Tepoztlán
2026
An eight-week phenomenology intensive in the mountains of Tepoztlán, combining jhana meditation, meditation research, instrument building, and a festival finale.
- Duration 8 weeks · May 4 – Jun 28
- Location Tepoztlán, Morelos, Mexico
- Format Residential · rotating cohort of 8–15
- Access Invite only · please apply below
Why Tepoztlán
HEART (High Energy Awareness Research Team) retreats are the most productive and cohesive weeks of QRI’s year. 2026 we are running the same format for eight.
QRI is heading back to Mexico for another HEART retreat. We ran pilots in Brazil and Canada in 2023, and a shorter Tepoztlán workshop in 2024 where the Oscilleditor and the Tactile Visualizer first took shape. 2026 is longer, more instrumented, and tighter on coordination. The throughline from earlier retreats to what we’re now building is sketched in State of the Qualia, Fall 2020 and the 2026 Fundraiser overview.
What we’re doing
Intentionally designed to make the most of high-energy experiences.
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Tuning the body
Fixed sleep · fixed meals · long walks · yoga/meditation/dancing habits
For Explorers -
Drafting what we know
Paper backlog · data analyses · posts · morning group sits · evening group sits
For Researchers -
Building the instruments
Biofeedback rigs · oscilleditor · meditation tools · pre-jhana baselines
For Engineers & Mathematicians -
Jhana retreat
Noble Silence · long sits 2–3/day · J1–J8 self-report · during-session tracking · biometrics
For Meditators -
Mapping the jhanas
Data aggregation · jhana-stage classifier · pre-meditation baselines
For Phenomenologists -
Meditation Week
Hosted at Tandava Retreats · pre-session baselines · during-session tracking · integration sits · biometrics
For Psychonauts -
Modeling awakening
Jhana vs meditation comparison · extended 2-hour sits · control baselines · coupling-kernel fitting · writing · diagramming
For Scientists -
Festival of Phenomenological Optics
Oscilleditor on the rocks · VR gallery of jhanas · EEG-to-haptic · odorant synthesis · local artist collabs · poster session · Tepoztlán Centro day
For Artists & Designers
What we’re building
Two of the projects we’ll be conducting on the ground. You don’t have to attend to help out.
Jhana Visualization Contest
Open call for renderings, simulations, and instruments that capture the phenomenology of the jhanas. Submissions will be judged during the silent retreat week by practitioners actively holding the states.
Oscilleditor
A grid of Kuramoto oscillators sitting on top of a photo, where each pixel wants to synchronize or anti-synchronize with its neighbors. Combined with pattern recognition and drifting effects, it lets users replicate the kinds of textures, tracers, and symmetries that show up in altered states.
Where we’ll be
Food, housing, and health, the basics.
Houses
Participants are distributed across a small cluster of houses in Tepoztlán. A core residence for the full-retreat cohort, a second for rotating shorter stays, and additional capacity added during peak weeks. Single rooms are available.
Food
A local chef cooks two meals a day at the Villa Cristina kitchen, breakfast around 8 and a main meal in the late afternoon. Most meals are vegetarian, with vegan, gluten-free, and allium-free options. During the silent retreat a quieter cook takes over with simpler meals so Noble Silence stays unbroken. Meditation Week shifts to lighter meals with no alcohol all week.
Health
A light COVID protocol protects the silent and Meditation Weeks. Arrivals near those dates quarantine briefly and test before joining. Mornings are reserved for walks and the Tepozteco climb.
Research focus
The retreat is built around one question. What is the computational medium of the brain? Our working model is that it looks like a non-linear optical computer running on a liquid crystal substrate, and that coupling kernels shape how attention and energy propagate across the field of experience. The jhana weeks and the Meditation week come at the question from two directions.
On the jhana side, we want to see what happens to the medium as it gets progressively smoother. In our model, the jhanas are a staircase of phase transitions in which the field loses geometric frustration in stages. Long sits, during-session tracking, and the Oscilleditor run together during Noble Silence so we can fit coupling-kernel parameters to each stage, not only to post-hoc trip reports.
On the meditation side, the focus is long-term valence enhancement. meditation tends to unblock the flow of energy across the field, loosening layers of tension the nervous system wasn't aware it was holding. The experiences we care most about are the ones where the field becomes isotropic and the last remnants of oscillation in the visual field drop away. These are give-aways of the underlying medium. Comparing the two modes of smoothing, the jhanic staircase and the isotropic collapse, is where we expect the real structure to show up.
The primary deliverable is a paper on coupling kernels, extending preliminary data we already have with what we gather on the ground. Secondary deliverables are a jhana-stage classifier, festival-ready Oscilleditor replays of the eight weeks, and the entries submitted to the Jhana Visualization Contest.
For deeper context, see QRI Research Revealed (2026 Fundraiser).
The barrier to progress in consciousness research isn’t money or hardware. It’s coordination.
Getting the right physicists, phenomenologists, mathematicians, and artists into the same room long enough for insights to compound. QRI retreats collapse that coordination cost, turning what would normally take years into weeks of high-energy work.
The next generation of science and technology will be ushered into existence by a theory of consciousness that works. Help build it.