A talk where Vince Fakhoury Horn introduces the Blue Kasina meditation, exploring how color—especially blue—can evoke calm & open states of mind, which is especially skillful for practitioners with aversive temperaments.
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💬 Transcript:
Vince: I was a student for a few years at Naropa University, which we jokingly called the “Buddhist Harvard,” simply because there are only like three Buddhist universities—so by default, it must be an Ivy League one.
While I was there, they had this really interesting thing—I don’t think you’ll find it on any other college campus in the world—called the Maitri Rooms. Maitri is Sanskrit for “Loving-Kindness.” The Maitri Rooms were designed to be spaces where you could go meditate in a room that had a single color theme. There were four different rooms—yellow, red, blue, and so on. They basically mapped onto the kasinas that we’re working with here, though I’m not one hundred percent sure that’s the case. But they were very similar.
Each room wasn’t just painted in one color; everything was that color. The carpeting, the walls—everything. And, in addition to that, each room had a unique physical shape. They weren’t just square boxes. They were shaped intentionally to evoke some particular quality of mind. That was the purpose of the Maitri Rooms—to go into these spaces where the environment itself invokes a certain state in you, leaning you toward that state through both color and shape.
There are a lot of parallels here with the work we’re doing now with kasinas—especially the color kasinas. It’s an interesting thing to explore, this relationship between color and mind. I don’t know a ton about color theory myself. I know there are different theories and they don’t all agree—like most theories.
Still, it’s safe to say color impacts perception. It affects how we see and feel. And in the Visuddhimagga—the Path of Purification—it’s said that unitary kasinas, or colored kasinas, are especially supportive for those with an aversive-type mind. That makes sense. As someone with that kind of mind, I can see why something unitary—a single color or shape—helps settle things down.
Part of the challenge with an aversive mind is that you’re always seeing differences, distinctions—you’re attuned to what’s wrong or out of place. It’s a discerning mind, but one that lacks patience or compassion for what’s arising. The clear seeing isn’t the problem—it’s the reactivity that follows.
So here, we apply that same clarity to something simple: a circle, a colored circle. You can’t do much with a colored circle in terms of analysis. You can take an abstract teaching and spend days dissecting it, but if you just say, “Look at this circle—this blue circle,” there’s not much for the mind to hold onto. And that’s the point. It gives the mind very little to grasp.
Today, I wanted to introduce the Blue Kasina as a tool for practice. It’s the one I started with, partly because of that reference in the Visuddhimagga. Knowing my own mind’s aversive tendencies, I figured it made sense to start with an object that, for thousands of years, practitioners have found helpful for that temperament.
And I did find it soothing—very calming. Which shouldn’t be surprising, given how the color blue shows up in our natural environment. It’s the color of the open sky, the vast ocean—spaces that are expansive and tranquil. From an evolutionary psychology point of view, it makes sense that blue evokes spacious, open, calm states of mind. And in my experience, it really does.
Interested in the topic?
Sign-up for free the KASINA web application
or join us for a live training in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha
