I did the online Jhana Journey retreat in July 2024. This is a reflection on what actually stayed with me about a year and a half later.
Keeping a meditation journal
One of the most valuable things I kept from the retreat was the habit of maintaining a meditation journal. I kept it extremely simple in Notion: date, duration, type of meditation, and some notes. Sometimes a column for small experiments to try.
Over time I realized the journal was doing two things at once. It deepened the practice itself, but it also became a way of running small experiments in life. When you meditate and reflect every day, you get surprisingly sensitive to the introduction of new variables in your routine.
A good example was when I started taking finasteride for male hair loss. After a few weeks I noticed that my ability to generate piti and progress into the jhanas seemed to stagnate. At first I dismissed the idea that finasteride could be responsible, since the official documentation doesn’t list obvious psychological effects. But after reading more about it, I learned that it blocks the synthesis of certain neurosteroids in the brain, which modulate GABA receptors.
If I hadn’t been journaling and paying close attention to subtle internal changes, I probably would have dismissed the whole thing. If someone had told me this story before it happened to me, it might have sounded like neuroticism, honestly.
A lot of substances have psychological effects that stay invisible while you’re taking them. Coffee is a good example. People often only notice its influence when they stop abruptly and start paying attention to what changes: feeling less irritated by small things, maintaining eye contact more easily, noticing that a persistent neck tension has quietly disappeared. Meditation plus journaling created a feedback loop that made these patterns easier to notice.
Faster access to jhanas
Over time I also noticed that my access time to the jhanas decreased significantly. But just as important, I became much more aware of the conditions that completely block them or subtly change their quality. Small things like sleep, stimulants, emotional agitation, mental pressure can shift the whole texture of the experience.
This sensitivity is both useful and slightly inconvenient. You start seeing how fragile certain states actually are.
Returning to ordinary life
One unexpected difficulty after the retreat was emotional. Right after it ended, I felt a kind of grief. During the retreat there was a very supportive and gentle environment, and suddenly I was back in ordinary life. Work stress, distracted people, occasional hostility, and the general noise of everyday concerns.
For a while it felt difficult to connect those two worlds.
I also couldn’t maintain the long meditation sessions from the retreat. Instead of forcing it, I stabilized the practice at about 20 minutes per day and gradually increased it to around 40 minutes. That’s where it has remained fairly consistently.
Looking back, that stability mattered much more than trying to replicate retreat conditions.
Signals that the practice is working
One of the most useful heuristics I learned during the retreat is simple. You know the meditation is working when the sits tend to leave you more relaxed, in a better mood (even when difficult emotions appear during the sit), and softer somehow. More open. More curious and empathic.
If meditation consistently makes you more tense or rigid, something in the approach is probably off.
Enjoying the practice
The most important ingredient for sustaining the practice turned out to be very simple: I genuinely like doing it.
Meditation leaves me feeling better when I finish. If that hadn’t been the case, I doubt I would have maintained it this long. Discipline alone is rarely enough over long periods. Some intrinsic reward needs to be present.
Interestingly, the effects this time were different from my earlier practice. I’ve been meditating for about ten years, but jhana practice is something else. Back then the changes felt dramatic. My experience of mind and emotions shifted quickly and in obvious ways. This time the transformation was quieter. It’s curious that the more vivid and altered the experience, the more transparent the effects in daily life.
What I seem to have gained instead is something closer to an inner fortress. The downs of life still happen, but they don’t knock me down as easily. Emotions like guilt and shame are met with much more understanding and compassion. Failures still hurt, sometimes a lot, but they are less catastrophic and less destabilizing than they used to be. The overall system feels more resilient.
A sense of curiosity
Another effect is harder to describe, but feels equally important: curiosity.
I don’t think I fully understand the implications of having seen that jhanas are possible and how they work. But even knowing that they exist, and experiencing them repeatedly, feels like a very unusual gift.
Even today, when I sit and enter jhana, I often leave the meditation with a strong sense of wonder. It still surprises me. In a subtle way, it changes how I see life. It makes the world feel a bit more mysterious, a bit more open. There are more possibilities than I previously assumed.
That feeling tends to spill into the rest of life as well. It brings a kind of beginner’s mind toward the future. Less certainty, but more curiosity about what might unfold.
A year and a half later, the biggest outcome isn’t any particular meditation state. It’s that the practice quietly stayed in my life.