The Buddhist Geeks approach begins with the classical model of historical Buddhism–the 3 Trainings of Meditation, Wisdom, & Ethics. In a break from earlier tradition, we have rearranged the order of these 3 trainings, starting with Meditation, instead of beginning with Ethics. This change acknowledges that a vast majority of people today enter into a Buddhist-based orientation, through the doorway of Meditation, and more specifically Mindfulness Meditation. This change is about skillful means–i.e. meeting people where they are.

In the Buddhist Geeks approach it’s the discipline of meditation practice, and the powerful insights leading to deep existential wisdom, that make possible a true transformation in our ethical behavior. Without this discipline and transformation we would simply be pretending to be different–acting like good little Buddhists. What we’re aiming for in the Buddhist Geeks approach to training IS a radical transformation of self & culture in the world.

Meditation Training

Within the larger training of Meditation, we’ve developed a modular practice model called the Six Ways to Meditate. These Six Ways were reverse-engineered from the Buddhist meditative traditions and from secular mindfulness techniques, and they include:

1. Concentration

2. Mindfulness

3. Heartfulness

4. Inquiry

5. Awareness

6. Embodiment

While each of the Six Ways–represented in the circles below–is a distinct approach to meditation, they contain many different techniques, or instructions, for practicing meditation. Each of the ways has a unique aim, and can thus be said to be distinct, yet they are all interconnected, and are all Meditation.

After we unbundled the Six Ways from the complexity of the Buddhist tradition, we realized that they can be consciously recombined. Each line in the graph above represents one of the 15 Meditative Dyads that emerge out of the direct connections between the Six Ways. (Ex: “Embodied Awareness”, “Mindful Inquiry”, “Heartful Concentration”). These new combinations, or meditative dyads, allow for a more nuanced exploration of the different flavors of meditation practice.

One of the central aspects of the Buddhist Geeks approach to Meditation is that we encourage practitioners to find their way through this complexity. We never tell people what they should be practicing, or draw out one particular path that everyone must follow. Rather, we offer many training opportunities in these different ways, and encourage people to experiment, and find out what works. We suggest to people that they play to your strengths and relate to your weaknesses, and that they do this DIY (“do it yourself”) experimentation, not in isolation, but within a larger community of experimentation. At Buddhist Geeks we engage in independent practice within an interdependent community of learning.

Lastly, when you engage in a Buddhist Geeks Training, a Buddhist Geeks Retreat, when you do private mentoring with a Buddhist Geeks Teacher, or engage in practice within our Buddhist Geeks Sangha, you will find that there are 3 Forms of Meditation that we practice together, including:

1. Silent Meditation – The classic form of practicing together in silence. In silent meditation practice, everyone is encouraged to practice however they see fit.

2. Guided Meditation – Another classical form, in which a teacher offers guidance based on their own depths of experience. In guided meditation, everyone is invited to follow the instructions, or if they don’t find them helpful, to let go of them and direct their own practice.

3. Social Meditation – In this newer form of interpersonal practice–which we’re helping to pioneer–a facilitator presents instructions, and the group engages in out-loud, peer-2-peer practice. In social meditation, you are always welcome to participate out-loud, with others, or as a silent witness to the process.

Within Buddhist Geeks, we practice the Six Ways to Meditate, the 15 Meditative Dyads, and all of the other possible combinations of meditation that our creativity can muster. We maintain our individual agency, while stressing the importance of interpersonal practice. We practice together Silently, with Guidance from experienced Teachers, and out-loud, with practices that are Facilitated by competent peers.

Wisdom Training

When training in Wisdom, we recognize that how we practice is as, or more, important than what we practice. We recognize that there are different modes we can practice in, including not only Formal Practice (on the cushion), but also Life Practice (which happens off the cushion), and Spontaneous Practice (wherever & whenever it occurs).

We also recognize that while engaging in practice, one must end up Practicing with Polarity. This involves engaging with common paradoxes that invite us into a deeper understanding of the fundamental nature of human consciousness, such as the polarities of:

• Practice & Life

• Movement & Stillness

• Emptiness & Form

• Subject & Object

• Self & Others

• Gradual & Sudden

• Sameness & Difference

• Conserving & Adapting

As our practice deepens and broadens, we also find that a very natural process of insight occurs. Sometimes this process is very linear, or stage-like, while at other times it feels like progress comes and goes, much like the waxing & waning of the moon. In The Phases of Insight, we describe the core phases that one can move through, as you deepen in Insight. The final phase of insight–The Completion Phase–marks the beginning of what we call the Waves of Wakefulness–a map which describes the life-long journey of deepening wisdom, one that begins with Waking Up to the fundamental truth of consciousness, and then turns toward Waking Down with all of life.

Many Dharmas

Finally we include within our Wisdom Training–Many Dharmas–multiple ways of knowing truth. For us, the map of our biggest influences would need to include the following dharmas: Mindful Dharma, Pragmatic Dharma, Psychedelic Dharma, EcoDharma, & Integral Dharma. This list is not exhaustive, we have other influences, but these are the main dharmas that inspire our dharma.

Mindful Dharma is borne out of the Western Insight Meditation movement–the original hot bed of innovation and practice out of which the mindfulness movement was borne. Here, we find connection to Mindful Dharma through our teachers, Jack Kornfield & Trudy Goodman, and from many other Insight meditation teachers, especially Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and many others. In the Mindful Dharma approach we aim to bring together the best of the East & West in language & concepts which are accessible, but which bring forth the depths out of which they sprang.

Inspired by the original Buddha’s teachings, while being fleshed out through the contemporary teachings of & Daniel Ingram & Kenneth Folk, Pragmatic Dharma is a ruthlessly practical approach to the three trainings of Buddhism. And while Pragmatic Dharma is often known for its emphasis on the classical stages of insight meditation, and mastery of the states of meditative absorption, it’s also known for its innovative contributions to the contemporary Buddhist & Mindfulness scenes. In fact, through Kenneth Folk’s pragmatic dharma, the practice of Social Meditation & Social Noting were born.

With Psychedelic Dharma, we recognize that the long-standing usage of psychedelic substances, when combined with both clear intention & care to the path of Buddhist meditation, can lead to wonderful results–to deep insights, healing, and freedom. Psychedelic Dharma brings conventional forms of wisdom into question, and opens up a practical path of investigation, working alongside a psychedelic agent. We give special thanks to the psychedelic dharma teachings of Ram Dass, pioneer of the way, and to all of the indigenous wisdom traditions of human heritage.

With EcoDharma we recognize that during this time & age, our practice must also be a response to the Ecological Crisis. We don’t exist in individual bubbles, where we can practice independently from the world, rather we are part of this planet, and must learn to practice as-if this were true. Inspired, especially, by the teachings & writings of David Loy, EcoDharma is included because it provides a direct call to action, rooted in both an awareness of the profound potential of dharma, and as a need to revise our traditional dharmas, so that they can be in response to the Ecological Crisis.

Finally, inspired by Ken Wilber and his Integral Metatheory, Integral Dharma uses The Four Turnings of the Wheel and The Four Ups–Waking Up, Growing Up, Cleaning Up, & Showing Up–to help us orient toward integrating the deepest depths of practice with the biggest potentials for evolving life. Also, we must mention Diane “Musho” Hamilton and her Integral Zen as a deep and abiding influence on our approach to Integral Dharma.

Ethical Training

As our practice matures, our capacity to act skillfully, and with greater wisdom & compassion, increases. In the training of ethics we examine the ways that we can bring the depths of our practice into life, and life into practice. Here we take the contemporary meta-crisis–the overlapping & interconnected crises that our planetary species is facing, including Systemic Racism, the Ecological Crisis, the Inequality Crisis, the Democracy Crisis, and the Meaning Crisis–just to name a few of the overlapping crises that make up our larger Meta-Crisis.

Through our practice we explore the best ways to marry together contemplation and action. We don’t see Ethics as being separate from Meditation, rather it’s the natural place to look for how we’re being changed by our practice. The culmination of meditative discipline is in transcendent wisdom which takes embodied form as right action in-context. That these 3 trainings continue endlessly, means that we continue to refine our understanding in response to changing life conditions–that is our dharma evolves.

With respect to Buddhist Geeks, the organization, we also include within our training in ethics, our Universal Training Guidelines [in process] and our Teacher’s Code of Ethics. These guidelines and codes help us to orient skillfully with one another, in community, helping us to not “go off the rails.”

In an attempt to respond to the meta-crisis, we’ve developed an alternative economic model, that we call Transparent Generosity. And we’re also working to pioneer a new protocol for sharing information–openly & freely–called Open Source Dharma. Anyone can adopt the Open Source Dharma protocol-it simply requires a re-thinking of how one shares information, and earns a livelihood in the information age. Finally, our organization engages in the cutting edge organizational practice called Holacracy. We see this practice of self-organization as providing a powerful alternative to traditional models of organizing, as it avoids both the extremes of authoritarianism and death by consensus.

One of the core challenges many of us face in the digital age is the fragmentation of our attentions. Digital distractions and habitual self-interruption team up to leave us unable to bring our full focus to bear on what’s most important to us.

By Vince Fakhoury Horn

By: Vince Horn

Related Practice:

By Vince Fakhoury Horn

I remember walking around SXSW several years ago, the giant technology, music, & film festival in Austin, TX , with a name tag that read: “Vincent Horn, Buddhist Geeks.” I was there to participate on a panel exploring the relationship between Buddhism and the Internet of Things. Almost every time someone read my name tag they had something interesting to say about Buddhism, mindfulness, and meditation and were happy to share their thoughts with me. 😉

The general consensus from the people I talked to ended up being: "I’m interested in meditation & mindfulness and have (usually) tried it. Also, Buddhism seems cool, but I don’t have the time to learn such a huge system." Of course, they’re right. Buddhism is a massive system, and mindfulness meditation is all the rage , even the main characters on popular Showtime show Billions are doing it.

Frankly, what first got me into Buddhism to begin with was meditation , the mind training system. I had to wade through the system of Buddhism ,  spending years studying it at college and well over a decade practicing with a variety of Buddhist communities ,  to be able to discover the practices and ideas that ended up being really life changing for me. I’m totally glad I did, but damn did I have to wade through some crazy shit too!

So the question both my teaching partner Emily & I have had for the last several years is: how do we take some of the awesome and life transforming things we learned from our time practicing and studying in various Buddhist contexts and make that accessible and relevant to folks like the ones I was hanging out with in Austin? One of the big keys in answering this question for us has been in the concept of unbundling.

Buddhism Unbundled

Part of what’s happening in the digital revolution we’re living through is that all of the old bundles of knowledge , and the institutions that carried them forward, are being broken apart into the individual components that make them up. Here’s how this force is described on the encyclopedic unbundler, Wikipedia:

Unbundling is a neologism to describe how the ubiquity of mobile devices, Internet connectivity, consumer web technologies, social media and information access in the 21st century is affecting older institutions (education, broadcasting, newspapers, games, shopping, etc.) by “break[ing] up the packages they once offered, providing particular parts of them at a scale and cost unmatchable by the old order.” Unbundling has been called “the great disruptor”.

Unbundling explains part of why “mindfulness” has become such a popular term (and why “compassion” is soon to follow), how education has started to go online with massive open online courses (MOOCs), and also why large media companies like HBO and Showtime are pulling themselves from the big cable companies and going it alone successfully.

As we looked at our own history of mind training we saw there were a number of core practice styles, ones that you could find not just in a single tradition, but repeated across virtually all the traditions. What’s more, some of these styles had already started to become unbundled from their original context (mindfulness, for instance). So instead of trying to conserve the original institutions, and models that we were handed, we’ve decided to go with the unbundling. That’s how we came up with the six styles of meditation.

Paradigms of Practice

Each of these styles of meditation is also a practice paradigm. What I mean by paradigm is akin to how the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn used the term: “a framework of concepts, results, and procedures within which subsequent work is structured.”

These frameworks , concepts, results, & procedures (i.e. practices)   are really important, because without a coherent training model it’s difficult to gain traction and make progress inside the paradigm you’re practicing within. Having a clear sense of what the practice is, how to do it effectively, and what it's designed to lead to is foundational for learning. If we don’t know where we're going (results), what we're doing (procedures), and why we're doing it (concepts), nothing much, short of a miracle, can happen.

So, the modular approach to meditation is about stripping down a variety of different training paradigms (i.e. the six ways to meditate) to their bare bones. These different minimized paradigms leave much for the practitioner to fill in, while still maintaining all the needed structure to work as designed.

Rebundling the Path

Here’s the thing though: It’s not enough to unbundle and unravel things, we still need to make meaning out of all the little bits that are left over. And that’s where modularity comes in. With a modular design approach, one can build a multiplicity of new systems out of the individual parts (or modules). In other words, you can rebundle a meditative path of your choosing.

In our modular approach, these six ways to meditate become modules (or core components) in a larger system which has many different possible configurations. One can practice any of these styles alone or one can begin to combine modules and get different combinations of practice (ex. Mindfulness + Awareness = Mindful Awareness). Some of these combinations have a beautiful harmonic effect ,  like the sound of multiple musical notes making a new chord ,  and they’re very attractive for certain people that want to get deeper into meditation.

What are you Practicing For?

As an example, of one of the things the practitioner can determine with a modular approach ,  that wasn’t previously available in an institutional approach ,  is what their intention & motivation is for doing the practice. One person may want to learn to practice concentration meditation so it’s easier to learn some of the other styles of meditation, while another could learn the same style to improve their golf game. Still another person could do the same training to experience extraordinary states of altered consciousness, while yet another person could do this training to develop a more stable and focused mind while doing activist work in the middle of a war-torn region.

With this unbundled, modularized approach to meditation we aren’t necessarily telling people why they should be meditating, but rather we explain how to do it well from a technical perspective. One of the reasons this is so important is because it simplifies things while also handing the power back to the person interested in practicing meditation. If you want to learn meditation you get to choose what kind of training system you design. You don’t have to adopt and learn a bloated system right off the bat, receive a special spiritual name, be expected to change your clothes, religious status, etc. You can bypass all of that and jump right into what interests you about meditation. You can just meditate.

At the end of the day we believe that modularity increases the degree of choice a practitioner has, while at the same time decentralizing the power of pre-established systems & lineages, which can’t help but impose a monopoly of meaning upon these techniques. This moves meditation into the hands of new generations who can work together to create meditative paths and meditative solutions to our most pressing human challenges. Presented here is one such path.

By: Emily Horn

Unfortunately, concentration is a power that many people have forgotten they possess. We are constantly being pulled this way and that by forces vying for our attention. Some have our best interests at heart. Many do not. When we lose control of the ability to direct our attention, we become programmed by the world instead of programmers of it. In this course we will practice reclaiming the power of a well-trained attention & unlocking the hidden potential of our minds. This potential can take form as a number of different super powers. From expanding space & time, to tapping into natural joy, the concentrated mind is reality-bending.

Time Dilation

When we say we don’t have time for something, what we really mean is that something else has our attention. Time isn’t the scarce resource, attention is! By training our attention we actually learn to dilate time, to make more of less. The power of concentration allows you to make the most of your time by taming your mind.

Natural Joy

When we aren’t trying to escape our experience, or focus all our energy on finding something to distract us from what we’re feeling, we can just stop and be present with our lives. What we find, when we do this, is the extraordinarily ordinary experience of natural joy. With concentration practice we learn to stop chasing joy, and instead, find it where we already are.

Spacious Mind

When our attention becomes focused the mind becomes still & quiet. As our concentration deepens the intense ripples of experience that normally disturb us start to settle all by themselves. This still & quiet mind feels like vast, open space. It stretches endlessly in all directions and encompasses everything in our experience. Concentration practice introduces us to a mind like space.

Metacognitive Mastery

What is going on in your mind right now? What has your attention? Concentration meditation trains not only the capacity to notice what is in attention, but also to notice where attention is. This meta-cognitive capacity, literally "knowing what is being known", can be strengthened just like a physical muscle.

Full Presence

When a full and heartfelt concentration is brought to bear in relationships it’s felt as presence. Being fully present enables us to really hear one another because we’re not overly distracted by our own internal dialogue. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of powerful presence, of someone who is really attentive to you, then you already know what a powerful gift it can be. Total presence lets you be that gift for others.

Losing Yourself

When we’re really deeply involved in something we lose ourselves (in the best sense). This is in contrast to our default mode, where we’re perpetually planning for and worrying about what is going to happen to us next. Our default mode is a kind of persistent self-obsession characterized by high levels of anxiety. Concentration practice helps you more easily lose yourself to the simple experience of being alive.

By Vince Horn

Unedited Transcript 📃

I wanted to start by just saying that the way that I think about meditation, at this point is, is as a medicine. It's a type of medicine. It's, of course, not just one thing, there are many different kinds meditation and styles of meditation, but all of them, at least the ones that I've studied, have at the core of their intention to be able to heal some sort of ailment or make something more whole.

I was thinking about the mindfulness movement, which is extraordinarily popular now, but the origin story of how mindfulness started. Not mindfulness with a big M, but Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. It's started in the basement of the UMass Medical School where this molecular biologist trained at MIT named Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is also a meditator, as an meditator and Vipassana meditator. He started a program with several others to teach meditation in a way that sort of stripped all of the explicitly Buddhist and religious elements out and just taught what he saw as the core technique and did so within the context and the frame of medical intervention.

At the beginning, the way he tells it is that they would actually send patients down to the basement who couldn't get any relief or couldn't get significant relief through other interventions, through surgery, through medication, through talk therapy. It's sort of, especially people with chronic pain who had tried basically everything and couldn't get relief, and they sent these folks. It was like last resort down to the basement with Jon Kabat-Zinn and some other meditation teachers, and out of that because the folks that went down there, many of them did get some very significant relief. Maybe not that type of relief they were expecting, but they were able to learn how to cope with and deal with the pain that they experienced on an ongoing basis or with the illness or the terminal diagnosis they were given. Out of that, developed the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program, which is very much framed in terms of a kind of medicine or medical intervention.

If you go back even further, back to the original time of the Buddha, one of the core models or teaching frameworks that was being taught then was also framed in terms of a medical model. That the Four Noble Truths, it was framed primarily in terms of this classical Indian medical model where you start off with the First Truth: life contained suffering. This was the diagnosis. This is like, this is the way it is. The Second Noble truth was about the cause of that suffering, and they talked about in terms of craving or trying to grasp onto certain kinds of experiences.

In the medical language, that's the, hopefully I'm saying this right, Lisa can correct me if not, the etiology where something arises from, the causes of the diagnosis. Then the Third Noble Truth being about how there could be an end to suffering, there could be an end to this particular variety of suffering. That's the prognosis. Then finally, the Four Noble Truth was about this particular path and how to get there: the full path or the three trainings of ethics, meditation and wisdom, and that was the prescription. This is what you do to kind of resolve the ailment that is ailing you.

From the time that meditation started to proliferate, already it was framed as in terms of a medical model that made the more sense. One of my first teachers, the first teacher I really worked with extensively is a fellow named Daniel Ingram, and he is a medical doctor who works in emergency rooms. He works in Northern Alabama, which from what I gather from him is one of the most challenging places to be in the emergency room. I guess it also probably pays better. That is why he's probably down there. Something that he said early on as I started working with him was, that it was crazy to him being a medical doctor having gone through all that training, at the same time done all this hard-core meditation training, that unlike in medicine where every form of medicine has to come with some warning label.

It may not literally a label on bottle, but it comes with some acknowledgment of the various side effects and cross effects and possible things that can happen when you take the medicine that aren't necessarily things you want to have happened, but they might be just part of the deal. That is crazy that that was a legal requirement for almost 100 years in the West, but that meditation had no such warning labels, at least in modern times. He was a big advocate for being open and upfront about the possible side effects of hard-core meditation, to use the medical analogy of meditation where you get the dose high enough and you take it long enough to get the intended effects.

I wanted to start off this kind of broader exploration of different ways to train the mind and to meditate with this really upfront acknowledgment that there are side effects, and the side effects are important to understand to have some sense of what could arise and some sense of what they mean and how to work with them. I sort of came up with the side effect label that I would put on the bottle of meditation. I don't think this is totally comprehensive or it's supposed to cover everything, but it's kind of what I found to be helpful description of the side effects.

For me, the side effects of meditation include an increased sensitivity to the full range of your human experience and the potential dissolving of who and what you take yourself to be, and this can lead to periods of existential grief, anxiety and depression, so that's the "Meditation: The Warning Label" that I would put on the bottle. I wanted to kind of go into that and explore kind of what I mean by that and why is it that if we're doing this practice that's medicine, that's considered a way to heal body and mind, how that could be leading to periods of grief or anxiety or depression which we normally think of as problems themselves.

I think it's worth saying that it's interesting that not a whole lot of meditation teachers in the last few decades have led with us. It's not that they don't talk about it, but it's usually that is the first thing they talk about. Something they talk about when you're like on day four of a hard-core retreat and everything starting to shake a little your perceptual field, or they talk about it with close students, people that they know well who they can see are having some of these effects. I think part of the reason might be that since meditation is so new in the West or has been so new that there was a sense of them, this is such a great thing and we don't want to ruin it by talking about all the bad things first. We don't want to hurt the marketing efforts essentially.

I don't know. I don't know what it's like for the different teachers up there and how they teach, but I know for myself it's felt really important to bring it up front and center. There are lots of historical precedents for that as well. There actually has been a warning label on the bottle of meditation. The ancient contemplative texts in the Buddhist tradition referenced them, hold them. Every single one of them talk about the difficult phases and stages and experiences that can come up when you meditate. Modern researchers now are studying them officially.

One woman who we've talked to several times on the Buddhist Geeks Podcast named Willoughby Britton. She's based up North, Brown University, and she's been studying what she originally started calling "The Dark Knight Project" sort of a reference to this Christian contemplative tradition text. Now, she's calling it the "Difficult Stages of the Contemplative Path Research," and she's been basically talking to and exploring all the various, talking with people who've done meditation practice and had these side effects and sort of doing an exhaustive look at what kinds of effects there are. I'm looking forward to her research coming out now, because I think it'll shed a real light on this. Not only are they mentioned in the ancient text and not only are researchers studying them, but people are experiencing them all the time; many without even knowing that they're experiencing the side effects.

A lot of people who get into meditation actually find this is a very common pattern that they start practicing, they really enjoy it, they get a lot of benefit from it, and then all of a sudden it's like things started going downhill, or suddenly difficult emotions start running up to the surface in a way that feels overwhelming and unbearable. Oftentimes, these are the side effects of meditation and not knowing that they stop meditating. They go, "Oh, I didn't sign up for this, and I clearly am doing something wrong because I heard meditation is about just experiencing total bliss and clarity and seeing the nature of everything that's arising. I didn't expect all of this fear and anger at my mom, ended up few coming out for whatever."

Yeah, these side effects I talked about them in my warning label as existential grief, depression, anxiety. The existential part I sort of put in the front there because it does seem to be the unique quality of the side effects of meditation. That it's about our existence, it's about these fundamental existence questions: Who am I? What is this? What's happening? Why am I here? The type of grief and anxiety and depression that I want to talk about is very much related to our existence, to our feeling of being alive and who we are. I think that's important because that differentiates these type of side effects from other forms of anxiety or grief or depression.

It's important, I think, not to confuse or conflate what can arise in meditation as a kind of meditative funk with, for instance, a seasonal affective disorder or postpartum depression or social anxiety, and these are different forms of anxiety and depression that have different causes and oftentimes have different or different responses are necessary. Now, it's difficult because we can't completely tease these things apart because we're human beings, we live in the modern world, and who among us doesn't have some degree of difficulty psychologically, physically, and then we go into meditation and then some of these natural side effects rise and suddenly we got all kinds of different challenging things kind of arising together. That's what amplifies these side effects that makes them more difficult to work with. It's what I think of as the cross effects, and let's just put it this way: it's challenging territory.

Let me start with the first one, and I was pretend as if there are no cross effects. We're just experiencing. We're totally psychologically mature people with no issues, and we go into meditation. I'm sure several of you are fit into that category here, and we go into meditation and we begin practicing whatever form or style of practice that we're doing. I want to bring up this quote from the meditation teacher Chögyam Trungpa talking more broadly about the spiritual path. He says, "Treading the spiritual path is painful. It's a constant unmasking, peeling off of layer after layer of masks. It involves insult after insult." I was thinking about grief in terms of this thing that Trungpa is talking about, how when we really engage in the practice of meditation.

No matter what kind of meditation I think, we start to see that we have certain identities or personas or masks. These masks are kind of like our provisional identities. At some point, we pick them up and we put them on. We may not even remember when, and they became provisionally who we are, at least in certain contexts, certain times. These are our masks that are very deep in terms of being a mother or a father or son or daughter, family member. These are also masks related to our function in the world: our job titles, CEO, administrative assistant, executive, coordinator of global outreach. You can just come up with every title that we take on, and our function at work becomes part of who we are, part of our masks. The deep mask of or a person or human being. We kind of inherited that one as soon as we came wailing into the world.

We have all these different ones, and some of them are deeper, some of them are more profoundly part of who we are and some of them are more superficial, and we pick them up and put them off without much trouble. When we see through the practice of meditation through direct sensory investigation that some of these masks are not who we are, in fact that we've imbued them with too much of ourselves and that we've actually there's a case of mistaken identity that we've taken ourselves to be the role or the persona or the function that we serve in the world, then there's a process of first shock, "Oh my God, I can't believe I thought that's who I was" and then gradually a process of dissolving those identities.

Interestingly, that doesn't necessarily mean that the masks go away. It just means that we no longer think they are who we are. In a very real sense when we engage in that process, we die to these sense of who we are, various kinds of sense of who we are. Any time something dies, whether it's an idea or a person or a role or mask, anything that we give importance to that we imbue with our attention and care; any time something dies and falls away, there's a natural grieving process, there's a natural feeling of losing something of loss.

For me, this really hit home couple of years ago when my partner and I had a failing business on our hands. Buddhist Geeks was a for-profit company at one point, and we started that way because we didn't know what we were doing, and we had at certain point wanted to grow and expand, do more, so we took on investment, we took on investors. These are all great people fortunately. We used their money to hire couple of new people and to build some things. Like a lot of enterprises like this, a lot of it didn't pan out, it didn't work, so here we had a bunch of money that we owed folks and a project that wasn't quite working, although it still had something really important to it, and we were no longer able to pay our bills.

At this point, we were living in Boulder, which was expensive, and we're like "Oh my God, how are we going to pay our next month's rent? We can't take any more money from these people." Knowing that what we're doing, our current strategy just isn't working. What I hadn't realized even though one of my mentors told me this is that part of what made it so difficult wasn't just that: here's our business, it's failing, and we have to do something and figure it out. It was that I had imbued my identity so fully with the project over the years, I had become Buddhist Geeks.

One my mentors warned me about this. He told me that this happens. He said every time someone starts a project or company, they have to merge their identity with it for a few, because it's insane. You're trying to do something that nine times out of ten fails, and so you have to become crazy and think that you are that, so that you can make it through all the days and nights where everything is like crazy, and you don't know how you're going to make it to the next day. What I hadn't realized was how deeply I had identified with the project and with that company, and so not only was it failing but like I was failing, I was dying. Two years ago, we made this move to here actually where my family lives. We hold up in Mars Hill, and one of my grandparents have a little guest cabin, and we fortunately were able to go there and just let everything fall away.

For about two months, I was in there just unable to do anything. I was just totally grief-stricken. There were couple things I was able to manage doing. I was able to continue doing the podcast and talk to people, but that was it. I couldn't work. I couldn't, I was mostly functional, but for the most part just going through a tremendous grief process, because I felt like who I was and all that this thing that I've given so much energy to was dying or dissolving. I didn't know what was going to happen next. For me, this was a real, it was a wake-up call to see how, even though I've been practicing meditation for all these years and I'm seeing all these provisional identities and seeing how they weren't true.

Here again, I'd fully merged my identity with this project, this thing outside of me and when it started shaking, I started shaking. That was a real process of grieving and having to let go of me as that and allow that to do whatever it would, to come back in whatever new form or to dissolve completely. I really did get to a point where I was okay with that, and that's where grief brings us eventually is to total acceptance of what's happened. In order to get to that point, we usually have to go through, and this is the hard part of grief; the deep sorrow and what someone's called the ocean of sadness. We have to actually feel incredibly sorrowful. We have to feel the deep sadness of loss itself of nothing being able to be held onto forever.

Once we're able to feel that and this is the sort of the way to work with the side effect is, you actually eventually get decent at opening to grief and sorrow and loss and accepting that that's part of this, then the grief process moves through. It's a natural process. It actually unfolds without any need for us to do a bunch. We just have to be there and show up and feel things, but it can be really hard and it can take a long time. For me, with Buddhist Geeks, it took several months to get to the point of being able to like intellectually acknowledge that this thing was actually not going to work, that that actually was dissolving in its current form.

That's just a company. I think about a loved one or parent or a sibling or a spouse or a someone close when they have a life-threatening illness or die; how much harder is it then to acknowledge the reality and feel the sorrow and sadness? Also with spiritual practice when we start to see that who we thought we were like since we were born, that who like we fundamentally think we are is actually not who we are and that itself begins to dissolve. How much even more sadness and grief is there? Yeah, I don't want to get too much into that, because it feels quite bottomless, but that's the process of grief and one of the side effects of meditation. If you really do it well, you get in touch with how everything is that we care for and we hold onto, that we cherish and that we imbue with our own sense of identity, is eventually pulled from us in some way.

Then anxiety. This is really interesting. I always joke with my wife that she's the master of anxiety. She would acknowledge that openly. When it comes to anxiety, the existential variety of anxiety, I was thinking about that and why is it that that arises when we start to practice and start to question and start to get into this meditative process. I was realizing that for myself, as soon as I started meditating, I started asking questions and in fact that maybe the questions came before the meditation. I started asking questions and thought of meditations and way to do this formally, but as children, most children go through a phase where like they are unafraid to ask any question. They'll ask every question that you could imagine: why is the sky blue, who am I, where are we from. They're just in a process of asking these questions for the first time, and so they don't have any answers to those question, that have any solid answers. I mean they have the answers people give them, but for them they're just like WTF, what is going on.

At a certain point, that WTF, we get answers, we inherit models, we get busy. We have stuff to do, we fall in love, we do stuff and in a way that questioning, of course, we can't sustain that level of questioning and maybe we nor should we probably sustain that level questioning, but in a way the meditative process is about returning to those questions, asking those fundamental questions again that we thought we had all sewed up already, that we had wrapped up, that society has wrapped up. Questions like who am I, what is this, what's the purpose, or what is a purpose for life that's worth living.

As we begin to open back up to those questions through meditation, it puts us back in touch with the feeling of not being completely shut or of not knowing exactly what the answers are, and that not knowing while it's always celebrated in spiritual circles as being like the penultimate or the ultimate understanding, it also comes with it very much of a sense of freaking the fuck out often. Because we know to not have the answer to the question who am I or what is this, is to open oneself to complete uncertainty. It's actually to open oneself to or to bring oneself right to the edge of insanity in a certain way, because consensual reality and how we operate in consensual reality determines our sanity, and so to question these things in a certain way is kind of insane, because you start to open doors that most people get uncomfortable with being open around you.

You start to behave in idiosyncratic weird ways often. You go out 10 months in silence contemplating these things perhaps, or you start putting into Google, "who and what is the nature of consciousness." I'm sure Google stating that, people, executives at Google, "What the hell?" That not knowing can bring up and can surface this deep sense of anxiety of dis-ease of feeling like something's not quite right here, something kind of subtly off, and maybe in a way that subtle feeling of anxiety is what brings us to ask the questions also in the first place. In a way, we all deal with certain amount of existential anxiety, but the degree which we let it in and we actually let it inform us and that we actually take it seriously instead of trying to ignore it or cope with it, that seems to be the thing that gets a lot of people interested in meditation. In part, because it's so deeply unpleasant and we much rather not be anxious.

We would like to find a solution to that anxiety, and may be the solution is enlightenment or being nonjudgmentally mindful moment to moment with our experience, and maybe then we won't feel the sense of complete groundlessness and uncertainty. It is the groundlessness, it is the feeling of not knowing but also not having a place to put our, to stand, not having a solid reference point that we can go back to every year. That is tied to the anxiety, but it's also tied to the freedom that can be discovered in the midst of this anxiety. There's a story that another of my teachers, Joseph Goldstein tells.

It's kind of like a metaphor for the spiritual journey and in the story, there is a skydiver who's going up to take their first jump, and they've got all their equipment on. They've been trained. They're up in the middle of the airplane like 10,000 feet or whatever, and then it's time to jump. They've done all this preparation. They've put all this effort in and then there's the exhilaration moment in the actual jumping, and this is like the big breakthrough experience or moments like "Wow. Jumping out of the airplane's amazing."

The next phase of the story is that the skydiver goes to pull the ripcord and realizes they don't have one, and this is the existential anxiety. This is the feeling of "Oh my God, I don't have a way to just let this thing down or to control this. It's out-of-control." The meditation practice gets us in touch with the out-of-controlness. We can feel it moment to moment. We don't even know what's going to happen next, so how could we possibly control it. The good news is the next phase of the story is that the skydiver, and this is a weird skydiving trip, granted, but the skydiver realizes that there is no ground, so he's flying through empty space, groundless, no parachute, but then realizes there's also no ground. There's no way that he's going to hit anything.

For me, what really, there was a turning point in my own practice when I realized that that fear and anxiety that would constantly and even sometimes predictably come up in meditation practice, especially when I was contemplating how impermanent, how everything's changing, that that anxiety, that fear is itself groundless. That groundlessness puts us in touch with the anxiety, but the anxiety itself is groundless, so here we are flying through empty space freaking out, but we're just flying through empty space.

When we notice that the anxiety is flying through empty space, that it doesn't have anywhere to land either, or anyone who could be stuck with it forever, then it also can dissolve and then we're left with a kind of openness and a kind of freedom in free fall, and that's in some ways the antidote to, or the way work with the side effect is to notice that itself, the anxiety itself is groundless. Again, it doesn't mean it's going to go away, although it might go away for short periods. It probably will come back up, because shit this is still groundless, but when we remember, oh yeah, this too is groundless. I thought for a second this is happening, it is someone real. No. It's not completely real. It's real enough that I'm freaking out right now, but it's not completely real, because I see that it's passing.

Then, the last side effect is existential depression. In the Warning Label, you remember I said the side effects of meditation may include an increased sensitivity to the full range of human experience where that increased sensitivity rate comes through training. We train our minds to focus more clearly on what's rising to be stably with, our breath for instance, or to notice our emotions and thoughts and body sensations to question, to incline our mind to open the heart, to just rest, just be in awareness itself. Through all of those modes, we are increasing various kinds of sensitivities to what's happening, to what's arising.

We're not just fueling the habitual thought based way of relating to experience. We're just constantly thinking about our experience. We're thinking about the world. We're actually dropping into our bodies, feeling our emotions, noticing our thoughts, and so we become much more attuned and much more sensitive to the full range, the panoply of experience that's unfolding in us and around us because we're not disconnected from each other, so we actually feel part of what each other's feeling too. In doing that, we open to so many new things. We open new states. We see things we've never seen before in our own minds and hearts, as I'm sure all of you have. We see discomforts and subtle tensions and pains in the body that we didn't know were there that we'd kind of been masking, and then we have to deal with that.

Ideally where this is supposed to lead, this increased sensitivity, is to what one of my mentors Ken Wilber called "Hurts more, but bothers you less." That is that your sensitivity is increased, so actually things actually hurt you more too. You feel the pain more acutely, the difficulty more poignantly, and yet at some points must also bother you less, because you have a balance with it and also the joys are that much more beautiful, but it's the hurt more part that really ties in with this side effect of depression, because the hurts more bothers you less. There's often a gap between the two unfortunately.

It starts off hurting more and feeling more pleasurable that we increase the range of what we can feel the sensitivity, and then often what happens and certainly what I've noticed is within that increased range and sensitivity, suddenly some part of our experience or some parts feel unbearable. They actually feel too much. It's like we turned up the volume of sensitivity and then we suddenly hear this unbelievably loud piercing sound that are like, that I can't, I can't listen to that, I can't open to that, that is too much, so in a way the sensitivity leads us into experiences that are overwhelming. They're designed in a sense to do that.

I'm just going to pull up some of my notes into and cut off of this place. There we go. Here we are. We're open. We're more open, more sensitive, and then suddenly something rushes in, that totally overwhelms us. It could be a new form of experience or pain in our bodies, emotional pain that we didn't notice there. It could be past traumas and hurts coming to the surface, and oftentimes our strategy, one of the only strategies we have for working with that overwhelm is to actually then deaden or dampen the range. It's like suddenly we practice opening it and now something came through this, just like blew us open, and we actually just we clam down. We find a way to actually compress the highs and lows back down to something more manageable.

That's one way of understanding depression actually, is that it's a kind of deadening or dampening of the full range of our experiences. Sometimes it's the opposite of what we're trying to do or what we start to do as we meditate open, and it's also, I think this is a really important point. It's also, there's a wisdom in it, because it shows us that there's stuff we can experience and it kind of enables us to not have to experience it. There's a wisdom of depression in that, but ideally and here's a thing I've been through this too.

When I went gung-ho into the meditation practice and when I first started, my wife, both of us were gung-ho headfirst, and we had some profound opening experiences and all the sorts of insights and we're excited and we're just dedicating our full attention to this thing, and then at certain point, we found ourselves sitting on the couch night after night, feeling kind of hopeless and not really knowing what to do with our lives. I'd like look over to her, and I'd say, "Honey, what do you want to do tonight? It's Friday night." We're like in our early 20s. "What do you want to do tonight?" "I don't know. What do you want to do?" I'll be like, "I don't know. What you want to do?" Then really we'll go like this like every single night for like 10 or 15 minutes, and so we eventually decided we weren't going to do anything. We would just like, sit there and read spiritual books or something.

We were both, at that time, dealing with this existential depression. We didn't know what the, what was the point of all this. We're like we thought it was like about happiness and the pursuit of happiness. We have these ideas and we deconstructed them now, and we'd opened into this kind of other realm of experience, and that even that was overwhelming and too much to deal with. Now, it's like we couldn't go backward, because we knew that that whole thing that was motivating us before was bullshit, and yet the thing we'd open into and thought was so awesome was also like too much to bear. Here, we just couldn't do anything. We were paralyzed for a while.

Fortunately, we had good teachers and good support structure, so we both were able to kind of realize how to get out of this. Mainly, what we learned is we just have to slowly with heartfulness and with care begin to like open to those things that were overwhelming, the pain, the loss, the trauma, all this things that felt like too much to deal with. Just slowly, we started to learn how to open to those things and to also let go of our ideals of what we thought this was about.

We thought it was going to be this like nonstop bliss fest, and it really turned out to be like some big highs and some big lows, so we had to come to terms with the reality of that as well. As we did that and as I think as meditators, as we are able to then open to the greater intensity because we have this increased sensitivity, eventually we start to be able to hold it and then it bothers us less. Then finally, it does bother us less. At that point, we start to notice that we have a kind of balance that we're both more sensitive, but we can also modulate the sensitivity. We don't always have to be like wide-open feeling everything. We can sometimes just kind of close down a little bit and kind of feel as much as we're able to feel.

We don't have to feel everyone's experience all the time. We can actually just kind of be silent and be with ourselves. We all have to mask the overwhelm with various things. We can actually just be with it, and in that comes a kind of increased confidence that we can deal with whatever comes. Anything that arises, we know eventually we'll be able to work with it. It might take a while and it might knock us off our feet for a while, but we know that there's an inner resiliency that starts to develop in being able to work with that increased sensitivity.

Then, depression becomes something that is like an old friend, this existential depression. You know you're going through at times when you're in over your head, and you know that that's part of the path, at least it has been for me, and that there are ways to mitigate, to kind of lower the dosage. Meditation or to go out and enjoy, going on walks, or taking that hot tub baths, to talk to friends, to get some perspective on what you're doing and interject some humor into the whole thing, and then it seems it's more bearable. It's not like doesn't have to become so intense and so hard core, which it does for some people unfortunately. That the dampening and the deadening itself becomes unbearable. That the depression itself becomes something we can't live with.

Yeah, these are to me some of the common side effects, and ideally when we learn how to work with them, they're passing. They come and go. They're not things that we have to worry about long term as being they're going to totally disrupt our lives forever. That the medicine of meditation continued to ... In effect, the side effects are what opens us, and the medicine is actually embedded in the side effects. They are teachers. They teach us how to open more deeply to our experience, to accept the fuller range of it and to see that this isn't some sort of pie-in-the-sky endeavor. It's actually about coming down and waking down into our lives more fully and being able to relate more completely to other people into the full range of their human experience, because we're not so different. Yeah, here's to enjoying the side effects of meditation and utilizing them as the path itself.

“Program or be programmed.” — Douglas Rushkoff

In the 21st century reality is becoming increasingly programmable. Patterns of information are being discovered in everything, from the atoms that make up the objects around us, to the code embedded within our DNA , this amazing genetic software that writes its own hardware. Our inner experience , our minds,  are also programmable. They can be trained! And one of the most effective ways to train the mind is through the practice of meditation. Training the mind to reprogram itself.

Unfortunately, our inner experience is overrun by patterns and habits that we didn’t willingly choose. Before we were born we didn’t get to build out our own character sheet, choosing which attributes we’d like to have and which we’d like to avoid. We are pre-programmed by the genetics of our ancestors, by the socioeconomics of our current situation, and by the relationships that we’re born into. We didn’t choose this life, but it’s what we have to work with now.

Fortunately, we aren’t the first group of people to attempt to train our minds. For thousands of years people with an interest in understanding the mind,  we’ll call them contemplatives,  have been exploring this same inner landscape. The traditions of wisdom they’ve left behind are some of the most powerful repositories of code we have for upgrading our inner operating systems. They’re also the basis of this open source lineage.

These Several Ways to Meditate were reverse-engineered from the Buddhist meditative traditions and from secular mindfulness techniques. On the Buddhist side of the street these styles are heavily influenced by the Theravada, Zen, and Tibetan practice lineages. And on the secular mindfulness side of the street they are influenced by the pioneering work of Jon Kabat-Zinn and the mindfulness-based practices that have sprung up around his work. They are informed by the emerging science of meditation as well as by Buddhist psychology. As such they represent some of the most time-tested and verifiably effective approaches that exist to train the mind. With these different styles we are, as one of our friends & teachers Kenneth Folk put it, “performing neurosurgery on ourselves.”

First and foremost these six ways are practices. They are things we do, that when done well, lead to certain results. Each of these ways complements the others, but are also complete in themselves. They can each be taken to extraordinary depths, and they all have the power to re-construct our sense of reality. They are also modules in a larger practice system. They can be practiced separately or they can be combined in extraordinary ways. Here are our six ways to meditate, along with the corresponding practices and results they’re designed to lead to.

Concentration Meditation

Concentration is in many ways the most foundational way to meditate. And not just in terms of being able to train the mind, but in terms of everything we do. Without concentration we can’t act.

With the practice of concentration meditation we work with a very simple recurring experience, called a ‘meditation object.’ Standard objects of meditation include things like the breath, sound, the body, a simple phrase, or even a visualization. Regardless of which object we select, the practice of concentration involves a very simple feedback loop. In the first step of this feedback loop we direct our attention to the meditation object and connect with the direct sensory experience of it. We then sustain our attention there for as long as we’re able. At some point, often quite quickly, our attention will wander off to something else. This ‘mind wandering’ is not a problem, but rather prompts the next point in the loop, which is to notice that we’ve wandered and then re-direct our attention back to the object. From there the loop continues, direct, sustain, wander, notice, and re-direct. It’s an extremely simple practice, but can be quite difficult to master. This is why it’s called a practice.

In much the same way that strength training enhances physical strength, concentration strengthens the muscle of attention. As our attentional strength grows we become less distractible. Outside stimuli have less control over us because we have trained ourselves to be present. As a result our emotional baseline becomes more calm and settled. A natural joy and clarity start to emerge as our concentration improves and we find we enjoy even the most mundane and simple activities more.

The concentrated mind is also a more effective mind. As your attention becomes stronger and more settled you can apply it to whatever you’re doing, whether working in the backyard, managing a complex project, or listening to your family tell you about their day. Concentration is a super power.

Mindfulness Meditation

There are many ways to practice Mindfulness, but what each has in common is a focus on the direct investigation of sensory experience. With mindfulness you learn how to notice what you're sensing in real-time. With mindfulness practice you learn to tune into and recognize the patterns of experience that make up your moment-to-moment reality, including the ebb and flow of body sensations, emotions, and thoughts. Mindfulness practice is like pointing the telescope of concentration toward the direct observation of your subjective universe.

As you train in mindfulness it enables you to experience, sometimes for the very first time, a gap between the stimulus of experience and our response to it. As World War II camp survivor Viktor Frankl discovered, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Like Neo, who slowed down time in the Matrix to dodge bullets, we can slow down time using the power of mindfulness. Instead of dodging bullets we’re dodging the tendency to get caught in reactive emotions & thoughts, the nightmare stories that we sometimes have trouble waking up from.

Even as mindfulness frees us from the prison of our own untrained mind, it also presents new challenges and opens up new vistas. The better we get at seeing patterns of experience the less likely we are to confuse those patterns with who and what we are. We start to see that all of these body sensations, emotions, and thoughts are objects in our experience, therefore they can not be the subject who is aware of them.

As a result of an increase in the subtlety of mindful attention, our normal identity, who we take ourselves to be, begins to dissolve. This experience of dissolving can be quite disorienting and difficult. But if we’re ready for it, and have the knowledge and support we need to make the transition , it can be one of the most significant transformations of our lives. As our old sense of self dissolves an expanded sense of identity emerges. We discover we are not who we thought we were. We also find out it’s totally ok, because we are incomprehensibly vast.

Heartfulness Meditation

The practice of Heartfulness involves inclining the mind toward opening the heart. One way this is done is by using intentional anchoring phrases (ex. “May you be happy” or “May you be safe”) to set the GPS coordinates of the heart toward states like love, kindness, joy, compassion, and resilience. As we incline the mind toward opening the heart we start by offering these well wishes to people that are easy for us to love. We also learn to send it to ourselves, to those people we typically overlook, to those that are difficult or challenging for us, and eventually to all beings everywhere. As we become more proficient at opening the heart we can also practice heartfulness by calling to mind the state of heart we wish to rest in and simply abiding there.

The result of this practice is the gradual opening of the heart. We become better at forgiving ourselves and others. We feel a more natural and effortless kindness toward others, even those people we normally feel nothing toward. It becomes easier to resonate, with compassion, to the suffering we encounter. We begin to befriend ourselves at a much deeper level. If we’ve struggled with self-hatred or criticism, we begin to notice the unclenching of these patterns in the face of a continued and steady openness of heart.

Now, this may sound totally awesome, an open heart, where do I sign up!? But the road to these results is littered with obstacles. The most common obstacles of an open heart are fear, anger, doubt, and judgement. These obstacles (seem to) protect us from hurt and pain. They are also conditioned by some of our earliest and most difficult struggles as people. With this practice we learn to work skillfully and compassionately with our own deepest fears and hurts. As the waves of difficulty arise, and are met with a steady and compassionate heart, they transform into their opposite. In doing this we gradually learn to traverse what Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield calls, “a path with heart.”

Inquiry Meditation

The practice of Inquiry involves repeatedly working with a meditative question, such as “Who am I?” or “What is life?” The first stage of the practice involves discovering the questions that drive us. To do this we start with the question: What is the most important thing? Only when we’re in touch with the most important thing can we begin to formulate and work with our own question. From there we practice continually dropping the question into awareness and sticking with the inquiry process. As we do so we learn to neither fixate on any particular answer, no matter how profound, nor give up on the process of asking. Sometimes we hold the question gently and sometimes we drive every bit of our attention into it, as if our lives depended on reaching the bottom. When we notice that the inquiry has trailed off, we return to the question, as if for the very first time, and ask again.

One of the primary results of meditative inquiry practice is that we become deeply familiar with the state of not knowing. We become ok not having answers and not having all of life figured out. How often do we really know everything that’s going on? As we learn to rest in the ‘don’t know mind’ we begin to trust in the wisdom of uncertainty. When we aren’t completely certain we stay in touch with what Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki called “beginner’s mind.” Being in touch with beginner’s mind allows us to hold paradox and tension in our attention.

A common tension in practice has to do with effort and trust. Should I put forth more effort, or should I trust and let go more? This tension, and others like it, eventually resolve themselves as we practice a middle way, holding both extremes in attention at once. This middle way allows us to venture to a place that is between and beyond the tensions we’re wrestling with. When we don’t have the answers, and are open to whatever comes, the most interesting insights can arise. But we don’t stop there. We keep plunging deeper and deeper into the heart of not knowing. We allow ourselves to become like a question, open ended, curious, fluid, and penetrating.

Awareness Meditation

The practice of Awareness isn’t a practice in the normal sense. With awareness we’re learning to simply rest in experience without attempting to change or manipulate it. This includes resting in the experience of trying to change or manipulate what’s happening! In very simple terms awareness is the practice of simply being with what is. Even more simply, awareness is being what is. Awareness is being.

Practically speaking, we can ease our way into the totality of awareness by focusing on a couple of things. One is on the simple experience of being embodied. The body is already perfectly good at being with what is, it doesn’t really have any other choice. It’s the thinking mind that conceptualizes in terms of past, present, and future. It’s only the thinking mind that can be somewhere else. The body can’t do that. So resting in embodied awareness involves learning this capacity from our physical form. The other thing we can focus on is the recognition of when we start trying to do something. When we notice we are starting to try and do something, even meditation, we allow that doing to dissolve. As meditation teacher Shinzen Young suggests, “Every time you notice the intention to control your attention, drop the intention.” It’s as simple as that, notice the intention to do something, let the attention drop, and rest in awareness. This doesn’t mean doing goes away, as there’s a profound paradox at the heart of awareness. Doing continues to spontaneously arise, even as the sense of a separate doer, apart from experience, dissolves.

The result of awareness practice is the increased ability to relax into the understanding that there is nothing that we need to do, or know, or become for things to be completely ok as they are. Whatever is happening is what’s happening. And because it’s happening, it’s already too late to change it. If we try to change it, then that’s what’s happening! As we learn to trust in awareness we start to understand that much of our existential struggle comes from not accepting the way our experience already is.

Embodiment Meditation

Embodiment is the practice of inhabiting the direct and non-conceptual experience of the body. Whereas mindfulness practice is focused mainly on the contents of experience, embodiment invites us into an even less less mediated experience of ourselves. In this practice one drops all preconceptions of “what” it is we’re paying attention to, and instead allows attention to return to what somatic meditation teacher Reggie Ray calls “the darkness of the body.”

The result of embodiment practice is an increasingly grounded way of being and knowing. One knows with the body, as if it’s an infinitely connected sensor. This intuitive and somatic way of knowing presents all kinds of new information that was was being filtered out or simply ignored. It literally opens up a new dimension of experience, one that constantly defies imagination.

Imaginal Meditation

Every style of meditation moves through different phases as we practice it. Sometimes that movement appears to be a linear, we could call these stages of practice. At other times it seems to be circling around and around, cycling from one phase to the next, not really going anywhere that seems deeper or better. We could refer to these as cycles of practice. At still other times there’s no discernible pattern whatsoever, and it feels like we’re stuck in the same place, or randomly bouncing around. These are different states of practice, with no specific pattern connecting them, or at least not ones we recognize. No matter how it unfolds it can be useful to have a map of the various phases of practice that can show up.

In Phase 1 we find that we’re totally distracted. Our mind feels untrained. We’re like total noobs. Almost as soon as we’ve connected with our object of focus our attention bounces off of it, quickly flitting toward something else. This phase can be frustrating, and the frustration feeds the sense of incompetency. The upside of this phase is that if we spend time focusing on a single point, and continue coming back again and again to that point, eventually our attention starts to settle and we begin to be able to stay with the object for longer periods of time.

In Phase 2 there’s the sense that we’ve tuned into the object of meditation. It may still be shaky, and we may still get lost for periods of time, but those periods begin to diminish and there’s a sense that we’re really starting to get a hang of the process. If learning to concentrate were like riding a bike, this would be the phase where we’re still a bit shaky, and still fall from time to time, but we’ve basically learned to ride.

In Phase 3 we find that we’re totally locked into our meditation object. Attention becomes clear and stable, and the object becomes amazingly vivid. It’s like we’re staring down an electron microscope toward a universe that we never knew existed. Our bodies feel at ease, our interactions feel natural and easy, and we float on a cloud of effortless joy. This is the peak of the mountain phase.

In Phase 4 attention turns back on itself and destabilizes the sense of being the awareness, or watcher, or witness of what’s happening. The center of attention becomes blurry, even as the periphery expands. We find that it’s difficult to corral our attention into a small spot, it’s almost as if attention wants to be bigger, yet hasn’t found a way to stabilize in that bigness. This can be a difficult phase, especially if we’re just coming out of a period where things were more easy and blissful. It can feel like we’ve lost our previous abilities, but the reality is that they’re actually expanding to include more, while also becoming more subtle and refined.

In Phase 5 attention expands out to include the entire space of experience. It becomes panoramic and our point of focus becomes vast, even boundaryless. Instead of focusing our attention down on a particular point, as we did in the first few phases, our focal point becomes the point that includes all points. Concentration in this phase feels natural and effortless, spacious and formless. It takes only the slightest hint of effort to tune into the field of experience, to become one with everything. But this phase, like all phases, will eventually change. That’s what a phase is: a distinct period in a process of change.

As you continue to develop your concentration, and as you cycle through these phases, keep in mind that there is no final end point to this process. Rather, there’s a building and a scattering, an expanding and contracting, a deepening and a letting go. There’s something we can learn in every phase of practice. That’s why we call it practice.

By: Vince Horn

By: Emily Horn

In the classical Buddhist system there are 40 different meditation objects which are taught. They range from focusing on the breath to focusing on the disgusting smell of a rotting corpse (seriously!). They also included visual meditation objects (blue, white, red, yellow), elemental objects (fire, earth, air, water, space), auditory objects (a mantra), complex mental states (like loving-kindness or compassion), and even ideas (like death or peace).

There are many things we can concentrate on, and which ones we pick matter. I’d like to advocate initially for finding an object, which when you practice with it leaves you feeling joyful, excited, & hungry for more. A practice that has a deep impact on you, and which you feel you want to explore further. Here are some of the meditation objects that you can select from:

1. Discovering - use embodied intuition to discover where attention "wants" to rest

2. Breath - working with the physical breath as your point of focus

3. Joy - working with the heartfulness practice on joy in a concentrative fashion

4. “1” - Like numbers? Use the number “1” as your meditation object.

5. Kasina Meditation - Focus on a simple visual object, such as a white colored disc

6. Walking - Focus on a changing object, like walking.

7. Dishes - Focus on the everyday life practice of washing the dishes.

8. Emailing - A digital age life practice.

9. Something Else - Pick another concentration object not listed here & use that

Note that there are different ways that these objects break down, in terms of their type. Some are designed to be formal practices, while others are life practices. Some are more predominantly somatic, visual, or auditory in their orientation, while others include multiple senses.

Once you find a meditation object that you jive with, then keep going with it. Stay with the object, practice with it regularly, and go through a transformative process with it. When you come out the other side then you can make intelligent comparisons, but until then just focus on plumbing the depths and being consistent.

By: Vince Horn

Recorded by: Emily Horn

By: Vince Horn

The practice of concentration is actually quite simple. This doesn’t mean it’s easy, it takes sustained effort to improve one’s concentration skills, but it’s pretty straightforward in terms of how it works.

The model we’d like to share with you, to help explain how concentration practice functions, involves a simple 4-point feedback loop. You can visualize this as 4 points around a simple circle. The 4-points of the loop are:

1. Directing

2. Sustaining

3. Wandering

4. Remembering

Before we get into each point of the loop, it’s useful to know that this basic model holds true regardless of what you’re paying attention to. You can be working with the breath, a visualization, a mantra, even a quality like space. And not just classical meditation objects like these but also on any activity that you’re engaged in, like e-mailing or doing the dishes or walking. In each case it’s the same basic process.

The first point of the feedback loop is to direct attention to the object of meditation. By doing this we make initial contact with the object. Once we’ve directed attention then the next point is to sustain attention with the object, for as long as we’re able. Directing and sustaining. Making contact and then sticking with it.

Then at some point, no matter how awesome our powers of concentration are, something will come along, a loud sound, a thought or feeling, some pain in our body, whatever it is, and it will grab our attention. This is the next point of the feedback loop, where the mind wanders from our intended object of focus.

One thing worth mentioning about mind wandering is that it isn’t always the case that attention totally leaves the meditation object (though often it does). Mind wandering exists on a spectrum, from totally losing the object to just barely losing touch with it. It can be that some part of our attention wanders from the object, but we’re still partially with it at the same time. This is still mind wandering, it’s just a more subtle version of it.

Now, when the mind has wandered, at some point, we can remember our intention to come back, again and again, to our object of focus. This remembering is a simple noticing of what is happening in our experience and how we lost touch with our concentration object. Once we’ve noticed that we’ve wandered, and remember to return, we complete the loop, by going back to the first point, of directing attention back to the object.

The feedback loop of concentration continues as we then sustain our attention for as long as we’re able, eventually losing track of it in some way, wandering off into some other experience. Then again we notice that we’ve wandered and remember to return to the object: Directing, Sustaining, Wandering, Remembering, re-cycling through the loop again and again as we train attention.

By: Vince Horn

Recorded by: Vince Horn

Recorded by: Emily Horn

Guided Kasina Meditation

💻 Computer Instructions

1. Save the desktop version of the file to your computer

2. Open the file

3. In the program you're previewing the image in, set it to go to full screen mode

4. Place your computer screen in a position that you can sit and gaze down at it comfortably

   1. It's important here that your neck isn't craned up or down and that it's resting directly in the line of vision that's natural for you when you're relaxed & alert with eyes open.

5. Watch the Guided Kasina Meditation for instructions

📱 Smartphone Instructions

1. Save the mobile version of the file to your computer

2. Upload the file to a cross-platform cloud storage application (like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.)

3. Go to your phones settings and set it so that your phone won't automatically turn off after a set period of time

4. Open the file in the appropriate app on your smartphone

5. Watch the Guided Kasina Meditation for instructions

⬇️ Kasina File Downloads

Recorded by: Vince Horn

By Emily Horn

By Vince Horn Learn more about Social Meditation

Recorded by: Emily Horn

by Vince Horn

Focus on Email, Part 1: Eliminating Distractions

Recorded by: Vince Horn

Focus on Email, Part 2: Inbox Practice

Recorded by: Vince Horn

By Vince Fakhoury Horn Learn more about Social Meditation

By Emily Horn

More Detail:

By Vince Horn Learn more about Social Noting

By Vince Horn Learn more about Social Noting

By Vince Horn Learn more about Social Noting

By Vince Horn Learn more about Social Noting

By: Vince Horn

By: Emily Horn

By: Vince Horn

By: Emily Horn

Read on Lion's Roar: How to Cool the Flames of Anger with "RAIN"

Download the PDF version here:

By: Emily Horn

Expanding the Field of Mindfulness

Other Formal Practices

Life Practices

Work Practices

In this technique, we suggest working through the following sequence one by one, starting with Breath, then moving to Body, Emotions, Thinking, and finally to all of our Experience.

There are 2 meditations recorded for each phase, one that is 10 minutes long and another version which is 30 minutes long. The main difference is that the 30 minute version goes into slightly more depth with the instructions, and gives more time for exploring the practice.

Mindful of Emotions 10m

Recorded by: Emily Horn

Mindful of Emotions 30m

Recorded by: Vince Horn

Mindful of Body 10m

Recorded by: Vince Horn

Mindful of Body 30m

Recorded by: Emily Horn

Mindful of Breathing 10m

Recorded by: Vince Horn

Mindful of Breathing 30m

Recorded by: Emily Horn

Mindful of Thinking 10m

Recorded by: Vince Horn

Mindful of Thinking 30m

Recorded by: Emily Horn

Mindful of Experience 10m

Recorded by: Emily Horn

Mindful of Experience 30m

Recorded by: Vince Horn

Recorded by: Emily Horn

Recorded by: Vince Horn

Recorded by: Emily Horn

Recorded by: Vince Horn

Recorded by: Emily Horn

Recorded by: Emily Horn

Recorded by: Emily Horn

By Emily Horn

By: Emily Horn

By: Vince Horn

By: Emily Horn

Forgiveness Phrases

• If I have hurt or harmed anyone, knowingly or unknowingly, I ask their forgiveness.

  • shortened version: I ask your forgiveness

• If anyone has hurt or harmed me, knowingly or unknowingly, I forgive them.

  • shortened version: I forgive you

• For all the ways I have hurt or harmed myself, knowingly or unknowingly, I offer forgiveness.

  • shortened version: I forgive myself

Loving-Kindness Phrases

• May we be happy.

• May we be healthy.

• May we live with an open heart.

Compassion Phrases

• May I be free from suffering.

• May I give myself the compassion I need.

• May I be safe & protected.

Joy Phrases

• May you be happy

• May your well being deepen & grow

• May joy arise

• May your happiness not diminish

• May your good fortune continue

Equanimity Phrases

• May I accept things just as they are

• May I be undisturbed by the comings and goings of things

• May I be balanced and at peace.

• I care about the pain of others, yet I cannot control it.

• May you have true equanimity.

• May I bear witness to things just as they are.

• May I remain peaceful and let go of fixation.

• May I offer care without hesitation, knowing I may be met with gratitude, anger, or resistance.

• May I offer care, knowing I don’t control the course of life, suffering, or death.

• May I find the inner resources to genuinely contribute where needed.

• May I be undisturbed by the comings and goings of things.

May Love Arise!

Meditation By Vince Fakhoury Horn

Meditation by: Vince Horn

Meditation by: Vince Horn

Meditation by: Emily Horn

By Emily Horn

Meditation by: Vince Horn

Meditation by: Emily Horn

Meditation by: Emily Horn

By: Emily Horn

By: Emily Horn

By: Vince Horn

Meditation by: Emily Horn

By: Vince Horn

By: Vince Horn

Meditation by: Emily Horn

Meditation by: Emily Horn

Meditation by: Vince Horn

Guided Meditations 🎧

By: Vince Horn

As we focus on our sitting posture there are six points that we want to cover. Each of these points is an important part of an overall posture that will allow us to be more steady and engaged in our meditation practice. The first point is our seat, where we’re sitting and how. There are few options for how one can take a seat in meditation. One is in a chair, the other is on a cushion with your legs crossed in front of you. The last is kneeling on the floor on a bench or a large cushion. It’s important that you find a seat that is comfortable where you can stay relatively still for an extended period of time. The second point of posture has to do with the placement of your hands. Here we’ll give you a couple options, one resting them on your thighs, the other resting on your lap. The third point of posture has to do with your eyes. Do you keep our eyes open in meditation, or do your close them? Here both are going to be an option and will go into the pros and cons of each. The fourth point of posture is related to your physical balance--in particular how you’re balanced in space. The fifth point of posture is alignment, and specifically your physical alignment with the force of gravity. The sixth and final point of posture is what we call attitude, and it’s the mental and emotional attitude that most accurately reflects all the previous points of posture. It’s the combination of both ease and alertness that allows us to feel settled, not just physically but also emotionally and mentally.

These are the six points of posture.

Connected Meditations 🎧

During this series you will be introduced to the Six Points of Posture: 1) Seat, 2) Hands, 3) Eyes, 4) Balance, 5) Alignment, & 6) Attitude. Taken together these six pointers form a systematic & comprehensive approach to meditating in the sitting posture.

Primary Meditation 🎧

Pointer Meditations 🎧

By: Vince Horn

By: Emily Horn

Meditation by: Vince Horn

By: Emily Horn

By Vince Fakhoury Horn

Each line in the graph below represents one of the fifteen practice pairs that emerge out of the direct connections between the Six Ways to Meditate.

Pairing practices, in these 15 meditative dyads, is an important skill, because it reveals the multifaceted nature of meditation, giving us a stronger and more flexible base from which to practice. The more ways we know how to meditate, the more ways we can respond to the changing conditions of life. The more ways we know how to practice, the more we realize what is shared amongst them all.

By: Vince Horn