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- 4 days ago7 min
The Grammar of Social Metta
Vince Fakhoury Horn on the grammar of social metta—why a metta phrase needs a wish and only optionally a subject, how Sharon Salzberg’s “pith metta” shortens the phrase once the wish starts coming true, and why open-heartedness is a byproduct of the practice rather than its purpose, so there is always more to aspire to.💬 TranscriptVince 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
- 1 weeks ago11 min
Social Metta Works!
In “Social Metta Works!”, Vince Fakhoury Horn traces the origin story and practical mechanics of practicing loving-kindness out loud and together, making the case that metta—a fundamentally pro-social practice—works better when it stops being something we do silently, alone in our own heads.If you’d like to learn more about Social Metta, and how to share these pro-social practices with others, I’m beginning a Social Metta Faciltiation training for all hardcore members of the new Pragmatic Dharma App. (cost: $20/month, or try the free version and still get unlimited access to live multiplayer meditations.)💬 TranscriptVince: 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’r
- 2 weeks ago11 min
Equanimity Includes Everything
Emily Horn teaches equanimity as upekkhā, using Thich Nhat Hanh’s preferred translation—inclusion—exploring:* How befriending pain and steadying over and over earns back your own trust* Why non-preferencing is an engaged state rather than a passive one* Why acceptance is not the same as condoning harm* How a kind of mini-death has to happen before equanimity can take its shape.This teaching was recorded during a previous iteration of the Heartful Jhāna training series. To join the next live one, become a Hardcore member of the Pragmatic Dharma App.💬 TranscriptEmily 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 aroun
- 2 weeks ago4 min
Concentrating More & More on Less & Less
Brian Newman opens a twelve-week jhāna course by parsing five lines of sutta into a whole curriculum—a first month of falling in love with the breath, the jhānic arc where less effort brings subtler pleasure, and the claim that any jhāna, even boundless consciousness, can be entered from a cold start once you learn how.Join Brian Newman for a live cohort of this training (or listen to the recordings)—beginning this Wednesday, September 2nd—in the PragmaticDharma.app. It’s available for all Hardcore members (@ $20/mo).💬 TranscriptBrian 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’
- 3 weeks ago10 min
What is Mindful Intuitive Movement?
Vince Fakhoury Horn introduces Mindful Intuitive Movement, the bottom-up practice he built from years of letting his body teach him how to move—the ChiRunning focuses that give the thinking mind something small to hold, the day his body refused the cushion and won, and why the only injury this practice ever gave him came from moving with aggression.💬 TranscriptVince 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
- Aug 20, 202622 min
The Insight Chord
Vince Horn, Emily Horn, and Brian Newman talk through the design of their Insight Chord Retreat in Western North Carolina—why everyone will start with a single “go-to move” (of their choosing) for the first 3 days, what Brian learned about reintegration after doing daily multiplayer meditation on retreat, and how to maximize individual choicemaking on the retreat while having a solid community of practice to fall back on, including qualified teachers & dedicated peers.💬 TranscriptVince 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 b
- Aug 7, 202654 min
The Fire Inside
Vince Fakhoury Horn speakswith Rima Vesely-Flad about The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde—the silence she found in her own Buddhist community when she began writing about Palestine, Baldwin and Lorde's distinction between hatred that corrodes and rage that comes from the examined life, and the question they keep returning to: how to feel it all without causing more harm.Vince Horn: So, Rima, great to see you.I’ve been really loving getting to know you as a person and also your work. I’ve been reading your book. Unfortunately, I also spilled water on my copy, so it is a little... If you see me struggling to flip through the pages, that’s ‘cause we had a bit of an accident here. But I’ve really enjoyed reading your work. Can’t wait to get into it with you. Thank you so much for your time.Rima Vesely-Flad: Yeah. Thank you, Vince. It’s been great to get to know you, too. We’re so close. Amazing. Amazing.Vince Horn: Yes, and it’s amazing as adults, we can carve out the time to hang out. So that’s sometimes the hardest part. I feel like being in middle age is, like, making time to spend with cool people, so appreciate your time.Rima Vesely-Flad: Me too.Vince Horn: So let’s talk about your new book. This is The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. Of course, before reading this book, I was familiar with you and your work. But it really struck me that you were writing in this book, like from the very beginning, you’re writing about Palestine and Israel, which is not something I see many Buddhists really writing about or talking about in America.So it stands out just the fact that you’re even talking about this subject. And then on top of that, you’re bringing to bear these beautiful Dharma teachings and wisdom teachings from the Black tradition of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, bringing them to bear on this topic in the first chapter of the book, which I thought was quite courageous.And I really appreciate it, you know, as someone who has Palestinian family members and people in the West Bank I care about. So just on a personal level, really am grateful that you centered this in your writing. And I thought maybe we could start with that first chapter if you’re up for it.Rima Vesely-Flad: Absolutely. It was actually the very last chapter I wrote. I wrote this book of course over several years, but as I was concluding in real time, the genocide was taking place, and I just found myself absolutely in a state of grief and rage and was really politically active around it in ways that I hadn’t been in quite some time.Like feeling very pushed to speak out and to contact the Biden administration and representatives, people here in North Carolina who might or might not speak in Congress, and just found that I needed ways to speak out, and this is my community. The people who self-identify as Buddhist claim these traditions, these lineages, these practices, these schools of thought, and yet there was so much silence, and I felt really compelled to speak into that silence. And I know that’s something that you feel and understand in a deep way. And then also, I’m not by any stretch the first Black activist or academic or thought leader to make the connections between oppression of people of African descent whose ancestors were enslaved and people who are in a state of survival as their land is being taken in real time. So all of those connections were very present, and yet in the Buddhist world, there was so much silence, so much evasion or even erasure of what’s taking place. And it felt like it wasn’t separate from my practice, and I had to speak.Even though at the time I hadn’t even visited the West Bank. I since have, but at the time I was thinking and writing and observing and feeling from afar.Vince Horn: Yeah. Okay. I didn’t realize you’d gone to the West Bank. Wow, we’ll have to talk about that sometime. Yeah, there’s early on in the book, there’s a quote here that’s really echoing what you just shared.I thought I’d share this ‘cause it really moved me quite a bit. You said, “I, like many Black Americans, like Southwest Asian and North African Buddhists, observe that violent oppression of Palestinians can never bring safety and security to Jewish Israelis. And as a Buddhist practitioner, it’s important for me to speak out against the violence sanctioned by my government, my tax dollars.The policies of the US government do not represent my commitments. I’m horrified by the massacres in Gaza day after day, by the constant terrorizing of Palestinians in the West Bank. I think daily of Baldwin’s words, ‘You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall because you don’t wa
- Jul 22, 202653 min
Working Class Dharma
Vince Fakhoury Horn speaks with Mushim Patricia Ikeda about working class dharma—from growing up as "the minority of Greensburg, Ohio" in a third-generation Japanese American family, to training in penniless Korean Zen temples where renovating the building was the practice. Along the way: bliss bunnies, samadhi junkies, mutual aid networks, and why affordability may be the grassroots issue of 2026.💬 TranscriptVince Horn: Okay. So yeah, I think it was really the beginning of this year — I was teaching a retreat in Portugal with a friend. It’s our annual Pragmatic Dharma retreat. And while I was there, I had picked up recently this book called Emergent Dharma, by Dr. Sharon Suh, and I scrolled through the chapters, and I looked, and I went straight to yours, and I read it.That was the first thing I read, and I just loved hearing about your story. For me, some of the coolest part about the Dharma is hearing people’s, like, stories and their biographies and, like, their real lived experience of the Dharma, and I just felt that in your story in the chapter there — you’re talking about how you were raised, and your family, and where you came from, and how you started engaging with Buddhism, and just the whole story there, that I’ve heard now more of since I’ve gotten to know you better over this year.And really, I was just hoping we could talk about, you know, your story in part here, because the theme is working class Dharma. And when we last spoke, we decided that was a good kind of place to focus some of the conversation. But a lot of it is about your experience, really.Like, what does it mean to live in the, quote-unquote, working class in the modern world, and to also be a Dharma practitioner? And how different is that in a heritage Asian ethnic tradition than in a white convert tradition, which is more how Emily and I have come up? I think that’s an interesting conversation too, because now we’re talking about class and ethnicity — two different dimensions that are often interwoven, or braided.So anyway, could you share a bit about your story, Mushim? I know you come out of the Zen tradition, both in Japan and Korea, but how did you get into this? Was it a family tradition, or is it something that you came back to explore — like, the roots of your family’s tradition — later?Mushim Ikeda: Yeah, thank you so much, Vince. So I was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1954, and I am, by our system — meaning Japanese Americans, by our system — a third-generation Japanese American. We count the first generation to be the immigrants, so those were my grandparents on both sides, and they’re the Issei — “ichi,” meaning one.My parents were the Nisei, meaning they were both born in the United States, and they were the Nisei — “ni,” two. Three is “san,” so I am Sansei, or third-generation Japanese American, by how we count. I was born in Cleveland, grew up in Ohio, because that’s where my father’s work took him. And we grew up very working class.In Cleveland, when I was born, my father sold Wear-Ever pots and pans from door to door, and then he got a job inspecting fruit and vegetables — perishables that were being shipped on the railroads — working for an independent company called the RPIA, Railroad Perishable Inspection Agency.And that took us down to the rural area between Akron and Canton, going a little bit toward the middle of Ohio, south of Cleveland. And most of my classmates in the public schools that I attended — I would say the majority of them were children of people from West Virginia who came north to Akron, then the tire capital of the world.Goodyear, Firestone, Seiberling — they were all there, along with Quaker Oats, which produced a very interesting smell when the wind wafted from Akron our way, with a mixture of burning rubber and toasted oats. That was the smell of my childhood. And the air pollution was incredible, producing magnificent sunsets. And that’s where I grew up. So my classmates were children of the tire factory workers for the most part, as well as some were children of the remnants of the dairy farms, the cow pastures in that area that were gradually turning into suburban housing tract lands and so forth.That was my childhood. We were in an all-white community, except for us. One of my teachers used to call our family “the minority of Greensburg, Ohio.” And at home, we had a very strong sense of who we were. We were Japanese American. We were not Japanese. We were certainly not white or middle-class Americans.We were working-class Japanese Americans. And little by little, my parents wanted us to go to college. They rose into the lower middle class, then vaguely towards the middle middle class. However, I realized
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