Buddhist Geeks

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, and that you think of immediately, in relationship to other people. And yet the way that we’re trained in this tradition to practice it is in an anti-social kind of way.
Where we’re being pro-social by ourselves, in our own head. I see some laughing, right? It’s kind of obvious when you think about it. I didn’t think about it for many years, until I started doing these out-loud practices, and I was like, wait. Hmm. Maybe there’s something of a mismatch between the design of the practice and the aims of the practice, where they’re not quite aligned.
And so, for me, the Social Metta is a realignment as well — of metta practice toward a form that may be more appropriate for many more people. I’d say, especially for those of us that have more extroverted tendencies. We tend to regulate ourselves with the external environment and other people, rather than regulating ourselves internally as easily.
So for me, these practices allow a kind of extroverted self-regulation that’s, on a very conventional level, part of what they offer. And then they offer this really cool opportunity that you see in a practice like Essence Noting, where you can build this virtuous feedback mechanism through each other, where we start to actually feel the good wishes of each other and the sincerity behind them.
And it touches us. It opens our own hearts, and it becomes easier to access that ourselves, so we can kind of draft off of each other’s goodwill and sincerity, and virtuously build that together in a way that’s infectious and delightful. So, I know I’m making some strong claims here.
For those that haven’t tried Social Metta, I do want to say: it doesn’t work for everybody. Some people don’t find this particularly helpful, and that’s part of what we’re exploring with Pragmatic Dharma too — how to figure out what works for you, or what works right now. So if this doesn’t work for you, that’s okay.
For me, I trust that you’ll use what works and abandon the rest.



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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 our cognitive minds, I’ll just remind us that acceptance and condoning are two different things, the way that I mean what I’m explaining here. It’s like there is the acceptance of experience and at the same time that doesn’t mean that I’m condoning actions that are causing harm.
Remember, we go through our personal content as we expand to sense into where this interconnection is in these universal states. Let’s say inclusion, equanimity, upekkhā. And we can meet and then it’s like, okay, like how does this get expressed in our unique expression of it? And in some sense, you know, the actions that will come from a cultivation of spaciousness, in some sense balance, you know, but we find our balance by falling out of balance.
Sometimes people can describe it as dreamlike. And since there is that alleviation of such a strong pull into certain kinds of suffering, when equanimity is present, it frees us up to be able to act in ways that... You just sense into it. Like, acting from equanimity, and then acting from that reaction when your friend or partner or fill-in-the-blank says something that hurts, and then you just snap. It’s just this automatic reaction, which has its place. And yet equanimity provides that kind of counterbalance to reaction that says, “Okay, well maybe there is something else here and some way else to be. Some other move that we can make.”
My sense is that if we’re reacting and we’re acting out of our freeze, fight, flight, then that’s not, in the long run, going to be a supportive thing in our lives. So there’s a lot of messes that I’ve had to clean up from that place, more so in my experience than with equanimity.
However, I just want to kind of remind us too that to move into equanimity, there’s usually a strong sense of a fight before. May or may not happen in your experience, but usually equanimity, it’s not hard won, but it’s also, there is a part of us, it’s like a mini death in my experience, that has to shed in order to really kind of take form in the shape of the state of equanimity.


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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.



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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.” And I started to kinda notice when aggression was present, I’d soften around the aggression.
So this is another focus, softening around aggression, not letting that become the thing that’s moving us. I haven’t been hurt since, and that’s weird to me too, because sometimes this practice I do things with my body that’s like, “What?” Like, how did the body do that or how did I do that without being hurt?
How can you trust your body to move injury-free? Actually, that was the subtitle of ChiRunning, Injury-Free Running. So there’s this idea that when you actually trust the wisdom of the body and you let the body move you, it’s actually optimal. You know, this is the optimal way to move. You’re going to be injured less because you’re actually in tune with what’s the most natural way to move.
We’re trusting our evolutionary heritage here. It’s like this body has a lot of wisdom, like billions of years if you believe the current narrative about where we come from. It’s like, “Oh, no, we’ve been doing this for a long time, since the Big Bang.” Life has been moving. We can trust that. We actually don’t have to be the one that knows how to do this in this practice.
That’s the intuitive part. The mindful part is that we do wanna notice what’s happening, though. It’s not about becoming unconscious, although sometimes you might have moments, right, in the flow where it feels like we go unconscious. But that’s a kind of superconsciousness. It’s not unconsciousness.
And when we’re superconscious, we’re aware of what’s happening even as we’re not controlling it. So that’s what we’re aiming for here, is this sort of mindful, intuitive, aware of and trusting in the flow of experience while knowing what’s arising. In this training, we’re also going to tie this together to what I call multiplayer meditation.
We’re going to do some guided practice, and we’re going to do some multiplayer practice. We’ll usually start with the guided, and we’ll do some multiplayer as well at the end, meaning we’ll do the same practice, but we’ll be doing it aloud. So as you feel moved, you could, for instance, say, “Standing,” or “Grounding,” or “Sensing,” or “Responding,” or “Trusting,” different single words that kind of point toward these different focuses.
We’ll gradually build that practice up, starting very simple, adding focuses. But we’re going to practice this both individually with some guidance and also multiplayer mode, all off camera, so we’ll just be able to hear each other.


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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 think is unique about this retreat, in addition to suggesting that y’all have a go-to move, anyone who’s on the retreat, is that we’re going to start the first few days just with the go-to move. So we’re going to invite everyone to pick the one thing you know you can do and just focus on doing that for the first three days, so that we actually have this sort of crucible of concentration that starts to build, of one-pointedness, that makes it a lot easier later on in the retreat when we start to kind of open up the teachings and open up the possibility space—to have some stability and some malleability of mind that allows that to be more fruitful.
So that’s one thing that we’re—in terms of design thinking and holding together agency and community, while at the same time recognizing certain things on retreat just seem to work well, just like having just one thing to focus on for a few days before you start to kind of get experimental and start, you know, doing the freestyle jazz practice.
That’s one thing I wanted to highlight there that I think kind of is important.
Brian Newman: Being the resident shamatha jhāna person, I’d like to say a little bit about that. So many great meditation centers around the world have established this as a really tried and true method. They’re going to start you with three days of concentration practice and then take you into the primary practice after that.
What this does is it produces a feeling of ambient concentration in the meditation hall and everywhere, in fact. And ambient concentration is something that you feel if you go into a yoga shala and they’re practicing Ashtanga. The whole room is concentrated, and it’s a bodily felt thing. We all, I think, are familiar with the proximate cause of concentration, and the proximate cause of concentration, for those who haven’t heard it, is concentration itself.
And it turns out that other people’s concentration can be a proximate cause to yours. And so if we can get a feeling of ambient concentration happening in our meditation hall and the dining hall and the public spaces, that’s going to help everybody get more concentrated, and I think we’re all going to really feel that.
And then what this opens up is, what you might not see on day one as a potential for practice becomes available to you on day four, after the mind is quite settled and concentrated. So you might want to make different choices than you would have at the beginning of the retreat about what you might have focused on.
So I think this is a way of expanding your possibilities for deeper practice, if we adopt a little bit of rigor up front with a go-to move.
Vince Horn: Yeah, I like it too because it sort of acknowledges, hey, retreat is itself a kind of exclusive practice form, and it makes sense, if we’re going to leave our home and our jobs and our kids and our everything and come to do this thing, that in the beginning we do that, we kind of, like, just collect and gather our attention in a very exclusive way.
Then we can start to open up into the inclusive practice a little bit more, and to more relational practice and things that help kind of expand the field of practice. But it seems like expanding from a small point is really skillful oftentimes, because you have the stability of that small point of focus first, the focus here. The ānāpānasati I love for that reason.
It’s so skillful to start there because that’s where usually people are, and that’s what they can manage, is to focus right here. So yeah, in that sense I’m looking forward to going with the natural development of the practice and how it seems to work normally, and just kind of designing a format that kind of goes with that as much as possible rather than working against it.
Emily Horn: I also want to bring in the multiplayer meditation. So Vince, do you want to talk a little bit about the multiplayer meditation option?
Vince Horn: Oh, so you just wanted to call on me to talk about it? I gotcha. Yeah, sure, I can talk about that. I mean, so that’ll be something that we’ll bring into this retreat. Oftentimes Brian, Emily, and myself use that as a teaching tool—not just guided meditation, but we’ll sometimes bring in these multiplayer practices.
We’ll probably be doing that from very early on, and just giving people an option to participate in those sessions so they can get a sense for extending the meditation practice into the relational space. And I think, Brian, going into our retreat last January, it was really cool to see how, like, your relationship to the practice seemed to change over the retreat, and it was—I don’t know if you could share a little bit about that, because it’s a, it’s a good testament.
Brian Newman: Yeah, so, well, I have very little experience on a retreat of doing sort of social practices like that.
And when Vince and I were planning the retreat schedule—did we do it twice a day, Vince, or once?
Vince Horn: Well, at least once.
Brian Newman: At least once. When we were planning the retreat schedule, Vince said, “So we’ll, you know, we’ll be having a 2:00 PM session every day when we’re all going to be talking and social,” and I’m like, “You’re doing what? Every day?” What if it was like every five days maybe or something? It was kind of my idea. So I wasn’t openly resistant, but I was kind of, in the context of a silent retreat...
What I’d like to say is that I’m a complete convert. Absolutely converted, and here’s some reasons why.
And I wasn’t an easy convert, I don’t think. So here’s one thing I was thinking of. You know when you feel sick or bad or tired, and you meet a good friend, and you have like a little chat, and you just feel better? Like, there’s that quality to it. So when some of us are sort of feeling a lot of dukkha, that social power, really the interpersonal stuff, does something to the system.
It’s really uplifting. So there’s something there. By integrating this every day, it turns out it didn’t make any concentration worse, at least in my experience. Nobody was like a worse meditator because of that. But what does happen is, on the backside when you’re leaving the retreat, reintegration is completely different.
Because at least once a day you’re having some social interaction. In my case, when I practice really hard, I go back to normal non-retreat life—I’ve had my wife say things to me like, “Maybe you should take three days after the retreat before you come home,” because I’m so frazzled and jittery she doesn’t even want me around.
That completely wasn’t the case in Portugal, and I think it was because of the social practice of just being with people, talking a little bit, that made that movement out so much better. So, totally converted, and can’t really imagine a group retreat without it now. I think this is essential and probably really unique about our retreats, that this happens.
So for some of you that are like, “Oh, God, I don’t want to be in the room meditating with people,” I was probably the hardest to convert, and I vouch for the effectiveness of this.
Emily Horn: Yeah, and I’ll just vouch for the effect in a trauma-informed way. I’ve seen, on multiple retreats now with multiple situations, that for some people, like, this actually really provides an opportunity for co-regulation that’s really needed in a retreat.
And it really does support the prevention of any kind of sense that you’re isolated and doing something alone. Like, this really can soothe the nervous system in a way that’s very impactful for a lot of people. And I’ve also heard that for some people concentration actually deepens with this kind of meditation, because they’re able to have the accountability.
Their nervous system needs that accountability with other nervous systems to be able to feel comfortable enough to settle, because a lot of times on these retreats, going from 150 miles an hour to zero, that in itself is quite a transition, and a lot happens in transitions. And so we want to make sure that you all have options and choices on this retreat so that we can slowly and steadily sense into, you know, what it’s like to collect and to soothe our nervous systems, not only individually, but also collectively.
Okay, two things. My mind is diverging. But one thing to close the loop on the social meditation, before this session is over: if it would be helpful, I’m happy to model it with Vince and Brian. We can do a little bit so you have a sense of it and a taste of it, because sometimes just talking about it, it doesn’t land in a way that, if you could see it and experience it, that might be helpful.
The other thing that my mind is diverging—I’ll be very honest with you. We’re staying at Art of Living Center in Boone, North Carolina, and there’s a spa. And I don’t really know if I’m talking to anybody in here that likes spas, but I do want to say that that is an option. So anyway, just to let you all know that. And I think that’s probably enough for that. We can model the social meditation, but I’ll give it space and see what’s here.
Brian Newman: I’m just remembering also, there’s other retreat groups there that aren’t in total silence—that’s right—which is also kind of interesting. So Vince, can you maybe say something about that? I think you know more.
Vince Horn: Yeah. So this is a really large retreat center, and in fact they can host something like, I don’t know, a 1,000-person retreat.
We have a smaller meditation hall that’s just for us, and so people can practice there in silence any time. There will be other people on different retreats sharing the same, like, eating facilities as us. And so this is going to be an interesting opportunity, I think, to either eat in silence as a group and kind of notice what it’s like to be silent while there’s activity going on—so kind of maintaining silence.
And there’s going to be an option, which I’ll facilitate, around having a kind of contemplative lunch with others where there is some speaking, but it’s geared around a particular question, and it’s not like we’re just jabbering, you know? It’s like, there’s an actual intent behind the speech.
So that’s another place we’re going to play with the exclusive and inclusive focus, and give you some choice-making around, do you want to be in silence and kind of nurturing that exclusive focus, or do you want to play around—probably after the first few days, we probably won’t start with this, but like later on in the retreat—play around with being at a table with fellow retreatants and exploring a topic that’s meaningful while eating together.
So yeah, that’ll be something that’s, I think, pretty unique. I remember experiencing this once on one of my earliest retreats in Colorado. I went on a short retreat over the weekend in this community that had a retreat center, but it was like a normal community where people lived, they had kids, they did their thing.
They would all come into the dining hall and talk, and I was like, “Oh gosh, this isn’t like IMS where everything is in pure pristine silence.” But I learned so much about practice doing it that way, because I was like, “Oh, this is what it’s like to practice in normal life. Like, if you’re being silent and exclusive and you have to deal with distractions, like, this is a good training environment for that.”
So yeah, the distractions are opportunities more than anything, on a retreat like this.
Emily Horn: And if you really want to go the hermit route—last time I was there, and I’ll have to confirm—they let people take out their meals. So come and get your meal and take it out. So there is a wide range of hermit to more of the more inclusive—
Brian Newman: More relational.
Emily Horn: Relational.
Brian Newman: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Emily Horn: Mm.
Brian Newman: Yes. Yeah, the retreats we’ve done there at this retreat center have been with the Ram Dass community. And those retreats, there’s no silence. It’s just totally open. People are drinking chai, listening to kirtan, and chatting.
And often, sometimes, hooking up and all kinds of things. It’s on the far end of the inclusive side of the spectrum. So we’re going to be somewhere between that and a really silent, strict insight meditation retreat.
Are we taking precepts against hooking up?
Emily Horn: I was just going to say, we’ll have group guidelines. That opened us up to, like, so what are the guidelines? Sorry.
Brian Newman: Yeah, yeah. Right, right.
Emily Horn: And we, yes, we will have group guidelines around appropriate sexuality and substances. That’s—
Brian Newman: High beds.
Emily Horn: Those are the two main ones, and then there’s some other ones you can, we’ll talk about, like technology and things like that.
Vince Horn: On the Insight Chord, would it be useful just to say, like, Emily’s going to be emphasizing teachings on heartfulness, Brian will be emphasizing teachings on shamatha, concentration, and I’ll be doing the same with vipassanā, mindfulness. So we’re going to be, each one of us, holding one of those strands as we weave them together.
But of course, you know, we each have experience with the different strands. So these are not—we’re not sort of specialists per se. We’re just more like holding the things that we tend to specialize in more, so that we can kind of make the whole weave a little bit more, I don’t know, interesting.
Do you want to model the multiplayer meditation?
Sure, why don’t we do that?
Emily Horn: That would be my suggestion, just in case. Mm-hmm.
Brian Newman: What practice do you want to propose here, Em?
Emily Horn: Maybe there is noting.
Brian Newman: Mm-hmm.
Emily Horn: And then drop the “there is.”
Brian Newman: Okay, sounds good.
Emily Horn: I’ll kick it off. Hearing.
Brian Newman: There is confusion.
Vince Horn: There is confusion.
Emily Horn: There is seeing.
Brian Newman: There is delight.
Vince Horn: There is hearing.
Emily Horn: There is understanding.
Brian Newman: There is confusion.
Vince Horn: There is relaxing.
Emily Horn: Breathing.
Brian Newman: Stability.
Vince Horn: Inhaling.
Emily Horn: Relaxing.
Brian Newman: Concentration.
Vince Horn: Fatigue, unpleasant.
Emily Horn: Thinking.
Brian Newman: Gone.
Vince Horn: Impermanence.
Emily Horn: Heartfulness.
Brian Newman: Anticipation.
Vince Horn: Energy.
Emily Horn: Deliberating thought.
Brian Newman: Opening.
Vince Horn: Dropping.
Emily Horn: Breathing.
Brian Newman: Bliss.
Vince Horn: Itching.
Emily Horn: Joy.
Brian Newman: Bliss.
Vince Horn: Flow.
Emily Horn: Calm.
Brian Newman: Self-consciousness.
Vince Horn: Breathing long.
Emily Horn: Pressure.
Brian Newman: Twitching.
Vince Horn: Tingling.
Emily Horn: Thank you.
Brian Newman: Thank you.
Vince Horn: Thanks.



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