Unpacking Blissful Jhana States: What Jhana Is and Why Joy Can Feel Intense
About the teacher
Stephen Zerfas
Stephen Zerfas is the CEO and co-founder of Jhourney, a meditation education company focused on making jhana practice more learnable and accessible. His public writing focuses on what jhana is, how people learn it, what research can and cannot claim, and how to think carefully about safety when working with unusually strong meditative states.
Learn more →What jhana is, in Stephen’s words
The jhanas are altered states of profound bliss and peace that you can learn to enter into with a little bit of meditation practice.
Why intensity can feel like a panic attack
The idea of a positive feedback loop between attention and emotion is shockingly familiar. Anybody who's experienced anxiety is intimately familiar with how minute 10 into anxious thinking is a whole lot worse than minute one, and so it turns out that you can effectively start that same sort of positive feedback loop, that spiraling direction with a little bit of practice.
How Stephen learned, and what he noticed changed
One of the things that I find most exciting is how you can use altered states to alter traits.
The number one thing I probably said in my head was like, "Oh, come here, my dear friend," instead of like turning towards my anxiety or fear or sadness as opposed to subtly resisting it.
At first it's really just a matter of finding a way to get the basic technique to work for you.
From here we move into where I think the real game is played, which is how you relate to an object in your experience. It's here where we talk a lot about curiosity, enjoyment, and relaxation.
Learning stance, experiments, and agency
Imagine that you're trying to hike home in the mountains with 10 feet of visibility because the fog is so bad, in this world you do not want to work hard without working smart, you want to be intentional about explore versus exploit trade-offs.
It's not experience that creates expertise. It's experience plus reflection that creates expertise.
It's spot and release, or awareness and love all the way down. They're like two wings of a bird that have to be of equal size and strength for flight to take place.
The prompt we like is, can I do this at a hundredth of the effort, because that's radical. You need a whole different paradigm if you're going to get even close to something like a hundredth.
Practice
A short experiment for when pleasantness surprises you
- Welcome the pleasantness. Use an inward phrase such as "Oh, come here, my dear friend."
- Meet pain with kindness. Notice any tightening and soften it.
- Soften effort. Ask, can I do this at a hundredth of the effort?
- Reflect briefly. Note what changed and use that observation to design the next small experiment.
If meditation reliably increases panic, dissociation, insomnia, or disorganisation, reduce intensity and seek qualified support.
Free assessment
Map your nervous system patterns.
Take the Free AssessmentContinue exploring
- Browse the Nervous System Mastery masterclass guide library for more masterclass guides.
- Read Meditation Myth-Busting: Effortless Living Without Spiritual Pressure for a grounded lens on fit, effort, and meditation myths.
- Explore How to Work With Chronic Anxiety for more context on what happens when the nervous system treats intensity as threat.