A Profoundly Good Time

On Jhanas, losing everything, and somehow being fine

About 4 years ago a cofounder that I loved dearly left an organization I cared about intensely in a way that made me feel like I was dying.

In brief, we started this thing together and grinded for years on ramen-level basic allowances to get to a semi-reliable pool of donors for really exciting, impactful work. Simultaneously, we had bootstrapped a growing tech-enabled-services business that was finally starting to get real traction.

After a long slog of trying and failing to get these things off the ground, we were actually starting to hit our stride, make some money, invest in a company with more than 3 months to live, and grow the team.

It was busy and hard. And we loved each other. She was like my sister, best friend, and work-wife all at once. Finding a good cofounder is insanely hard. We cried in each other’s arms through hard times, argued and repaired and came back stronger over and over. I felt, at the time, that we were unstoppable and would eventually figure things out and be wildly successful.

And we were on the precipice. The plan was stupidly intense: We had presold a lucrative, 12 month non-profit program and signed a handful of big contracts. I would work 100 hour weeks to deliver the program solo (so we could skim profit off the operational budget we had pitched) and execute on the contracts with just 1 new employee. She would shift from operations to hussle-her-ass-off fundraising. At the end of this year of insanity, we’d have nearly a million dollars of pure profit in the bank, be able to pay ourselves out a bit, and have new money to invest in the next phase.

Mad grindset, but with light at the end of the tunnel.

Category-5 Shitstorm

Then, somewhat out of nowhere, our biggest partner made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.

She was breaking off her engagement, moving to New York, and needed to make much more money as fast as possible for other personal reasons. This was the push she needed to change everything all at once.

In hindsight, I get it. At the time I felt so incredibly fucked I was having panic attacks.

We talked about how to make it work. I asked her to stay at least 3 months to transition. She promised. 24 hours later she told me she was out by Monday. Then, I begged her to let me get ahead of this and communicate privately to our donors, clients, partners so they wouldn’t freak out. A very public announcement named her as the CEO of this new thing the next day with no warning. Along the way I found out she’d also dropped a shitload of balls like, y’know, getting our employees contractually promised healthcare setup.

I was crestfallen, incandescently furious, and overwhelmed.

This whole thing wasn’t really malicious but she was burning her life to the ground and I was trapped in the building.

Madness, Magic, and Mastery

Okay now that you feel sufficiently sorry for me, let’s talk about magic.

Incidentally, around the same time, my meditation practice was ramping up. Not because of the bad situation but because after many years of intermittently dedicated sitting and looking at my breath like a mad man, I was starting to get wild results.

More specifically, I was doing a meditation practice called “Jhanas”

If you don’t know about them, basically Jhanas are reliably achievable, trainable, sequential states of intense mental focus that are as blissful as MDMA, as peaceful as prescription opiates, and more transformative than taking mushrooms in the forest with your best friends sitting in a drum circle and your therapist on speed-dial.

Meditation nerds argue about the details. Whatever.

People get access to these with more and less practice depending on various factors. I didn’t have a teacher or optimized pedagogy, so for me it probably took 6ish months of sitting ~45min per day to start getting to Jhanas reliably during meditation.

Before moving on: This post is not a guide for how to do the Jhanas.

This post is about how in the depths of despairing about my life falling apart, the Jhanas saved me, and I think changed my mind forever in the process.

Swingsets, Becoming the Sky, and First Jhana

During the fallout I had about 20 minutes a day to meditate.

Every day I would wake up, 4 or 5am sad-boy grindset, feverishly slam down enough caffeine to give a horse a heart attack, and work with machine-like precision and efficiency before taking a full day of back-to-back meetings with people who were variously: mad at me, demanding answers I didn’t have, expecting high stakes deliverables I’d finished no more than 5 minutes prior, asking when they could go see their doctor again, etc.

Afterwards, I would usually go sit on a swingset in a semi-abandoned playground in a wide unkept field by my house. Rocking back and forth, looking up at the sky, I’d try to focus without too much mental clinging on: my body, then my feelings, then my thoughts, and then my experience as a whole, directly.

Most days, the sense of my awareness would then expand to be as wide as the sky.

After this warm up, I’d “do” Jhana practice. Simplistically this amounts to paying attention to the good feelings in your experience so they get incrementally good-er until this loop hits an exponential takeoff point.

So, I’m there on the swingset in “first” Jhana. For me, J1 feels almost uncomfortably pleasurable on the tingly-body-sensation axis. Think: the strongest “runners high” ever + being stuck just on the edge of orgasm. There’s a generic happiness feeling underneath it but it’s overshadowed by the brash intensity of being hit by periodic, increasingly powerful crashing waves of cosmic body-bliss.

So, J1 feels good, but it’s not actually life-changing because this flavor of bliss is kind of too much.

Remember, I only had a coffee-break amount of meditation time, so I’d mostly get there and move on. I move on by doing a basic instruction: I take a big, deep breath with a long exhale.

Now I’m in Jhana 2. Tears well up for me just writing about J2.

To try to do it justice, I’m going to switch registers to try to put the experiences into words. Bear with me.

Jhana 2: Nothing changes but everything changes

There’s this feeling I realized I carried around all my life that I can’t just be happy.

Not until the next thing I want to happen, happens. Not until I find my person. Not until I make enough money to relax. Not until I solve the next problem. This feeling goes on and on, always moving ahead in time.

In Jhana 2, that feeling stops arising entirely. It’s not that I’m just happy in J2. It’s actually that I stop trying to find or make or reach for happiness. The moment I stop, happiness erupts from my heart. It finds me. It was just right here.

At once it’s clear: I was an animal walking desperately through the desert, chasing mirage after mirage, just trying to survive. Finally I stop marching, only to realize I am already here at the oasis. I drink from a cup of glacially pure happiness, and it keeps refilling. It’s not a cup, it’s a deep well. I plunge myself into it. I bathe in it for what feels like an eternity, but it’s only been maybe a minute. It gives and gives and I actually, maybe for the first time in my whole life, yearn for nothing else.

Then I walk back to my house and sit at my desk and everything burning down around me is actually, legitimately, fine. Happiness, I now suddenly, fully believe in some deep part of my mind-body-thing, is not dependent on this thing in my life going the way I want it to.

Jhana 3: Impossible Okay-ness

Some days, while I was performing life-saving-surgery on what I felt was my life’s most important work, I would manage to carve out a bit more time for myself.

I would drive to a redwood forest just out of town. I would walk alone, focusing as calmly as I could manage on the pain in my chest that persisted through this whole period. Most days, the pain felt distinctly like a sharp, elongated, crystalline obsidian dagger embedded in my solar plexus.

Focusing. Jhana 1: waves of body-bliss crash into the black dagger. 3-4 times a second, wave of immense pain + bliss. Keep focusing. Jhana 2: body, mind, dagger. All somehow suffused with happiness.

Suddenly, I feel I’ve had enough happiness for a whole lifetime. Something shifts. I do the thing the guy says to do in that book and allow my breathing to become slow and shallow. I stop drinking from the well of happiness because I somehow don’t even need happiness to be okay?

The happiness subsides and becomes infinitely more subtle.

Jhana 3: A tiny blue orb of thin, silken, contentment slowly blooms from the centerpoint where the dagger meets my chest. Tears stream quietly down my cheeks as I step slowly through the trees. The gossamer bubble of contentedness grows in oscillating cycles, expanding with each wave.

As it expands, it carries my spatial sense of the boundaries of my awareness outwards to envelop the entire forest. The dagger is still there. Strangely, it hurts more. But it’s so small now. The fear and anguish and hurt and betrayal, more clear and painful than ever, but when I look at the dagger now it’s this tiny spec in the center of my awareness which is now so vast and so inherently okay. The okayness would be incredibly shocking if the shock itself wasn’t so small and so okay.

I feel that in some way that exists outside of time, I am going to be okay. I am flooded with appreciation for my wife who loves me, for my friends and for the smell of the redwoods and for… the pain? The pain is actually okay.

Jhana 4: Nothing will ever be the same

A few weeks later. I am still doing 14 hours days of un-fucking myself. I am working and sleeping and eating and hugging my wife briefly before she goes to bed after a full day of not seeing or talking to me at all.

20 minutes a day, I revisit the impossible okay-ness of things. At this point, ridiculously, I am kind of thriving I guess?

One day, I sit down to look at my breath again in the backyard. Around sunset hundreds of tiny birds swarm and settle into sleeping spots in the trees in an orchestral uprising of chirping and warbling and trilling. I’m sitting on a wobbly old wooden chair I dragged out of the kitchen and my feet feel slightly moist touching the grass.

I make contact with contentment again and notice that the okayness is very okay today.

I am paying closer and closer attention to the texture of the blue gossamer orb of contentment that is expanding towards the sunset in the distance. It’s getting thinner and thinner and then it just thins out of existence.

People say Jhana 4 is “equanimity”.

My awareness becomes transcendently, incredibly normal. My experience is so okay that an incredibly subtle disbelief in the contentment I didn’t realize I was holding onto goes quiet for just a split second.

The contentment is still present but it’s not centered around my awareness anymore. It’s radiating from every bird chirping sound, exactly where it is, it’s reverberating off the trees. It’s in the wetness of the grass and the tiny creak of the chair. The okayness is now somehow just in reality itself. I have the sense that I’m noticing it as it is, not actually generating it myself. It weirdly has nothing to do with me.

The raw psychedelia of this whole experience being totally normal drops onto me with an obviousness that makes me laugh out loud at myself. Oh my god I was wrong about everything and it’s so obvious that I am not this character I spent every second of my entire life playing.

The punchline of this joke I’ve been playing on myself is the funniest thing ever. I am chuckling.

No longer characterizing myself at all, “I” am freed up to feel the raw sensations of every microscopic sound, sight, touch at an insanely fast rate. The time dilation accelerates more and more until every single second is an infinity and I feel that I’ve lived a lifetime already in this moment before the next one even arrives.

With all the time in the world, I watch hundreds of specific, individual sensations pop into my awareness per second, appearing and resolving with impossible clarity.

The stream of sensations is so fast and slow and clear that the feeling of each sensory stream (sight, sound, touch, etc) being distinct disappears, and they all unify into one sense. Every sensation has the exact same taste. They taste like… idk… raw information? The sameness and normalness of it all keeps compounding on itself.

It’s so consistent that I can’t help but notice the precise details of the sensory process itself. Every single sensation arises first as the taste of raw information. Then every single time, almost immediately, there is the smallest, most subtle urge to flinch away or cling onto it.

But I don’t do either because for some reason in this state I can just not.

The relief of this is dumbfounding. It hits me like a truck and then dissolves because I don’t even have the urge to try to hold onto the greatest relief I’ve ever experienced.

The Road Back

A moment later, for some reason, I decided to drop the Jhana and go back to the character and reassume all my accumulated baggage.

It wasn’t like before though. Unlike returning from Jhana 3, I didn’t feel buoyed by relief because things were going to be okay even if my life fell apart.

I felt grief. I felt everything all at once. I felt my whole life return, every experience in memory replayed at 10000x speed to wind the tape back up from the non-self thing I had just been to return to the fully formed character I was always going to return to.

I went back inside to my wife and clung to her and I said “It’s just so sad”, and let go of some ineffable, fundamental, thing that was previously holding me together through sheer will and tension.

I won’t try to explain in more detail, but I think the grief was for my former self, and for all the needless suffering I had accumulated in order to make that version of character real.

Coda

Jhanas are not the most important thing in life. Probably not even close.

But neither are jobs and goals and stories we tell ourselves to make getting out of bed and scratching out a living more bearable.

I’m not going to tell you to go meditate. I’m not a teacher, this wasn’t a how-to, and I don’t think you need to sit on a cushion and attain something called enlightenment to live a life worth living.

But I will say that with years of distance now between me and that swingset, when I scroll back through my memories of that period, with the panic attacks, the feelings of betrayal, the 14-hour days, the obsidian dagger in my chest, what I actually remember most isn’t the suffering.

What I remember is those 20 minutes a day in the redwoods, and hugging my wife.

I remember it as a profoundly good time. That still kind of surprises me.

Jhanas didn’t “fix” anything in my life. They didn’t save my failing business or mend the friendship I lost or give me back the years I’d spent building them.

What they did was quietly, repeatedly demonstrate, in a way that apparently my rational brain could not do on its own, that I was already okay.

That the okayness was just kind of... there. In the wet grass, in the birds, in my wife’s shoulder.

I am really, really grateful I was able to notice it.