Fair and understandable criticisms. Some quick responses:
1) I’ve attempted to share resources and pointers that I hope can get people similar benefits for free without signing up for a retreat (like Rob Burbea’s retreat videos, Nadia Asparouhova’s write-up with meditation instructions, and other content). Since I found most of these after my Jhourney retreat I can’t speak from experience about their effectiveness. I’d be excited for more people to experiment and share what does and doesn’t work for them, and for people with more experience to share what’s worked for them (on the meditation front, emotion processing, and more). I also don’t intend to suggest that Jhourney has access to insights that are only discoverable by doing one of their retreats. They do seem to be taking the prospect that jhanas can be accessed quickly much more seriously than many others, and have encouraging results.
2) As I mentioned, my experience appears to have been somewhat of an outlier, and I don’t have a great understanding as to why. Insofar as whatever worked for me can help others, I aim to share. That said, Twitter discourse about jhanas and Jhourney seems to match my impression, other unaffiliated people have discussed Jhourney retreats seeming to generate many outlier positive experiences.
3) It doesn’t surprise me at all that there’s low-hanging fruit on the mindfulness front. Buddhist texts are very poorly (anti-helpfully) translated. There has not been that much serious exploration, optimization pressure, and investment into improving and democratizing mindfulness education and wellbeing. This extends beyond mindfulness. Why did it take as long as it did for GLP-1 medications to become widespread? Many self-help interventions are incentivized against actually fixing people’s problems (e.g. therapists stop getting paid if they permanently fix your problems). There are other orgs that seem to generate very positive experiences working in related areas, like Art of Accomplishment content and courses for processing emotions, making better decisions, and better connecting with others.
4) I don’t know Jhourney’s team well and don’t want to speak on their behalf (but I do think they’re well-intentioned). I’ve found their official and staff Twitter accounts share the most relevant instructions they provide on retreat—e.g. they publicly discusscultivating positivity likely being more effective for accessing jhanas, forgiveness meditation (which I’m realizing I should add to the main post) and guided recordings, and many other insights.
My impression is that expected donations/fees for week-long meditation retreats is often in the $1000+ range (though granted this is for in-person retreats, and I haven’t explored this in detail). We did have daily personalized instruction, and staff were available on-call throughout our retreat. Given how quickly Jhourney’s retreats sell out, from a profit-maximizing perspective it seems like they could be charging more. I also don’t know what they do with their profits. I wouldn’t be surprised if they donated a decent amount, or spent it in ways they think make sense on altruistic grounds. They say in their blog post about their plans that they aspire to change the lives of tens of millions with the following steps:
Build a school to demonstrate that it’s possible to transform wellbeing with meditation
Invest the money and attention from the school into technology to accelerate that process
Sorry for the very late reply to an ancient thread. Just want to point out one small thing that is not helping your case:
Many self-help interventions are incentivized against actually fixing people’s problems (e.g. therapists stop getting paid if they permanently fix your problems).
This is a typical pseudoscience/fake medicine line. The doctors and pharma companies want you to be sick! That’s their business model!
Doesn’t add up.
[Edited on Nov. 22, 2025 at 10:15 PM to add: think about the incentives of the researchers who came up with cognitive behavioural therapy or who tested its efficacy. Think about the incentives of the clinical psychology professors or other instructors who teach therapists how to apply techniques like CBT. What are they incentivized to do? Are they incentivized, in any plausible way, to develop of teach techniques that don’t work? Skeptical, iconoclastic, anti-establishment hunches like these about science or medicine typically start to look implausible very quickly when you start to look at them more closely.]
Fair and understandable criticisms. Some quick responses:
1) I’ve attempted to share resources and pointers that I hope can get people similar benefits for free without signing up for a retreat (like Rob Burbea’s retreat videos, Nadia Asparouhova’s write-up with meditation instructions, and other content). Since I found most of these after my Jhourney retreat I can’t speak from experience about their effectiveness. I’d be excited for more people to experiment and share what does and doesn’t work for them, and for people with more experience to share what’s worked for them (on the meditation front, emotion processing, and more). I also don’t intend to suggest that Jhourney has access to insights that are only discoverable by doing one of their retreats. They do seem to be taking the prospect that jhanas can be accessed quickly much more seriously than many others, and have encouraging results.
2) As I mentioned, my experience appears to have been somewhat of an outlier, and I don’t have a great understanding as to why. Insofar as whatever worked for me can help others, I aim to share. That said, Twitter discourse about jhanas and Jhourney seems to match my impression, other unaffiliated people have discussed Jhourney retreats seeming to generate many outlier positive experiences.
3) It doesn’t surprise me at all that there’s low-hanging fruit on the mindfulness front. Buddhist texts are very poorly (anti-helpfully) translated. There has not been that much serious exploration, optimization pressure, and investment into improving and democratizing mindfulness education and wellbeing. This extends beyond mindfulness. Why did it take as long as it did for GLP-1 medications to become widespread? Many self-help interventions are incentivized against actually fixing people’s problems (e.g. therapists stop getting paid if they permanently fix your problems). There are other orgs that seem to generate very positive experiences working in related areas, like Art of Accomplishment content and courses for processing emotions, making better decisions, and better connecting with others.
4) I don’t know Jhourney’s team well and don’t want to speak on their behalf (but I do think they’re well-intentioned). I’ve found their official and staff Twitter accounts share the most relevant instructions they provide on retreat—e.g. they publicly discuss cultivating positivity likely being more effective for accessing jhanas, forgiveness meditation (which I’m realizing I should add to the main post) and guided recordings, and many other insights.
My impression is that expected donations/fees for week-long meditation retreats is often in the $1000+ range (though granted this is for in-person retreats, and I haven’t explored this in detail). We did have daily personalized instruction, and staff were available on-call throughout our retreat. Given how quickly Jhourney’s retreats sell out, from a profit-maximizing perspective it seems like they could be charging more. I also don’t know what they do with their profits. I wouldn’t be surprised if they donated a decent amount, or spent it in ways they think make sense on altruistic grounds. They say in their blog post about their plans that they aspire to change the lives of tens of millions with the following steps:
Sorry for the very late reply to an ancient thread. Just want to point out one small thing that is not helping your case:
This is a typical pseudoscience/fake medicine line. The doctors and pharma companies want you to be sick! That’s their business model!
Doesn’t add up.
[Edited on Nov. 22, 2025 at 10:15 PM to add: think about the incentives of the researchers who came up with cognitive behavioural therapy or who tested its efficacy. Think about the incentives of the clinical psychology professors or other instructors who teach therapists how to apply techniques like CBT. What are they incentivized to do? Are they incentivized, in any plausible way, to develop of teach techniques that don’t work? Skeptical, iconoclastic, anti-establishment hunches like these about science or medicine typically start to look implausible very quickly when you start to look at them more closely.]