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Buddhist Geeks

Vince Fakhoury Horn

Evolving Dharma in the Age of the Network

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  • October 29 · 51 min

    No One Has Ever Got Jhāna

    Recorded on the first evening of a 2026 Pragmatic Dharma meditation retreat, this dharma talk from Brian Newman offers a wide-ranging exploration of jhāna practice, the Pa-Auk tradition, the jhānic factors, and the role of faith in concentration meditation, grounding listeners in both historical context and practical instruction. If you’re inspired by this dharma talk, consider joining us for the real thing in Boone, North Carolina. 💬 Transcript Brian Newman: This talk tonight is called No One Has Ever Got Jhāna. I’m not sure if that’s the right way to start. If we could get jhāna, that would imply that there’s an agent doing the getting, and then if we could get it, it would be an object that could be gotten—stored, saved, put in a safe, buried in the ground, passed to my friends. But none of that is true, and that would mean there’s this agent going out and acquiring things. Acquiring objects—basic Dharma theory just says that’s completely invalid right from the get-go. And if jhāna could be gotten, Vince and I would have called this retreat How to Get Jhāna. We would have had like four times the number of people in here. It would be better sales and marketing to say we’re going to teach you how to get jhāna. Which kind of puts us at the heart of the paradox: even though we can’t get it, it does happen. And for at least 2,500 years of written history, we know that human beings have been experiencing these states. We’re pretty sure it predates written history—way, way, way back. Because when the Buddha, even before he was the Buddha, went out into the world, that was the first practice he found. It was probably the predominant practice of the time. And as many of you have heard, the end times for the Dharma will come when people don’t practice jhāna anymore—it’s said that. So we’re doing our best here to keep the Dharma going, the wheel turning. So anything that’s been around for 2,500 years and the book still exists is probably pretty good stuff. Until fairly recently, there were still Bibles in most hotels or motels across America. A book that’s been around for a really long time—and it’s still today in the bedside table of a hotel in Asia, actually. They have suttas sometimes in the hotels. You open up the bedside table and find a book of suttas. Really wonderful. So we can’t get it. It doesn’t seem we can create it, but maybe we can create the causes and conditions that allow it to arise. People have been experiencing it for 2,500 years, and this paradox points us toward faith. Faith is really interesting. It’s the exact opposite of one of the five hindrances: skeptical doubt. Christian traditions and other wisdom traditions talk a lot about faith. I don’t know that we talk about faith so much in Buddhist traditions, in Dharma. Traditionally, the faith required for a Dharma practitioner is faith in the teachings, faith in the ancient tradition itself, faith in the teacher, and faith in oneself—that you can actually do this practice. I spoke a little bit about this earlier: this idea that human society has advanced over the past 2,500 years in every single way possible, except the ability to get jhāna, and that the people who were in caves 2,500 years ago would be better at that than us. That seems to me to be a cognitive error. They were Buddhist geeks hanging out with their friends, talking about these rarefied concentration states. They did exactly what we would be doing today, or exactly what we did when we were talking earlier. I think they were exactly like us. They smelled like us. They went to the bathroom like us. They ate similar food. They had the same IQ. Of course we can do what they did—and probably do it better, since human society has progressed. So faith is to do something and not have it work, but believe that it’s going to work eventually if you keep doing it. The faith that’s not talked about very often is faith in the meditation object itself. There are forty concentration objects. People have been using their breath to get concentrated for millennia. This object works. It’s been validated. We all have teachers; we all know people who have made great progress with this object. This idea of doing something—I compare it to endurance sports—where there are long, long periods of nothing happening, and then something happens. There’s a saying people quote: “Gradually, then suddenly.” You’ve probably heard that. It’s kind of a meme these days. That’s actually from Hemingway, in regard to bankruptcy. Someone asks, “How did he go bankrupt?” “Well, gradually, then suddenly.” Jhāna is kind of like that. We have experience of this. It’s not like this is the only thing in our lives that requires a bunch of time to get some sort of benefit. What about learning a foreign language? There are so many bilingual people in this room—maybe trilingual. I learned a foreign language. It took forever. I couldn’t understand anything with my homestay family in Japan when I was 18. And then suddenly, around month eight, I could understand everything. It seemed to happen overnight—gradually, then suddenly. How about deep psychotherapy, really doing some work? I probably didn’t get fixed in three weeks—maybe three years. A typical Jungian analysis would take seven years. I don’t know—ten years. Who can play a musical instrument? How long did that take? How long did your parents suffer until you figured it out? They were so patient. How about raising kids? That takes eighteen years, and you still don’t know if you did it right. How about compound interest? Your IRA looks like shit for ten years, and then suddenly you’re like, “Whoa, what happened?” So faith is where we land when we are in despair, but we’re not going to give up. There’s a quote from Thomas Moore. Thomas Moore is a depth psychologist in the tradition of James Hillman. He has a book called Care of the Soul. It’s a really wonderful book. I recommend it to everybody—related, but unrelated, to the Dharma. The subtitle is A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life. He has a quote about faith: “We have to arrive at that difficult point where we don’t know what is going on or what we can do. That precise point is an opening to true faith.” Just when it’s at its worst, as they say, there are no atheists in foxholes. When you’re being bombed, you’ll pray to God, even if you said you were a non-believer. I want to tell a little story about faith for me, related to jhāna practice. I wanted to learn jhāna, and I didn’t know where to go. It wasn’t like now, where there are all these jhāna things going on. From what I could gather, there was Shaila Catherine, who had been at Pa-Auk. I wanted to do the Pa-Auk tradition. Shaila Catherine was teaching, but not really—she was doing wellness retreats in New Mexico. Then there were Tina and Stephen Snyder and Lee Brasington. Lee wasn’t Pa-Auk, so I wasn’t as interested in that. After I read his book, I found Stephen and Tina. They had a retreat, and I wanted to go in hot. I wanted to go in warm. So I reached out and signed up for the retreat, and I asked if I could speak to them before the retreat. Tina agreed to talk to me. We got on a call, did introductions, and I asked, “Can you give me some advice on how to prepare for this retreat? What would you suggest I do?” She was very explicit, and I think she was happy to have that question. She said, “Here’s what you’re going to do. We have about two months. I need you to get off all media. No TV, no radio, no podcasts, definitely no news. No magazines, no newspapers. Dharma books are okay.” She asked how long I was practicing. I said maybe an hour a day. She said, “Start adding incrementally. By the time I meet you, I want you to be able to sit for two hours at a time.” That felt like a high bar. And keep in mind, I didn’t have a jhāna practice. I’d never had a jhāna teacher. I’d read Lee Brasington’s book and was finding piti in my hands—the very low end of practice. But I had faith. She seemed realized. She’d been val… Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • October 14 · 14 min

    Three Ways to Prepare a Dharma Talk

    Vince Fakhoury Horn lays out three ways to prepare a dharma talk for teachers-in-training, exploring how detailed notes can polish a talk into dead words, why speaking with no preparation depends on being prepared not to be prepared, and whether minimal preparation is really the middle way between the previous two, or just the approach he happens to prefer. If you find this helpful, consider our year-long meditation teacher training. 💬 Transcript Vince: The dharma talk. It’s a public talk in a way, but it’s a unique kind of public talk, because you’re talking about something of such deep importance and intimacy, and yet something that can be easily misunderstood or misconstrued. So there’s some need to be precise at times in the dharma talk, right, to say things in a way that are easily understood and not easily misconstrued. And at the same time, there’s, I think, a recognition, right, as dharma students, that sometimes, like after you’ve heard the same story 10,000 times from your favorite teacher, or whatever, it starts to sound kind of like dull, or like it lacks the same kind of aliveness that it used to have. Part of the reason could be because it is actually in fact dull and just kind of like old hat and rehearsed to death. And so as a dharma teacher, we want to talk in a way that’s alive and fresh and relevant to the moment and to who we’re speaking with, that is enacting that ideal of skillful means that’s so important here in the Second Turning. How do we do that in reality? And here I want to present a model of preparation for the dharma talk in which there are three positions that I’ll throw out there. One is the detailed preparation approach. This is the position in which you spend a good amount of time preparing your dharma talk. And you get what’s basically like a close to script level detail. You almost could read the dharma talk from your notes. It’s that detailed. It may not be completely script, but it’s close enough that you can gather all of the relevant information directly from your notes. And it has a very clear and planned out structure, and logical flow from one thing to another, perhaps building on a point, or presenting a list and going very methodically from one point to another subpoint of the list, the overall list you’re teaching, or whatever it might be. There’s some very clear and planned out structure. So that’s the detailed preparation. On the other end, the other side here is no preparation. So this is where you do little to no upfront preparation, aside from trusting your practice and trusting all the preparation you’ve already done. You’re really responding to the moment as it’s arising and changing, who’s present. Maybe you have kind of a theme or title to work with, or maybe you’re just responding to questions in the moment. Maybe there’s some very minimal structure, but there’s within that a lot of formlessness in terms of your preparation. So that’s the no-prep dharma talk. And then if you imagine these as two existing on a spectrum, right? Detailed preparation, no preparation. Then I want to present an apex position here called minimal preparation. In the minimal preparation mode, there is a core structure, that you can see an overall flow or logic to the talk, but there are as few bullet points needed as possible to describe and detail out the subject matter that you’re getting into. In fact, within minimal preparation notes, for me, I wouldn’t expect to see any quotes. I would have a separate page, maybe just one page for quotes, if I have stuff I want to share that I can’t, you know, remember all the specifics from. But within my actual just minimal prep thing, it’s just bullet points, some basic subject headlines and some basic points. Just something to remind me of what it is I’m talking about. And then within that minimal structure, there’s a lot of space for improvisation and for flow. So I want to talk about each of these a little bit more, and the relative upsides and downsides, and then just open it up for conversation. So in terms of the detailed preparation mode, this is kind of how I started teaching, in which you spend a lot of time, painstaking effort, in getting your presentation prepared. And so there’s a lot of upside to this. You have a lot of control over what you end up saying. And if you get good at using these detailed notes, you’re not going to make a lot of flubs, verbally, linguistically. You’re not going to sound like you’re all over the place. It’ll actually sound pretty logical, and it’ll be easier to follow, more cognitively coherent. There’s a way in which over time, you’re constantly editing your notes from dharma talk to dharma talk. So you give the same dharma talk over and over again, and you kind of get to perfect it. That’s one thing I really noticed at IMS and Spirit Rock. The Insight Meditation tradition teachers is like, some of them had these dharma talks that they’d been perfecting for decades, and like, they were brilliant. Like, they were like a really well-performed comedy act that had been refined to the nth degree. And the only reason it would be no longer relevant anymore is it just has been around long enough that culture changes and times change. You know, in terms of the form of it, it’s perfect, perfect as you can get for the relative world. But there are downsides to this approach, and I’m sure you’re aware of at least some of them just thinking about them now, right? I mean, for one thing, it’s hard to change that much. You know, you could change things, but if you change things a lot, it’s a lot of work. So this kind of form of really detailed notes are kind of hard to adapt. They can be a little rigid. Can be hard to edit, since everything is so detailed and refers to everything else. You know, if you change one thing, you have to change five, 10 other things. Whereas with, you know, the minimal preparation approach, for instance, you might just change one bullet point, and then over here, another bullet point. Because of the increased detail, there’s more maintenance to maintain the style of notes. The other thing, I think the main downside with these kind of notes, is if we get disconnected from the deeper spirit of what we’re saying and we start to just sound rehearsed, then this comes across as—in the Zen tradition, they call this dead words. We start sounding like we’re just saying some dead words. And I shared this experience with many of you before, but I had the ultimate detailed-note, dead-word teaching experience with Kenneth Folk one day on retreat, when I was teaching on Dongshan’s Five Ranks. And it was so sad to me too, because I had taught on this in a previous retreat, and had really been alive and very much live words. And so because I was trying to look good in front of my teacher and be, you know, I guess like, validated, I ended up making the mistake of just too much reliance on the words, and got lost in words. And I think that’s what can happen. We get lost in these kind of concepts, and we’re just throwing around words and trying to make this beautiful word salad. And it’s like, no, it’s a salad. It’s a word salad. There’s something missing underneath it. You know, there’s some sustenance and some substance that’s lacking. So that’s the dead word challenge. Now, no preparation can respond to that challenge, right? If you come in without any preparation, if you come in and you’re just like, “Okay, here we go. Uh, what’s the topic? What’s the question? Go.” Then there is this potential for more flow and more spontaneity. And if you really have done some training, and you’ve learned some stuff, and you have access to it, then it’ll come—at least some of it will. And so you can kind of trust that these words will be alive. I have some notes here. I’m using the minimal preparation method for this presentation. Here, the upside of the no preparation is you can learn how to trust your intuitive wisdom. You can start to kind of get a sense for what yo… Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • October 9 · 8 min

    What are Buddhist Wisdom Chords?

    Vince Fakhoury Horn introduces the Buddhist Wisdom Chords, which is both a teaching model, and a live training in the Pragmatic Dharma app, that looks at each Buddhist lineage as a chord made up of seven meditative notes, played across the Four Turnings of Buddhism’s evolution, looking at what each tradition emphasizes, what it leaves out, and why being able to strum a simple chord is not the same as playing a beautiful piece of music. 💬 Transcript Vince Horn: Okay, I want to give you a little introduction to the Buddhist Wisdom Chords. This is both a schema and model that I’m presenting to help understand the practice orientations of different Buddhist wisdom traditions, presented within a larger framework of the Four Turnings, which is a evolutionary framework for understanding the way that Buddhadharma has evolved and is currently evolving in today’s world. It’s also a training that I’m leading in the Pragmatic Dharma app, and it’s a live twelve-week training, and let me just give you a sense for what this model is. In this training, over twelve weeks, we’ll be exploring each of twelve different wisdom chords. These chords are made up of different notes, you could say, using the metaphor here in music, of notes making up a chord. The notes here are concentration, mindfulness, heartfulness, inquiry, awareness, embodiment, and finally, imaginal meditation. No tradition in this model plays just one note. Each tradition is made up of and uses multiple techniques, and weaves them together into a larger whole. But that said, no lineage is also completely comprehensive or does not have a shadow side, blind spots, et cetera. So this model helps us to understand lineage in terms of the practice focus, and also to see what some of the blind spots might be so we can address them in our practice. Here’s the basic model: If you visualize it as a cone or triangle, awareness sits at the top. It’s at the apex of this model. It’s a special way of meditating in that you don’t do anything. There’s no doing in awareness. As you go up this model, you go toward non-doing. As you go down, you work toward more effortful practice. Embodiment, there’s some amount of effort involved in becoming embodied, but really when you’re in the body, it just takes care of itself. Mindfulness, there’s even more effort. With inquiry and imaginal, a similar amount. Concentration and heartfulness, the most effortful practices. Here, if you look from the left to right, you also see another axis of difference that divides and describes the distinctions between these ways of meditating, which is apophatic, or subtraction, on the one side, on the left side, and kataphatic on the right. So you see imaginal practice being an example of a very kataphatic practice, where you’re adding something to your experience. With inquiry, we’re taking it away by using a question. What is this? We’re taking away all of our knowing, our answers. That’s apophatic practice. Some of these practices are more in the middle or slightly lean, like heartfulness toward the kataphatic, concentration toward the apophatic. There’s some more detail here about the notes. You can visit this at pragmaticdharma.com/chords if you want to see the full detail. I do want to just give you an overview of the chords themselves, because this is what we’ll cover from week to week. We’re going to begin in the First Turning and work our way through each of the turnings. We’ll start with my favorite, which was also my own path: the Power Chord. The Power Chord is when you’re strumming both concentration and mindfulness and you’re hitting those two really hard. You see this in the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition of mental noting, in the early Pragmatic Dharma lineage of Daniel Ingram. This is how I practiced coming up in the dharma, and it can lead to fast results, big insight, movement across the maps, progress of insight, etc., stages of enlightenment. And yet, notice how it leaves out the heart, leaves out the body, leaves out awareness. A lot is left out here in order to make this rapid progress, and the downside of this approach is you have to loop back around, in my experience, and fill in your understanding of the dharma. A little bit more filled-in model here, or chord, is the Insight Chord. This is something you see across many of the early Buddhist traditions, in the modern Theravāda lineages. Concentration here is the telescope we use to focus. Mindfulness is what we’re looking through, and heartfulness keeps our looking warm, keeps it from turning cold and icy. So these three together form the Insight Chord. Notice how different lineages in the Theravāda tradition emphasize one of these different notes more than the other while still strumming all three. Like the Pa-Auk Sayadaw lineage of Burma really emphasizes concentration. Or the tradition I trained in, the Mahasi lineage, really emphasizes [mindfulness], while you see a modern lineage like the TWIM lineage of Bhante Vimalaramsi really doing the same thing but using heartfulness as its main note. So here we’ll begin to explore, in this training, the way that different notes can be strummed or emphasized, and how that changes the wisdom chord that we’re playing or practicing. Finally, in the First Turning, we’ll cover the Forest Chord. Also a really nice one in terms of getting the body involved, seeing an embodied lineage that also touches on awareness as one of its notes. Notice the Insight Chord and the Power Chord before didn’t emphasize the always-already nature of awareness. But here, this lineage, which is also part of my training background and my lineage through Ajahn Chah, emphasizes awareness and leads with embodiment. We can and will explore the Second Turning, for instance, the classic tension between the Rinzai and Sōtō schools of Zen. And we’ll look at it from this point of view: how the Rinzai emphasizes a very apophatic approach, which is inquiry-dominant. It includes awareness, but awareness isn’t the main note, whereas in the Sōtō school of Dōgen, awareness is the lead. “Zazen is enlightenment.” You’re just sitting as awareness. Now, it is embodied as well. Both Rinzai and Sōtō have the body involved, and both have concentration, but Sōtō is less inquiry-based and more awareness-driven. So you have to see some differences here in the traditions, and we’ll practice some practices in this training that emphasize, and hopefully will give us a felt sense for, each of these harmonics. The Pure Land Chord and the Daimoku Chord: very kataphatic expressions in the Second Turning, compared to the more apophatic, awareness-driven. These are more gradual-path approaches. Interestingly, they also present as a kind of chord with different notes being strummed. So we’ll explore those together. The Third Turning, we get into the Vajra Chord. Very different, very kataphatic, very relational. And then we can see within this larger chord, you can break it down. You know, you can dissect it into these different sublineages. The Dzogchen Chord, for instance, and the Mahāmudrā Chord. Very interestingly, the Mahāmudrā Chord and later the Western Insight Chord share a basic same shape. We’ll look at that. The Lamrim Chord, the Gelug tradition in Tibetan Buddhism, playing a very different strum and bringing in inquiry as a kind of counterbalance to the lack of inquiry in the Vajra Chord. So we’ll understand the evolution of the tradition through this chord lens as well, seeing how the focus on practices, it is contextual. It arises within a cultural context. We’ll look at the Fourth Turning also. This is probably the most exciting part of this training for me, looking at my own tradition of the Western Insight Chord, which gave birth to the Secular Mindfulness Chord, the Soulmaking Chord of Rob Burbea’s Soulmaking Dharma, the EcoDharma Chord through teachers like David Loy and others, the Integral Chord of Ken Wilber, the Pragmatic Chord of my own lineage. We’ll explore the differences and distinctions … Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • September 30 · 13 min

    The Insight Chord

    Vince Fakhoury Horn describes the insight meditation tradition as a chord in which concentration, mindfulness and heartfulness sound together, with concentration giving mindfulness its depth and heartfulness keeping the whole enterprise from turning dry and frightening. My teaching colleagues & I are leading a 10-day meditation retreat focusing on The Insight Chord. We’d love to see you there! 💬 Transcript Vince Horn: Practically speaking, we’ve been focused on kind of three different forms of practice over our time together. We started with concentration practice, which is related to the training in concentration. We talked about mindfulness practice, which is often associated with the training in wisdom. And then last week we started to get into the heartfulness-style practice, or metta practice as it’s known in the early Buddhist tradition. Or brahmavihāra practice, another term that’s used to describe some of the heart qualities that early Buddhism is really interested in cultivating, developing. And you could say for sure that you can get into concentration states with heartfulness. And they also can be very helpful in terms of the first training of morality and ethics. They can come in very handy there, as in all the meditation practices. I remember when I was on a two-month retreat with Emily at Spirit Rock, someone asked during one of the Q&As with Jack Kornfield, they said, “I’ve heard that metta practice, heartfulness practice, is a relative practice, that you can’t actually get to the absolute, the universal goal of emptiness through metta, that you have to do vipassanā. Is that true?” To which Jack responded something like, “If you can’t awaken through the heart, I don’t know how else you can do it.” “If you can’t awaken through love, what are we even talking about?” And I thought that was a nice response, because it challenged that notion in the early Buddhist tradition — it does creep up, actually, a lot — that heartfulness is a relative practice. Well, maybe not. Maybe it could actually lead to ultimate wisdom. Or maybe it is an expression of ultimate wisdom. That’s my view. So we’ve looked at these three forms of practice, all of which are, in the broader sense, meditation practice, but they all connect to these three trainings, and are useful and skillful things to do. So I want to explore how these three come together. It’s something that I noticed as Emily and I started to come up with this framework of the different ways to meditate, to try to describe our own experience. I noticed that when I looked back at my training in the early Buddhist tradition, these three forms of practice were the ones that predominated. I didn’t really experience a tremendous amount of focus on inquiry practice in the early tradition. It does pop up from time to time. You do get an occasional question or occasional inquiry. You might find some Theravada teachers that have an interest in that, but it’s not predominant. Nor is the sort of awareness-style practice that you then find in a more mature form later in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, in Mahāmudrā, or in Zen and Shikantaza, or Dzogchen — these practices where you’re just being, there’s no technique, no form, just awareness. Again, you can find examples of it in early Buddhism for sure, but it just doesn’t seem to be emphasized in the same way. Likewise with embodiment practices, there’s just not a whole lot of emphasis on inhabiting or being in the body. More about mindfulness of the body—like the body’s an object that you’re being mindful of, rather than something that you’re learning to inhabit the mystery of. And so for me, these three—and likewise with the imaginal practice too—it’s these other styles of meditation that we’ve touched on that just don’t seem to be as predominant as concentration, mindfulness, and heartfulness. And so I started thinking of that. It’s, in a way, what makes the insight meditation tradition—which comes out of the early Buddhist tradition, is in a way like a modern lineage of that, which is also a little confusing, because it’s not completely that, because it’s also interfacing with all these other traditions and teachers and has incorporated elements from them. So in that sense it’s more like really a fourth-turning tradition. But nonetheless, if we take the emphasis to be on these three, then we have a kind of—you could imagine, from a musical perspective, thinking of this as like a chord. If you’ve ever played a guitar, you know that you have a few different notes that you strum together at once. Those can, in certain circumstances, work together to form what’s called a chord. That chord is a harmony of different things that come together to form something more than the sum of their parts. And this is in some ways how I think about traditions: that they’ve hit on these really interesting combinations of different ideas and practices to form something that’s very unique and seems to be pretty anti-fragile. It can continue delivering value and being useful over time for many people. So they hit on something deep here. Likewise, if you think about food, I think this is another way it’s obvious. You think about cuisine, and you think about the kind of traditions of cuisine that emerge in different areas. Think about Thai cuisine or French cuisine or whatever type of cuisine you like. There are certain ingredients that are endemic to those areas where the cuisine developed. And over many hundreds, thousands of years, these ingredients were cultivated, combined, experimented with, until certain kinds of combinations, flavor combinations, start to emerge as being particularly powerful. Why is it that every Thai dish I learn how to cook, it all calls for curry and it calls for fish sauce? There’s certain things that you just tend to find. These ingredients end up working together in harmony, balancing each other, providing different elements. I think here too with the early Buddhist tradition, we’ve got these kind of ingredients, these basic meditation ingredients, that come together to form something more. It’s like something that’s so good that we want to pass it on, and we don’t want to see it die, because it really works. And the insight chord—one thing I’ll point out about this is, if you look at each of these forms of practice, all of them can be seen from, and are often seen from, a gradual cultivation point of view. Like, we gradually cultivate our concentration and develop our concentration. We develop our mindfulness, cultivate mindfulness; we develop our heartfulness, we cultivate heartfulness. All of these practices in the insight chord are really usually held in that way, that this is a gradual practice. This is something we’re gonna cultivate gradually over time, sometimes step by step or stage by stage. And so one of the unique things about the insight chord is that it’s a gradual progression. You could say it’s a progressive tradition, in that it’s interested in, focused on progress, on the progress of meditation, development, cultivation of these qualities. Another thing to say about the insight chord, I think, is the non-duality of mind and heart. You could say there’s an emphasis on both mindfulness and heartfulness together. And if you look back at the term citta, the way that it’s often translated as “mind” in Western cultures, because we like minds so much—but often people will have to correct that translation, as actually it means something like mind and heart. It’s understood traditionally more broadly than that. And in the early Buddhist tradition—yeah, heart and mind—these ideas, these notions weren’t so different from each other. There wasn’t such a sharp and clean distinction drawn between them. So the citta is not something that we would think of as just existing up here in the head or being associated with the brain, but rather citta is something that is more inclusive than that. The other thing I’d say about the insight chord is that concentration pr… Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • September 22 · 23 min

    Imaginal Meditation

    In “Imaginal Meditation,” Emily West Horn introduces an approach to imaginal practice—drawing on Vajrayana deity yoga, Jack Kornfield, Chögyam Trungpa, and Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche—to show how invoking, dissolving, and embodying the image of the Buddha can loosen the boundary between self & world, inclining the mind toward non-duality. 💬 Transcript Emily Horn: So I want to explore imaginal meditation with you all today. And I want to start just simply with the Buddhist Geeks definition of it, and then I’m going to unpack what imaginal meditation means in the context of the third turning, and in particular Vajrayana practice. I’m not going to unpack what Vajrayana is or some of these terms that we’ve already previously unpacked. So if you have questions about Vajrayana and Buddhism, things like that, you can watch the other recordings with these sessions. I’m also going to talk about a few of the challenges that I’ve seen and that I’ve experienced with imaginal meditation. And then, of course, we’ll actually practice it after this concludes. So, the general definition that Buddhist Geeks offers and proposes for you all is: imaginal meditation is the practice of incorporating subtle imagery and energy, the result of which is fullness. So we’re moving into a somewhat — for some people — challenging practice, because it’s really asking us to move beyond our ordinary way of perceiving. It’s asking us to shift outside of whatever framework you might be entering through. Imaginal meditation asks us to actually sense into the possibilities. It’s a creative practice. And it also challenges the rational mind a little bit, because we’re moving from perceiving to imagining what you might not have even perceived or recognized before. And it’s also aiming at incorporating subtle vibes. I think “vibe” is the new word, not “energy” necessarily, so we can go with that. If you have these kinds of experiences where it’s like, “Huh, I’m not sure exactly what that is, but I felt it” — I’ve had a lot of those experiences around people. It’s like I can feel this certain kind of energy, vibe, and I’m like, what is that? Well, imaginal meditation is asking us to actually say, okay, there is something beyond our ordinary perception that we can actually get more and more attuned to, and then start to embody. For example, in the meditation, in the way that I’m going to zoom in today with you all, we’re going to be working with the image of the Buddha. So that image in itself has a certain kind of vibe, and it invokes a certain kind of experience. I’ll give you more information about that in a moment. But I want to also offer you a little bit about what it is from the Vajrayana perspective. He says, “The technique of visualization” — and I want to highlight and bold “visualization,” and I’m going to honor his way of talking about things, but then I’m also going to tell you all why Buddhist Geeks has changed that to “imaginal.” So “visualization” isn’t the way we’re going to be talking about it. However, I do want to honor where this is coming from and the way that it’s spoken about typically. So: “The technique of visualization is employed throughout the Vajrayana practices of Tibetan Buddhism. Its use of our imagination makes it quite different from other meditations such as shamatha, which is concentration or calm abiding. Imagination also plays a major part in our deluded experience of life. Everything we encounter and perceive in our daily life is a product of our imagination, but because we believe in the illusions we create, they become such deeply rooted mental habits that we completely forget that they’re little more than fantasy. The imagination is therefore one of our most powerful tools, and working with it by changing the ways we look at our world is what we call the practice of visualization.” So it’s really aimed at starting to sense into: okay, wait, maybe we are creative beings. Maybe there is more here than we actually can recognize. And what’s it like to imagine a different way of living, of being? In some ways, what would it be like to imagine that human beings could all live together and thrive? It can go into that way of looking at it. Now, I’ve also done a lot of different kinds of visualization or imaginal practices. There are so many different kinds. When I studied with Jack Kornfield, he taught me and others how to guide people. It’s kind of like a mix between a psychological framework and a Buddhist framework. He would offer ways to unlock different ways of knowing through symbols. There were healing journeys. There was a healing temple that we would imagine and venture into. There are time-travel visualizations, imaginal practices where you get on magic carpets and go exploring. And it’s really just a way of getting to know these parts of us that we don’t typically recognize. There’s also, in psychotherapy, if you’ve done trauma work, which I have — there was a whole thing with my therapist before I could even do EMDR, which is an alleviation-of-trauma technique. And “resourcing”: I had to visualize and imagine a place that brought me some nurturing and comfort. That was my go-to place when things got intense. I would go back to the beach in LA, or wherever. I think that was my safe spot at the time. So there are all kinds of ways that this has been incorporated into meditation in the West. A lot of the teachers that I’ve studied with, I know, have drawn from Vajrayana and some of the imaginal practices in that tradition. Today, though, we’re going to zoom into a type of deity yoga — or deity imaginal practice. And we’re going to use the Buddha, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about that again in a minute. So I also want to touch on this: when we sense into imaginal practice, I’m not sure what your relationship to it is. So take a moment and just sense in — have you done this before? Do you feel a little reactive, like, “Oh,” about this? Is it really intriguing, “Ooh, what’s going to happen?” So just sense into what’s going on for you as we explore this, because it does ask us to engage a part of us that, for whatever reasons, is not very well known. I’m not sure how many people in the United States visualize Buddhas and then start to embody them, let alone Europe, and then as we expand. So I think some of you are there. One of the challenges that comes up with this practice is — again, I highlighted and bolded that word “visualization” — that can be a challenge, with thinking that it’s only visual. So I want to see what we can do in the session to expand and imagine in so many different ways. It can be very unique to you how your imagination actually takes form and shape and senses in this practice. To think of it as visualization — sometimes visualization gets equated, or there’s this association, with images: like you think in pictures, you see pictures. And I just want to invite us to soften around that, because this practice — some people will see very clearly in images, and that’s not the case for everyone. So just soften around what you might think this needs to look like. It might be kinesthetic. And for me, thought imprints are a way that, a lot of times, I’ve gotten really attuned to sensing the vibes behind thoughts and intuition in these imaginal practices. Sometimes it comes in the form of a thought. So just allow yourself to expand and include more and more and more when we go into the practice. That’s part of where imagination practices take us — to include more and more and more in our experience. Another challenge — and this is pretty much for all practices, and in particular this one — in a lot of ways it can bring up these thoughts like, “Am I doing this right? Am I doing this right?” The important thing to keep in mind with this practice is that however you invoke the image — we’re going to be working, of course, with imagery and imagining — however that imagining process happens for you, see if you can, if that thought comes in, “Am I do… Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • September 16 · 7 min

    The Grammar of Social Metta

    Vince Fakhoury Horn on the grammar of social metta—why a metta phrase needs a wish and only optionally a subject, how Sharon Salzberg’s “pith metta” shortens the phrase once the wish starts coming true, and why open-heartedness is a byproduct of the practice rather than its purpose, so there is always more to aspire to. 💬 Transcript Vince Horn: Today as we continue to unfold the social metta instructions I wanted to talk a little bit about the grammar of social metta, meaning the linguistic structure of how this practice works at least as far as I understand, which is very much an emerging understanding. And I think talking about grammar with this stuff is really helpful, because as one of my mentors Ken Wilber often points out, you know, you can be a completely fluent speaker without having any understanding of the grammar of the language you’re speaking. In fact that’s how all of us learn language, unless you have like linguistic professor parents or something, who are teaching you grammar early. You know, we all learn to speak without knowing the rules of the language. And then later in school, you know, we go to school and still most of us don’t learn the grammar of the language we’re speaking. And so, to know the grammar, to know how something works is not required to do it. But it’s very much helpful if you’re going to try to help other people do it, or if you wanna have a deeper understanding of what you’re doing. So I wanted to just share a little bit of sort of the grammar here of what we’re working with. At the heart of how we’re working with social metta, and I think this is because it’s an out-loud practice, and out-loud practices seem to really be aided by words. We’re working with a phrase, this metta phrase, and we started with a very simple phrase: may it arise. May loving awareness arise. May compassionate presence arise. May happiness arise. Whatever the it is, working with a quality of presence or of a dimension of the open heart and inviting it to arise. That’s a simple phrase and it has in that phrase a wish. This is the kind of one of the key parts of the metta phrase, is there’s a wish embedded in the phrase. There’s something that we’re wishing for, in this case, compassionate presence. Now I’d say at the very minimum, a metta phrase has to have a wish. There has to be something that we’re wishing for. That’s kind of what makes it a metta phrase. It’s a well wish. It’s a prayer using other language. Metta is Buddhist prayer in a way. And the other thing that often can show up in the basic structure grammar of social metta, but it doesn’t have to, as you can see with the phrase “may it arise,” is that there can often and is often a subject as well in the phrase. That is a person or group of people or category of beings that we are sharing that wish with. So, instead of just “may it arise,” where there’s not a clear sense of the subject, it could be for everyone, it could just be for me. Who knows what is going on in the interiority of someone who’s saying that phrase. It’s kind of hard to tell. But when we actually include a subject, and we are using things like pronouns, or we’re coming up with particular categories. For instance, you know, with the situation, the political unfolding in Russia, we could — “May all Russian people be happy.” And really, you could call to mind a particular group or category of beings. “May all animals be happy and healthy.” There’s really no limit there in terms of how we parse out who it is that we’re wishing this for. But that’s the subject, the who, in this practice. And so I’d say that metta phrases have to at least have a wish in them, and then can also have a subject. In a sense, that’s the elementary grammar of a social metta practice that include that as a kind of minimum. Then you can build, you know, more complex structures and sentences and things. You can rotate through phrases. You can pick phrases. You can go through a sequence of different subjects with a particular intention in mind. You know, these practices are very versatile in terms of how you can apply them. So that’s why we’re focusing on the core grammar. If we understand the elemental aspect of this, it becomes easier to build. Once you understand how a sentence works, it’s much easier to write a paragraph and then a book, and so forth. So yeah, just a little bit about that. And this is important, too, for our practice today. We’re going to explore the practice of pith metta, which I first learned about this through Sharon Salzberg and working with her instructions on loving-kindness practice. And she would often share with people and suggest that say you’re on a deep metta retreat, and you’re doing a lot of metta practice. And here I’d say, or if you’re doing social metta and it starts to happen, because social metta in some ways maybe can be like the equivalent of being on a retreat. You start to notice that you are actually feeling it. The wish becomes reality. You know, your wish comes true, and you’re suddenly not just wishing for compassionate presence to arise, but you are feeling compassionate presence, or you are being compassionate presence. In that case, Sharon would suggest that having this whole phrase can become clunky and get in the way of the living experience of the practice. And in that case, she said, feel free to shorten the phrase down to its pith. What’s the essential wish, the one or two usually words that points to what you’re wishing for. And you could just shorten it down to the pith in those cases, and just say happy or compassionate presence or just compassion, whatever feels the most pithy. The most kind of simple. And so in this practice too, in social metta, we found it really helpful to introduce the pith phrase. And that is essentially just working with the wish, just being with the wish. Here what’s important, I think, to highlight is that sometimes metta practice, we are aspiring, you know, we’re wishing, and sometimes we are realizing. It moves from inclining the mind toward the open heart to being open-hearted. And important, I think, to recognize those two different possibilities because the purpose of the practice isn’t to be open-hearted. It is actually to incline toward open-heartedness. And if it arises, great. That’s beautiful, and it’s a byproduct of doing the practice. But it’s not the purpose of the practice. It’s a result that can happen from doing the practice. So, even if you’re using the full phrase or you’re just working with the pith, it’s always possible to share it in a way where it’s more of an aspiration. It’s like, may compassionate presence arise. I’m not feeling it. I don’t even know what it is. I sure wish it were here. That’s fine. Like, that’s actually totally legit to practice metta in that way, to wish for it to arise. It’s also totally legit if it arises to just say “compassionate presence.” Or even you can say, may compassionate presence arise, and you can feel it. It may have arisen here, but has it arisen everywhere for everyone throughout all space and time? Well, if not, there’s more. There’s more to aspire to. And I think that’s always the case with metta. Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • September 9 · 11 min

    Social Metta Works!

    In “Social Metta Works!”, Vince Fakhoury Horn traces the origin story and practical mechanics of practicing loving-kindness out loud and together, making the case that metta—a fundamentally pro-social practice—works better when it stops being something we do silently, alone in our own heads. If you’d like to learn more about Social Metta, and how to share these pro-social practices with others, I’m beginning a Social Metta Faciltiation training for all hardcore members of the new Pragmatic Dharma App. (cost: $20/month, or try the free version and still get unlimited access to live multiplayer meditations.) 💬 Transcript Vince: Social Metta Works! And I wanted today to kind of talk about and explore, in practical terms, this practice of social metta, or this orientation to metta practice in which we’re doing it out loud, with other people. And so I guess I want to start with just the origin story of that. Every good superhero story starts with the origin story, and to me, good practices are similar — there’s always a good story behind a good practice. And this practice really originates out of the work that I was doing, both as a practitioner and also as a teacher and facilitator, with Kenneth’s Social Noting practices. I had been working with them actively for several years and finding them really helpful — again, both on a personal level, and also as a teaching tool. And so, at a certain point, as I watched Kenneth go through his creative process with coming up with Social Noting and start to generate new practices, new ways of doing the Noting technique, it occurred to me, one, that I could do that too. And Kenneth would’ve actively encouraged me to do that, and other people. So I was like, oh, I can take what I’m learning from how this person’s innovating and make similar kinds of innovations. So I started to kind of play with the noting technique and come up with other alternative formulas for doing the noting practice. And it seemed like a very natural next step from there to say, well, if this works for noting — if you can take the noting practice and do it out loud and make it this intersubjective process, with all these interesting second-order effects — maybe you could do the same with other techniques that are not noting based. And so, some easy ones we started off with — and when I say we, I’m thinking here of my partner Emily and I. We were doing a lot of experimentation together, because we were teaching a lot together at this time. So we did social breath counting. That was our first attempt at socializing another kind of practice. Which is, you’re just taking turns counting out loud, syncing the count with the end of your out-breath, the dissolution of that out-breath — 1, 2, 3, all the way up to 10. But doing it in a group, where there’s a group count. You’re collectively counting instead of just you counting by yourself. And that worked pretty well. It’s, again, taking the sort of peer pressure of social meditation — it works for us. And I found it worked well for helping people stay on point. And then the question arose: well, could we do the same for metta practice? And that’s where Emily and I hit a roadblock with that practice. It took us quite a while to start to get a sense for how we would introduce that to people, because I think the way that traditionally metta, or loving kindness, practices are taught in the contemporary Buddhist scene is they’re taught as a very complex practice, actually. You’re given — or invited. You’re either given a number of phrases, usually four traditionally, or you come up with your own, and then you’re rotating through these phrases. And they’re not just rotating through them, but you’re also then changing who you’re directing these well-wishes to, these phrases of well-wishing — starting with sometimes yourself or a benefactor, and then moving through this traditional sequence of several categories of beings, which is all very cool. And it has a really smart rationale. And it’s a good way to train. But it turns out it’s very hard to take that and just do it out loud. Noting is very simple, right? It’s like we’re using just one or two words often to describe what we’re noticing, and doing that out loud doesn’t — it does change the practice, but not in some fundamental way. But here it’s like, how do you introduce all these moving pieces, these elements of social metta? You have the phrase, or phrases, and then you have the subject or subjects to whom you’re wishing well. And then you’re often rotating through those in some complex order, and then you’re doing it with other people. So I started to try to just do the traditional metta out loud, and it was a train wreck. It was like, oh no, I have four phrases, but it’s an odd number of people, or an even number of people, and so we’re going to end up everyone repeating the same phrase — things like that. And I was like, wait, we’ve got to simplify this. How do we make it like noting, where it’s just a very simple mechanism? And what we got to, Emily and I, was that we started to question: what is the elemental thing that makes up metta? With noting, it’s the note or the label. With metta, what is it? It’s a phrase, fundamentally. It’s a phrase that we’re using to wish ourselves and/or others well. And you can actually frame this phrase in a way that doesn’t include any reference to a particular person or people — in a generalized way. You could say something like this, and this is the first practice that we found that felt like — Emily and I felt like it really made metta accessible as a social practice — which is, you could just say: may it arise. It being whatever it is that you’re wishing well for yourself and all beings. In this practice — and this is something we call May Heartfulness Arise, the name of the technique — so if I were doing that by myself, it would look something like this: May Ease Arise. May Peace Arise. May Self-acceptance Arise. And here you might notice it’s freestyle, in the same way that freestyle noting is, in that you can pick whatever words you want to use to express that positive wish. In this practice, it is freestyle in that sense. And so what we discovered here, I think, is a way to simplify the practice — to make it easy to just start to play with the basic mechanism of wishing well. And here, inviting whatever it is that we’re wishing for to arise, to become manifest, to be actualized — that’s the basic idea. And here I want to say something about the difference between metta practice, or heartfulness practice, and vipassana, or mindfulness practices. To me, there’s a very core difference in the intention behind the words as well. In that, with the noting practice, our intention is to notice what’s happening in our experience — we’re noticing what’s actually there right now — whereas with metta practice we’re aspiring, or we’re wishing, for something to be that may or may not be the case right now. And in that wishing, and that aspiring, we are inclining the mind toward opening the heart. That’s the basic movement in heartfulness practices, I would describe it — we’re inclining in that direction. Or, to use a mettaphor, we’re setting the GPS coordinates of our heart, the direction we want to incline our hearts. And then we’re moving in that direction through setting an intention, through actually just repeating this wish, and connecting with the sincerity behind it, actually. Sometimes it’s just hollow words — we’re just saying words. This is why I’m going to make the case that Social Metta works. It’s because just saying the words by yourself, what I’ve found is, that’s not quite as effective as saying them out loud — or even less so than saying them out loud with other people. So I want to make the case that, for many people, doing this kind of very pro-social practice... The goals and aims of metta are very pro-social. They’re about increased connection, pro-sociability, ease. They’re about a lot of qualities that make sense, an… Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • September 3 · 11 min

    Equanimity Includes Everything

    Emily Horn teaches equanimity as upekkhā, using Thich Nhat Hanh’s preferred translation—inclusion—exploring: * How befriending pain and steadying over and over earns back your own trust * Why non-preferencing is an engaged state rather than a passive one * Why acceptance is not the same as condoning harm * How a kind of mini-death has to happen before equanimity can take its shape. This teaching was recorded during a previous iteration of the Heartful Jhāna training series. To join the next live one, become a Hardcore member of the Pragmatic Dharma App. 💬 Transcript Emily Horn: I just want to invite you to just sense into — so, may equanimity arise, just a general kind of invitation. And then with mindfulness, if you’re up for it in this moment, like, what’s happening and what are you sensing? Just kind of as an indication to what happens when we incline to equanimity. You know, sometimes for me even confusion can arise as part of the landscape, because equanimity can be a term that — I don’t know about you all, but I didn’t learn until later in life. We’ve talked about it before, and we’re still in that landscape of translation and the vibe of concepts. Like, what is the vibe of it? Like, what’s the experience of equanimity, right? Our cognitive minds, you know, that is what for me can bring up that sense of confusion. Like, what is it, trying to map the concept onto the experience? And that can be useful, to have a conceptual kind of overlay, so we can start there. And inclusion is Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation of upekkhā, equanimity in the Buddhist tradition. Inclusion. And if you sense into what you already know and what you already kind of have practiced with the heart space, inclusion to me has that sense of, like, with loving kindness and metta we’re befriending. Something can arise in our experience, or we come in contact with something, and it’s like that first move of the heart could be, “Okay, let me see if I can be willing to befriend whatever this is,” even if it’s just a little bit, just a little bit. Like, okay, that curiosity, that warmth, however you might describe that sense of, oh, befriend. Huh. Okay. And then you all know, as we settle in and practice and as we move about our lives, they’re not disconnected. And so we encounter, even though we have the intention to befriend, we’ll encounter really, some painful — I don’t even have the right concept for how intense it can be in our lives, in our practice. But pain, right? Pain on a spectrum. And so if we’re befriending and then we encounter pain, then there’s this natural response, even if it’s a split second, for compassion to arise. If we’re in fight, flight, freeze, if our nervous systems aren’t really regulated, then, you know, this can be wobbly, to try to befriend, to encounter the pain, to sense into meeting it. Sometimes that’s where people and practitioners and myself, we’re like, “I’m overwhelmed.” Right? Ah. All right. So okay, that’s fine. That’s when we can back off and we can steady. We can, you know, just sense this moment, the contact that we have with the seat that we are in. And then maybe we go back in, right? Maybe we kind of go back in, we meet it a little bit more, that sense of pain. We steady. Now, over and over again, that sense of, like, being willing to meet and to... there’s an impulse to alleviate the suffering. So pain is there. With compassion, there’s, okay, meeting it and then the alleviation of it. So some pain can be alleviated. So let’s remember that. So there’s that alleviation. And the more that we touch it and the more that we do that over and over, the way I’ll describe it is we kind of start to earn our own trust back in our practice and in our ability to work with, in some ways, unimaginable suffering. We can’t do it just, like, at one time. Over and over again with our practice, we start to build that capacity of being able to, like, befriend and meet, alleviate. So equanimity is like once we start to kind of see, “Oh yeah, I can be with this. Oh yeah, I can sense into how I don’t have to be overwhelmed, and I can steady and then come back, and steady and come back.” And the more we meet it, the more the energy, kind of the vibe, that we can move — the difficulty moves. And what happens is that sense of equanimity or inclusion begins to build and grow, and we start to see: our sense of identity and relationship has changed to the suffering, and there’s a part of me that is so much bigger than it. So much bigger than it. And so whatever’s happening can happen within the bigger space. There’s a part of us that’s undisturbed by the comings and the goings of things. All right, doesn’t mean that’s not painful anymore, but there’s this space and effort around it where the pain has... it doesn’t take us under as much. But if it takes us under, then that’s when we go back to steadying, equanimity’s not there, and we can just say, “Oh, equanimity is not here.” Because just by noticing it’s not, it can incline us to it. All right. Now, what’s interesting is with equanimity, we’ve talked a lot about pain, but with equanimity, pleasure is also included. In a sense, we’ve also learned in our practice to say, “Okay, we can work with the pain,” and then we can work with whatever comes up when we start to sense into pleasure, pleasant sensations. And interestingly, there’s a lot there to work with, too, because some of us block it. “Oh, there’s joy,” and we block it, right? Or there’s something that’s like, “Ooh, bliss,” and we want more of it, and so we start clinging. And so in equanimity, though, it’s like both the sensations of pleasure and pain can just be arising and passing. Until equanimity really grows and that’s like, there’s complete absorption in it, and that is the goal or what you’re aiming for, complete absorption in equanimity. Okay, it’s just happening. But there’s some variant and some, you know, in between that complete absorption. In that in between, there’s a lot that can co-arise, a lot that can move and, in some ways, dance freely in our experience without that pushing and pulling and getting involved with it. It doesn’t mean that we don’t take action though. You might remember, this is one of the misconceptions about equanimity. So just know that there’s so much space and inclusion of whatever’s happening because there’s not that pushing away of anything. So in a sense with equanimity, there is this sense of non-preferencing. However, that doesn’t mean... Like, I’ll share with you that I was in a shuttle leaving from Spirit Rock after a month-long retreat, and the shuttle driver says, “I know you meditators, you know, are supposed to have non-preference. But please, like, if it’s hot or cold, let me know because I’m here to, like, help manage the situation and make you as comfortable as possible.” And I was just like, “Oh, yeah, that’s right.” You know, with the sense of, like, non-preferencing, it’s like hot or cold, there’s not that reactivity. Okay, it’s hot, I’m hot. There is this sense of being able to be non-disturbed by it, but at the same time, remember, there’s other heart states, compassion wants to alleviate. If I’m hot, then turn the air down. Make some adjustments. So equanimity is actually a very engaged state. Very engaged. The more it deepens though, the more there’s this sense of... And you can sense into your own experience. Some people say accepting. Some people say allowing. And this can be a little... The word that came to me is startling. I’m not sure if that lands for you, but it can be a little bit, Speaker: uh, ugh, Emily Horn: you know, to kind of sense into, to a spaciousness, that can include everything, and at the same time there’s this sense of, like, being able to ride it. Being able to ride the waves. Being able to ride the changing sensations. Because you’re allowing. It’s just like this just happening. A lot of our experience is out of our control. We have influence, but it’s out of our control. Now, our cognitive minds... For o… Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • August 31 · 4 min

    Concentrating More & More on Less & Less

    Brian Newman opens a twelve-week jhāna course by parsing five lines of sutta into a whole curriculum—a first month of falling in love with the breath, the jhānic arc where less effort brings subtler pleasure, and the claim that any jhāna, even boundless consciousness, can be entered from a cold start once you learn how. Join Brian Newman for a live cohort of this training (or listen to the recordings)—beginning this Wednesday, September 2nd—in the PragmaticDharma.app. It’s available for all Hardcore members (@ $20/mo). 💬 Transcript Brian Newman: So we have 12 weeks to essentially parse the paragraph sutta that I just read to you, which said, “Establish mindfulness to the fore and then see if your breath is long or short.” That was like five lines. We’re going to go real deep, and we’re going to find all the detail in that and get really, really specific. We’re going to start gently though, and so for our first month we’re calling this falling in love with the breath. Just really getting tuned in to what it means to have awareness of the breath in different ways, in different parts of the body. And the reason we’re taking sort of a gentle entry is if we start to do concentration practice, and if we really kind of bear down on it, and if we try to focus on a really small point, which is what the practice is inviting us to do, there’s a tendency to get quite tight. And so instead of trying to go from wherever we are right now to kind of tight and concentrated, we’re going to ease our way in. It’s really nice to ease our way in. And part of that easing the way in is to develop some intimacy with our breath, something that we’re not so familiar with unless we’ve done a lot of concentration practice. As I say that, I’m just remembering, you know, is it pleasant to breathe? Do you find breathing a pleasant sensation? Does it feel constricted for you? Is there a way for you to change the way that you breathe so that it feels more comfortable? Permission to play with the breath a little bit if that’s going to be helpful. After those first weeks of sort of establishing what this practice is and some of the foundations, it’s going to be helpful. We’re going to be getting into the very specific jhānic flavors. And as I think many of us know, we’re going to end with the jhānic stack. The jhānic stack is just a way to talk about doing the whole up and down the stack, all eight. I think probably many of us know, but let’s take a look at what that looks like. So this is an arc. We could call this the jhānic arc. On the far left side, you can see that at the bottom on that horizontal axis, gross pleasure. Gross as in the opposite of subtle, not gross like disgusting, of course. Gross pleasure, so like big, big, big energy pleasure, and kind of high effort. To get this practice going does require some effort. We’ve got to kind of bear down a little bit to build up the momentum. As the practice develops, it actually gets easier along the way, so we sort of tend to fall into the next state, fall into the next jhāna when we’ve reached culmination of the current jhāna. And so it turns out that less effort is actually required as we move up this jhānic arc. There’s a sense of the jhāna taking over, the jhāna sort of taking us over and just moving us through this arc. And ultimately, the less effort means more pleasure, because effort tends to remove our pleasure. There’s a sense of relaxation and that subtle pleasure. One way to say this is through this practice and moving up the jhānic arc, we are going to be concentrating more and more on less and less. We’re going to be concentrating more and more on less and less. I mean, just look at the words here. If you look at the seventh jhāna, you’ll see that the concentration object is no thing, nothing. That’s quite subtle. There’s not many things that are more subtle to concentrate on than the no thing, and yet in this practice, there is something more subtle than the no thing, and that’s neither perception nor non-perception, the eighth jhāna. And so what this means is we’ll spend four months building our foundation, falling in love with the breath, and then we have — I’m sorry, four weeks — and then we have eight weeks per jhāna, essentially. So we’re going to basically take a whole week and really look at the first jhāna, a whole week and really look at the second jhāna. What you’re going to find along the way is you’re going to have preferences. This is not necessarily a linear practice. Some of you think that you have to start at the first to get the second, or you have to get to the second to get to the third. That’s not true. She will tell you that the third is incredibly accessible for some people right out of the gate, cold start. I’m going to teach you how to do this. So maybe the most shocking thing I could say up front here is one could enter any of these jhānas from a cold start once you learn how to do so. One could enter directly into the realm of boundless consciousness from a cold start, from zero. It’s not required to move through the jhānic arc, although it’s nice and less effortful to do so. Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • August 25 · 10 min

    Mindful Intuitive Movement

    Vince Fakhoury Horn introduces Mindful Intuitive Movement, the bottom-up practice he built from years of letting his body teach him how to move—the ChiRunning focuses that give the thinking mind something small to hold, the day his body refused the cushion and won, and why the only injury this practice ever gave him came from moving with aggression. 💬 Transcript Vince Horn: I’m excited to share with you this practice today called Mindful Intuitive Movement. It used to be called Spontaneous Movement. This is a technique or approach that I’ve developed, although I can’t take very much credit for it. I feel like it’s more that I started listening to my body, and trusting my body, and over many years of doing that, I sort of reflected on what my body taught me, and I’m trying to share those lessons with others in this practice. That’s just sort of essentially what it is. So really, this practice arises from the wisdom of the body. It’s a bottom-up practice. It’s not a top-down practice. That said, sometimes it’s hard to get into a bottom-up practice, right? Where you’re just trusting the wisdom of your body. Sometimes we have ideas about how our body should be moving or about what it should look like, and those ideas stand in the way of the body’s own wisdom. So a lot of the things I’ll offer with this approach are really just simple things we can focus on while we’re trying to allow the body to move us, that help us get out of our own way and get out of the way of the wisdom of the body. That’s the purpose of any sort of top-down instruction in this approach, which you’re always welcome to jettison if it then gets in the way. So that’s the invitation. I came up with this approach in part inspired by a program that I edited when I was a producer at a company called Sounds True in my 20s — it’s a spiritual media company. And I would just basically spend all day editing programs that we had recorded, and one of those programs was a program called ChiRunning by Danny Dreyer. Danny’s a longtime Tai Chi practitioner and also, like, a hardcore long distance runner, and he combined those practices together to form this thing called ChiRunning. What was interesting about his technique — ‘cause I edited every single minute of it, believe me — was that he offered these particular, what he called focuses, these little things you do while running because you can’t think too much and still run. You know, if you’ve ever run before, and I used to be a runner, so I really enjoyed this program from that point of view. It’s like you can’t be, like, thinking about all these things you’re doing while running. You’ve gotta, to some degree, just trust your body and run. But if you just trust your body, a lot of times trust in this case looks like habitual conditioning. We just trust our habits, you know, and we’re just, like, off to the races, right? So here we’re trusting something deeper than our habitual ways of moving and holding our bodies. And these focuses help us kind of do that. So for instance, Danny Dreyer in ChiRunning, he had a focus that was like something like sitting up in your seat. So while you’re running, you just keep bringing your attention back to sitting up in a seat, like getting this feeling that your pelvis is sitting up in a chair. And that kind of shift just kind of brings you forward a little bit, brings your whole torso forward, and then you feel a little... like it’s easier to run. And you just keep kind of bringing your focus back to that. He had several of these focuses, and he’d teach them in a way where you just work with one, and then at the end, you start to kind of bring them together, and you integrate them and kind of make them more intuitive and just... Then you’re doing it. You’re ChiRunning. And the focuses can kind of drop away. This is the same approach we’re going to take in this training over the course of 10 weeks. We’re going to do one focus after another. Today, I’ll offer two, called standing and grounding, and we’ll just work with these simple focuses while we trust our body and let our bodies move. That’s the basic methodology here. I want to also say this, this practice was inspired, too, by encountering work while I was at Naropa University, a Buddhist hippie college in Colorado, called Authentic Movement. And Authentic Movement was developed by a dancer named Mary Starks Whitehouse, and she ended up teaching that, I think, at Naropa at some point. Anyway, my wife found her way into one of these courses, and she was doing this thing that at the time I had no idea. It sounded totally fruity and something I was not interested in at all. Then like a few years later, I had my own experience of finally coming into the body after many years of sitting like a hardcore, rigid meditator, where I was never moved. You know, always still, hardcore, sit through the pain, and with a terrible posture, mind you, ‘cause I wasn’t in my body. I probably looked like I was in severe pain, and I was. But I was powering through it. That was kind of the model I had at the time. And I got to a point in my practice where actually even with terrible posture and being largely dissociated from my own body, I amazingly had some insights and did some good, decent practice, and that practice, where it led me was to realizing that I was totally dissociated from my own body. After several years of meditating and I don’t know how many months of silent retreat, I one day found myself trying to sit at home, and I couldn’t. I literally could not stay seated on my cushion, and I just kept falling off the cushion and like with my head laying on it, just laying there. And I’m like, “Why can’t I sit?” And I try to push myself to sit, but then I realize like, well, no, that’s not really what I’ve learned from meditation. Like, I’ve learned how to trust and relax. And so I’d sat there with this tension of trying, like on the one hand, having all these ideas about what meditation is and how I should be sitting still and doing this every day, on the other hand, my body just completely rejecting this form and being like, “No, I’m not going to do it.” And it was really crazy to me. I’d never had this experience where my body rejected my mind and actually won. So eventually I started to actually make the move of listening to my body, amazingly. Took some weeks, but I finally was like, “Okay, well, maybe if I just let my body show me what to do, it will know.” And this was a complete reverse in my thinking. And this is the purpose of this mindful intuitive movement — to learn this kind of logic, this intuitive bottom-up logic of flow. And I found that if I stopped trying to get somewhere in my practice or impose this idea of what it should look like or to be still, that actually where my practice wanted to go or where my body wanted to take me was toward spontaneous movement, toward just letting myself move and letting myself explore the full range of the body and not having a sort of prescription in mind for how that should look. That was what it looked like. And I learned many things along the way of the years of my body teaching me how to move, and that’s what we’ll be exploring over the course of this training, basically. We’ll be exploring focuses like sensing and responding. You know, how when we’re in our body do we sense into what’s happening and then allow the body to respond appropriately, like moment to moment, sensing, responding? How do we trust the emergence of movement from our body? How do we actually trust that? We’ll focus on that. We’ll focus on when aggression arises and starts to drive our movement. The only time I’ve ever hurt myself doing this practice was one night when I was doing it alone and I was quite a... There was an aggressive feeling behind the movement, like I was trying to make something happen, and then I hurt myself. And I realized, “Oh, probably those things are connected. Probably I hurt myself because of the aggressive thing behind my movement.” An… Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • August 20 · 22 min

    The Insight Chord

    Vince Horn, Emily Horn, and Brian Newman talk through the design of their Insight Chord Retreat in Western North Carolina—why everyone will start with a single “go-to move” (of their choosing) for the first 3 days, what Brian learned about reintegration after doing daily multiplayer meditation on retreat, and how to maximize individual choicemaking on the retreat while having a solid community of practice to fall back on, including qualified teachers & dedicated peers. 💬 Transcript Vince Horn: So in the service of using the time we have wisely here, our plan today—Brian, Emily, and I wanted to have a conversation about this retreat that we’re planning in January 2027 here in Western North Carolina, on the Insight Chord. We wanted to talk a bit about some of, like, the design thinking that’s going into this retreat and how we’re planning on holding it together. And we’re happy to be tested, and we realize it’s a lot of trust that people put in teachers and communities when they go on retreat. It’s a very intimate and very suggestive space of practice, so we want to make sure we honor people’s choice-making there. Yeah, thank you, Brian and Emily, for joining me today in this. It’s great to be here with y’all. So there really are three things that we wanted to talk about. This is going to be more of, like, a free-flowing conversation, but I’ll set up the frame a little bit here for us first. If you got an email from me last week talking about this retreat, you’ll have seen that there were three points I wanted to highlight that I think make this retreat kind of unique and different from the kinds of meditation retreats you might have been on or heard about, in some ways. I’m not saying that it’s completely different and everything we’re doing is completely novel. Of course, that’s not true. The first thing that we’re doing is not novel at all. In a way, it’s just the way that we’re framing it that I think is novel, and that’s the focus on this retreat on what we’re calling the Insight Chord. This is, in a way, super traditional in the early Buddhist tradition. You’d see these three practices or these three ways of practicing: Concentration, Mindfulness, and Heartfulness, or shamatha, samādhi, vipassanā, and mettā, brahmavihāra practice. All of these things you’re going to see in early Buddhist retreats. You’re going to see them at the insight tradition. You’re going to see them on Goenka retreats. You’re going to see them anywhere you go and do an intensive retreat. These practices will show up. What I think is unique is that we see that. We see that as the unique chord or unique combination of practices that makes this early Buddhist tradition sort of distinctive. It gives it a particular sound or flavor, and we really value that flavor, the three of us, because we’ve trained deeply in that tradition. And so we wanted to kind of build this retreat around these three practices or these three ways of practicing. I’d like to open it up here in a moment just to talk about that, but I’ll just quickly name the other two points of the retreat that are distinctive. One is that we’re going to be holding a kind of tension that’s hopefully generative. Brian and I certainly found it quite generative on our last retreat, The Flavors of Jhāna, where we’re going to hold this tension between the exclusive focus in meditation—like focusing exclusively on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, narrowing your attention so that you’re just, say, with the breath or just with your mettā phrases or whatever it might be—and then on the other hand, we’ve got an inclusive focus that is broad and open. It’s like the kind of practice where you’re opening to include everything in your field of awareness. This is very similar to, like, the Zen style of shikantaza, or our social, multiplayer meditation forms, you know, where we’re meditating out loud with other people. And we’re going to hold this tension between exclusive and inclusive on the retreat, giving space for both types of practice. And then finally, we’re going to hold another tension that’s generative between what I would call here agency-maxing and community-maxing, or between agency and communion. And that is, we’re going to honor and acknowledge that each one of us are adults on this retreat who are going to be practicing our own practice, choosing how to practice. At the same time, we’re doing that together in an explicitly communal container that’s been designed over thousands of years to help make that process more efficient and more powerful. So how do we hold both agency and communion together in a way that they really serve and support each other? That’s the third thing that we’re going to be holding together as we do this retreat. So yeah, let me just open it up here to my colleagues and friends. Talk a bit about each of these three points. We can of course go one by one, or we can kind of move around as your minds do. Emily Horn: Yeah, I just want to say I’m really excited about this particular weaving together of practices. And in some ways you could really go deep on one of the three, or you can really follow, like, a traditional kind of arc. Meaning you can start with concentration, and once concentration gets really steady you can start to incline, if you choose to, to really deepen into the vipassanā or insight. In particular, you know, we’ll definitely include teachings around three characteristics like impermanence, no self, and, ugh, suffering. And then there’s going to be opportunities to really deepen with the heart. And I’ve been teaching heart jhāna practice for the last, I don’t know, couple years now, and particularly focused on how do you build concentration within the heart states. And so I’m really excited to have that a part of this retreat, and also have it as part of it in a way where you can emphasize it a lot, or you can just know that it’s happening in the background, and know that you’re held with it. So to me that feels like a really interesting way to be able to participate in a retreat, is to be able to kind of increase that sense of discernment that we all really need to increase with our practice. Like, really we’re deepening in concentration, insight, and heartfulness, and at the same time we’re also learning how to discern what’s needed in our own practice. And a lot of times I feel like the discernment part is lacking on retreats. Like, how do you really start to learn, like, what’s needed and what’s going to be beneficial to your practice? And so I’m really hoping that, being held with a teaching team with Brian and Vince and myself, that we’ll be able to support you, and really, in a sense, driving your own car. And then we’re there to really support you in not going off the sides of the cliffs or anything. We’ll have you. I feel confident in that. So yeah, that’s what comes up for me right now. Vince Horn: Kenneth, when we were leading retreats together—and Brian, you were on one of those retreats, so you know this well—we came up with this idea of the go-to move, and it was an attempt to sort of help preserve people’s agency on retreat, explicitly to say, “Hey, like, it’s up to you what you choose to do.” But if you just leave yourself in the sort of paralysis of choice where you could do anything at any time, it’s really problematic, because then you spend a lot of time worrying about what to do and if you’re doing it right, rather than actually doing something useful. So the go-to move was meant to kind of undercut that tendency to get lost in choice while still having choice preserved. And here the choice is, if on this retreat there’s any point at which I don’t know what to do, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to do this go-to move. It’s like the thing I know I can trust that I’m good at. For me, it was Noting, and for Kenneth, I think Noting as well. But for other people, it could be focus here on the breath, or it could be back to love, or to May Love Arise. One thing I th… Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • August 7 · 54 min

    The Fire Inside

    Vince Fakhoury Horn speakswith Rima Vesely-Flad about The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde—the silence she found in her own Buddhist community when she began writing about Palestine, Baldwin and Lorde's distinction between hatred that corrodes and rage that comes from the examined life, and the question they keep returning to: how to feel it all without causing more harm. Vince Horn: So, Rima, great to see you. I’ve been really loving getting to know you as a person and also your work. I’ve been reading your book. Unfortunately, I also spilled water on my copy, so it is a little... If you see me struggling to flip through the pages, that’s ‘cause we had a bit of an accident here. But I’ve really enjoyed reading your work. Can’t wait to get into it with you. Thank you so much for your time. Rima Vesely-Flad: Yeah. Thank you, Vince. It’s been great to get to know you, too. We’re so close. Amazing. Amazing. Vince Horn: Yes, and it’s amazing as adults, we can carve out the time to hang out. So that’s sometimes the hardest part. I feel like being in middle age is, like, making time to spend with cool people, so appreciate your time. Rima Vesely-Flad: Me too. Vince Horn: So let’s talk about your new book. This is The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. Of course, before reading this book, I was familiar with you and your work. But it really struck me that you were writing in this book, like from the very beginning, you’re writing about Palestine and Israel, which is not something I see many Buddhists really writing about or talking about in America. So it stands out just the fact that you’re even talking about this subject. And then on top of that, you’re bringing to bear these beautiful Dharma teachings and wisdom teachings from the Black tradition of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, bringing them to bear on this topic in the first chapter of the book, which I thought was quite courageous. And I really appreciate it, you know, as someone who has Palestinian family members and people in the West Bank I care about. So just on a personal level, really am grateful that you centered this in your writing. And I thought maybe we could start with that first chapter if you’re up for it. Rima Vesely-Flad: Absolutely. It was actually the very last chapter I wrote. I wrote this book of course over several years, but as I was concluding in real time, the genocide was taking place, and I just found myself absolutely in a state of grief and rage and was really politically active around it in ways that I hadn’t been in quite some time. Like feeling very pushed to speak out and to contact the Biden administration and representatives, people here in North Carolina who might or might not speak in Congress, and just found that I needed ways to speak out, and this is my community. The people who self-identify as Buddhist claim these traditions, these lineages, these practices, these schools of thought, and yet there was so much silence, and I felt really compelled to speak into that silence. And I know that’s something that you feel and understand in a deep way. And then also, I’m not by any stretch the first Black activist or academic or thought leader to make the connections between oppression of people of African descent whose ancestors were enslaved and people who are in a state of survival as their land is being taken in real time. So all of those connections were very present, and yet in the Buddhist world, there was so much silence, so much evasion or even erasure of what’s taking place. And it felt like it wasn’t separate from my practice, and I had to speak. Even though at the time I hadn’t even visited the West Bank. I since have, but at the time I was thinking and writing and observing and feeling from afar. Vince Horn: Yeah. Okay. I didn’t realize you’d gone to the West Bank. Wow, we’ll have to talk about that sometime. Yeah, there’s early on in the book, there’s a quote here that’s really echoing what you just shared. I thought I’d share this ‘cause it really moved me quite a bit. You said, “I, like many Black Americans, like Southwest Asian and North African Buddhists, observe that violent oppression of Palestinians can never bring safety and security to Jewish Israelis. And as a Buddhist practitioner, it’s important for me to speak out against the violence sanctioned by my government, my tax dollars. The policies of the US government do not represent my commitments. I’m horrified by the massacres in Gaza day after day, by the constant terrorizing of Palestinians in the West Bank. I think daily of Baldwin’s words, ‘You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall because you don’t want to know.’” Rima Vesely-Flad: Wow. Even just hearing Baldwin’s words in that context again, it really brings me chills. And so prescient, right? So prescient in terms of just anticipating how much more extensive... At the time actually that Baldwin visited, there wasn’t a formal occupation, although there was theft of land. But this— that was 1961, and then the wall— right now the walls, the checkpoints, the just sheer magnitude of aggression and violence. Like Baldwin anticipated that, and then the myopia in Israel and in the United States. Vince Horn: Yeah. I think at the same time though as I read through your writing on this, I was really also struck that you’re really trying to hold multiple realities here at once. You know, both holding the suffering of the Palestinians and the apartheid state that you’re describing. At the same time, you have a lot of, as I do, Jewish friends and people that you care about who may not be able to hold that reality in the same way or who are struggling to in some cases. Who... and you treat that with real compassion I think in your writing and in your words. As I try to, you know, my best. And it’s, of course, important to differentiate between Jewish identity and Israeli identity, which is often, you know, merged intentionally by the State of Israel. And for many people it’s the way they’re inculturated. It seems like that was kind of an unconscious merger in a lot of folks’ identity. At least I’ve noticed that with close friends and even students in the last few years where we’ve had conversations around this. There’s been real tension. And anyway, I appreciate that you’re holding it with compassion, both realities here, not trying to sort of demonize Israelis or Jewish people. And really being aware of the antisemitism that this whole issue is also bringing about. Or it’s... I’m not sure if it’s bringing about or giving excuse to people to be bigoted. So I think it’s cool the way that you’re trying to weave those different things. And I guess I’m curious if you could say a bit about how you’re taking that approach or why that’s important to you. Rima Vesely-Flad: Yes. I start off the book talking about a relationship I had with a, I would say a mama bear, a mother figure who claimed herself, who self-identified as my godmother, and she was born in France to a very well-known filmmaker who had the opportunity for asylum in the United States, and he and his wife were granted this opportunity to flee, but were told they couldn’t take their daughter, who was my godmother Via– Vince Horn: Wow. Rima Vesely-Flad: –was sent to a convent in France. So a Jewish girl sent to a Catholic institution, and she was blamed for the war and has suffered horrific antisemitic abuse. And it scarred her indefinitely. When she came to the United States, she took off the first part of her name, just called herself Via. She died of cancer many years later, and the wounds of that period were still quite evident at the time. I just remember, I have such extraordinary memories of her and what she suffered. And so part of my compassion and empathy, which is real, is that this nation state we call Israel was founded as ostensibly a refuge for people like Via and her parents. And this is a nation state founded upon theft of land. And what… Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • July 22 · 53 min

    Working Class Dharma

    Vince Fakhoury Horn speaks with Mushim Patricia Ikeda about working class dharma—from growing up as "the minority of Greensburg, Ohio" in a third-generation Japanese American family, to training in penniless Korean Zen temples where renovating the building was the practice. Along the way: bliss bunnies, samadhi junkies, mutual aid networks, and why affordability may be the grassroots issue of 2026. 💬 Transcript Vince Horn: Okay. So yeah, I think it was really the beginning of this year — I was teaching a retreat in Portugal with a friend. It’s our annual Pragmatic Dharma retreat. And while I was there, I had picked up recently this book called Emergent Dharma, by Dr. Sharon Suh, and I scrolled through the chapters, and I looked, and I went straight to yours, and I read it. That was the first thing I read, and I just loved hearing about your story. For me, some of the coolest part about the Dharma is hearing people’s, like, stories and their biographies and, like, their real lived experience of the Dharma, and I just felt that in your story in the chapter there — you’re talking about how you were raised, and your family, and where you came from, and how you started engaging with Buddhism, and just the whole story there, that I’ve heard now more of since I’ve gotten to know you better over this year. And really, I was just hoping we could talk about, you know, your story in part here, because the theme is working class Dharma. And when we last spoke, we decided that was a good kind of place to focus some of the conversation. But a lot of it is about your experience, really. Like, what does it mean to live in the, quote-unquote, working class in the modern world, and to also be a Dharma practitioner? And how different is that in a heritage Asian ethnic tradition than in a white convert tradition, which is more how Emily and I have come up? I think that’s an interesting conversation too, because now we’re talking about class and ethnicity — two different dimensions that are often interwoven, or braided. So anyway, could you share a bit about your story, Mushim? I know you come out of the Zen tradition, both in Japan and Korea, but how did you get into this? Was it a family tradition, or is it something that you came back to explore — like, the roots of your family’s tradition — later? Mushim Ikeda: Yeah, thank you so much, Vince. So I was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1954, and I am, by our system — meaning Japanese Americans, by our system — a third-generation Japanese American. We count the first generation to be the immigrants, so those were my grandparents on both sides, and they’re the Issei — “ichi,” meaning one. My parents were the Nisei, meaning they were both born in the United States, and they were the Nisei — “ni,” two. Three is “san,” so I am Sansei, or third-generation Japanese American, by how we count. I was born in Cleveland, grew up in Ohio, because that’s where my father’s work took him. And we grew up very working class. In Cleveland, when I was born, my father sold Wear-Ever pots and pans from door to door, and then he got a job inspecting fruit and vegetables — perishables that were being shipped on the railroads — working for an independent company called the RPIA, Railroad Perishable Inspection Agency. And that took us down to the rural area between Akron and Canton, going a little bit toward the middle of Ohio, south of Cleveland. And most of my classmates in the public schools that I attended — I would say the majority of them were children of people from West Virginia who came north to Akron, then the tire capital of the world. Goodyear, Firestone, Seiberling — they were all there, along with Quaker Oats, which produced a very interesting smell when the wind wafted from Akron our way, with a mixture of burning rubber and toasted oats. That was the smell of my childhood. And the air pollution was incredible, producing magnificent sunsets. And that’s where I grew up. So my classmates were children of the tire factory workers for the most part, as well as some were children of the remnants of the dairy farms, the cow pastures in that area that were gradually turning into suburban housing tract lands and so forth. That was my childhood. We were in an all-white community, except for us. One of my teachers used to call our family “the minority of Greensburg, Ohio.” And at home, we had a very strong sense of who we were. We were Japanese American. We were not Japanese. We were certainly not white or middle-class Americans. We were working-class Japanese Americans. And little by little, my parents wanted us to go to college. They rose into the lower middle class, then vaguely towards the middle middle class. However, I realized as I’ve grown older that I was raised — so, this is to just be completely fair: I was formed by my parents, and I do have a prejudice, and their prejudice was against what they perceived as upper-class privileged people, which in this case meant mostly white Americans who would look down upon their fellow white Americans who had come up from West Virginia and worked in the tire factories, and certainly looked down upon us, since we were not privileged white Americans. So there we see, like, race, ethnicity, class, as always, are completely interwoven. And I freely admit I was raised to not be entitled and superior, and my parents would say snotty — like, in their words — a rich kid. Vince Horn: It seems like, immediately hearing you, the way you’re describing that, that sounds like a good thing. Mushim Ikeda: I hope so. Vince Horn: And I mean, there’s a clearly good dimension to what you’re describing that I so appreciate. I guess I’m relating to this — the way you described it, almost like there’s, like, a spectrum of experience here, where you’re talking about the white West Virginian expats who are coming over to Ohio. In terms of the sort of hierarchy of sort of caste, I guess, for lack of a better term. Mushim Ikeda: It is caste. Vince Horn: Yes. You have this sort of racialized caste system. And it seems like I can relate to what you’re saying from where I was formed, in this formation, you know. And it’s like, oh, I can see growing up with a Palestinian family, and I can see the racialized part of that, and the opportunities that were lost there, and the economic opportunities, and the bootstraps attitude — like, you gotta help yourself if you want any help; like, no one’s gonna help you. Like, all of those things were very formative. But at the same time, you know, my grandfather did well with that attitude, and he had resources. And I knew, like, I was never gonna be homeless, you know? And that was something — I had friends that didn’t have that same level of security. You know, to know that they had someone — that, you know, even if your parents, your single mom, couldn’t earn any money or got sick or something, you had people that could take care of you. That’s a huge level of security not everyone has. So I guess I’m relating to it from there — of, like, oh yeah, the further you’re down in the caste system, the less support you have, and the more, in a sense, it’s like up to you to kind of, like, hard-knuckle it through really adverse conditions that, you know, are imposed. Mushim Ikeda: Very much so. And of course, to state the obvious, we have the legacy in the United States of the World War II incarceration into internment and concentration camps of the Japanese immigrants and their children, the Japanese-American citizens. Vince Horn: Right. How did that specifically impact your family system? Mushim Ikeda: The way it impacted my family was that my mother grew up in Hawaii, on Oahu, near Pearl Harbor, and there actually is a family story, which is true — we have evidence. The attack was in the morning, and my mom’s mom, my maternal grandma, who was a Shin Buddhist practitioner — her husband, my grandpa, was a Soto Zen Buddhist practitioner. They had a mixed Buddhist marriage. So the family lore is that in the Pearl Harb… Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • July 9 · 31 min

    Modern Buddhisms

    In “The Fourth Turning of the Wheel,” Vince Horn traces the Three Turnings of the Wheel of Dharma from early Buddhism to Tibetan Vajrayana, then argues we’re living through new turnings right now—the modern, postmodern, and metamodern waves of Buddhist practice—and asks what it takes to hold them all. Get access to the full Modern Buddhisms training cohort by joining the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha. 💬 Transcript Vince: So Modern Buddhisms — this title’s really in part inspired by my time at Naropa University. I should just say that up front, because being there for about four years or so in the mid-aughts really influenced me as a Dharma practitioner and then later as a teacher. When I started teaching, of course, my view had already been really molded and shaped in the halls of Naropa, you could say. Naropa was founded by a Tibetan Buddhist teacher named Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who’s quite both famous and infamous for his influence on American Dharma. When I was a student at Naropa, one of the core offerings in the Religious Studies department, which is where I spent most of my time and where I got my degree, was called the First Turning, the Second Turning, and the Third Turning — the Turnings. There was a class on each one of them. I took the First Turning with Judith Simmer-Brown, who was an acharya, a teacher in that lineage, and a professor at Naropa. And it was cool to really learn in an in-depth way over six, seven months — a college class, you’re writing papers and reading a stack of books — in more depth about the tradition that I was in love with. And seeing it from the point of view, in this case, of this Tibetan model called the Three Turnings. As I said, Chogyam Trungpa was Tibetan, so this model was influential and informed a lot of the curriculum at Naropa. The Tibetan model of the Three Turnings emerges later in the evolution and history of Buddhism. So to talk about modern Buddhisms, we of course have to talk about historical Buddhisms too. We can’t just skip to the modern era — unless we’re being really hyper-modern, then we would. Then we’d be like, “Oh, yeah, it all began today. Here we are.” No. We’re going to actually kind of try to trace this back a little bit. And of course, this is such a huge area, with so much history and so many people involved, and I’m going to totally do it injustice by compressing things and making big, broad points and claims. So I just want to kind of apologize for that upfront. It’s kind of one of the things you unfortunately have to do to talk about a topic that’s so broad and make any sense at all, I think. So I’m going to try to make some sense without shredding apart reality here too badly. The way I understand it, and understood it then at Naropa, is that early Buddhism starts with the historical Buddha Siddhartha Gautama in Northern India, Nepal — modern-day Nepal. And there’s a particular kind of flavor to that early Buddhist philosophy, even as it starts to become diversified into many different schools. There were, like, 17 schools of early Buddhism intact at one point in India, just kind of all competing for meme share. And what we have now that’s kind of extant, that’s currently evolved from there, is just one of those 17 schools that came through: the Theravada school of early Buddhism. They called it the Path of the Elders, which is where most of my teachers had trained, in that lineage. This becomes known as early Buddhism, or what the Tibetans would later call the first turning of the wheel — the First Turning dharma. And why is it called the first turning? Because this is when the Buddha first taught his unique approach — what we call Buddhism now. And the wheel represents the teachings that the Buddha gave, the core of the teachings, which are the Noble Eightfold Path, sometimes compressed down to or simplified as the three trainings, the Threefold Training. The Threefold Training in what? In Ethics or Morality or Virtue, in Concentration, Meditation, and in Insight, Wisdom. These are the things that the Buddha taught, and this is the unique collection of trainings that made it Buddish. This is how you know the Buddish pattern, when you see these eight represented as the Threefold Training and this sort of unique constellation and specific ways of looking at things. In the Eightfold Path, we have two in particular that are quite important here, which are Right Intention and Right View. This is how we see and do the thing. This is how we’re seeing and doing it. So in early Buddhism there’s a particular view and intention that goes along with that view. The intention is to put an end to suffering. And the view is that it’s possible. Suffering does exist, but it’s possible to experience a cessation of suffering. The end of dukkha. And there’s a path that you follow to do that called the Eightfold Path. This is the view of early Buddhism. You’re stuck in samsara and there is freedom. It’s called nirvana. You can get out. You can have an experience of freedom. Later Buddhists don’t disagree on this point — they just disagree, I would say, on how far to extend it and how much to fall in love with our concepts about what’s happening here. The Second Turning — I remember at the very end of the First Turning course I took with Judith Simmer-Brown at Naropa, she basically delivered the big rug pull after learning all these models, the Four Noble Truths and the 12 Links of Codependent Origination — I mean, model after model after model. We’re just learning and reading texts and learning. And at the end she says, “In the next course, the second turning, they’re going to come through” — and just kind of point. And we read The Heart Sutra, and she’s like, “They’re going to point out that the problem with this whole edifice of early Buddhism is that people fell in love with their concepts and wanted to try to explain everything.” That’s what the Abhidhamma ends up becoming — this attempt to describe how everything is related. We’re going to describe and map the entire world of interdependent phenomena and describe everything in detail. And there was something about that that was problematic, which was the freezing or the reifying of that, and it said, no. Basically, like, no. This is not the move. And it negated that in a way that was meant to de-reify that tendency to kind of build mental sandcastles and to believe that our thoughts are the things that are real. And early Buddhism has this built in, in a way, because the early Buddhists say, “Here’s the right view. This is the way you need to understand things.” And that is an understanding of early Buddhism. You want to download this view and understand things this way. Practice in a way that you see that this is true — the three characteristics of experience. You want to see impermanence, see selflessness, see all this stuff. But the problem there is you’re taking the view quite seriously. It’s like, this is the right view. If you get too attached to your view — in the Second Turning, there’s a recognition that this becomes problematic, and we can describe this as emptiness: to let go of your fixed views. To realize, oh, this is more open and fluid. So the second turning emerges. It’s described in terms of non-duality of samsara and nirvana and the emptiness of views — of not believing there’s some thing over there called nirvana that’s separate from this experience of samsara. Cosmological dualism. Oh, no, that’s a problem. If that’s really true, we’ve got a problem here. The Second Turning releases the problem by pointing out that the problem is fixed dualistic thinking. Ah. Okay. Now we’re in the realm of non-duality. The view here shifts from the three characteristics in the First Turning — the Second Turning is about Emptiness and Interdependence. Compassion is just as important as wisdom in the second turning. I remember Shinzen Young explaining this in a way that really struck me. He said, “In the Second Turning, in Mahayana Zen, compassion has equal precedent… Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • July 3 · 30 min

    The Cost of Silence

    In “The Cost of Silence,” dharma teacher Vince Horn and guest Daniel Klein trace what it costs us—psychologically, relationally, economically, and spiritually—to withhold the truth, arguing that the small silences of the dinner table are the same debt that scales into complicity with collective harm, asking what it takes to finally stop paying it. 💬 Transcript Vince Horn: So, welcome back to the Insight Diaspora. I’m your host, Vince Fukuri-Horn. Good to be here with you again in this exploration of ... I don’t know, what is it exactly we’re exploring here, Daniel? You have to tell me. Daniel Klein: I think it’s going to be an emergent phenomenon. Vince Horn: Great. Okay. Another of those emergent phenomenons. So, no, looking forward to this conversation genuinely. We are talking about the cost of silence today. And for a little background, Daniel and I had a conversation prior to this that we aired through Buddhist Geeks, and it was called The Cost of Truth. And there we were sharing some reflections from both of our experiences, in very different positions, in this sort of Israel-Gaza — I don’t even know what to call it anymore — kerfuckle. This situation is just terrible. We’re coming at it from different places, but both had this experience of speaking up and saying things that weren’t super welcome by our social groups. And so we’re talking about the cost of that, and what happens when you speak up even though it’s not really welcomed. Today we want to explore the other side of that equation, which is the cost of not speaking up, because we also both have had that experience as well. And it’s not like we suddenly woke up one day and were like, “Okay, I’m going to speak the truth about everything, no matter what.” We’re both social humans, so we have gone through a process of learning how to speak what’s true for us. And I imagine Daniel, like myself, is still going through that process. So we wanted to talk about that today. And also, just before we jump in, I want to say a word about generosity. I’m not a huge fan of the generosity talks and Dharma things. I’ll be honest with you. It always felt weird and cringey to me. Now that I’m on the other end of it, it’s a different matter, of course. And Emily was reminding me that the Buddhist teachings start with the practice of generosity. If you look at the 10 perfections, the 10 Paramis, which are these 10 things we’re cultivating on the path, the first one is generosity. So it’s sort of foundational. And it’s foundational to this project as well. We’re doing this out of the generosity of our own hearts. We’re organizing this and having these conversations and wanting to talk about things that are not super comfortable sometimes, or popular. And we’re putting a lot on the line to do that. And we’re asking, for folks that find this valuable, to meet us there, and to see generosity as a mutual process. And so, with that in mind, I just wanted to highlight that there are really two ways, in terms of financial support, that you could consider supporting us today. One is by supporting this project directly, the Insight Diaspora, which runs through the Buddhist Geeks organization, which is an educational nonprofit. There’s a link in the chat if you wanted to become a supporting member of this project; you could do that. That money goes directly to supporting our guests. We donate to our guests to support their livelihood, and it supports us as organizers as well. And then I also wanted to highlight this organization that Daniel’s associated with. Each of these meetings, we want to highlight good organizations that are doing good work in the world. And so I wanted to mention the Soulforce Project, which promotes social justice using music and the arts. And I thought maybe, Daniel, if you could say something about this, because I know they’re your friends. Maybe what the Soulforce Project is about. Daniel Klein: Well, one of the ways that I describe them is that they’re doing the work that we’re doing, but they’re operating at the level of arts and culture. So how do we promote deep transformational work in the field of liberation and collective liberation by bringing together world-class musicians to facilitate these experiences? Run by an amazing, amazing sitar player— Vince Horn: Hmm. Daniel Klein: —who I’ve done a couple events with actually in my own home. So he’s a dear friend. Vince Horn: Okay. And is this a California-based organization as well? Daniel Klein: Yeah, Altadena. Vince Horn: Okay. Great. Awesome. And just for context, you’re based in southern California, I believe? Daniel Klein: Yes. Yeah, Los Angeles. Vince Horn: Yeah. Sorry to hear that. Having lived in Los Angeles. No, it’s a beautiful place. Daniel Klein: I’m in my little bubble. I very rarely leave my living room, and it’s very beautiful up here in Topanga. Vince Horn: Okay. Oh, yeah, you really are. Topanga is a bubble. So yeah, that’s the way to do it if you’re going to live in LA. Good. Well, again, Daniel, thank you so much for being here. This is such a delight to talk to you again. Daniel Klein: Thank you all. Vince Horn: Yeah. So I wanted to start with a quote, if that’s cool with you, Daniel, and just have you, I guess, riff on it or respond. This is the main thing that came to my mind when inquiring about the question of the cost associated with not speaking up, or not saying something which is true. This comes from a book called Trauma and the Unbound Body, by Judith Blackstone. And she says, “Children may be faced with a terrible choice: truth or love. They can limit their own senses and intelligence and be cozily embraced by the family, or they can stick to their view of reality, shutting down their heart instead of their wits and enduring the family rejection.” Daniel Klein: Hmm. Vince Horn: Yeah, you can probably see why I brought this quote up. Daniel Klein: Yeah. Very, very powerful. Very powerful indeed, because I think that it’s really in childhood that we first incur this trauma of: there is a cost associated with speaking the truth. And from my own experience as a child, that’s where my own personal self split. The authentic self, and then all of the walls and masks that I needed to perform and to put up in order to be accepted by my family — and this goes deep into our deepest abandonment and rejection wounds. Vince Horn: Yeah. Daniel Klein: And in many ways it’s these small things, obviously, that start in childhood that then scale to mass atrocities. And I always say that, “Genocide starts at the dinner table, not in the halls of politics.” Vince Horn: That’s a powerful statement. I’ve heard you say that before, actually. Yeah. How did you experience that, growing up in the West Bank? Because we talked about last time how you kind of made a break from the society and culture that you were in, in a certain way. But what happened prior to that? How was that at the dinner table? Daniel Klein: Yeah. It’s really interesting, because this process of telling the truth is a very long process. Because very often we think things, and we already have this inner clarity, but then to get to the point where you reckon with these truths publicly, there’s this in-between stage, and that’s the stage of the silence where the real suffering is happening, where you’ve had this internal shift, but you are completely misaligned on the outside. And so when it comes to genocide at the dinner table, that’s the stage where people around you could start saying really shocking things. I recall a specific conversation where a close and immediate family member was laughing at the starvation in Gaza, and there was a news headline that said that a turtle had washed up on shore. And this immediate family member said, “I thought they’re starving, they can eat the turtle.” And that’s just really the kind of joke, the kind of comment that somebody can drop. And when you’re in this in-between stage, there’s this nodding along that you have — “Hmm. Hmm. Okay.” — becau… Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • June 26 · 37 min

    Dharma & Empire

    In “Dharma & Empire,” Mary Thanissara and Vince Fakhoury Horn trace how the structures of Empire occupy not just land but the psyche—moving from their own Irish, Palestinian, and colonial family histories to Gaza, climate, and class—and ask what a more revolutionary Dharma might require of practitioners right now. 💬 Transcript Vince Horn: So Thanissara, thank you again. Great to be here with you. Thanissara: Likewise, likewise. Really, really thrilled to plunge into this Insight Diaspora. That was a brilliant capturing of our wandering, homeless group. Vince Horn: Yes, indeed. I was curious too. I know you started off in the Ajahn Chah tradition — in the Thai Forest Tradition — as a nun in the ‘70s, and I think you were a nun for like 12 years, when I was reading. So that’s a long time. Thanissara: Yeah. Vince Horn: Do you consider yourself part of the insight meditation tradition, or were you coming up at the same time that that whole thing was coming up? Thanissara: I’ve never really designated a category for myself, other than a Dharma practitioner in quite a broad sense. And having said that, most of the development of my practice has been guided through, first of all, the U Ba Khin lineage, which was transmitted to Goenkaji — those teachers were my first teachers from Burma, Myanmar. And then through Ajahn Chah, and that was a very pivotal formation of my practice, because I was young and very shaped by that lineage and the premise that they were teaching from. And then since leaving the robes, I’ve almost entirely taught and practiced within the lay insight world. That’s been a constant adaptation and inquiry, and not a particularly easeful landing. Well, none of it’s been an easeful landing, because it’s all in transition and having to be translated on so many levels. So I guess there’s no end to that in the Dharma. Vince Horn: That really fits with how I’ve interpreted your work from afar for many years. I’ve always heard you and Kittisaro’s name mentioned together, and I’ve heard about the work you’ve been doing in South Africa and other places with activism. It has always felt like it’s been a little bit on the emerging edge of the insight tradition. You’re not quite inside, but you’re not outside either. You’re influencing but not quite. You all seem to be strange attractors in this community. And I mean that in the best possible way. Thanissara: No, it’s a good position to be in, I think, in terms of having space from having to conform, and also being able to help shift some of the parameters of what’s allowed to be discussed or what the Dharma is, from within. Also relationship to the folks that I’ve grown to know so well in that movement — having taught a lot or discussed things over many, many years. So there’s a relationship where both being in and out is an awkward reality. Vince Horn: Yeah, and I can relate to that. Thanissara: A sense of tension around that, and creativity maybe. Vince Horn: Yeah, it’s like generative tension sometimes, and other times it’s just tension. That’s my experience anyway of what you’re describing. Thanissara: Yeah, totally. Vince Horn: So we spoke recently for the first time privately, and I think it was interesting to me that the first thing we got into was our family histories. It seemed like there’s no way to really avoid talking about that. Not that I want to at this point, but we both share ancestry from the UK, from Ireland, and I know your family moved at some point to London as well. You mentioned to me that your dad was in the military and that he was posted at some point in Palestine, I believe it was. Thanissara: Yeah. Well, he was a teenage conscript. But he was trying to really escape the poverty that he grew up in, in the tenements of Dublin — which were quite infamous, and still somewhat, although they were closed down in the 1960s. And the oppression, I think, that he felt, even though Ireland was in a process of liberating itself post the 1916 uprising, and then the liberation that started about when he was born, really, 1925 or so. But it wasn’t very liberated for him. So it’s complex, and I think that’s one of the very interesting things about being both colonized, and yet shape-shifting to find a way out through becoming part of, at that time, the war effort of the Second World War. Which was a movement of idealism, but it was a movement of some feeling of needing to break set from not only the economic oppression, but the religious oppression that he grew up under. Of course, the Catholic Church was both extremely oppressive, and it was also the place that people went to for support, to find solace from this unrelenting violence and oppression that had gone on for so long in Ireland under the British. So in that process, he was posted to Palestine and around many places in the so-called Middle East. And I didn’t really know that until quite recently, actually. My elder brother is the holder of history, and somehow in discussion it came out that he was actually posted. And it was very meaningful for me. It’s like, oh my goodness, that he — and apparently one of the things he talked about that my brother remembered was the Irgun, the terrorism that was going on from the early Zionists that were settling. And of course they were also fighting the British as well, blowing up British posts and things. So that was obviously something that really went deep for him in his memory bank. But he never really talked much about any of that, as that generation didn’t. Vince Horn: Right. Thanissara: We have probably in common a lot of lost stories, as people shape-shift and assimilate. And there was also a lot of shame for the Irish fighting for the British, particularly in the Second World War. And it was hard to go home. There’s a lot written about that. They were displaced again in another sort of way, because at that point Ireland didn’t join the war effort — they didn’t want to align with the British. So it was a very complex political dynamic that was going on. Vince Horn: Yeah, that is complex. And it shines a light on the contemporary situation where Ireland is one of the few countries, and their leaders are one of the few, that actually consistently speak up on behalf of Palestinian people. They can empathize with the situation. Thanissara: Deeply, deeply. So much was shaped by so much bitterness. I mean, if you go to the west — where, when Kittisaro and I were first together, we stayed in County Mayo, which is on the far west coast of Ireland — they still talk about the great hunger as if it was yesterday. Vince Horn: Wow. Thanissara: You still see the little crofting houses that were the Black and Tans, who were very, very brutal. In fact, I think they were sent to Palestine after Ireland. You can still see where they pulled down the houses of people and threw them out as they were starving. And I still think — this is another issue — there was such a big silence about the shame of the deprivation of that. It’s only very, very recently that some of the most awful aspects of the impacts of that constructed famine or starvation, really a genocide by the British, are being discussed. While they were exporting food, and it was very, very desperate, and in the workhouses. And then part of the silence was — I remember when Frank McCourt came out with the book Angela’s Ashes, which was a while ago, but it was portraying this period of history in Ireland, the same time when my father grew up, of this extreme poverty and the struggle. And the whole of my Irish family were very upset by this, because they felt ashamed. They were like, “No, it was like —” But in fact, that portrayed some of the conditions that they were struggling with as well in the tenements. So all of these add to the complexity of lost stories, broken lineages. It’s how empire really shapes identity — not just the occupation of land, but the occupation of psyches. And how that takes up real estate in the imaginal levels of people understanding t… Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • May 7 · 13 min

    The Most Slept-On Meditation Object

    In “The Most Slept-On Meditation Object,” Vince Horn introduces the kasina — the visual concentration object that dominated Early Buddhist practice yet is barely used today — and lays out a 12-week curriculum that maps color & elemental kasinas onto the full arc of the eight jhānas, and then finishes with the technodelic practice of breath kasina. Interested in the topic?Sign-up for free the KASINA web applicationor join us for a live training in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha 💬 Transcript Vince Horn: So welcome to Kasina. The backdrop for this practice, as you all know — this is really meant to be a concentration-based practice. So when I zoom back out to kind of the bigger picture for me, looking at all the different ways we could meditate, this is one technique that is part of the approach that I would just simply call concentration. And concentration for me is the practice of bringing attention to a single point, the result of which is unification. We become one with the point of focus. We become fused or merged, you could say, with the object. Of course, there’s a gradual process by which that happens. It’s not that we instantly merge, although sometimes that can happen. And the kasina in this case is a visual orb or a circle. It is literally a visual point. It literally translates — the word — into English as All, Whole, or Complete. That’s the meaning of the term kasina. And it occupies a really important place in the Early Buddhist tradition. It’s listed in the Visuddhimagga, which is an important commentary, a commentarial text that was written a thousand years after the time of the Buddha, but is kind of like a super hardcore nerdy meditation manual. In that manual, it lists 40 different meditation objects that you can use to train your concentration, and to go deep in concentration. And a full quarter of these 40 are these visual kasina objects. So it’s literally the most common object you’d see in the Early Buddhist tradition. And yet you’ll notice in modern times, it’s one of the least commonly used. So that’s quite interesting. I think because of that, kasinas are one of the most slept-on meditation objects in modernity. We’re somehow not tapping into the tremendous power of using the visual processing systems that we all are born with, which actually dominate our nervous system. Looking into this, researching this, I found out 30 to 40% of the brain’s cortex is wired for vision. Compare that to hearing, which is only 3 to 5%. We are deeply visual beings. Under typical conditions, actually, vision uses 5 to 10 times more bandwidth than touch, which is the second most bandwidth-intensive sense. Neurobiologically, we are actually deeply wired to see. And also from a neurobiological perspective, circular orbs make really good concentration objects, and there seem to be a few reasons for this that I’ve been able to kind of detect. One is there’s a really similar parallel between our eyes and the shape of our eyes and the shape of the kasina. Your retina is basically circular, and lenses in our eyes focus light in concentric rings, so the round shape of the kasina maps neatly onto the geometry of our eyes. And like I said earlier, so much of our brain is actually wired for visual processing, and the early visual neurons are tuned to detect edges and symmetries. In the visual processing, that’s among the first things that happen — we detect edges and symmetries. Circles, of course, are pure symmetry, so there are no sudden directional shifts when you’re looking at a circle. The signal is much more clean and predictable. This is another reason I think the kasina is such a powerful object. We also have to consider how attention — human attention — has evolved. Here, smooth, continuous boundaries tend to stand out against jagged, natural edges. Think rocks, branches, trees. So if you see things like berries or fruits or faces, the Sun, the Moon — all of these natural objects that humans have been evolving with — we evolutionarily can reward these things with quick detection, because they’re important for our survival. And then finally, I just note that when you’re resting your attention on a circle, there’s no privileged starting point. There’s no point at which your attention can look and be like, “Oh, that’s the point that you start with.” So your eyes don’t keep darting to all the angles and ends. Actually, they kind of do. I’ll share from my own experience: I’ve noticed, as I rest my attention in the kasina, if you get focused, you can actually start to see the ways your eyes are constantly, very rapidly looking for edges. And you’ll see, actually, in the circle — this is my experience — you’ll see in the circle all of these sort of edges at the very edge of the circle constantly being re-perceptualized. But because there isn’t any privileged edge to stay with, your mind can kind of rest more in the circle itself, so it’s easier to hold in meditation. So these are some of the reasons I think the kasina is a really natural object to focus on, and that we are, in a sense, hardwired to be able to. I suspect that’s why in early Buddhism, 10 of the 40 objects were kasinas. And I suspect also, based on what you all have shared and just kind of thinking more deeply about this, in some ways, maybe this is why kasina isn’t the most popular form of meditation, because it potentially is too effective, right? If you have an experience where suddenly things get really intense or trippy, like you’re tripping on psychedelics, you might be like, “Oh, whoa, wait a second. Let me chill for a minute. I’ve got to go to work in the morning.” “I’ve got to go on a date tonight,” or whatever. “I’ve got to take care of the kids, take care of dinner.” Yeah, that actually could be quite disruptive. If you’re a meditator or monk living a thousand years ago in a monastery and everyone around you is just constantly tripping out on things, it makes sense. But in the modern world perhaps, it’s a little bit disruptive to get into such deep concentration states so rapidly, or maybe we just don’t have a reference point for it with other objects of concentration, so it’s maybe a little scary. I could totally see that. So just want to kinda honor the reality of that. The way I want to approach this training together in kasina — we have 12 weeks from here, and I’ve kinda laid out the kasina training in a very specific kind of curriculum. The first eight weeks will just be focused on working with visual kasina, and each week we’re going to move between different kasinas. We’re going to try a different object. Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m suggesting that you all should be following along with your own personal practice with that kasina, although if you do that, you’ll probably get some benefits. You’re very welcome to engage with this content in whatever way seems appropriate to your practice, just as a reminder. I know you’ll do that anyway, but you don’t have to make this your primary practice while you’re doing it if something else is primary. But of course, the more you engage with the practice, the more you’ll learn. In the first four weeks, I want to focus just on the arc called the Rūpa Jhāna arc, so focusing on the first four jhānas. So each week we’ll both cover a different kasina — in the first four weeks, we’ll focus actually on the color kasinas, just simple visual orbs that are made of a solid color. We’ll start with Red in the first jhāna, then we’ll move to Yellow in the second jhāna, Blue in the third jhāna, and White in the fourth jhāna. And I have some reasonings for that. I think that’s kind of the best matchup that one can make between the actual colors and what they evoke, according to tradition and my experience, and the qualities of each of these jhānas. So we’ll both be exploring the jhānas as we go along, exploring these progressively more subtle states of meditative absorption, while also exploring different kasina objects that seem to pair nicely with each jhāna. In the seco… Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • May 4 · 7 min

    Focusing on the Fire Kasina

    In Focusing on the Fire Kasina Vince Fakhoury Horn introduces the Fire Kasina meditation practice, emphasizing the primacy of concentration and the recursive process of learning through focused attention on a candle flame. Interested in the topic?Sign-up for free the KASINA web application or join us for a live training in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha 💬 Transcript Vince: All right, so today we’re going to be diving into the practice of the Fire Kasina, and I’m excited to share this with you in part because it seems like it was a really important part of my own teacher’s practice—my first meditation teacher, Daniel Ingram. When I was reading his book for the first time, I remember him talking about how he went on retreat and worked with the candle flame at the end of a long vipassana retreat. Later on, that story was shared again in the beginning of a book called The Fire Kasina, which I’d recommend. It was a conversation—a dialogical book—between him and Shannon Stein, an experienced meditator who was talking to Daniel during her own replication of his long Fire Kasina retreat practice. It gives some great instructions in that book—a good overview of the practice and the kind of stages that one can go through. Not universal, perhaps, but fairly common. It also gives some really good, basic, practical pointers on how to do concentration practice. And this is one of the two frames that I’d like to share today in exploring the Fire Kasina, because I think it’s useful. I’m going to start here and then loop back around, because it’s so important that it bears returning to. So here’s what Daniel said in The Fire Kasina book to Shannon, as she asked for basic instructions on how to do the Fire Kasina. He said, “Concentration on what is happening is more important than what is happening.” What does that mean? It seems pretty simple in a way, but it’s deceptively simple, because we just seem to keep forgetting this important point when we do the practice. So what does it mean to me? “Concentration on what is happening” means that what we’re focusing on is more important than whatever is happening there. So if we’re focusing on our breath—the classic meditation object—then whatever’s happening with the breath is what’s happening. We could think, “Oh, I wish my breath were really soft and gentle,” or, “I wish my breath had stopped, because I heard that when it stops, that’s a good sign of concentration.” Okay, cool—but what is actually happening? Because what might be happening is you might be thinking about your breath instead of noticing your breath. This is the simple way we get lost in concepts about what’s happening instead of being with our meditation subject. So: concentration on what is happening is more important than whatever’s happening. That’s the most important thing to remember. What does that mean in terms of Fire Kasina? Here, I think it’s really useful to consider that whatever you’re seeing is what you’re seeing. You may be looking at a candle flame, and you may see all kinds of things—eyes open or eyes closed. In the guided practice to come, I’ll offer instructions for both. When that’s happening, it’s important to just remember: whatever you’re seeing is what you’re seeing. That’s what’s happening. It might be really clear and vivid, which makes it easy to see. Other times it might be unclear, murky, dull, or hazy—and that’s what’s happening. That’s what you’re seeing. Concentration on what’s happening is more important than what’s happening. The other thing that’s useful to remember in this practice is something John Vervaeke, the professor from Toronto, said: “Evolution is revolution with change.” Evolution is a process where we take something that we go through again and again—a recursive process—and something changes in the recursion. With learning and doing a practice like this, what’s the recursion? It’s the concentration feedback loop. It’s the loop we go through every time we work on strengthening our concentration. We select an object and engage with it—in this case, the candle flame. Then at some point, our mind fragments or we get distracted and lose clarity around what’s happening. We have to recognize that, remember to return, and we do that—we come back. That’s the basic feedback loop: we engage with an object, we get distracted or fragmented, we recognize that’s happened, we recollect, and we return all of ourselves back to the meditation subject. In this case, back to the candle flame. If you’re working with the afterimage and get lost with eyes closed, you can always return, open your eyes, and look at the candle flame again. That’s one way to do it. “Evolution is revolution with change.” As we go through this learning loop many times, even if it’s subtle fragmentation and subtle returning, we’re learning in each loop. Each time, we have an opportunity to understand what’s happening in the process. “Oh wow, every time I do this after lunch, it’s harder.” Okay—then be more patient with yourself. That’s part of the limitation of being human. Or, “I keep noticing this subtle recurring pattern.” Great, there’s something to pay attention to. Each time we do the practice, we’re learning—and that’s evolution. Because to me, I don’t really know what the difference is, from the point of view of being a person. Evolution is just learning how to be better in this situation—with whoever I’m with and whatever’s happening, even if it’s just with a candle flame. Here, we’re learning to be with the candle flame. To focus. To learn through what happens—what grabs our attention, what it’s like to let go, and what it’s like to return. Interested in the topic?Sign-up for free the KASINA web application or join us for a live training in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • April 29 · 6 min

    Access Concentration and the Kasina

    In Access Concentration and the Kasina, Vince Fakhoury Horn explains how kasina meditation cultivates stable attention by letting a visual object fill awareness until it naturally enters the foreground of experience into a state known as access concentration. Interested in the topic?Sign-up for free the KASINA web application or join us for a live training in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha 💬 Transcript Vince: There is this really important idea in the Buddhist meditative tradition. It doesn’t come online until, I don’t know, a thousand years into the Buddhist tradition’s evolution, but it’s still an important concept today, which is the idea of Access Concentration. And the idea of “Access” simply means that when we get into the state, we then have access to the jhānas. That’s why it’s called Access Concentration. But it’s a little weird and abstract. So for me, I simplify my own definition of what this means. For me, it’s very simple: it’s when the meditation object—the thing you’re focusing on—moves into the foreground of your experience, and distractions and other things that are pulling you from that move into the background. So it’s a flip—a foreground-background flip of attention. And it doesn’t mean that there aren’t other things that grab your attention. It doesn’t mean that you can’t get lost. Of course, you can fall out of the state; something else can grab your attention and have most of it. But the basic idea here, with the kasina—since we’re using a visual orb as our focal point—is that when we’re in Access Concentration, it means the kasina has most of our attention. Of course, it’s not always easy to know when it has most of your attention, but you can just get a feel for it when you work with the kasina. When does it feel like most of your attention—if you have 100% of your attention available—is in the kasina, is present there in the orb, and less than 50% is elsewhere: in your body, with the surrounding environment, with thoughts and feelings that are coming up that don’t have to do with the kasina? If you’ve got at least 50% of your attention on the kasina, then you’re in Access Concentration. And it feels different because it’s, again, foregrounded—it’s got the main position in your attention. Foreground and background is, of course, a visual analogy, and here it really works well talking about the kasina, because it’s a visual object. What does it mean for a visual object to be in the foreground of your experience? It doesn’t necessarily mean that it grows and grows until it visually takes up more than 50% of your visual experience—although that’s one possible way it could look. It’s not just about the percentage of your visual experience the kasina takes up; it’s the percentage of your attention that it fills up. Something very small can fill up our entire attentional field. Usually in meditation, the first object that’s taught in most traditions, I’ve noticed, is focus on the breath at the nostrils. That’s a small point of attention—it’s very small if you think about it, especially compared to a bigger circle. And still, if we focus on something, if we bring our attention to it, it fills up our attention. If you think about it, subject and object in concentration practices—the subject is the one who’s paying attention, the object is the thing we’re paying attention to. What happens as you pay more attention to something? Your attention gets closer to the object, right? That’s how we describe it. Our attention actually gets closer—even if we don’t move, our body doesn’t move, our attention can actually zoom in on things. It can zoom in and zoom out with attention, and when we get really interested in something, we zoom in on it and often exclude everything that’s not that. So here, that’s what’s happening with the kasina. The kasina object doesn’t necessarily have to change for it to fill our attentional field. It doesn’t have to be big; it could be small. We’re going to actually work with a meditation soon here where we just find the sweet spot: how big does the kasina need to be in relation to me—the subject, the one that’s paying attention to it? What is the sweet spot in terms of the size of the kasina? What is the right size? We’re going to explore that in a guided meditation. And then we’re also going to look at what’s the sweet spot in terms of how we’re attending to the kasina. There’s this whole notion in Buddhist meditation of “not too tight, not too loose.” I’m sure you’ve heard that story—the Buddha talking to the lute stringer, and the lute stringer explaining, “You don’t want it too tight, you don’t want it too loose.” And the Buddha’s like, “Yeah, just like meditation.” So here, focus too on how you focus in a way that’s not too tight, not too loose when it comes to a visual object. Fortunately for us, we have lots of experience with this, being modern people. We already know what it’s like to focus too much on screens or to strain on what we’re focusing on when it comes to visual things. So we’ll use that knowledge to help us focus in a different way on the kasina. We’ll look for the experience of Access Concentration, even if it’s just temporary—even if it just happens for a moment. One of the things I appreciate about Access Concentration is it does feel like a shift, especially if you haven’t experienced it regularly or you haven’t experienced it with that particular meditation object. Say you’re used to getting into Access Concentration to do your work or to do other things, but you haven’t necessarily done it with a blue hovering orb. And then you have the experience—you’re like, “Oh, wow, that’s cool. I can just focus on this orb, and that can become the most interesting thing in my experience,” even though from an objective standpoint it’s not that interesting. It’s just a blue circle. But actually, yeah, when I start to look at it, it becomes more than that. It actually seems now like it’s a three-dimensional orb. It’s not just a circle—it’s got dimensionality to it, and it’s luminescent, and it’s glowing, and it even has a little bit of a sense of motion. Oh wow, this is really interesting. What is this? We’ll get deeper into the experience of what the kasina’s like when we gain Access Concentration. Interested in the topic?Sign-up for free the KASINA web application or join us for a live training in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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  • April 1 · 13 min

    Metta & Compassion Vibes

    In “Metta & Compassion Vibes,” Emily Horn explores the crucial difference between befriending difficulty through metta and the deeper, boundary-dissolving willingness of compassion to actually meet suffering — and why that meeting sometimes sounds like a fierce and loving no. ☸️ The Ten Pāramīs You’re invited. to join Emily Horn in a practical exploration of The Ten Pāramīs: Ten Trainings for a Liberated Life this April. Become a member of the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha, and gain access to both live cohorts. Or you can join the kick-off session, on either of these dates, to see if it’s a good fit: * 📅 Wednesday, April 22nd @ 12pm ET * 📅 Thursday, April 23rd @ 5pm ET 💬 Transcript Emily: Sometimes when I sense into compassion, one of the things that comes up for me is this all-or-nothing kind of sense — where it is like compassion is here or it is not here — this binary kind of experience. All or nothing. I just want to invite that if it is here for us, it is like where I can have compassion for that person, but I cannot have it for myself. That is another kind of all or nothing. So there are these different kinds of barriers — we could call them barriers to compassion — that start to arise when we incline. And we have been working with loving kindness. Metta, metta, metta, metta. So perhaps sense into inclining to metta for a moment. Metta. Metta, this sense of befriending. And I have been sensing into that quality of befriending. It is a very difficult world. Humans are being everything on the spectrum to each other at this moment. There is a lot of cruelty. And there is a lot of love. So when I sense into metta, there is this sense of, okay, befriending even the cruelty. And that is a big ask. That is a big ask. And what does that even look like? Metta is a sense and a vibe — it is not a prescription for any kind of action, right, first of all. Now where compassion comes in for me, and where that inclination is important, is in the world and in our lives and in our relationships, and even with ourselves. We can have a sense of befriending, like welcoming. But then for me, it can get like, okay, I can befriend and welcome, but I am going to keep it over there. All right, I am going to keep it over there. I am going to keep you over there. I am even going to kind of see this sense of anger or agitation in myself, and I am going to kind of witness it. It is still going to kind of be over there in my experience — in here, over there. Now as metta grows, that sense of boundary can dissolve. But here is where I want to bring in compassion, because to me, when I incline to compassion, you can sense into this. May compassion arise. There is this sense of boundary shift, so that whatever is painful, that has been — in the moment — befriended enough, just befriended enough to start to sense into compassion. Compassion is going to require me in a lot of ways to merge with that sense of pain, difficulty, even if it is just for a moment. There is a sense of meeting it, right? With compassion, we meet suffering. And in some ways that sense of who is it that is really meeting it — we might not recognize it in the moment if it arises. Compassion in itself is a boundless state. It is not going to have a sense of boundary. We might not recognize that until after. Okay? We might explore compassion in a way that requires us to remember with mindfulness what it was like to experience it. But compassion requires me to meet the suffering, whether it is arising internally, externally, and then sometimes it will shift where it is like both internal and external. All right. These are the concepts that start to be used to describe this energetic — remember the vibe that we are sensing into as we explore these states. It is like, what is the vibe that comes with it? In the Pali language: metta, compassion, loving kindness. So the sense of befriending, and then this willingness — compassion asks us to meet it. To meet the suffering. Now, it might be helpful to just remember: when we say suffering, what is it that we mean? What do I mean by suffering? All right, what is this? And there is so much of it, so many different flavors of it. With compassion, there is this genuine sense of — there is a willingness to see it. To meet it. Then even if it is conscious or not, a movement towards the alleviation of it. And that is really important. It is like the alleviation of it. And the alleviation of it might be in the form of a no. All right. So compassion might lead us into the action of no — no, we are not going to keep doing this because it keeps adding onto the suffering. All right. Logically, sometimes it is a very simple thing to see. It is like, no, we are not going to hit people, because that hurts. And then what happens? That sense of compassion leads me into the alleviation of it. Sometimes this gets confused with empathy and I want to kind of put a sticky note on that. What is the difference between empathy and compassion? Empathy — we human beings are very, whether or not we want to see this or even are attuned to seeing this, we are very connected biologically, neurologically. So empathy is that ability to sense other people’s feelings, to sense what is going on as a collective. And yet empathy, if we are not aware of it and we do not sense it and know it as empathy, then sometimes we get confused and think it is compassion. But here is one of the differences: empathy can make us tired, right? Compassion — believe it or not — compassion is a boundless, energetic state. Right? Firefighters, people that rescue for a living — they talk about running into burning buildings without even thinking. All right, it is like this natural kind of — for them, natural kind of response to run towards, to try to alleviate the suffering. And they might not even realize it is compassion in that moment, right? Because the sense of boundaries dissolves. That is one of the ways that it gets confusing. It is because compassion arises, there is not this sense of me and you. And yet it is really difficult sometimes to sense into where that sense of blocking happens when we start to expand into the universal mind state, heart state of it. I can sense into certain kinds of difficult people where it is like, no, not them. And for me, what is really supportive is to say, okay, yeah, with metta — metta is a boundless state as well. Everything is held in it. And with compassion there is that sense of alleviation of suffering that also can hold a no. So we can — in some ways our cognitive mind might have to be reprogrammed a little bit as to what we think this has to look like, because a lot of times that is where the confusion comes in. There can be a fierce quality of compassion that can still hold everything in the universe and at the same time say, okay, in this human, personal world, we are going to stand for the embodiment of love and say no to that which is not right, to that which is not. And that can look a lot of different ways. And we are seeing that more and more and more. We are seeing more and more of that no, collectively, against the kind of cruelty that compassion asks us to meet. And it is a really, really big ask. One of the challenges with compassion — just in the heart states in general — and remember, part of the way this is traditionally laid out in the Buddhist framework, especially with the metta practices and the insight meditation tradition, it is like we start with loving kindness to kind of get that sense and get our sea legs with befriending even some of the difficulty that we do not even want to in ourselves. We kind of get our sea legs, and then we are like, okay, compassion — let us take it slow and steady, but learn how to digest the closeness, the intimacy, the connection that can be an acquired taste. Through that realization of, oh yeah, we are so connected — that for me, unless I have been able to digest that suffering a little bit at a time, then the next heart capacity that we learn to … Get full access to Buddhist Geeks at www.buddhistgeeks.org/subscribe

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