In this special podcast episode, we sit down with David Treleaven, author of “Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness,” to explore the intersection of trauma, safety, and meditation. David shares his journey through intensive meditation retreats and the transformative impact of integrating trauma-informed practices. We discuss the role of jhanas in emotional processing, the concept of the window of tolerance, and practical strategies for ensuring safety in meditation retreats. This conversation highlights the importance of balancing deep meditative practices with trauma awareness to create a safe and effective retreat experience.

00:01:04 Introduction to David Treleaven and TSM
00:07:48 Jhanas: Synthesizing depth, safety, and emotional work
00:10:14 Running experiments with awareness and tension
00:13:14 Understanding trauma work and progress
00:17:04 Window of tolerance, "How do I know when to meditate less?"
00:23:23 Memory reconsolidation and virtuous cycles for trait change
00:26:49 What does it mean to be safe?
00:30:09 Downsides of overemphasizing trauma and hurt
00:33:12 Jhourney's POV on safety and responding to persistent challenging experiences
00:38:05 Taking an iterative approach to instruction
00:41:20 Healing by staying mindful while out of the window of tolerance
00:45:40 "Being with" vs. "working with" practices
00:52:00 Designing for a safety-informed retreat experience
00:57:48 "It's all good, we can work with your experience here"

In this episode, we speak with Leigh Brasington, one of the most famous jhana teachers alive today. Leigh is the author of Right Concentration, a remarkably clear and simple book that is commonly cited by novices who learned to enter jhanas on their own. We discuss how he first learned the jhanas, spent years looking for a teacher to show him how to navigate them, and how the jhanas changed his personality to be happier and more prone to glee over time. He shares how he believes the jhanas can show you it’s possible to be happier than you ever realized for no apparent reason, and most importantly, how they can help you see what Buddhists call capital-I Insights: things like how malleable your ego really is. Leigh visited us during an online jhana retreat, and fields several questions from the audience near the end.

Sections:

• 0:54 How Leigh got started with meditation
• 6:42 Quitting marijuana in order meditate clearly
• 8:54 Leigh’s first jhana
• 11:49 Discovering how to enter piti (glee) consistently
• 14:18 Learning what jhanas are
• 15:44 J1 and piti: like the rush of marijuana
• 18:19 Moving to the second jhana
• 21:46 J2 and sukka: happiness
• 23:04 The effects of J2 on baseline wellbeing
• 28:53 J3: wishlessness
• 30:37 J4: stillness and a mind ready for Insight
• 33:26 Jhanas as a warmup for Insight
• 37:21 You’re more malleable than you think you are
• 39:36 Leigh’s advice to his younger self
• 41:20 What traits in students predict success in learning jhanas?
• 43:13 Common pitfalls
• 46:33 How many people are practicing the jhanas today?
• 47:41 Why aren’t they more popular?
• 49:31 How Leigh’s teaching philosophy has changed
• 50:37 What might be done before meditating to make jhana easier?
• 52:55 Supplements or drugs that might make jhanas easier
• 54:13 Audience Q&A: lucid dreaming and body scanning
• 55:31 Insight and changes in values stemming from jhanas
• 57:42 Does Leigh currently have a sense of self?
• 58:28 Jhanic experiences in mundane activites, like sports and dating
• 1:01:15 The value of following instructions in meditation
• 1:05:13 Asking the “why” behind restlessness
• 1:07:46 Injecting jhanas into life off the cushion
• 1:10:31 Learning jhanas via Leigh’s book alone has proven surprisingly doable

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