The transcript of AI & I with Stephen Zerfas is below. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps

1. Introduction: 00:00:56
2. A primer on Jhana meditation: 00:01:18
3. Zerfas guides himself into a Jhana: 00:05:47
4. Why Jhana is about resting into what already exists: 00:36:04
5. Approaching meditation with play and curiosity: 00:39:30
6. The potential pitfalls of Jhana meditation: 00:45:04
7. How to hack your personality through memory reconsolidation: 00:48:21
8. Why Jhana won’t let you numb yourself to real problems: 00:53:10
9. How Jhana meditation has changed Zerfas: 00:55:36
10. How Jhourney is using AI to make Jhanas more accessible: 01:09:41

Transcript

(00:00:00)

Dan Shipper

Stephen, welcome to the show.

Stephen Zerfas

Thanks, Dan. I’m excited to be here.

Dan Shipper

Excited to have you. For people who don’t know, you are the founder of Jhourney, which actually, how do you describe Jhourney as a company? I know Jhourney because I went on one of your meditation retreats, but I know that Jhourney is bigger than that. So give us the spiel on Jhourney really quickly.

Stephen Zerfas

Yeah, so we’re working to make life-changing meditation accessible to everybody, and we’re starting with states known as the Jhanas, which turns out are altered states you can learn to enter into with a bit of meditation practice that span the spectrum from bliss to peace. And when you learn to effectively create a feedback loop between attention and emotion, it’s a forcing function to learn to navigate your own nervous system with an unprecedented level of fluency. And in a world in which so many of us are optimizing everything from our sleep to our diet to our work performance, it raises the question of why not optimize your nervous system fluency or your relationship with your emotions, because that makes everything else easier and ultimately makes it easier to be the person you aspire to be. So it’s in many ways about helping you get to endogenous altered states as fast as possible. But that’s really just the first goal. The real goal is to set you up so that your subconscious works for you, not against you.

Dan Shipper

Wait, say that one more time. To set you up so that your—

Stephen Zerfas

Subconscious works for you, not against you.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. I feel that, and I have to say I went on one of your week-long meditation retreats and I’ve been meditating for a long time and done a lot of retreats and it was by far the best retreat that I’ve ever been on. And it has generated lasting changes in my practice and therefore lasting changes in my life. So I really mean, I love everything that you do and I’m really excited to have you here.

Stephen Zerfas

I’d love to hear that, Dan. It’s a labor of love for the team.

Dan Shipper

You can feel it. So we have a bit of a plan here for this show, which I think will be interesting and new, which is we’re gonna, you’re gonna get into a Jhana or at least get as close as you possibly can to being in a Jhana and you’re going to narrate your internal experience as you do it. Then we’re gonna, you’re gonna come out of that and we’re gonna talk about what happened and just talk about your practice. And I’ll talk about my practice and sort of share what these states are and how they’ve affected our lives. And then we’re going to move into, I know there’s a lot of stuff on your short-term and long-term roadmap that uses AI to help people do this better. And so we’re just gonna get into this technology aspect and the future aspect of this. So I’m psyched. Let’s start with, I wanna see you get into a Jhana.

Stephen Zerfas

Terrific.

Dan Shipper

No pressure.

Stephen Zerfas

The pressure is part of the fun. So a little bit of context and framing for the listeners. Jhanas have historically been believed to be states that take thousands of hours of meditation practice to enter. And it’s become apparent that that need not be the case. Our thesis at Jhourney is that the reason these states often take so long and aren’t so widespread is because it’s a guesswork problem—that meditation is invisible and nonverbal in a way that learning many skills is not. And so your feedback loops get all gunked up with guesswork. So at Jhourney, what we do is we’re really intentional about feedback loops. Our curriculum and our group sessions are set up to run rapid fire experiments and kind of give you the tools to assess whether or not your experiments are helping you move in a certain direction. And then you’ll come in for your interviews and a facilitator is just gonna grill you and be like, what did you feel? Where in the body? What did it feel like? Did it have a temperature? Was it oscillating? How did it change over time? And use that to pattern match against other students and say, okay, let’s co-create an experimentation plan that you’re gonna be personally excited about. Go do that. Come back, report back, and we’ll repeat. So what we’re gonna do here is I’m just going to throw a lot of the thinking about your experience out the door, offer my, narrate my experience for on the order of 10 to 20 minutes. I’ve done this a lot. I did this every day for many years and still do it very frequently. And so your experience may look different than mine. That’s okay. The point is, in the same way that you’re better off to watch a professional serve a tennis ball than to try to read a book on how to serve a tennis ball, it might prime your intuition a bit. So with that context, I think we can jump into me narrating my experience aloud. I’ll just wanna offer a couple additional things, which is one, we talk a lot about collectiveness and conductivity. And so the game that I’m going to be playing here is I’m gonna be gently collecting all of my attention and experience around an open-hearted feeling. That’s gonna be, I might be saying phrases that are all gonna be pointing at a kindness or a gratitude or this kind of thing. And the second is we talk about conductivity, and that’s embracing anything that comes up wholeheartedly, ranging from distractions to little pinches of emotional tension, including the pressure that Dan just put on me to try to get into a Jhana live on a show. All of these things I’m going to be looking to turn towards and imbue with a sense of compassion or embrace such that nothing is untouched by this kind compassion kind of thing.

Dan Shipper

Yeah, and to add onto that, or maybe put a finer point on it, there are endless numbers of guided meditations on the internet or on Dharma Seed or whatever, which are helpful. And one of the things that I think is so unique about Jhourney, and one of the things I love the most, is this thing that you’re doing, which is imitate an expert, which is watch an expert navigate their own internal experience, which is infinitely complex and unique to them. And it’s not about necessarily copying them, it’s not about necessarily listening to a guided meditation, following all those instructions, although that can be useful. It is about watching them navigate and then being like, oh, here’s one or two tools I can use that maybe I didn’t even realize I could use to then navigate myself, my own experience. And I find that to be incredibly valuable and it’s super fun to watch.

Stephen Zerfas

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I think success is you discover something that you didn’t know you were allowed to do or you didn’t know you could use, something that kind of thing. Just because it has a funny shape, you’re like, why the hell did he turn left when I was expecting him to turn right? Perfect. You’re kind of looking for surprise. And doing so, if anybody wants to follow along and meditate as we go, do so in just the most gentle, wide open, letting it wash over your intuition. You’re not trying to hang on to every word. You’re just letting your subconscious see if it can be like, oh, that’s the general flow we’re going in. As a side note, and maybe we’ll talk about this later, a lot of this idea came from inspiration from the US military, which is not your typical or, maybe depending on how you think about it, a classic source of meditation wisdom.

Dan Shipper

This is what I love about you is you’re just like, you’re pulling from the military, but it’s like any source that might be good. It’s like the military over here and the Buddha over here and there’s 50 other places over here and it’s just all in this unique mishmash that really works well and I love it.

Stephen Zerfas

That’s right. That’s right. The reason the military even got mentioned is because there’s some related work that was done with the military on tacit knowledge transfer and that I think is sort of the key word in some of the things that inspired some of this. So, okay, let’s get started. So to settle, I like to close my eyes and I’m gonna take a deep breath in and just relax to let it out. And just watching the end of the out breath, where does it end? And another deep breath in and just let it all out. I am settling into these old habits of mine, looking for a sense of what it feels like to come home, like coming home after a long day at work and dropping the bags on the floor. I’m just going to start dropping any tension in my experience. I’ve got a racing heart from being on this exciting podcast. I got a little brain fog from being woken up by my baby in the middle of the night, and I had some anxiety rushing around to prepare to get on this podcast with you all. And I’m just gonna start welcoming all those experiences like long lost friends and letting them gently slide in next to me as we come home after a long day of work.

(00:10:00)

Just letting another breath slow the system down. The slower I breathe, the easier I feel and the slower my thoughts are invited to be. I have two favorite ways of really settling into a relaxation or a sense of coming home before turning to an earnest, open-hearted feeling. The first is to blow my awareness wide open, so vast, so wide, that if an airplane were to hum overhead or the tiniest tremble were to come through the building in the floor below me, I would feel it all instantly. And I’m not reaching for the airplane or for the trembles. I’m just dropping this sense of narrowness that I didn’t realize I was carrying. I am dropping bags coming home from a long day at work, and I’m noticing my anxiety a bit in my head and a little bit in my chest. I’m having periodic stray thoughts about what Dan’s experience is right now, or somebody listening to this. And each one of these, I’m just brushing with a sense of kindness and reception, welcoming it into this vast mind, completely uncontained, no boundaries, deeply at ease, settling in like a warm hot tub. Into the sense of coming home, I just noticed I had kind of closed down my awareness while talking, and so I let it fall wide open again, completely open, more open than I might think is possible. All the talking and thinking is still keeping me up, so I’m gonna do one breath of silence to just really settle in with this much ease and openness. I can lend a gentle sense of kindness to anything that might quote unquote distract me. I’m starting to feel a little gratitude and open-heartedness already, but before I go all the way into that, I like to take a minute to relax the body too. And so like a warm shower happening in slow motion, I’m gonna start at the top of the head and I’m gonna relax every muscle as I go down from head to toe, finding tension I didn’t realize I was carrying. And I’m gonna try to do the whole thing from this wide open, vast mind, no boundaries, no containment. And when I narrow or contract, I’m just gonna gently open back up. So at the top of my head, slowly moving down. There was a little sound in the distance and there was a little brain fog or anxiety or sleepiness happening in my head. And all of these just gently brushing with an open-hearted welcome and carrying on this little body scan. The muscles, my forehead, letting them relax down my ears, the back of my head, all around the eyes. So many ways to relax the muscles around the eyes. I just found another layer in a moment of silence. I’m also realizing I’ve been running some thought about what I’m gonna say next to you all. I’m just gonna drop that now too. Any fear of making a mistake is gonna be brushed with kindness, just the same, down my cheeks to my jaw. Naming that I was a little scared was really good. Now I can just welcome it and I’m feeling myself relax in places I didn’t realize I was tense. May my fear be welcomed. I’m grateful that it’s looking out for me. Back to the body scan down through the neck. I can feel my shirt brushing against my skin and I’m just relaxing muscles I didn’t realize were tense. Both shoulders slumped down a little more. Moving down through the arms, the elbows. I have some pain from lifting recently, welcoming that too, down into my forearms and my hands, which are a little sweaty, welcoming that too, and the tips of my fingers. Letting the kindness of just brushing everything in my experience start to take on a bit of its own momentum. The pulsing in my hands is brushed almost as soon as I recognize the pulsing. The brush of the cool air on my skin is welcomed with kindness as soon as I recognize the cool air, still softening in new ways behind the eyes and in the head, experiencing a surge of gratitude for just that fear or sadness that I may mess up here. As gentle as I could possibly be with myself, may I come home. This kindness and this gratitude and this relaxation are in some ways all the same thing, and I’m gonna continue on my way down into my chest, relaxing muscles I didn’t realize were tense, touching every bodily sensation with a little relaxing kindness, down into my stomach, which I was holding and I didn’t know, letting it kind of fall open, vulnerably at peace, savoring a sense of safety that can be found in the stomach when I just let it be at peace, not sucking it in, down into the hips, the hamstrings and the quads, softening there in ways I didn’t realize I was tense, just a gentle, warm embrace, grateful for my legs, down into my calves, my ankles, the soles of my feet, and the tips of my toes. And pulling up for a moment and being grateful for this entire thing. The whole body, no precision, just a cloud of sensations, a throbbing of a pulse all the way from the tips of my toes to my upper lips, the gentle in and out breath, the shimmering and glimmering of all the tiny vibrations, and almost like that noise in the nervous system. You can’t tell if those tingles are real or not. The whole thing, letting it be a cause for gratitude and wonder, a softening. May I come home to it? May it come home to me? I actually dropped my first tear just a moment ago. I for years have softly cried while meditating. I don’t know when I crossed the threshold, but at some point the gentle ease and slipping into gratitude, the relief of coming home, began welling up and I just let it. Another thing to brush in my experience. Another thing to welcome to be part of a great coming home. And now with this vast, wide open mind, no boundaries, so free and at ease, and this shimmering glimmering body, I’m gonna begin sharing or repeating some of my favorite mantras that spark a little extra open-hearted feeling. And as I do so, I’m just gonna slip into where they feel most intense in the body. It’s like I’m using a metal detector, scanning over all of my experience, and ah, that’s where the open-heartedness is most intense. Can I just sink into that like a hot tub or pretend for a moment as if nothing else in the world existed? I get wondering if Dan would be pleased with this meditation or not. And so I’m just gonna welcome that thought in and gently brush the underlying fear, the underlying sadness, with a little compassion. May Dan be happy. May anybody listening be at ease. And may I be healthy. May I be filled with joy and live a life without suffering. I got a little anxious or tense about how strange or woo this might sound. What must it seem like for a grown man to be saying these words on a podcast? And that’s okay. Just like any other fear or sadness, I’m gonna brush that with a little kindness, welcome it in, be grateful that somebody’s looking out for me, for my image, and let it be another facet of just coming home. I just had a thought about how method actors, professional actors, will step into a part so deeply it will fully consume them. Their tears are genuine, their laughter is genuine, and yet it doesn’t require they change their worldview or betray themselves in some way. And just like that, I’m gonna keep falling into these open-hearted mantras. Wouldn’t it be nice if all beings were happy? What does it feel like in my body, in the heart space or in the head, if I knew that all beings could be healthy? What does it feel like to wish that they be filled with joy? Filled with joy. And that one comes with an extra glimmer or shimmer in the heart. It’s hard to say if it’s cool or if it’s warm, but there’s something there ever so subtle. And may all beings live lives without suffering. The peace and relaxation that sort of gently, ever so subtly, shimmers in my stomach and a relaxation of the shoulders. Each of these phrases sort of pulses just the tiniest of feelings. I actually know where to look for them and I’m cheating. They’re not yet strong enough for me to recognize if I don’t know where to look, but I know the familiar feeling of the opening of my heart in a way, or the softening of my gut, the celebratory joy in the back of my head. And as I say these feelings or say these phrases and the feelings spark just a minute, they fade out. And as they fade out, that too is an invitation to come home. I’m just letting all of these feelings fade away and sinking back into a vast, wide open mind, an absolutely wondrous body, and the backdrop of coming home.

Stephen Zerfas

May all beings be happy. May they be healthy. May they be filled with joy, like an actor crying on stage, imagining them filled. The world filled with joy and live lives without suffering.

Dan Shipper

Okay. I might suggest we start to bring it to a close here.

Stephen Zerfas

If I were on my own, I’d go another 40 minutes or something just continuing to dance with these feelings and sinking further and further into them. That was lovely. That was lovely. Thanks for inviting me to do that, Dan. Every time I do that in almost any context, you just come out the other side with a little bit more ease and vividness.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. I’m in a very different place than when I started. Yeah.

(00:30:00)

Stephen Zerfas

Yeah. Me too. Slower and at ease. I think I know I just said something to this effect, but there’s sort of the micro game and then there’s the more time-oriented game. And the micro game is just, in every single twist and turn, it’s amazing how fast we don’t brush our experience with kindness. And it’s just this infinitely fascinating game of seeing how gentler and gentler you can be and how much more rest and kindness kind of start to look like the same thing. And then with time, it’s just like a sinking into a hot tub and it takes on a life of its own. I didn’t try to drop a tear and I wouldn’t try in a way for that warmth in my chest to sort of expand to the point where it was a full body experience. And yet I know from experience that that’s how it would play out if we were to go another 30, 40 minutes or whatever.

Dan Shipper

I’m sort of feeling like I would like to narrate what happened for me.

Stephen Zerfas

Yeah. Tell me.

Dan Shipper

So I think right now I’m just much lower and slower, and one of the things that I think you do incredibly well that I picked up on this retreat is it actually surprised me how much time you spent in this sort of pre-meditation phase of just coming home and relaxing every part of my body. And I started to notice on this retreat and have taken it through, and I think this is happening now is, as you mentioned, there are all those little places where I’m tensed up and consciously physically changing the tension level changes the overall emotional valence of my body. And there was, there’s stuff there. I’m in an office, so I’m hearing people debating shit that I have to deal with. And so I was so annoyed and sort of self-conscious a little bit. And so you, but you have this brush it with kindness thing that honestly, just the way that you say it, I know that you can do it. And so I’m doing it, if that makes sense. It’s not like you’re just saying yeah, brush it with kindness. You’re doing it as you say it. And so I’m just like, I can do it too.

Stephen Zerfas

Even in my experience, I thought there was a bit of a shift at some point. I think it was the beginning of the body scan where I was like, oh, there’s all this fear I didn’t realize I was carrying here. And after that I think I slowed internally, I slowed down and I wondered if my voice slowed down a bit too.

Dan Shipper

I think it did and it sort of leaked into me, which is, I love this. Part of it is I am very sensitive to that kind of thing. So it just, maybe I would be a good hypnotist subject or something, but it just happens for me. And I found in my experience when I’m getting a little bit deeper, there’s almost like a warm blanket that comes over my head a little bit and I’m like, it just feels like I’m coming up on acid. I don’t know. And I end up feeling like just, I’m like energy, if that makes sense. And so my physical edges get a little softer and all that kind of stuff. And what was really nice is you had started to sort of say your phrases and it was for the world. And I was like, I’m just so grateful for you. And so I was just pushing it at you. And then you actually were like, I’m grateful for Dan, because you were thinking about what I was thinking and then I was just like, ugh, got a proper love fest going on. And yeah, then I was just in this sort of gooey, everything, just the hot tub thing I think is a good metaphor. And this is a very common experience for me now, post Jhourney retreat. And one thing that is maybe interesting for you is I think that you are opening up emotion. That was difficult for me. It was very difficult for me to do that without trying. And I think this is a thing that I had to actually unpack during the retreat and also subsequently is one of the things I love about how you teach is and why the Jhanas are interesting is if you try to get into a Jhana, you fail. And for people who are meditating, you’re often a sort of optimizer, Type A, and you’re like, oh, I want to let go or whatever. And then you just turn that into, I’m gonna figure out how to let go. I’m gonna be super good at letting go. And that doesn’t work very well. And you really unlocked in this retreat how to actually just enjoy yourself. Weirdly. And that enjoying yourself is the sort of key to getting into that state. And some of your metaphors about what does it feel like to come home or relaxing into a hot tub or that kind of thing were helpful, but it’s still kind of like, I couldn’t, that kind of I just opened up thing. It was just not that available. And the thing that kind of got me that I was doing as you were talking is I realized that I was already, that I was already open.

Stephen Zerfas

Yeah.

Dan Shipper

You know, and that that feeling is like sometimes you’re looking for your glasses.

Stephen Zerfas

Yes.

Dan Shipper

And then you realize they’re on. That’s exactly right. And that moment of like, oh, I’m already there is like, that for me is like the—

Stephen Zerfas

Yeah.

Dan Shipper

Oh, okay. I can relax into it. I know what that, I know what that move is, and once you identify it, then you can do it more. And then it’s really great.

Stephen Zerfas

There’s so much you said there that is really spot on. And I think you’re pointing at one of, if not the most, one of the most important and if not, and maybe one of the most difficult things to learn when you’re playing this game, is that it’s really about can you rest into love in a way and really emphasis on that rest. And there’s different frames, just realizing that you are already this. In fact, it’s more about subtraction than addition, or that it’s about slipping into a hot tub, or it turns out kindness and relaxation are kind of the same thing. These are all subtly pointing at this thing that we can go our entire lives and I think subtly missing because we have the habit of getting great things done with clenching down, with applied effort, with what we call mental tension. And pointing and beginning to see that mental tension and learning that you can soften it is tricky business. But so freeing when you’re able to do it, there’s all kinds of different approaches. And I think one of the things that’s fun about getting into this space is there’s actually a bunch of stuff I want to, I also want to put a mental pin in why this is valuable beyond just us having a mini love fest for a few minutes. But you begin to see that in some ways, every religion has always been two religions. There’s the mystics and the organizers and the mystics are sort of having these kinds of experiences and developing these sorts of tools to point at this, these difficult ideas of spotting and releasing mental tension or awareness and love all the way down, or recursive self-acceptance. Those are kind of the three ways we like to say the same thing on retreat. And some of this stuff I think is brilliant, but without the right, I think clarity or precision of word, it can be really confusing. So a good example is some meditation teachers will be like, meditation can and should not have any goal. It should not. Meditation should have zero goal. And I hear that and I’m like, that is extremely useful and not true. You’re conflating usefulness with truth. Of course meditation has a goal. How could it not? Everything you do has a goal, whether it’s to incrementally relax and take a little edge off your stress, or whether it’s to become full on enlightened. There is a goal. The game is how do you relate to that goal with a sense of play and openness as opposed to desperation or obligation. And how do you, and as it turns out, many of us effectively instantiate goals in our nervous system by making them contracts to be dissatisfied until we get what we want. And I think Naval has a good little couple blurbs on that kind of idea. And so learning to instantiate goals differently is a huge unlock.

(00:40:00)

Stephen Zerfas

Imagine if all of your goals were a sense of love and play, how much more sustainable and probably more effective that would be. Has any great performance come from a place other than play? Other than flow when you’re lost in the soccer field or in the virtuoso musician or sort of lost on stage as a CEO. That stuff is, I think can’t come from the sort of self-coercive place. And yet we for various reasons have sort of selected for and optimized the hell out of our self-coercion instead of our self-acceptance.

Dan Shipper

I love this kind of what you’re saying about play. And I just know for me, the times when as a founder building my company, I was like, I have to do it and I do it in the way that people are gonna do it ‘cause it’s gonna be a real company versus the times where it’s actually just coming from a place of play. The business has changed dramatically and has grown way quicker as I’ve just been like, no, no. The core of it is just like me playing and doing things I like. Very counterintuitive and very actually hard. It’s weirdly hard to do because people, our default is to be like, well, play is not serious enough to actually do something real. And so we’re actually kind of afraid and ashamed of that. So there’s all these little layers and subtle things where it’s like you can even make the decision to play at the surface level, but then there’s all these little micro moments where you’re actually not doing that. So it gets, there’s lots of different levels to this game as you’ve said. One of the things I wanna do right now is talk about pitfalls. And you have one that I think you wanna bring up and I have some that I wanna bring up because I think there are various ways to sort of misinterpret this and how to use it and when to use it and why, and all that kind of stuff. It would’ve saved me a lot of time myself if someone had said some of this stuff to me. Time and blood, sweat and tears and misery basically. So I think the first, at least for me, the first subtle way to get this wrong that makes it could even potentially harmful is if you are someone, for me, I’ll just say for me actually, ’cause it’s hard to generalize, but for me, I had untreated OCD, which is a horrible, horrible moment by moment, you’re just in hell pretty much all the time type of experience for 10 years. And so if you hear about the Jhanas or maybe meditation in general, and then maybe the Jhanas in particular, but I think this applies to lots of different types of meditation practice. You’re like, oh, cool. I will use this to get out of that state. And my experience is that that’s both, it doesn’t work and it can be quite counterproductive. And it has been much better for me. There are definitely times where you can be in, you’re sad or you’re upset or whatever, and you can use this as, at least for me, a touchstone or a bolster from which to go and examine those emotions and welcome them in, but I think your point about really seriously taking seriously the welcoming in of things is actually quite important because if you’re using it to solve your painful emotions, it’s bad. Or it’s not great. And at least for me, there are, there’s a time where you’re experiencing things that are so overwhelming that it is actually very hard if you’re not really good at this already, to actually actively welcome them. It would be kind of ridiculous. It’d be like my house is on fire. Great. You actually can’t, you can’t do that. You know? Maybe you have a little fire in the living room and you might welcome that. ‘Cause you’re like, I’ve done this before. I’ve dealt with the living room fire. But if your house is on fire and you go into one of these states, at least you can really have your whole experience start to be on fire. And it’s kind of bad. So yeah. Go for it.

Stephen Zerfas

Cool. So I think you’re pointing at a couple things that I think are super important. The first is the idea of welcoming something that may overwhelm your nervous system. And that’s a super important thing and I think we would do a disservice sort of offering a little bit of that sample imitate expert meditation clip without speaking to those limitations. The second is, is this a good idea when real stakes are on the table? Is it a good idea to lower the stakes for the nervous system? And when and why? When and how is that the case? So one at a time, first on welcoming something that would overwhelm the nervous system. This is super important and there’s a couple different things that I think lay out how to work with this. The first is this idea of window of tolerance, which is especially big in things like somatic therapy and in related fields. And the idea is that you don’t ever want to be playing with your attention and emotion that gets you to a point of dysregulation. Either hyperarousal, which might look like a proper panic attack, or hypoarousal, which might be a numbness or a strong dissociation. When you’re working with something like Grade A trauma, folks will have these reactions sort of associated with these stimuli. And very quickly, if you’re playing with Grade A trauma, you can end up in that kind of dysregulated place. And always the top priority is to stay inside your window of tolerance because if you get outside your window of tolerance, you can in fact sort of exacerbate and make things worse. You can retraumatize yourself. It can also be the case that you’re gonna inhibit your learning, not enhance your learning. So part of playing this game comes with figuring out where your guardrails are and learning how to not go blowing past your guardrails. And there’s ways to do that. There’s grounding and orientation exercises. There’s sort of titration, there’s in fact pay less attention to the body, pay more attention to sort of the external environment depending on where are some of the more kind of triggering and charged cues.

Dan Shipper

And maybe also at least from my experience, if you are dealing with actual, clinically relevant, really tough mental stuff, it’s probably better to deal with that before you start playing around. And there are ways usually to deal with it, to get to a place where you’re feeling, you’re obviously gonna feel your full range of emotions, but you’re not, for me, I was stuck in everything is fucking horrible all the time and I needed to deal with that before I could do any of this.

Stephen Zerfas

Totally. Absolutely. And I know you’ve written, I think inspiringly and elegantly about your journeys with OCD and the fact that when you finally got the right medication at the right time, that really created the base on which you could then experiment and explore with other things. Super important. There’s another piece of this puzzle about the welcoming thing that I think gets lost. And that is that one very simple framework by which to think about this whole game around what you might call nervous system fluency, or maybe I don’t wanna make such a broad claim around nervous system fluency, but certainly going down the meditation journey, one thing you can think about is this idea of memory reconsolidation and that being an orienting framework for a lot of what we’re doing. The idea of memory reconsolidation is really simple. It’s that if you co-activate a prior sort of negative emotional charge associated with a given stimuli and you co-activate a commensurate sense of safety, compassion, connection at the same time, that the two can kind of wash over each other and then the default charge associated with that stimulus can be rewritten and angled more towards something like the safety or the openness or the conductivity kind of thing. So you have two things here. You wanna reactivate the emotional charge, assuming you’re inside your window of tolerance. You wanna reactivate the challenging emotional charge or feel it live and co-activate a commensurate level of safety, compassion, connection, love, whatever. If you do these two things, you can reset the emotional default. Knowing that you can reset your emotional defaults is, in my mind, one of the most underappreciated secrets in the world. That developing this skill of, on a per stimulus basis, resetting your emotional defaults means you have root permissions to hack on your personality. What is your personality? It’s have a big bag of stimuli response patterns. And so that thing that has to do with what your mom says to you or your relationship to that difficult thing at work, it turns out that you can, if you can get yourself into the right state and you can co-activate these two things, you can change the defaults and make yourself lighter of being and more aligned with your values over time. I think that’s a huge deal, and basically what we’re doing when we’re doing this emotional conductivity stuff in meditation and leaning into, I like to use this analogy of an actor crying on stage, an actor leaning into an open-hearted feeling. We’re learning, for many folks, the challenging part of memory reconsolidation is having access to the commensurate safety, love, or connection to co-activate along with their challenging stuff. A lot of people can get into anxiety loops, no problem. They got that on tap. You can activate anxiety. Not a widespread issue in the world today. But co-activating a sense of safety, love, connection at the same time, to rewrite your emotional defaults to be something that might be more aligned with how you aspire to act is a really big deal. And so that’s basically the game we’re playing. I think there’s other ways of doing this. You can argue that this is actually what psychedelics are doing. This is the mechanism by which they work, is you’re getting yourself into a malleable state. You’re pulling up a schema, but because of the set and setting and dynamic, you’re co-activating and doing memory reconsolidation. You can also do this in interpersonal dynamics with communities that are maybe sharing emotions or vulnerably. So one of the things that’s so wonderful about connecting with loved ones, and meditation gives you a self-sufficient and very fine-tuned and precise way of playing this game. And this is one of the ways you can shape your personality over time.

(00:50:00)

Dan Shipper

I think that’s totally true. I will say another pitfall that that brings up for me, because what I think where I took that as a younger man is cool. I don’t actually have to make some of the hard decisions that I probably need to make and I can just deal with it internally so that I don’t have to have any uncomfortable conversations or make big changes in my life to fix things that are wrong because I could just be blissful all the time. That’s cool. Let’s just do that. And I like where you’re going with this. And I have actually found that to properly do this, to properly express love to yourself and express love to other people, your actions and your words need to be aligned. Because otherwise you’re not gonna believe yourself. And if you are acting in a way that is not loving towards yourself by putting yourself into lots of situations that you probably shouldn’t be in or hiding your emotions from other people and all that kind of stuff. If you’re doing all that and you’re saying, I love you to yourself, not gonna work. Not gonna work. You have to, this sort of love all the way down thing has to also go love all the way up. So at the grossest level of your actions, they have to kind of match the more subtle things that you’re doing too, in order to sort of fully unlock this. And it’s not a shortcut to just have everything in your life be horrible and you just feel good despite all of that. Sometimes you actually have to make real hard decisions for yourself.

Stephen Zerfas

Totally. Totally. And I think this is getting at the sort of second thing that you brought up earlier, which is is this a good idea? Is it a good idea to lower the stakes? Do you actually end up sort of just numbing yourself to your problems or not addressing the things that matter most to you? And that in my mind, is a thoughtful and well-meaning critique, but as it turns out, the way the mechanisms work, it doesn’t work that way. If you were to, yeah, let’s say not hold a boundary with a loved one, abandon yourself and you’re getting sort of walked over in a relationship or something. And then you go up to your room and you spend an hour doing the whole Jhana game and you’re like, I love myself. There you may soften the edges around some things that are sort of internally inconsistent and yet you’re still abandoning yourself. So you’re not loving yourself, it’s not gonna work. The mechanism isn’t gonna go all the way through. And this is more of an interpersonal sort of personal hypothetical. Same thing is true in the professional world. If you’re setting goals for the company or if you have intuition that you really should be going in the other way, or you’re thinking about taking the money from the investors. But there’s something deep within you that you haven’t yet sort of figured out, has already pattern matched it, that’s dangerous. You don’t wanna do that. Now’s not the time to take money. Or actually, I really need the growth capital because we need to be launching this rocketship now. Or not moving fast enough. Those are going to be embedded in the system and you’re not gonna be able to gloss past them into some sort of happy bliss outland. It’s going to require reckoning with those seriously. And so one of the other, one of the ways in which I think maybe the three biggest ways that I think this game really begins to pay dividends in action, has to do with relationships, with building habits, and with improving decision making. Because the system ends up, I think, being more aligned across the three.

Dan Shipper

I think we’ve spent enough time on some of the here be dragons warnings. Let’s go into some of the, you’ve talked about personality hacking. What are some of the ways that you have changed as a result of this practice?

Stephen Zerfas

Yeah. That’s a great question. So I’m thinking of a couple stories to sort of capture. One that was really big a little over a year ago in the spring of last year was I was really missing how much fear I had about the, we were at this point, so we started as a neurotech company. We had been collecting a bunch of data.

Dan Shipper

You started as a—sorry.

Stephen Zerfas

As a neurotech company. And we were collecting a bunch of data to see if we could map the sort of bio signals that would be needed to create better feedback loops for novices. And we needed to start running retreats in order to collect more data for R&D. And when we started running retreats, that’s when they kind of took off on us and we realized we could build a school rather than a lab. And then that school could be converted into a lab over time. And it would have a bunch of benefits. You know, we would be default alive. We would start a movement, we would get more shots on goal. Each shot on goal would be better than the last. And so this retreat pipeline we spun up, we see as the first step of something much bigger, a launchpad into something that works more effectively and for more people. We had, we were some months into running our retreats and I’m still terrified on these retreats. I’m a grown man basically repeating and sometimes crying in front of a group of people about may all beings be happy. How fucking out of touch am I? And these are tech executives. We’ve had co-founders of some of the world’s biggest companies and fastest growing companies come on these retreats. These are all people who I admire in person and on paper, and I’m making a fool of myself. And then on top of that, if I make a fool of myself, it’s one thing. And then if I don’t show them the thing that I find so valuable by the end of the week, it’s just, there was so much fear there. I was blind to this fear and I was actively, because of mind blindness. We would have these team meetings and we would have our spreadsheets and we’d have behind the scenes, okay, who’s this person? What are the top three hypotheses for what they need fixed, for what support they need? What have we done so far? What have we learned? In my mind there’s just these kind of perennial questions that we’re just asking for everybody rapid fire in this meeting. And I’m getting faster and faster and tighter and tighter in my voice. And now anybody who’s working with me is starting to get afraid.

Dan Shipper

You’re doing that. You’re doing that now. You are, you’re getting faster not even talking about it.

Stephen Zerfas

Exactly. I’m stepping back into the memory and you can, we need some reconsolidation right now. I can do some of that. So, but when I finally, and of course as this is happening, it’s way harder to meditate and I’m playing the game. This is one of the reasons why meditation is such good practice with day-to-day life is stuff comes up in day-to-day life. You see it in your meditation practice, you’re like, I don’t, what the hell is going on here. I can’t relax, I can’t open up. There’s now a game to be played. This is the real opportunity. I’m leveling up in the video game, so to speak. And finally I, through a few different things, I was like, oh my God, I’m terrified. Come here, terrified Stephen. Come here. I will not leave you. And I had, I’m sure I had a little bit of a cry and suddenly could retroactively see all these places I was creating unnecessary friction with the team and that was certainly hurting our performance and our ability to serve students. And so from there I was able to do an apology that would’ve been difficult for me a few days before to different team members and run the team meetings in a much more effective way and create a culture that would be much more, culture eats strategy for breakfast would not have been possible if I remained unaware and if I wasn’t able to turn towards it instead of away from it.

Dan Shipper

I feel that deeply. I think the way that it has manifested for me is first of all as someone coming from a very people pleaser type background. I think you can misinterpret a lot of dharma wisdom as, maybe we can say the dharma wisdom, which is true of a lot of religions is treat others as you would like to be treated. And for people pleasers, that’s natural. You just do that automatically. And, but to the expense of yourself, which ironically is not actually helpful for other people and it’s not helpful for you. And so I had to sort of flip that into the people pleaser rule, which is treat yourself as you would treat others. I like that. And I think once you start to realize that this is a very helpful practice for actually being like, okay, what is actually loving for myself right now? And once you have that base where you actually start to like or love yourself, you start, at least for me, I started to notice all of these things about myself that I couldn’t see before because it would be too scary that get in the way of your relationships, make you make bad decisions. Like a really simple example for me would be, oh wow. This person, I’m actually pretty jealous of them and I would never have been able to say that before. I would’ve wrapped it in all these other reasons why I didn’t like them.

(01:00:00)

Stephen Zerfas

Yeah, because it was too scary to imagine that you would be jealous. And that would mean you’re a bad person or flawed in some way or something. Exactly.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. Exactly. And it makes such a difference to be like, oh, I’m jealous. And if you have a close enough relationship with that person to be like, sometimes I get jealous in these situations and that’s why I act this way. And it just makes everything so much better.

Stephen Zerfas

So much freedom. So much freedom. It’s like, yeah, both internally and then when you have that kind of live interpersonal apology.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. I was surprised how much of my personality wraps around or wrapped around trying to feel loved. And when you can feel loved, just because you are you and you just go home and meditate and you’re like, oh, I feel pretty loved right now. It releases a lot of stuff that you thought was your personality, but it was really just you trying to feel loved for whatever reason. And that is also, I think a super important benefit of this practice for me.

Stephen Zerfas

Hugely important. It saves a bunch of energy. It prevents a bunch of unhelpful patterns or repeated behaviors, addictions effectively. I think one of the things I was speculating about the other day is in systems thinking you can show your stocks and flows and then if you change the arrival of certain information, you can move a system from that. Donella Meadows has got this great chapter in her book about thinking in systems. And if you change the info flows, you can sort of shift the system into a new equilibrium where there’s a bunch of oscillating instead of a sort of static equilibrium. And I was musing about how if you don’t sort of feel the feeling that you’re avoiding, you can get yourself on these oscillating loops where you are. I think procrastination is the obvious one that comes to mind. Time management is pain management sort of thing. You’re avoiding doing something, you’re avoiding doing something, so then you go do it really quick, which makes it more likely you’re gonna fail and then you fail, so then you avoid doing it again. And these play out constantly in relationship dynamics. My mom does that one thing, so then