Tepoztlán
2026
Eight weeks in Tepoztlán. A jhana retreat, a meditation week, a couple weeks building gear, and an open week at the end.
Why Tepoztlán
QRI ran HEART pilots in Brazil and Canada in 2023, then a Tepoztlán workshop in June 2024 where the Oscilleditor and Tactile Visualizer first took shape. The 2026 retreat is longer, with more gear, more people, and tighter logistics. You can read the longer arc in the 2026 Fundraiser overview.
About 20 people pass through over the eight weeks. Eight stay the whole stretch, others cycle in for specific weeks. Andrés Gómez Emilsson runs the program, an experienced Unified Mindfulness teacher facilitates the silent jhana retreat, and a rotating mix of phenomenologists, instrument-builders, and researchers fills out the rest.
What we’re doing
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Tuning the body
Fixed sleep · fixed meals · long walks · yoga, meditation, dancing habits · baseline biometric logging
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Drafting what we know
Paper backlog · data analyses · posts · morning group sits · evening group sits
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Building the instruments
Biofeedback rigs · oscilleditor · meditation tools · pre-jhana baselines
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Formless Jhana retreat
Noble Silence · long sits 2–3/day · J1–J8 self-report · during-session tracking · biometrics · facilitated by a Unified Mindfulness teacher (~2.5 years monastic training)
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Mapping the jhanas
Data aggregation · jhana-stage classifier · pre-meditation baselines
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Meditation week
Hosted at Tandava Retreats · pre-session baselines · during-session tracking · integration sits · biometrics
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Modeling awakening
Jhana vs meditation comparison · extended 2-hour sits · control baselines · coupling-kernel fitting · writing · diagramming
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Public festival week
Oscilleditor projected on the Tepozteco rocks · VR gallery of formless jhanas · EEG-to-haptic via Sensoria · odorant synthesis · CDMX and Tepoz artist collabs · poster session · public day in Tepoztlán Centro
What we’re building
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 (extended context in QRI Research Revealed, 2026 Fundraiser). The jhana weeks and the Meditation week come at the question from two directions.
On the jhana side, we want to see what changes in the medium as it gets smoother. In our model, the jhanas are a staircase of phase transitions where the field loses geometric frustration in stages. During Noble Silence we run long sits with biometric tracking and the Oscilleditor open, so we can fit coupling-kernel parameters to each jhana stage, not just to trip reports written afterward.
On the meditation side, we want to raise the floor of valence over time. Meditation tends to let energy move more freely across the field, loosening tension the nervous system was holding without registering it. The experiences we care most about are the ones where the field becomes isotropic and the last bits of oscillation in the visual field drop away. Those moments are tells about the underlying medium. Comparing the two smoothings (the jhanic staircase and the isotropic collapse) is where we expect the real structure to show up.
The main thing we want to ship is a paper on coupling kernels, building on data we already have with measurements from the retreat. Also a jhana-stage classifier, Oscilleditor replays of the eight weeks ready for the festival, and the Jhana Visualization Contest entries.
For scorpions, see the field guide.
This is a particle accelerator of the mind where we explore what happens to internal representations at different levels of energy.
HEART retreats get both under one roof for eight weeks. By the end, what people described shows up in code and measurement.
QRI fully funds eight participants’ attendance this retreat. Others self-fund or are partly supported. Interested in future HEART retreats? Write hello@qri.org.