Superwellbeing

Jhourney: Teaches jhānas, meditative states of intense joy and contentment. They run retreats and do research to make jhānas learnable in weeks rather than years.

Nick Cammarata: A researcher who writes about meditation, jhānas and how much better ordinary life can feel once craving loosens. Collected posts on jhāna.

Jonny Miller: Runs Nervous System Mastery and wrote How to Unclench. His idea is that much suffering comes from clenching, meaning physically and mentally bracing against what we feel. He teaches how to notice that and stop doing it.

Plus3Happiness: Michael Stroe teaches a secular approach to the Buddhist fetters. He describes them as assumptions we put on top of experience, including the sense of being a separate self and the need to push away unpleasant feelings. He talks a lot about dropping reactivity, especially craving and aversion, and how that changes ordinary life. This interview explains his approach.

Roger Thisdell: A meditation teacher and QRI advisor who studies experience very closely: how sensations, thoughts and the sense of being someone fit together. He describes awakening in terms of changes to that structure, including losing the sense of a separate observer. His work on bodily sensation and vision explores how what we feel shapes what we see. He also offers guided meditations.

Qualia Research Institute: A nonprofit trying to build a science of consciousness precise enough to explain why experiences feel good or bad. One of their hypotheses is that this relates to symmetry in the structure of experience. They combine mathematical models with detailed reports from meditation and psychedelics. Their HEART retreats study jhānas and psychedelic states, including attempts to recreate aspects of them visually so people can compare what they experience.

Michael Edward Johnson: Proposed “vasocomputation,” the idea that smooth muscle around blood vessels takes part in how the brain processes things, which might explain clinging and tension. It’s a hypothesis, but it’s one of the few concrete guesses about what physically happens when you “unclench.”

SEMA Lab / focused ultrasound: At the University of Arizona, Jay Sanguinetti and Shinzen Young’s lab studies whether transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) can make meditation easier to learn. It uses sound waves to temporarily change activity in targeted brain regions, including parts involved in self-related thought. They’re testing whether combining it with meditation can help people develop skills like equanimity. The research is still early.

Nudge: Building ultrasound devices that can reach deep brain regions without surgery. Their initial studies focus on chronic pain and substance use disorder. Longer term, they want to make devices people could use in everyday life to improve things like mood, focus and memory. That’s the ambition; they’re still developing and testing the technology.

Sasha Putilin: Writes Psychotechnology, about meditation, psychedelics, neuroscience and neurotech. His essay Zen and the art of speedrunning enlightenment asks whether we can understand meditation well enough to find faster, more reliable ways through it. He also writes about his own practice, including learning to relax while staying fully awake with Roger Thisdell, and how that might relate to unclenching.