A Beginner's Journey to Jhana, Personality-Change, and Forgiveness in 100hrs (Zach Lauzon)

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