fire doesn't work—some situations require action, not acceptance
• •Actions must align with words: saying 'I love myself' while abandoning yourself in relationships won't create change
• •The mechanism won't work if you're using bliss to avoid hard decisions—internal inconsistency blocks transformation

Stephen shares how recognizing his fear about running retreats transformed his leadership. Dan discusses the people-pleaser trap and learning to treat yourself as you treat others. Both explore how self-love enables seeing uncomfortable truths (like jealousy) that improve relationships and business decisions. The practice prevents oscillating loops like procrastination.

• •Stephen's case study: recognizing terror about 'making a fool of himself' on retreats enabled better team meetings and apologies
• •People-pleaser rule: treat yourself as you would treat others (inverse of the golden rule for those who neglect themselves)
• •Self-love creates safety to see uncomfortable truths like jealousy without defensive rationalization
• •Much of personality is actually strategies for feeling loved—when you can generate love internally, those patterns dissolve
• •Prevents oscillating loops: procrastination cycles break when you stop avoiding the underlying feeling

The conversation challenges the idea that meditation should have 'no goal.' Stephen argues this conflates usefulness with truth—everything has goals, but most people instantiate them as 'contracts to be dissatisfied until achieved.' Learning to hold goals with play and openness rather than desperation unlocks sustainable high performance. Dan confirms his business grew faster when operating from play rather than obligation.

• •Meditation teachers saying 'no goals' are useful but not truthful—the real skill is relating to goals playfully
• •Most people instantiate goals as contracts to be dissatisfied until completion—this is self-coercion
• •Great performance comes from flow states (play), not self-coercion—virtuoso musicians, athletes, CEOs in flow
• •Dan's business insight: growth accelerated dramatically when core work came from play rather than 'having to do it'
• •Culture eats strategy for breakfast—team performance improves when leaders operate from ease rather than fear

Stephen introduces the concept of 'super well-being' as equally tractable and important as super longevity and super intelligence. Advanced meditators make absurd-sounding claims like 'my worst day now is better than my best day years ago.' He argues the hedonic treadmill only applies when looking for happiness in the wrong places—meditation offers transformative baseline shifts, not incremental improvements.

• •If we take super longevity and super intelligence seriously, why not super well-being? What's the point of being smart and old if not happy?
• •Advanced meditators report baseline well-being transformations that contradict hedonic treadmill theory
• •The hedonic treadmill applies to external achievements (wealth, success) but not to internal state mastery
• •Current meditation tools are crude compared to future possibilities with neurotech and genetic interventions
• •Thinking seriously about suffering is currently contrarian but shouldn't be—it's as tractable as other moonshots

Stephen reveals Jhourney's roadmap to use AI for personalized meditation guidance. The vision: an app with superhuman guides that can do dyadic meditation, diagnose issues, and provide skill trees—getting people to jhanas in 15-30 hours instead of thousands. AI is already generating hypotheses for facilitators; the next step is direct-to-consumer guided meditation with LLMs. He's actively seeking world-class engineers to build this.

• •Everything done on Jhourney retreats can now be reliably done by AI—technology has caught up to the vision
• •Current use: AI ingests student data and generates hypotheses for human facilitators, improving QA and training
• •Near-term goal: 'Math Academy for jhanas' with skill trees, personalized AI guides, and 15-30 hour paths to altered states
• •AI can do dyadic guided meditation—real-time conversation about your experience with adaptive guidance
• •Stephen is torn between building it himself with Claude Opus 4.5 or hiring an engineer—actively recruiting