In this episode, we talk to Zach Lauzon, a Google engineer and novice meditator with less than 100 hours of meditation experience who learned the first five jhanas on a recent Jhourney retreat. He shares how the jhanas have changed his worldview, changed his relationship to hard things, and unlocked personality-change in what he describes as “self-therapy.” I tear up as he describes how he used the jhanas to finally process the suicide of his best friend after 7 years of therapy. I think you’ll find many of his tips and ideas, like how he welcomes distractions in meditation, counterintuitive, articulate, inspiring.
0:00 Memory of initial jhana experience
5:05 Benchmark "as joyful and exciting as getting my dream job" but within you
7:05 Do big payouts have to come with big work? Or it there within, just waiting to be found?
9:30 Worldview shifting to know the internal resource is just within you
14:25 Seeing difficult material in meditation as things to be understood, accepted, loved
19:25 Jhana as a basis for difficult emotional work
25:22 Experience with parts work and somatic therapies like internal family systems (IFS) affecting meditation
29:07 Unshakable resource from deeper jhana and working with the trauma of losing his best friend
34:35 Deep sense of equanimity and okayness
37:40 To you, what are the jhanas and what do they feel like? (states of harmony and unification). Aliveness/timeliness, then still calmness
47:10 Seeing it as "safety and assuredness"
50:00 How can it be familiar yet worldview breaking? From "finding" rather than cultivating
55:05 Getting into meditation 8 months prior and just 100hrs practice before jhana
1:05:40 Recap of 3 learnings for a novice
1:06:50 Growing up, professional background as a software engineer, personal interest in music
