Jhana Meditation Live: How Anyone Can Achieve Super Wellbeing

I’m psyched. Stephen, welcome to the show. Here’s the plan: you’ll guide yourself toward a jhana live, narrate what’s happening inside, then we’ll unpack it and finish with how AI might help more people do this.

Terrific. Success here is noticing you can do something you didn’t know you were allowed to do. If you’re listening, just soften and follow the general flow; let it land intuitively. Oddly enough, some of this was inspired by military work on how to transfer hard‑to‑teach skills.

I close my eyes, breathe slowly, and start by ‘coming home.’ I widen awareness until it feels boundless, then welcome whatever shows up—racing heart, foggy head, anxious thoughts—like old friends. I do a slow body scan from head to toe, relaxing micro‑tensions I didn’t know I was holding, brushing each sensation with simple kindness until gratitude and ease begin to gather.

When my mind narrows, I reopen it. I let tears come if they do. I use gentle phrases of goodwill and sink into wherever warmth or tenderness feels strongest, like using a metal detector to find the hotspot and soaking in it like a hot tub. If a thought about how this sounds pops up, I meet it with compassion and keep leaning into the felt sense—warmth in the chest, soft belly, a celebratory tingle behind the head—then I let even those fade into a wide, easy mind.

That was lovely. The quick game is relentless gentleness with whatever appears; the longer game is letting that warmth expand on its own. Give me thirty or forty more minutes and it usually grows into a whole‑body experience.

I’m in a very different place now—lower and slower. What surprised me on your retreat was how much you front‑load the ‘coming home’ phase. Physically relaxing tiny pockets of tension shifts my emotional tone. Your “brush it with kindness” lands because you’re genuinely doing it, which makes it feel doable for me. As I settled, my edges softened, almost like a warm blanket over the head, and I found myself beaming gratitude back at you.

The hard part for me was opening emotionally without trying to force it. I used to turn “letting go” into a goal. What unlocked it was realizing I was already open—like finding the glasses on my head—then relaxing into that. Once you spot the move, it becomes repeatable.

Exactly. The crux is resting into love. You can frame it as subtraction, slipping into a tub, or noticing that kindness and relaxation are the same move. We’re used to clenching our way to results, so softening mental effort is tricky but freeing. Meditation does have goals; the key is relating to them with play instead of contracting into a deal with yourself to be unhappy until you get there. Most great performance comes from play and flow, not self‑coercion.

That tracks in company building. When I shifted from ‘I have to’ to ‘I get to play,’ the business grew faster. It’s counterintuitive and, frankly, scary because play seems unserious. Let’s hit some pitfalls. For me, with untreated OCD, trying to use jhanas as an escape didn’t work and sometimes made it worse. Welcoming is powerful, but when you’re overwhelmed, it can be impossible. There’s a time to stabilize first.

Yes. Stay inside your window of tolerance. You don’t want to push into panic or numbness. Use grounding and orientation, titrate your attention, and sometimes anchor more outside the body. Another lens is memory reconsolidation: if you gently re‑activate a charged pattern while co‑activating real safety and care, the default response can rewrite toward ease. Many can summon anxiety; fewer can reliably access a felt sense of safety to pair with it. Cultivating that capacity lets you update emotional defaults—arguably the root permission to reshape your personality.

One more trap I fell into was trying to feel blissed out so I could avoid hard conversations or big life changes. It doesn’t work. If your words and actions aren’t loving, telling yourself ‘I love you’ won’t land. The subtle work has to propagate all the way up to behavior.

Totally. You can’t bypass boundaries with a glow. The mechanism won’t carry through if you’re abandoning yourself. Where this practice pays off is clearer relationships, stickier habits, and better decisions because the system is more aligned.

How have you changed through this practice?

We began as a neurotech lab collecting biosignals to help novices, then started retreats to gather data. The retreats took off, so we leaned into a school that could later inform the lab. Early on, I was terrified—imagining I looked ridiculous crying while wishing well for everyone in front of high‑powered founders. That fear leaked into meetings; I got tight, fast, and created friction. Seeing the fear clearly, welcoming it, and letting myself cry let me repair with the team and run calmer, more effective meetings. Culture improved immediately.

As a lifelong people‑pleaser, I had to flip the golden rule to ‘treat yourself as you treat others.’ Once I genuinely liked myself, I could admit things like jealousy without collapsing into shame, even say it out loud when appropriate. That honesty makes relationships cleaner.

It’s so freeing—internally and interpersonally.

I was also shocked by how much of my ‘personality’ was just strategies to feel loved. When you can feel loved just by sitting down and practicing, a lot of compensating patterns fall away.

Which saves energy and stops those oscillating loops—like procrastination or reactive family patterns. It also gives you more degrees of freedom for tough calls and helps keep your identity small enough to think clearly.

Let’s connect it to AI.

At a high level, we see super well‑being as a peer objective to super longevity and super intelligence. Many experienced meditators report a baseline shift so deep that their worst days feel better than their best from years ago. The hedonic treadmill often measures the wrong chase; this is more about non‑doing and emotional conductivity. Meditation got me there with crude tools; neurotech could add precision, and there are even genetic angles worth studying. Practically, our retreats already help most participants reach endogenous peak states comparable, in their words, to psychedelics, while changing how they relate to goals, relationships, and decisions. Later stages include shifts in identity and non‑duality, which we can save for part two.

Try Opus four point five. I think you could build your product flow in a week with it.

I’ve prototyped pieces with Sonnet and it’s wild how fast it moves. I’m torn between building it myself and, you know, running a company. What we need is someone with great product taste to own it. The retreat pipeline gives us transcripts, evals, and rapid iteration, so it feels inevitable.

This might be my favorite episode I’ve recorded. Thank you. Let’s do a part two.

I’d love that. We can go deep on later jhanas, non‑duality, and identity shifts. Thanks, Dan.