The Insight Chord

Vince Fakhoury Horn describes the insight meditation tradition as a chord in which concentration, mindfulness and heartfulness sound together, with concentration giving mindfulness its depth and heartfulness keeping the whole enterprise from turning dry and frightening.

My teaching colleagues & I are leading a 10-day meditation retreat focusing on The Insight Chord. We’d love to see you there!

💬 Transcript

Vince Horn: Practically speaking, we’ve been focused on kind of three different forms of practice over our time together.

We started with concentration practice, which is related to the training in concentration. We talked about mindfulness practice, which is often associated with the training in wisdom. And then last week we started to get into the heartfulness-style practice, or metta practice as it’s known in the early Buddhist tradition. Or brahmavihāra practice, another term that’s used to describe some of the heart qualities that early Buddhism is really interested in cultivating, developing. And you could say for sure that you can get into concentration states with heartfulness.

And they also can be very helpful in terms of the first training of morality and ethics. They can come in very handy there, as in all the meditation practices.

I remember when I was on a two-month retreat with Emily at Spirit Rock, someone asked during one of the Q&As with Jack Kornfield, they said, “I’ve heard that metta practice, heartfulness practice, is a relative practice, that you can’t actually get to the absolute, the universal goal of emptiness through metta, that you have to do vipassanā. Is that true?” To which Jack responded something like, “If you can’t awaken through the heart, I don’t know how else you can do it.”

“If you can’t awaken through love, what are we even talking about?” And I thought that was a nice response, because it challenged that notion in the early Buddhist tradition — it does creep up, actually, a lot — that heartfulness is a relative practice. Well, maybe not. Maybe it could actually lead to ultimate wisdom. Or maybe it is an expression of ultimate wisdom. That’s my view.

So we’ve looked at these three forms of practice, all of which are, in the broader sense, meditation practice, but they all connect to these three trainings, and are useful and skillful things to do.

So I want to explore how these three come together. It’s something that I noticed as Emily and I started to come up with this framework of the different ways to meditate,