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Buddhist Geeks

Buddhist Geeks

Written by: Vince Fakhoury Horn
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Evolving Dharma in the Age of the Network

www.buddhistgeeks.orgVince Fakhoury Horn Hygiene & Healthy Living Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Spirituality
Episodes
  • The Insight Chord

    The Insight Chord
    Aug 20 2026
    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 bit about each of these three points. We can of course go ...
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    23 mins
  • The Fire Inside

    The Fire Inside
    Aug 7 2026
    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 want to know.’”Rima Vesely-Flad: Wow. Even just hearing Baldwin’s words in that context again, it really brings me chills. And so prescient, right? So prescient in terms of just anticipating how much more extensive...
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    55 mins
  • Working Class Dharma

    Working Class Dharma
    Jul 22 2026
    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 as I’ve grown older that I was raised — so, this is to just be completely fair: I was formed by my parents, and I do have a prejudice, and their prejudice was against what they perceived as upper-class ...
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    53 mins
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