Check out our heart-to-heart with the talented Emily Horn, contributor to buddhify
By Dana Jaffe
Recently, our editor Dana Jaffe sat down with each of the buddhify teachers to find out what they’re all about. Here she talks with Emily Horn about what inspired her to teach meditation, her favorite track that she wrote for the app, and about the business she just started with her husband (and fellow buddhify teacher) Vince.
I never really intended to become a meditation teacher. I started practicing when I was in college and 10-12 years later my teachers — mainly Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman — were encouraging me to teach. I really loved the practice and saw the impact that meditation had on people in their lives, so it felt like a natural progression to offer what I had learned to other people.
I prefer intimate groups, and also the ability to encourage and facilitate wisdom coming from within the group. When it comes to styles of meditation, I don’t have a preference necessarily. I appreciate how different styles — like awareness, loving-kindness, mindfulness, and inquiry — point to and reveal different aspects of consciousness. In my own practice, they’re all pretty integrated at this point.
I’ve gotten feedback that the ‘Chain’ meditation is one of the meditations that has supported the most people. It is about working with pain. That one always comes up when I think about it, because I’ve gotten such good feedback and it’s supported people in situations that I can’t even imagine. One person was battling brain cancer actually and really struggling with the pain of it, and not understanding what to do. By listening to that meditation, she was able to separate the stories, because it walks you through the different aspects of the chain reaction of pain. It teaches you to go in the direct experience and take away the story. She said that it was one of the biggest things that helped her throughout the whole cancer process. It was very powerful.
For one, we’ve seen there’s a lot of people getting turned on to meditation right now through apps. Apps are really great. At the same time, the way that they stand now, to my understanding, is that there’s not a whole lot of interaction with humans. With meditation, in certain points of practice, it’s good to get that mirroring and to get that feedback from that personal connection.
With Meditate.io, we offer circles for people to join. There’s one-on-one teacher support that’s available. If people find their meditation practice through an app like buddhify, Meditate.io can support those people if they want to go deeper, if they have challenges, or if things are going really well and they just want that mirroring because we’re humans. I want to mention too that Meditate.io is online. It works for people all over the world.
A lot of younger people are attracted to it, because even though Vince and I have a background in Buddhist meditation and training, we really do hold that just as a framework. There are many different ways to do this. We have a spacious view. We’ve been told that it is very helpful to have that spacious view. You don’t have to be Buddhist to meditate.
A friend of buddhify since the very beginning, Emily’s unique talent has been part of buddhify since 2014. The co-founder of the Meditate.io programmes for deepening meditators and the Asheville-based Heart of Insight Community, Emily has been called a “power player of the mindfulness movement” by Wired Magazine.
You can experience Emily’s contributions to buddhify through the meditations for Eating, At Your Computer, Parks & Nature, Pain & Illness, Stress & Difficult Emotions II, and Needing Presence. You can find out more about her and her work at www.emilyhorn.com and meditate.io.
