A year after "achieving" deep okayness

Aug 15, 2025

Last year in June, I dropped the default behavior of resisting “negative” emotions. I posted at the top [1], declaring that I no longer suffered. It’s been over a year since then, and that original statement wasn’t 100% accurate. More like 97%.

Since last June, there’s been a handful of emotional and a couple physical experiences that have caused me to suffer. A ten hour tattoo session, McDonalds binge that triggered stomach pain and returning cancer fear, indoor olympics performance issue caused much shame and disappointment, intense waves of prolonged fear caused by airplane turbulence [2], and a few other periods I’m sure happened but I didn’t log. So about ten or less days where I suffered. 355/365 days, or 97% of the rest of the year I didn’t suffer.

I mean suffering with a capital S. What remained after that shift in June didn’t feel like I was Suffering. What remained included occasional slight, subtler meh-ness here and there, slight unsatisfactoriness. Calling those “suffering” feels inaccurate, like it trivializes the level of suck I felt when experiencing the components I bundled up in what I called “negative” emotions in the past. And those subtler ouchies that prevent 100 proof peace have dissolved more and more in the momentum gained from that before-after event last June.

Why have some moments still caused suffering? Maybe there’s experiences that are rare and trigger dusty conditioning which hasn’t been rewritten yet, where the logic behind resistance to emotional experience still lingers. Some patterns of my experience support that idea.

Or perhaps certain levels of combined duration and intensity of “negative” emotions still cause suffering, that the June shift just raised the capacity much higher but not all the way to account for the full range of what god’s gonna gift me. Some patterns of my experience support that idea, but maybe it’s also a characteristic of the former, where high levels of both duration and intensity of “negative” emotion trigger not-updated code.

I didn’t need off-retreat deterministic access to higher jhanas or multiple cessations or 35 noticings per second to stop resisting emotions, just a sporadic practice of looking in direct experience in specific ways (for like four months). But deterministic access to the second jhana, and the emotional work needed to get high without drugs, certainly helped weaken resistance to emotions.

It’s exciting that the jhanas are more widely known, even if still much an open secret outside meditation/tech twitter. And that it’s possible to nix the default assumptions causing emotional resistance using seemingly simple inquiry practices, or most suffering, is an even bigger open secret.

There’s a handful of other folks who publicly share that they've reproduced the results I’m talking about using the same practices, and I hope lots more do so. The shift last June has been the biggest upgrade to my wellbeing, but I’m not a special person who did something exceedingly hard. You can drop emotional resistance too, and there can be lots of ease and enjoyment along the way.

It took me a long time to experience my first jhana, and now most people learn in a week via Jhourney [3]. I hope a similar quickening happens with these inquiry practices.

I don’t know if how I feel is permanent, but over a year is great, and I don’t know why it’d stop being this way anytime soon. I’d love to help others drop default resistance to emotion using jhanas and inquiry. I’m doing more 1:1 calls with folks when I’m not working Jhourney retreats. See here [4]

[1]