Buddhist Geeks

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 doing this right?” — it’s a creative process. There’s not really a right or wrong. The mind will come in to try to steal your experiences, like Trudy Goodman says. So just keep that with a little yellow sticky note on it. “Doing it right, doing it wrong” — that’s part of the imaginal process. It can be really creative, and it can be fun.
Another thing that comes up a lot when people begin to practice this — and of course we call it a practice for a reason — is trying to analyze what’s happening. Trying to, like, “Oh, I read that article and that article said I should do it this way, or that article said... and oh wait, what now? What is imaginal practice again? What does that really mean?” So you’re going to start to try to analyze the practice and the concepts and the theory. And if that’s happening during the practice, I invite you to just be like, okay, not right now. Let me see if I can suspend that kind of cognitive knowing for just a moment here and sense into: okay, what is really being invoked in this practice? Or what are we really aiming to invoke?
And honestly, it’s really about how it comes alive for you. That’s the important part. If it feels alive, then you’re in the process of it. It can feel alive in one minute and then not another minute, but you’re still just trying to sense into that. What is the vibrancy of what’s happening? Can I really be in the moment and sense into this life quality that’s here? You may see something very clearly, or you may feel something very clearly, but sense into: okay, we’re aiming to bring this alive and then see it as clearly as possible, in whatever way that looks for you — whether it’s kinesthetic, thinking, sensing.
So another challenge that comes up in this practice is getting fixated. You may get fixated on seeing each and every detail of what we’re trying to invoke. I’ve done guided practices with this kind of imagery, like, “We’re going to invoke the Buddha.” There are so many different images of the Buddha. I’ve done a lot with this Blue Medicine Buddha, and he’s got all kinds of accoutrements; he is very fancy-looking, in my opinion. And so for a while it was like, “Oh gosh, I don’t see it like that when I start to practice. I forgot that detail.” So if the details are inspiring to you, and you’re one of those people who really loves the details and they just come up — like, “Oh, I can see the eyes, I can see the hair” — that’s great. And if that’s not what’s happening for you, that’s not, in my experience, the most important part. Again, it’s that sense of aliveness. It’s the sense of the clear knowing of it. And again, that can look a lot of different ways. So relax, if you’re one of the people who get hung up on details, as much as you can. It’s okay not to see all the little pieces of it.
I’ve sort of alluded to this, but I’ll name it directly: in some ways a challenge is people who are unwilling to believe the unbelievable. So I want to challenge you to expand and be open to what’s kind of unbelievable. Be open to experiences that you might not — that might not fit in your current framework. Because, again, we’re working with subtle vibes, and the more we sensitize to that and attune to that, the more you might notice that it’s always been here.
For example, when I was doing a lot of meditation practice at one point — it was on a retreat we were doing — one of the instructions was to imagine, of course, the Buddha, and then, if we’re having a difficult moment, or even if not, one of the anchoring phrases was, “This happy Buddha is like this, this calm Buddha is like this.” And I was doing that, and then I started feeling like these Buddhas were coming. I could feel the sense — perception just changes, especially with a lot of concentration. It’s kind of like doing drugs or psychedelics, let me be specific. And so I just kept feeling — and imagining — all these different kinds of Buddhas. And I went to Jack and I was like, “Ah, I don’t know, it feels like all these Buddhas are coming.” And he was just like, “Okay, cool.” And I was like, “But I don’t even know if it’s me or them.” I started to lose the differentiation between the outside and the inside. It started to merge together in a way where I was not so sure who was who and what was what. It was all just kind of happening. But my mind was seeing Buddhas.
So part of what happens in this practice is we invoke the imagery, and then we start to actually become it and embody it. So it starts to break down the separation between all these different aspects of experience that we typically see as separate. So that’ll be part of what we do in the practice: we’ll invoke the Buddha, and then we’ll start to dissolve the Buddha and embody the Buddha. Aiming toward — sensing into what I’m going to tell you about in a minute, which is non-duality.
Jack Kornfield says: you recognize that you can embody these energies. When you do that, then you can allow it to fill every cell of your being, every corner of your consciousness; see the world with the eyes of the Buddha or St. Francis; sense that you are holy. Practice this repeatedly until it becomes more natural to your heart than your ordinary identity. So in some ways our ordinary identity can become quite extraordinary, when we sense into: wait a second, there is more to this experience, to this human beingness, than sometimes I’m attuned to. And this practice helps us incline to that, and then start to — okay, yeah, let’s see what this is like to be this Buddha.
Again and again, it stretches us. Imagination stretches us. Chögyam Trungpa, from Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior — I’ve already talked about Trungpa — says: “You can experience a vast realm of perceptions unfolding. There is unlimited sound, unlimited sight, unlimited taste, unlimited feeling, and so on. The realm of perception is limitless — so limitless that perception itself is primordial, unthinkable, beyond thought. There are so many perceptions that are beyond imagination. There are a vast number of sounds. There are sounds that you’ve never heard. There are sights and colors that you’ve never seen. There are feelings that you’ve never experienced before. There are endless fields of perception.”
Endless fields of perception. So just sense into what it would be like to start to unlock, and then become whole, by starting to imagine in a new way — to include more and more and more of those vast, limitless ways to perceive. So again, when we invoke it and then we dissolve it, we’re going to start to sense into what it’s like for the external and the internal to come together. And, as I mentioned before, non-duality.
So let me tell you a little bit about what I mean by that. I went to ask Jack one time, I was like, “So what is this non-duality?” He still laughs at me. He’s like, “There are so many kinds of non-duality.” So it sounded nice to zoom in and say, okay, this is what we’re talking about with this particular practice that we’ll be doing today. So, again, from Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche: “The meaning of non-duality here is the absence of separation — the absence of separation, or the absence of difference, between appearance and emptiness. In other words, nothing we perceive — not the guru, the student, or anything else, not the Buddha — truly exists externally. And until we fully realize non-duality, the exercise of dissolving or merging the deity or guru with ourselves is an extremely useful tool.”
So it’s starting to incline us to imagining: okay, what would it be like if we really perceived in a way that we are interconnected, that we are not separate, that all this is happening within one field of experience? And of course there are different ways that we each experience it, but what would it be like if we started to imagine in a sense that, yes, we are individuals, but we’re also so connected that — wait, where does that line start and stop? So just something to imagine. I’ve had experiences where I’ve perceived reality in such a way that I’m not quite so sure where my body stops and starts. You remember Vince talked about the subtle bodies and the different bodies. So in some ways, what if our body extended beyond what we typically think? What if?
So again, we’re going to be evoking and then dissolving. One more thing from Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. He says: “Eventually you will come to realize that dissolution happens in the same way that the space inside a container mixes with the sky and the whole atmosphere. And this is the part of the practice that many students misunderstand. Imagine a clay pot. It is both surrounded by and filled with space. When the pot breaks, the space that had been inside the pot mixes with the space that has been outside of it, and the two become inseparable. It is not possible to tell the inside space from the outside space. Space is just space, and there’s no way of knowing where any part of it originated. This is how the practitioner and the guru-Buddha dissolve into each other to become inseparable.”
So it’s kind of a reorientation of thinking and sensing. It’s like, okay, wait, what is this like, to actually sense into this sense of non-separation?
So I want to give you a little bit of a different take. I want a little bit of a Western view here. There’s an article — a New York Times article by David Brooks. He talks about Plato and Aristotle here for a minute. So: “Plato gives the impression that imagination is a somewhat airy-fairy luxury good. It deals with illusions and make-believe and distracts us from reality and our capacity to fully reason about it.” So I’m not sure if that’s in there somewhere, in some of your consciousness. I had a strong reaction, in some ways, to imaginal meditation at a certain point, because my parents were New Agey. So anyway, that’s Plato. “Aristotle, though, countered and said that imagination is one of the foundations of all knowledge.” So, interesting.
David Brooks goes on to say: “A person who feeds his or her imagination with a fuller repertoire of thoughts and experiences has the ability not only to see reality more richly, but also — even more rare — to imagine the world through the imaginations of others. This is the skill we see in Shakespeare to such a miraculous degree: his ability to disappear into his characters and inhabit their points of view without ever pretending to explain them. Imagination helps you perceive reality, try on other realities, predict possible futures, and experience other viewpoints.”
So just imagine what it would be like to be able to connect to people regardless of situations and circumstances and beliefs, you know what I mean? You could imagine a thriving world, where we’re all thriving.



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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.



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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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