UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello, friends, my name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast: Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question and answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us. Explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Henry Shukman, poet, author, Zen meditation teacher, and spiritual director emeritus at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Henry Shukman is originally from Great Britain and has a master’s degree from Cambridge and a Master of Letters degree from St. Andrews. And he has a powerful personal story, one of spiritual awakening, physical healing, adventure. He shares his story in what he calls a Zen memoir. It’s called One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart. And now Henry has released a new book. It’s called Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening. And he’s also released a new meditation app called The Way. Henry, welcome.
Henry Shukman: Hi, Tami. Thank you for that lovely introduction and, more importantly, for this opportunity to be together to get to know you. And I’ve been a long-distance admirer for many, many years of what you’ve accomplished as such an important service to the world, I think, making this, what makes to some seem esoteric but is not at all esoteric stuff, much more mainstream and more widely accessible and available. I’m absolutely thrilled to be here.
TS: And here we are doing it together. And I’m glad that you started on this note of something that might seem esoteric and making it accessible and understandable, because I want to zero in on a certain section, if you will, of Original Love. There’s so much. We could turn to any page and talk about something, but this is the moment that I zeroed in on that I want to start our conversation, which is talking to that person. And I’m talking here to me and I’m also talking to, I think, a lot of listeners of Insights at the Edge who have had spiritual awakenings of some kind in their life. They’d say, “Yeah, there was this moment or that moment. Everything dissolved. There was a sense of no more subject and object.” Yes, I have had a taste of spiritual awakening and I suffer. I still suffer. I find myself falling into traps of… You call it trauma-based contractions, trauma-based contractions. And in this part of Original Love, you talk about how it’s possible that we can bring together awakening and the wound. And that’s where I wanted to start our conversation. If you could frame that for us and also talk about that in your own experience and how you moved through this sense of ping-ponging, if you will, between awakening and suffering and woundedness, how you have been able to move through that.
HS: Oh man, thank you for that. In a way, that’s the heart of the whole thing, as I understand it, is exactly right there, awakening, wound, healing all as one process, really. And in my own story, if I may, just to touch on that a little bit, I had a really prolonged chronic, very severe skin condition as a child from six months actually until my mid to late 20s. It was a very difficult thing to live with.
I had quite a bit of psychological stuff that I was carrying, but I had a weird moment, just as you described, when I was 19 years old. I was actually far from home at the time on a gap year between school and college. My skin cleared up while I was away, which was an immeasurable relief. And then it got worse again as soon as I got home. But in that time, I suddenly completely stone-cold sober without any interest in spirituality, actually, I suddenly discovered another whole way of being where I was not who I thought I was. Instead, I was just part of the whole universe. And the whole universe was empty. And it was indescribably beautiful and full of love, full of an immemorial love. And it was mind-blowing and wonderful.
And six weeks later, I went home and I had a completely converse experience where I went right back into trauma. I was really re-traumatized, I think. All the pains of my childhood that I’d somehow managed to compartmentalize as a kid so that I could function and navigate somewhat, I was so open then, it all just swamped me. It was very hard. It was very, very hard for a few years. In other words, with the ping pong effect you talk about, you were saying from being clear and not wrapped up in identity to being totally wrapped up in wound and identity and ping ponging. For me, that was a pretty slow ping pong for many years. It was a slow thing.
But then when I got into meditation in my mid-20s, I was 24 when I started, and that was the path started then. It was a path of healing, primarily. And I got into therapy while meditating. I started to meditate regularly every single day. I was clinging to it like a lifeline. And in time, I started to remember that moment when I’d been away from home. I was 19 at the time. And I started to remember it and think as my healing process was unfolding more, I was getting back into a place where that revelatory experience was starting to become curious to me again. I think I was so sunk in anxiety and depression and shame before that I just didn’t have the bandwidth to even think about exploring that. But then I did, and I started to realize that it wasn’t actually an utterly random, unknown thing. There were, in fact, people who knew about that experience and who valued it and who could perhaps help with some kind of path through and further into that kind of experience.
And it was a long process, but I got into… Zen training was the deepest single path I followed. I have tried various forms of meditation and practice, which I love all of them for different things. But the Zen was my particular deep path and my one channel that really carried me through to something I never expected, which was that there was a way of, I think, opening up more radically so that something didn’t quite close again. And then I could be broken-hearted, I could be open-hearted, I could be wholehearted, and all of them. And I didn’t have to resist woundedness or resist anything, actually. No longer needing to resist anything. Instead, it being much easier to be present and open and in love, in love with this moment. And it’s not perfect, it’s not like I’m there all the time, but I can access it way more easily. And usually, I just have to remember and something loosens and I’m back in some kind of condition of profound gratitude and love.
TS: Now, Henry, what would you say to that person who still is struggling with this, having these different parts of themselves take each other’s hand, if you will? Which is one of the images that you bring forward; a meeting. It’s like, “Oh, well, here I’m doing my therapeutic work, I’m working through anxiety, and here I’m doing my practice on the cushion,” but they’re still not quite coming together in my life. What would you recommend?
HS: Yeah. Yeah, I think, again, Tami, that’s the heart of the matter. Now, I have to acknowledge that we all have our own path, but what I’ve seen work for many people has basically been a practice of allowing. Instead of judging, resisting, this part’s bad, this part’s good, I want more of this, I want less of that, what about if the part of me that does that kind of triage, that kind of selecting, that kind of wanting this and not wanting that, if I can allow that part, then something bigger than that is allowing. It’s as if our capacity of awareness just grows half an inch. And it’s enough to hold all that arises within us and around us without being pushed back into the contraction of resisting.
To me, it’s like the equation is really between resisting and allowing. And I can feel the resisting in myself. It’s a contraction. There’s a signature in the chest or diaphragm or belly. There’s some kind of contraction and allowing. What’s so beautiful about it is that allowing does not say that contraction has to go away. It doesn’t say that. It says there’s a way I can love even that resistance. There’s a way that I can not need to get rid of my resisting. For me, that’s the beautiful thing is the… And it’s very real and it’s very doable. Something just opens, something just slackens a tiny bit to allow the state of a radical welcome.
And to me, again, it’s to do with heartbreak. It’s something like if we allow our heartbreak… And I think we all have some heartbreak. If we allow it, then the heart’s open rather than, of course we don’t want it, we don’t like it, but if we can allow it, it changes. It’s no longer a problem, it’s a beautiful thing.
TS: Now, your new book’s called Original Love. And as you’re speaking, what’s occurring to me is to want to understand more the connection between allowing our heartbreak and being available to what you call original love. And if you can point to that right here and help us actually taste it and know it.
HS: Oh, I’d love to be able to infallibly. That would be great.
TS: Well, even if it’s slightly fallible, let’s give it a go.
HS: Yeah. If there’s something in us, if we can track something that’s just a bit uneasy, a bit uncomfortable, whether it’s a trace of some anxiety, trace of some unease and feel it as a sensory signature in the torso, it’ll be in the diaphragm, it might be in the chest, it could be in the belly, just a little signature of something uneasy. And then if we can let that be there. And while it’s there, also be aware of this space we’re in, the physical space we’re in. We’re seeing and we’re feeling. You might feel your feet on the floor, feel your body, and still this little trace of a signature of unease is in the body.
Now, what if that doesn’t need to change? What if those little grains of unease are 100% welcome in this whole picture? They just are part of it and they’re wanted. We can allow them to be here. And they’re even loved, that our very experienced and the very aspects of our experience that as spiritual, therapeutically inclined people, we might think of as markers of non-development or non-progress or something we want to grow out of or need to leave behind, what if those very things were actually the grit that becomes the pearl in the oyster? That were the very thing that actually expands our love, that we can actually, by allowing them and by discovering that they really are already loved, they’re wanted, they’re loved, they’re arising for a reason, and therefore we just take a little step back to allow them. That is bringing us one step closer to a universal, unconditional love that is maybe even the generative source of this very moment. It’s a boundless goodness at the heart of this very moment. It’s always here.
TS: You write in Original Love about various spiritual breakthroughs and experiences that you have had in your life. I don’t remember, though, reading about your heartbreak and if there was a moment where you were with your heart and you said, “Oh, wow, this is this critical portal,” specifically heartbreak for you.
HS: Yeah, that may be the case, Tami, but there’s a section where I work with and encourage the reader to work with so-called hindrances, which is basically negative emotion states. Traditionally, they’re viewed as hindrances to meditation, but many of them are things we would tend to think of as just difficult feeling states, regardless of whether we’re trying to meditate or not. And with those, I think, in a way, we’re dealing with aspects of the experience of the heart.
In my own life, I’ve had various tides of heartbreak at different times caused by different things. Certainly what happened to me when I was 19 and came home and had that really dropped into despair, it was a heartbreak of loss at what I discovered about the world when I got home from that experience. But I couldn’t accept it. I was in a tight, very defensive, resisting state. And to come around to the heartbreak that was in the heart of that experience, actually, I couldn’t really welcome that back in until I could. And it was like a new heartbreak to accept that heartbreak.
TS: Can you help me understand, Henry, when you talk about the hindrances, and people may have heard of these, but you can share them with us from traditional meditation practice, how you link that to some type of defense or something from going right in to the heart of the matter, if you will?
HS: Yeah, yeah. Well, in traditional early Buddhism, there’s a list of five so-called hindrances. I guess they think of them as things that can come up when we’re trying to learn or just trying to practice meditation that will make it harder. And they’re things like craving and aversion or dislike and dullness, sleepiness, restlessness, and doubt, doubt about our capacity to practice and doubt about the values of practice and so on. And I slightly adapt that, especially in the app, actually, that you mentioned, The Way. But in principle, with all of them, the lesson, really, is the same, in my point of view.
I think and some traditional teachers would say, “Well, if craving is coming out while you’re sitting, you should deploy this strategy or that strategy,” but I don’t see it that way. I see it, once again, as, okay, this feeling of craving whatever it might be for, is arising. Sometimes it is just like, I wish this sit would finish, if I’m in public place where I’m sitting and got to be still and quiet or I’m just longing to do something else, or whatever it might be.
Rather than try to get rid of this state of mind, what would be the path to letting it be present, really letting it be in a radically open way? And I think they always hold a key to that, that a hindrance will come up and I’ve already got the necessary equipment to welcome it. All of us do. Rather than getting locked in a tussle with it to try to banish it, diminish it, navigate it, or reduce it, actually, there there’s a spaciousness in my own awareness and in my own heart that can love this thing, love this discomfort, love this creature that’s suffering in some way right now. And for me, that’s like an instant doorway to something really beautiful about our human makeup and about… It’s very close to awakening, in my view, that we’re getting to something larger and we’re not so fixated and tightened on a sense of a me that’s trying to get rid of something.
TS: Now, Henry, you mentioned this terrible skin condition that you had as a young person and how it briefly went away. You had this spiritual awakening experience, but then the skin condition came back after. And how do you understand your skin condition now? Was it a product of a disturbed nervous system? Did meditation create the healing? Does it still come back? What’s your whole now view of the skin condition you had and its healing?
HS: Yeah, thank you. One thing I want to say, this is really for anyone who has a chronic health condition, is I didn’t realize this until I was free of it, which I, touch wood, have been for 30 or so years now. But it was so dispiriting to see it get slightly better, which it sometimes would, and think, wow, maybe it’s retreating, maybe it’s going, and no, it’s not; it’s back with a fury a few days later. That rhythm of possible hope being dashed again and again and again is a very discouraging thing. I didn’t realize, actually, that I was living with something really difficult as a child. I thought, this is just how life is. A.
And it started when I was really young. I was six months old. My mum went away for a couple of weeks and that was how she weaned me, leaving me with an au pair girl. My mum and dad, they were professors at Oxford. And actually, at the time, they had fellowships in Helsinki. And they also, because they were in Russian studies, they were also, bizarre as it may sound, they were also actually working for British intelligence quietly alongside their professorial lives. And they went off to Leningrad to do something and just left me and my brother, who was then four, in Helsinki. And when they came back, I was covered in this raw skin as if my skin almost had gone. And I don’t know what I must have gone through. I’ve had inklings of it in some somatic therapy I’ve done where pretty, very, very tense reverbal energies coming out of my body.
But I think that the answer is really that I had a very dysregulated nervous system right through my youth. And when I started meditating, I don’t think it was like a direct mechanical thing like, oh, he’s meditating now; the expert gets better. By the way, I was often hospitalized through childhood for it. But it was more like once I started meditating, my nervous system was just beginning to discover and show me that it could be at peace, it could be calm, it could be quiet, it could actually be content, it could be satisfied. It was amazing to find that I could just exist in states that felt quite good. That was a mind-blowing discovery.
And I think in that, it was like changing the climate, and therefore the weather changed. In other words, whatever the climate had been, it was now a new climate with more calm and it wasn’t so conducive to the conditions that my skin affliction needed to thrive. It was like the climate changed and gradually the condition of my skin receded and it got better. That’s how I understand it.
TS: Henry, one of the things I notice being here with you and having this conversation is this very interesting quality of spaciousness that’s present in our conversation right now. And when we started and you said, “Yes, I had this profound experience when I was 19 and I had this discovery of how everything was made of this love and empty,” I thought, I’m going to have to track back and understand what did Henry mean when he said that he had the discovery of empty, that things were empty? Because I noticed that somehow that seems to be part of the spacious quality that I feel being with you right now. Remember, we’re going to make the esoteric understandable, so help us out here, Henry.
HS: Yeah. Okay, lovely. Yeah. Well, in that particular moment when I was 19, I was actually on a beach gazing at the sunlight on the water as the sun was setting. This was in South America. And suddenly, I wasn’t separate from what I was looking at. There simply was no division between me and the world.
And then it was as if everything turned into a insubstantial field of floating sparks. And that field was what the universe was made of; I was and everything was. And it had no time and it had no space. Actually, I felt that my nose was touching the end of time and that the furthest reaches of the universe were just at the tips of my fingers. I said, “Remember that impression from it.” That receded, and I knew again I was me. Well, at least I knew I was a person standing on a beach. The sun had gone down, or just about gone down.
And it was then that I felt, because it had become so clear that it wasn’t just that I belonged in the universe, I belonged utterly because what I was the universe, or what the universe was just absolutely integrated with what I was. There was just no separation at all. It wasn’t even a matter of belonging, I was just inseparable. But when I came out of the intensest part of the experience, I remember I was standing again on this beach, and then the sun was going down. And it was just mind blowingly beautiful. And I felt like the whole scene was a dream of some sort of infinite love was creating this dream, something like that. It was incredibly beautiful.
And like I said, I had zero… I just hadn’t known that there was something called spirituality to be interested in. I’d been brought up in Oxford in a very rational, logical, empirical framework, and there just wasn’t such a thing in my world as mystical or spiritual at all. And so it was very, very powerful because I’d had no idea about it before. And I just knew I had seen something more real about the way things really were. There was no doubt about it, that strange and utterly unfamiliar though that experience had been, it was true. I knew it was more true than the way I ordinarily experienced. But then I suppose in the way of these things, then it dwindled. I did live in a beautiful state for a few weeks of feeling weightless and transparent, but back in the normal way of experiencing, although in a beautifully free way.
And then I went home and collapsed into a dot of misery and despair. And then it took a few years before I realized there’s a journey to be made. And I feel very lucky that in time I was on a journey that took me beyond that first experience, I feel, in a tradition that really understood those kinds of experience. I knew there was even more to discover.
And in the end, I went through a different kind of experience where there wasn’t even anything. Even what I described with this insubstantial field, there wasn’t even that, there was really just nothing. Felt like I’d somehow touched some real source of everything. I don’t really know, but thereafter something was knocked out that hasn’t really come back that’s made life much more spacious.
TS: Okay, we’re going to have to hear more about this. What do you mean something was knocked out? Some way that you constellated as a separate individual, some character configuration? Or what was knocked out?
HS: Yeah, thank you for asking that. I hope I’m not talking too much about my own path and this. Hope this-
TS: Well, I’ve asked you, I’ve asked you. And I think it’s very helpful also because it’s concrete, it’s specific, it’s not just a general thing.
HS: Right. I will say first that I didn’t believe in the course of all my meandering and my path and my training, I didn’t believe that I would ever be like my teachers who clearly were more at home in the world, more at peace in the world. I was a pretty troubled guy. I had the skin stuff and the psychology of that, and yeah, I’d had a mind-blowing awakening experience and here and there a couple more in the course of my training, but I always went back to being a troubled guy. I was anxious and quite ambitious. And the writing life, I managed to live as a writer, which was very lucky, but it was precarious. And sometimes things went well and sometimes they didn’t go so well. And all along I was practicing daily diligently, consistently. But I seemed this is always going to be a management thing, maintaining as much equilibrium as I can, managing my moods the best I can, but I’m never going to really be one of those people who seems to have turned a corner somehow and they’re living more peacefully regularly. But something did happen.
TS: Here you are. It happened. It’s possible. It’s real. It’s wonderful.
HS: Yeah, it really is possible. I really want people to know that because I think a lot of people might feel like me. And this is for many years. Yeah, I’m diligent and it’s helpful, but I’m not going to get really changed. And actually, I really think I did. And it was in this one moment on a retreat when everything just fell away. I’d had experiences of there’s nobody here before, but this was different. It was like the whole factory that created my sense of self went away. It just was blown out. And that doesn’t mean that I live all the time without any sense of self. No, I wouldn’t make that claim at all. And I love myself, really, actually. And I don’t want to be banished. I value the fact that I’m a vulnerable, frail, fallible human being. I love that. But nevertheless, something was knocked out. And it was as if perhaps there was some kind of coalescing into a density that I hadn’t recognized was always happening. And boom, that was just gone. And didn’t re-coalesce.
Another way I felt it at the time and have since was that there was the cluster of roots, like a root system. And that root system was all the attachments that I was commonly making and the needs I felt I had, somehow in that experience, it’s like it was dug out. It was dug out is as if there was a big old tree stump and it got pulled out of the ground. And in the hole that was left, it’s like there was spring water welling up; and it was just love. Again, I can’t claim that I remember it all the time, but it’s much more accessible than I would ever expected it could be. It’s not quite like, I only have to remember, and here it is. It’s not quite there, but it’s close, or it’s closer than I would ever have thought possible.
TS: How long ago did the hole emerge or the root system get de-rooted?
HS: I know exactly when it was. It was January 2008. It actually happened to be on my mother’s birthday by some strange fortuity. And yeah, it was a moment in time that somehow for years I felt that moment was still with me. I don’t feel that anymore, actually, but I felt that for maybe 10 or 12 years. And now that’s changed, and I don’t quite feel that. I feel other nice things.
TS: You mean that that memory is no longer a touch point for you. You don’t reference it, you don’t think about it a lot. Is that what you’re saying?
HS: Not exactly. It was like for a long time I could actually feel precisely what I felt in that moment. I could just feel it was still here. It was almost as if time had stopped or I touched some… I used to wonder is that some kind of source that I somehow dropped into? And it was as if every new moment was just growing out of the same source. It was almost as if time had stopped, but the continual unfolding kept emerging from that space where there was no time, something like that.
TS: And then what shifted? And then what shifted?
HS: Yeah, about a few years ago, I’m not sure that it was a sudden thing. It seemed like it was a gradual thing of just, I started to think, well, actually, every moment’s new. It’s not that moment again and again, every moment’s new. I just didn’t feel it that way anymore. It was like, yeah, if I stop and check in, every moment’s new. Wow. It’s much freer. It’s even freer.
TS: Yeah. One of my favorite parts of Original Love is in the final sections of the book. Towards the end of the book, you offer this what you call a taxonomy of awakening. And you talk about how there are different faces of awakening. And in a way, you’re pointing to them a bit in your own story, but now here’s a chance to talk about them in general. And you talk about four different faces of awakening. And you mention oneness and emptiness, which we’ve touched on a little bit here in this conversation, emptiness. And I think, to be honest with you, the experience of oneness is something that, for many people, is the most accessible face of awakening. But then we get into the third and fourth face of awakening that you talk about, which I thought, huh, I wonder probably a lot of people wouldn’t language it like that or wouldn’t understand it or… It was very interesting, so I want us to touch on that. And you talk about something you call no way but through and then blazing forth. Let’s talk about this third and fourth face of awakening.
HS: Yeah, okay. In that one, no way but through, I was really trying to evoke what is sometimes talked about in the Zen tradition and sometimes in Theravada as well, which is going through a cessation. Well, in Theravada, they’ll call it cessation. They have a thing they call stream entry, which is probably, for most people, it’s more like a oneness experience. And then the differences with this going through, it’s not like you see something or you discover something or you experience something, it is more like you actually get sucked through something. And so I wanted to give a sense of that, the force of being taken through a transformative moment instead of flashing on, it’s all one, or flashing on, wow, it’s all empty, or flashing on, wow, I’m not really here. Where I thought myself was, there’s nothing here.
There’s a difference, I think, between getting a flash of that impression. Or maybe it’s more than just a flash, but it’s a kind of experiencing of it or a seeing of it versus actually being sucked through something and all resistance is gone, and boom, it’s like being sucked through a hose or sucked down a plughole you, and boom, you’re gone through something, and really all of you is taken through. It’s not so much an impression is flashed on us, an impression is left. Man, that was amazing. It’s more like we’re taken through. And I feel this. It’s maybe that’s something like the old biblical language of the camel passing through the eye of the needle, that actually that can happen. It can.
TS: Now, did this happen to you at a certain point in your meditative life or just your human life? Did this happen at some point?
HS: Yeah.
TS: What was that like? Tell me specifically.
HS: Well, it was actually rather like what I was talking about before with this, when everything fell away, that was one face of it. Everything fell away. There’s just nothing. But because there was just nothing, I think somehow it’s as if I was sucked through that nothing and came, bam, out the other side. And that was the transformative moment to have really released entirely so none of me was left maintaining a view of what was going on. There was no witness. It’s like womb.
When I said it was as if I touched nothing at all, really, it was like the experience itself, the experience of the world, the experience of awareness all vanished. And I don’t know for how long, but maybe only a moment. And then from that, things came back, awareness came back and I’ve been led… I’m sorry I’m talking. I love that you’re asking me because it’s making me think about it. But it was really like being taken through something tiny, infinitely small, and nothing, so small it was nothing, and coming out the other side changed.
TS: Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you for pointing that out. And then blazing forth, another face of awakening.
HS: Yeah. That would also be less familiar, maybe, but it is the possibility of actually seeing this very moment as arising. We can. And I think in the Theravada world, there’s the practice of noticing all the micro components of sensory experience arising and passing away, arising and passing away. In zen, there’s a nodding towards the possibility of seeing everything pouring out of who knows where, flashing forth like a river of lightning, everything pouring into awareness, into experience. There’s as if this whole very moment right here and now is actually emerging from a vast mystery, an empty mystery. It’s like a black hole in reverse; the opposite of a black hole. It’s like from the tiniest nothing, this moment right now is actually appearing, arising.
TS: Okay, two different types of questions. One is here you are, you’re a young person, you’re not even interested in spirituality and you have this profound initial opening on a beach. Why you? Lots of people who are practicing quite a lot don’t even have experiences like that. Why would it happen to you? What’s your understanding of that? We’ll start there with part one, and then we’ll get to part two.
HS: Okay. Okay. I would say first of all, such experiences may be more common than we know. I was just listening to a talk by Alan Watts, one of his many brilliant talks a few weeks ago when he said, “These things happen, and one of the times they seem to happen more commonly is in adolescence.” I don’t know what research he was looking at when he said that, but clearly they’re not entirely anomalous, they do happen.
I think in my own case, I’m pretty sure that the nearly two decades of really heavy, traumatic skin condition must have played a part because to be relieved of it was just incredible. And not only that, but actually I’d had this other strand in my life, which was that I was very creative and I’d loved poetry and I’d started writing poetry and being fascinated and passionate about poetry at the age of 14. And part of that was that I really wanted to wonder. I’d read these Chinese poems from the Tang Dynasty, these wandering poets who just lived with a backpack and wondered in the gorges and the mountains and wrote beautiful poems. And I thought, man, that’s what I want to do. And so when I went away from home on this gap year when I was 19 with a huge tube of very powerful steroid cream to use on my skin, actually, while I was away, I wrote my first book. And I hardly ever had to use the cream because my skin got better. And the combination of a creative fulfilment, because I did write what I thought was the whole draft, and the skin, I don’t know, I was just happy. And that was unfamiliar. And it was almost like standing on this beach all on my own feeling incredibly happy. I think maybe I was fascinated by the experience of being happy and studying.
TS: Right, the tremendous relief, the tremendous relief. Yeah. Okay, here’s my second part. You obviously committed yourself to daily practice. And I’ve met a lot of people. And I’ve met people who have practiced every day, and they seem very tight, very controlling, very proud of how much they’ve practiced; and they haven’t really changed that much. And I’ve met other people such as yourself, and their meditation practice has borne tremendous fruit. And so one of the questions I have for you is what do you think were the other factors in addition to just the fact that you had this commitment to meditation, the factors of, if you will, your heart orientation or your inner commitment? Or what was it? What is it that led you to get sucked on through?
HS: Okay, that’s a lovely question. It’s so nice to think about. Well, I’ve done a lot of therapy and I’ve done different kinds of therapy at different times, and so that’s definitely a factor. I’ve been incredibly lucky. I’ve had a beautiful, loving wife for many years, a stable home in that regard. And that’s lovely.
I think, God, really, probably it was about teachers. I was looking for a teacher without knowing that I was looking for a teacher for a long time. I just was going to different centers, trying retreats, trying weekly sits and so on, but never feeling 100% comfortable. And when I did feel comfortable, man, it was different. I would say finding comfortableness in our practice, whatever that means for us. It’s like not to be trying to force ourselves into a form of practice that just we don’t feel truly deeply comfortable in is a factor. And I know it’s not always that easy, but if we keep looking, I think we will eventually find some way of practicing that really feels like us or like we can really be ourselves in it. It touches something in us that really wants to be touched. I think that’s critical.
I think I’ve seen this quite a lot where people have been doing practice, just like you said, diligently, but I wonder if it’s really in some way their own practice. I think in a way, the practice will have certain parameters and contexts in which we’re practicing of course if we’re doing some traditional practice of some kind, and somehow I feel that context and those parameters have to be such that we can make the practice our own. It’s like it’s really got to be our own thing because we are actually the target of practice. We are the goal. What we’re looking for if we’re on a spiritual path is actually already what we are. Any sense we have of I’ve got to do it this way because he says so or she says so, the teacher says. I don’t know, sometimes that’s useful and helpful, but the heart of it is really, it’s always a means for us to come back deeply to our own truth of what we are. Anything that helps with that is great, and perhaps anything that doesn’t might not be, although we might need to try various steps that aren’t 100% right before we land on bullseye.
TS: All right, one question here for our non-meditators and then a question for our meditators in the audience. For the non-meditators, and I’ve had many people write to me and say, “I just don’t like to meditate, Tami. I hope Sounds True is going to have something else for me because I’m just not drawn to meditation.” And my answer always is, “Yes, of course.” And I wonder what your view is of that for people who really do want to make a full and complete journey of discovering who they are but they’re not drawn to meditation.
HS: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I’ve got to own a limitation here, which is that I have followed the meditative path primarily and I know it best, but, man, there’s a lot of practices that are deeply meditative without being meditation: Tai Chi, Qigong, breath practice, dance, yoga. There’s lots of things out there that are, I think, unquestionably meditative without being sitting on a cushion. And what about people who don’t even want to do any of those? Well, what about art practice? That can be a very profound journey. What about sport, actually? I think I know a runner who has a really deep zen practice that primarily is in her running.
Yeah, I think it’s a really important question because we’re in a time where meditation has gone from… In my lifetime, it’s gone from fringe to mainstream. It’s gone from maybe, I don’t know, 10,000 or a few tens of thousands of people to millions of people. And we got to be careful it doesn’t become another should, like you should be doing your mindfulness. That will be really sad.
And then there’s therapeutic paths. I had a phase in my own path where I was doing a lot of dream work, and that became a really powerful, transformative, healing adjunct. For me, the daily sit or two daily sits was a given, but I think the injection of deep dream work was invaluable. And I know for many people I knew in that world when I was doing it, they didn’t meditate, but they were surely developing tremendously through their dream work.
TS: All right, and now question for our meditators. Your book, Original Love: The Four Inns—I-N-N-S, before welcoming hospitable arenas—on the Path of Awakening, you start by talking about mindfulness, then you have your second welcoming, hospitable zone of finding support in a lot of different ways. And there’s a lot in Original Love for people to explore. The third inn is the one that I want to bring forward now for our meditators because it has to do with absorption or flow. And I wonder if you can just point to the person who says, “What? What’s going on here? I’m meditating, but I’m not necessarily reaching some state of absorption. That’s not happening.” What you could point to so they could start to explore that.
HS: Yeah, yeah. Just to speak to it generally a moment before getting a tactical.
TS: Please.
HS: Yeah. There’s a thing in the meditative schools known as Samadhi. And in the more Vedic or Hindu or Yogic world, that has different connotations where it can mean full-blown awakening. And in the Buddhist world, it does not mean that, it means states of deep absorption while meditating. Just again, to just check that we know what those are, they’re basically conditions or states that can come on in a whole range of activities; meditation is only one of them. But it’s where suddenly whatever activity we’re engaged in, it somehow seems to become really easy. It becomes effortless. There’s a feeling of timelessness sometimes. There’s a feeling of great fulfillment and in the moment not needing anything more. Usually there’s a sense that, well, the sense of self is quiet, and so it’s less self-conscious. Athletes get it, musicians get it. Actually, anybody can get it engaged in a task.
When it comes on meditation, which it can do, it’s known as Samadhi in Buddhism. What I’ve seen a lot with novice meditators is they’re doing their practice diligently, and then all of a sudden one day they’ll report, “This amazing thing happened. I was trying to follow my breath, and all of a sudden I was just in this very calm, easy state. It was so easy to follow my breath. I didn’t have to try it all. And it was just magical and beautiful. And then as soon as I became really aware of it, it vanished. And every day since then, I’ve been wanting it back, but I can’t get it back.” That would be a taste of Samadhi or absorption.
Alas, I don’t think there’s a surefire way of always bringing it on whenever we want it, but some things that will help are… Well, it comes back, actually, to what I was talking about earlier, allowing our state to be as it is. As long as we’re subtly at war with the condition of our body and mind and heart, it won’t come on. But when we are really welcoming of how we’re doing right now in a meditation, it can seep in around the edges, the state of Samadhi, the state of absorption, the state sometimes a sense of being carried rather than I’ve got to make the running, all the running in this meditation, somehow that we are relieved of that. And there’s a sense almost of being a passenger, a current, almost like a river who’s picked us up and carries us. That can come on simply through allowing, allowing, just letting our experience be as it is.
TS: Henry, I want to end on this note of how we can increase our allowing, because it’s really been the theme, I think, that’s run through our conversation. And earlier, you talked about how you can scan your body and you can find areas that feel like they’re tense or holding and they can let go more, and so there can be this feeling of unwinding and sinking. And I’m wondering if you have any other tips for us when we find ourselves, I don’t know, tensing up for whatever. Maybe it’s something we’re reading in the news, maybe it’s another… Whatever’s happening in our life that’s intensely irritating or something. And we’re like, “Okay, I’m working with my body. Is there anything else I could do right now to enter more of the flow state that Henry’s pointing to?” On the spot in our life.
HS: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s a great question. I’ll tell you where I go immediately is love myself, love myself. Can we love ourselves? Because at those moments, self-love is probably in short supply, or it might seem to be. And there’s a great old zen master from the 9th century who said, “Just take the backwards step that shines the lamp inwards.” Which maybe sounds a bit complicated, but it’s just a little bit of pulling back into self-love, pulling back into remembering that this is your life, it’s your life. It’s not someone else’s, it’s yours. It’s my life, my experience and loving me, loving this being with its trials and tribulations.
TS: A beautiful note to end on. Henry Shukman, author of the book, Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening. It’s a beautiful book. It’s been a gorgeous conversation. Your voice itself, let alone the qualities that your voice communicates, really a total joy, Henry. I feel very grateful as a kind of fusion that you’ve offered us. Thank you so much.
HS: Well, thank you so much, Tami. I feel the same with you, actually. You’re a very open space. It’s beautiful. It’s very beautiful. Thank you so much. I’m honored to be a guest, actually.
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