What is Social Noting?

In “What is Social Noting?”, Vince Horn traces how Kenneth Folk developed the Social Noting approach — one that broke two deep taboos of traditional meditation culture — becoming a bridge between intensive introspective meditation and the messy, relational reality of modern life.

This talk serves as an introduction to a 10-week Social Noting Facilitation Training, starting this Friday, March 13th–live groups meet from 12–1pm ET each week–in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha.

💬 Transcript

Vince: Wonderful. So, Social Noting. I want to start with, I guess, my personal story of how I encountered this practice in the beginning and then talk more about what the actual practice is. So, in 2010, I was living in Los Angeles. I was there for a year training with a teacher of mine named Trudy Goodman and teaching at a center of hers called InsightLA.

And at the same time, another one of my teachers named Kenneth Folk called me up, or actually as I recall, he Skyped me. We were Skyping, if you remember what it was like to Skype. And he was telling me about how he had recently discovered a new way of teaching his students how to do the Noting technique.

Now, if you have not heard of the “Noting Technique,” also known as Mental Noting, this is one of the classic and most popular forms of vipassana or mindfulness meditation that comes out of Southeast Asia. Specifically, it comes out of Burma, in the tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw, who is a Burmese monk.

And Mahasi taught this form of Mental Noting that he learned from his own teacher Ledi Sayadaw. And it is a very powerful method that employs the analytical mind. It uses the thinking mind in order to help one stay present with the constant change of experience. So this was the first form of vipassana that I really learned myself.

And by the time Kenneth Skyped me in 2010 to tell me he had learned this new way of teaching it, I had already spent some number of years going pretty deep on the practice myself, including at least at that time maybe four months of silent retreat practice where all I did was this silent noting technique.

So at that point, I had probably put thousands of hours into this practice. And the way I had learned it, which was the same way that Kenneth learned it, which is the way that the tradition teaches it, is that you do this practice to yourself internally, in silence. You may be on a retreat with other people, as I was for four months, and I never heard myself or anyone else say anything. It was all internal. From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, the instruction was to just note internally, moment to moment, whatever you are experiencing.

And what Kenneth did, which in retrospect was actually quite simple but was also kind of shocking because of the tradition that he was having to kind of work against — he just said, “I’ve learned how to do the practice out loud with other people, Vince, and it’s way better as a way of teaching.”

I had just started teaching myself at this time. That was appealing to me. Oh gosh, if I could find a better way to teach this stuff, then maybe I will be a better teacher. And if you have ever taught yourself in any context, you will know that for the first year or two of teaching, we are pretty much all kind of crappy teachers. We are learning still the basics of teaching. We have not quite become confident in what we know, even if we have trained a long time.

It is different to train in something and practice in it than it is to share it with others, and be at least partially responsible for the impact that has. So I was a really insecure teacher, a new teacher, and I thought, great, if there is a better way to teach, I am a hundred percent open. But what was kind of weird about what Kenneth did is he went against what I now realize is a cultural taboo in the Early Buddhist monastic tradition.

Actually, two taboos wrapped into one. The first taboo being, meditation is something that you do in silence, for the most part, or at least serious meditation. Maybe there is a little chanting at the end of the day at a retreat center, but for the rest of the day you are doing the serious work of introspecting.

And if people are speaking out loud, especially in a silent retreat context, that is considered a distraction. That is something that is going to disrupt your practice, not support it. So to meditate out loud was going in a completely opposite direction of the conventional wisdom — that meditation is something you do in silence, and it is something that you do by yourself.

You do it individually. It may be useful to go on retreat with other people. That helps get the cost of a retreat down and makes it easier in a sense to serve everyone. And you get the added benefit of doing this with other people. There is a very real social benefit, even if you do not talk to anyone or make eye contact, which are the instructions on a traditional noting technique retreat. You still have the benefit of knowing that you are not completely alone in doing it. But in a way you are alone, because you are not connecting with anyone really. And the idea being that you are developing your own practice as an individual.

So Kenneth had to break both taboos — the taboo of individuality and the taboo of silence — that were sort of just assumed to be right, in order to develop this technique. And that to me is the real innovation here.

What happens when you do this practice out loud, as Kenneth suggested — it is much easier to learn how to do the practice. And it is much easier, if you are in a teaching role, to be able to give someone feedback, because you can actually see how they are doing the practice.

You can demonstrate it yourself as well. You can show someone, “Oh, this is what it is like to practice out loud, to do this technique.” And if you see someone demonstrating something that they have done for thousands, or maybe tens of thousands of hours — someone who has achieved a certain level of mastery with respect to a technique — it is very, very useful.

I mean, if you think about it, most things that we learn in life are like that. We can see someone demonstrate the skill. Meditation is one of those weird things where, if it is done in silence and it is done individually, it is almost like it exists in a kind of black box of your own mind.

Like the black box in an airplane. We have to somehow find a way, I think, to externalize the practice in order to make it more pedagogically useful. The thing that Kenneth had not expected was that it also made the practice social. When he first started teaching me this practice, he called it Ping Pong Noting, and then after some time realized, “Oh, actually no, this is Social Noting.”

And if you know Kenneth or know anything about him — in a way it is super ironic that he developed Social Meditation, because that is not really his orientation. He is a self-described autist and is a hermit. And so I think it surprised him as much as anyone that this made this a social practice.

For me it was such a huge revelation. It was so timely and so useful, not just because it helped me become a better teacher, which it did, but more because it helped me bridge the gap that I had known was there but did not know how to bridge — which was this gap between long-term intensive silent retreat practice and living a normal day-to-day life as a lay person, having a job, being in a committed relationship.

Now I have a kid — at the time I did not — but it is like all of the things that we contend with as modern people. I did not really know how to bridge the gap between the deep introspective practice I had done and the kind of life that I wanted to live. And so in a lot of ways I felt, in that context, a little schizophrenic — like I am these two different experiences and they do not really connect.

So for me, Social Noting became a bridge between deep introspective practice and just living in the world, and all the craziness that comes with being a modern person. And it helped me kind of connect those two in a way that they did not feel so far apart.

I think what happens when we meditate alone is we get really good at introspecting. This for sure was the case for me, where I got extremely good at turning attention inward. If you hear someone say, “Hey, we’re going to meditate,” and your first inclination is to sit up and turn inward, you have developed the same habit I had.

And it turns out that habit, while great in many ways, leaves out everything outside of your experience. It does not include it in the scope of meditation. So that means your environment is not really included, unless you hear sounds or see things. If your eyes are closed, it is going to be hard to do that.

And those things are usually considered to be a distraction if they pull you out of your experience, right? So any external phenomena is not really included. We tolerate it as introspectives. We tolerate it, but it is not really included. And other people definitely are not included. We have to include our thoughts and emotions and feelings about other people, because we cannot turn that off. We are social beings after all. But we do not explicitly include them when we do introspective practice. So we are not learning how to meditate with others, or with the world, on their own terms.

That is the devastating critique of Social Meditation, once you have had a real chance to practice it. And that was the critique I would give myself of my own early practice. I had a profound introspective capacity and not a very good capacity to remain stable and connected to others in the world around me. When I got overwhelmed by relationships, or by the world, I would just escape inward, spiritually bypassing essentially.

So these social practices give us other tools, aside from bypassing, aside from just escaping into ourselves. And I think that is extremely useful if you find yourself, as I do, in relationship.

Additionally, the whole approach of Social Noting is, as I said, a mindfulness practice. So what happens is our introspection becomes something more like what I would call interspection. When I first started to try to find a word that described this experience of being aware not only of my own feelings and what is arising internally, but also of what is arising in the space between people — internally and externally, inter, between — I could not find one. There was not a word there.

There is no word for that. That itself is interesting. So I coined the term interspection to describe that process of bringing attention to the space, internal and external, in between the two.

Now, if you are or have a tendency toward thinking in individualist terms — and I do not blame you if you do, basically Western culture is built on individualism — so it is deep in many of our bones, but not all of ours. Not all of us come out of a Western culture. Some of my ancestors were born in the Levant, in West Asia. I grew up in a family where this was not hyper-individualistic all the time. There was a huge sense of communalism. And from that point of view, it is really, really odd to see a bunch of people meditating in silence by themselves.

I am kind of remembering here that one of the nicknames for the Insight Meditation Society — this retreat center I went to often in Massachusetts — the local residents, as they drove past it, they would call it “The Zombie Farm,” as they saw people walking slowly in front of the building really slowly. To them that was weird — someone in rural Massachusetts driving by, seeing a bunch of hippies moving like zombies.

Yeah. From the point of view of communal living, it is odd. It is odd that someone would act that way. Of course it is not when you understand what you are doing there. But in another sense, conventionally, it is totally weird.

So Social Meditation — I also describe this as meditation for extroverts. I do not know about you all, but I am something like in between. I am an ambivert. I like being social and extroverted at times, and I like being by myself and not having any demands on my attention at other times. But some people who I have talked to about meditation, who are true extroverts — they really enjoy socializing. For them, the idea of sitting alone in silence sounds like torture. It is close to, “Would you rather be waterboarded by other people, or would you rather sit in silence by yourself with your own mind?” It is like, “Well, there are other people there, maybe...” Half joking, half serious.

For those folks, Social Meditation is the kind of meditation they should have been introduced to from the beginning. This is the kind of meditation we taught our five-year-old when he was back when he was five. This was several years ago. I think it is a terrible idea to teach young children how to meditate alone by themselves. It is much better to do it in connection and out loud, as a type of fun, almost game-like practice.

Social Meditation inherently is interactive because of the nature of including each other in a process. And what I think marks it as also being quite different is that you can share Social Meditation without necessarily having to be a teacher or authority.

Because these practices are based on simple protocols — a simple description of, this is the technique, here is how you do it. For instance, we are going to do a practice called “There is” Noting Together. The instructions are super simple. We are going to take turns saying “There is,” and then using a word or two to describe whatever it is that we notice in our experience.

You can also say “there is uncertainty,” or “there is not knowing,” or you can simply say “pass” when it is your turn. That is it. That is the instruction. So do I need to have spent 20 years meditating an hour a day and have gone through multiple teacher trainings and received authorization in a certain lineage in order to share that with another person?

Gosh, I hope not, because not many people are going to be able to do it. So these practices can be done and can be shared with others with very little experience, because they are peer-to-peer. The facilitator is an important role here in that someone needs to take responsibility for making sure that people know what we are doing. And it is useful if someone can answer questions, although it is not completely necessary to know everything. Sometimes you figure this stuff out just through doing the practice together.

But the facilitator is not an authority figure necessarily. They may be, like in the case today — I am holding both roles. I am a facilitator. I am here with you as peers, and I am also a teacher. And I hold my seat of authority in that lineage, I think appropriately at this point in my life. I used to shy away from it and be scared to be in a position of power, because I was scared of power. Turns out that is not a very good way to relate to power. It is good to own it and then to be responsible with it.

But as a peer facilitator, I do not have to be so concerned about that. If I want to share this with a couple friends and say, “Hey, I learned this technique, would you want to try it with me?” — there is not a whole lot you need to know to do that. Which is why I love sharing these practices with others and immediately empowering people to share these techniques with anyone they would like. They are open source. You can share them.

Of course you can go out and be someone’s meditation teacher as well. I am not going to stop you from doing that. I am not a gatekeeper. But just to acknowledge, there are very real challenges — there is a lot more challenge that comes with putting oneself in a position of authority than there is with just sharing something that you want to share with a friend. So that is another thing that makes this practice different, and I think that is extremely important to point out.

Social Noting, as with all forms of Social Meditation, represents a kind of meditation for the internet age. If you think about what it was like before the internet — if you were alive then, as I was — you will remember that media, for instance, was all broadcast. One to many.

We still, of course, have one-to-many broadcast media, so this is not old news. It is just that now we also have a lot of peer-to-peer forms of internet — social media. And Social Meditation really is an adaptation of broadcast, one-to-many forms of meditation — like the guided meditation, right, which would be the perfect example of this. The teacher sits at the front of the room and instructs everyone else on how to practice, on what to do with their own minds.

Here with Social Meditation, the facilitator says, “Hey, this is the technique. Does anyone have any questions about how to do it? Feel free to not participate if you do not feel moved.” And then, let us do it together. The facilitator is just another peer when they are practicing with other people. They do not put themselves in a special place and just watch everyone and judge them. No, they participate. They do the practice.

Why? Because doing the practice is the best way to model the practice, the best way to show people how it is done. And if you have experience, that is a great way to teach — just teach through doing it. And then we can learn from each other. There is not one privileged person who is the teacher. Everyone can be teaching. We teach through our actual practice. We learn together.

Turns out this is more effective, often, as a format for learning. Because if we are confused and we do not know what is going on, we just say “there is confusion.” We do not have to feel like we are doing something wrong, or we are not getting it. Because then two minutes later, we are going to hear someone else say “there is doubt,” or “there is fear,” or “there is anxiety.” Yeah. We are all experiencing that.

I really did not know what other people were experiencing on these long silent meditation retreats. I assumed they were going through something like I was, but when you look at someone just sitting there like a rock, you are thinking, “Gosh, I wish I was that equanimous and stable.” And we start to make up all kinds of crap. But if you can actually hear what is going on in their experience, you are going to realize, no, actually they are going through the same stuff that I am. We are in this together. We really are. There is no room for misinterpreting that.

Practice with us: We learn more, when we learn together. If you want to learn together with experienced teachers & driven peers, we’re welcoming new members to the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha.

Work with me: I have over 15 years of experience being a catalyst for other’s natural process of awakening & integration. Schedule a free intro call with me, if you’d like to connect & learn more.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit substack.pragmaticdharma.com