In part one of this two-part conversation, we walked along the edge of paradox where effort gives way to ease and the search itself becomes the obstacle. In this second part of my conversation with Zen teacher Henry Shukman, the way begins to reveal itself, not as something we grasp, but something we live. We talk about awakening, the collapse of separation, and what it means to encounter reality directly beyond language, beyond self. And we find ourselves circling the same mystery from different directions, Henry through the Zen path and his app The Way and me through a new project with Rebind, which is a new AI powered dialogue with the Tao Te Ching. Different forms, different longing to meet life more honestly, more fully and more whole.
Discover a Deeper Path in Meditation – Looking for more than just another meditation app? The Way, created by Zen teacher Henry Shukman, offers a single, step-by-step journey designed to take you deeper—one session at a time. Get started today with 30 free sessions!
The Tao Te Ching is one of those books I keep coming back to. Ancient wisdom, wrapped in poetry, that somehow feels more relevant every year. Like this line: “If you look to others for happiness, you will never be happy. If your well-being depends on money, you will never be content.“Simple. Clear. Actually useful.I’ve teamed up with Rebind.ai to create an interactive edition of the Tao—forty essential verses, translated into plain, everyday language, with space to reflect, explore, and ask questions. It’s like having a conversation not just with the Tao, but with me too. If you’re looking for more clarity, calm, or direction, come check it out here.
Key Takeaways:
- Exploration of meditation and mindfulness practices.
- Insights on the nature of thoughts and their observation during meditation.
- Importance of a structured approach to meditation.
- Personal experiences and reflections on meditation journeys.
- Discussion of the “inner radio” metaphor for understanding thoughts.
- Techniques for enhancing present-moment awareness through meditation.
- The significance of variety in meditation practices to cater to individual needs.
- The role of moderation and balance in personal growth, drawing from the Dao De Jing.
- The relationship between relative understanding and direct experience in Zen.
- The transformative potential of embracing uncertainty and interconnectedness in life.
Henry Shukman is a poet, author, and meditation teacher who has guided thousands of students from around the world through mindfulness and awakening practices. A Zen master in the Sanbo Zen lineage and the spiritual director emeritus at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Shukman is a cofounder of The Way meditation app and founder of the Original Love meditation program and has taught meditation at Google and Harvard Business School. He has written award-winning and bestselling books of poetry and fiction, he has taught poetry at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and his poems have appeared in The New Yorker and the Guardian.
Connect with Henry Shukman: Website | Instagram
If you enjoyed this conversation with Henry Shukman, check out these other episodes:
Embrace the Chaos: Finding Clarity Through Meditation with Henry Shukman (Part 1)
How to Find and Follow a Healing Path with Henry Shukman
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Episode Transcript:
Chris Forbes 00:00:07 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:00:52 In part one of this two part conversation, we walked along the edge of paradox where effort gives way to ease and the search itself becomes the obstacle. In this second part of my conversation with Zen teacher Henry Shukman, the way begins to reveal itself, not as something we grasp, but something we live. We talk about awakening, the collapse of separation, and what it means to encounter reality directly beyond language, beyond self.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:23 And we find ourselves circling the same mystery from different directions, Henry through the Zen path and his app the way and me through a new project with Rebind, which is a new AI powered dialogue with the Daodejing. Different forms, different longing to meet life more honestly, more fully and more whole. I’m Erik Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Henry. Welcome back to part two of this conversation.
Henry Shukman 00:01:53 Great to be carrying on with you, Eric.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:55 If people want to know how Henry responded to the parable of the two Wolves. Go back to the last episode and it’s all there. I’m not going to make us do that again, so we’re going to jump right in. I ended the last interview with a little bit of a cliffhanger, and I said that even though I’ve been meditating for 30 years in lots of different traditions and lots of different teachers in your app, the way I had an insight that I had not had before. And so I kind of want to share it, and then we’ll kind of go into the conversation from there.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:30 And in the app, you do a great job of walking people through what sort of objects of meditation can be, or what you might notice as you pay attention to your present experience? Right. You can hear sounds. You can feel things in your body. You can see things with your eyes open, your eyes closed. You can hear things. But you talked about thoughts And thinking of them like an inner radio. And I have used that analogy a bunch of times to talk about how you can sort of just tune out your thoughts because I, you know, I may have gotten this from Stephen Hayes and acceptance of commitment therapy, but something about like, sometimes you could treat your thoughts like a radio in your neighbor’s house. You can’t turn it off, but you actually did something a little bit different, which was to encourage us to pay actual attention to the thoughts, to listen to them as if they were the radio. And up until now, every time there’s a thought, I may glance at it.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:35 And I’ve had teachers encouraged me to glance at it, but then you come back to something else. But in this meditation, that was it. It was the thoughts were you treated them like an inner radio. And I have to say, it kind of opened my mind in a new way.
Henry Shukman 00:03:50 Well, I’m happy to hear it, Eric. Yeah. You know, I remember, when I was a kid, I must have been five. Probably. Or maybe six. This was in the UK, in Oxford, you know, back in the late 60s. It would have been. And my parents, along with having kind of a modern transistor radio little thing box, you know, they also had this sort of ancient thing called a wireless set, which was a wooden big thing, maybe 2 or 3ft tall, which stood on its own. It had these actually, it still had these things called valves in it, which were these sort of like long, thin light bulbs, and they had to warm up.
Henry Shukman 00:04:29 So you switched it on. It took kind of five minutes for these things to start working. And then it was just a radio with almost like a kind of wicker front where the speaker was.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:38 I seen them, they’re actually kind of beautiful now.
Henry Shukman 00:04:41 Well, it was, it was, yeah. It was like a piece of furniture, you know. Right. And anyway, I remember I loved listening to it, you know, whatever was on it was fascinating. And it didn’t matter if it was, you know, music Musical people talking. And I remember this day when I was sitting next to it or kneeling next to it or whatever. I was right there looking at it. Hearing voices inside. And I had been assuming that there were little people in there. You know, I was young enough to have just thought, well, obviously, somehow I don’t know how it works, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t really think think it through. There’s got to be little, little guys in there talking, you know.
Henry Shukman 00:05:20 And then I suddenly had this realization. No, there aren’t actually people in that. But the voices are still happening. Yes. And so that I’ve often thought back to that moment as an insight into thinking, because if you’ve become a meditator, you get good at just recognizing, oh, I’ve been lost in thought. Yeah. And I think I was like that for years. I knew if I’d been lost in thought, but I hadn’t really stopped to. And I could have said what the subject matter was. You know, I was I was thinking of that conversation I had 18 years ago or yesterday or I might be having tomorrow or whatever it was, but I hadn’t really delved into what is actually happening. What’s the phenomenology? What are the what’s the actual concrete phenomena? Sort of concrete of thinking. And of course, it actually is describable. We typically hear voices. We hear talk in the mind, and we sometimes see images. This sort of video, you could say radio and sometimes video sometimes, of course, both like watching a movie.
Henry Shukman 00:06:31 But that moment from my childhood, it taught me something about thinking, which is that, I mean, later when I thought back to it, you know that, yeah, I can hear the talk going on in my mind. And Rather than being the equivalent to thinking there’s real people, there is sort of getting sucked into the the subject matter that the voices are talking about, so to speak. It may just be one voice across the commentary. So actually, to take that step back and there isn’t a real thing going on there. That is what it’s about. The real thing that’s going on is hearing the words in the speech in my mind, and I can sit and be aware of that and not be drawn into it. And I can also do this thing of sitting and being aware of the kind of place or space in the mind where that kind of talk arises. And I can sit there and and be aware that, well, no talk is arising right now. Oh, there’s a bit there’s a little snippet.
Henry Shukman 00:07:45 Yeah, I almost missed it. It almost caught me, but I just saw it. I heard it rather, you know. I was aware of it. So it’s that kind of apparatus of the actual machinery, as it were, of thinking. I believe it’s incredibly helpful to become aware of a because it’ll mean over time we get less caught up in thought and more therefore more present. But be because it’s another thing to be aware of, just like sounds out in the world, you know, it’s another dimension of of mindfulness. We could say, you know.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:24 Yeah. It really struck me in that idea of like, where in your head is that voice coming from? And the thing that I noticed even more clearly, I had noticed this before, but again, this sort of sharpened the picture for me was that thoughts happen almost at different volumes, too. Right. Like there’s ones that are very sort of insistent or loud, but there’s others that are just barely audible that are sneaking through in there.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:55 That’s right. And so when I started, like you said, to pay attention to the machinery, it was really insightful for me. And and talking about being present, that is present moment awareness. I mean, those thoughts are happening right now. And so by noticing that then I’m there. And so it was just a slight reframe, but it was making spending some time letting thoughts actually be the object of your focus, instead of the thing that pulls you away from what the object of your focus was. And for me, was was really profound.
Henry Shukman 00:09:35 Yeah, I’m glad to hear it. And you described it perfectly. And by the way, on that thing about where they’re arising, it’s something that I find sometimes is I kind of okay, I’ve got. I’ve got the zone in my mind where they’re arising. I’ve got it clear and I’m listening in there. I’m listening in there. And then suddenly I was, oh boy, I wasn’t paying attention. And another one snuck in at a different, slightly different place than I thought.
Henry Shukman 00:10:00 Yeah. Yeah. Oh, there you are. Right. So it’s, you know, we have to stay on it in a sense. But I totally think it’s it’s a worthy object of mindfulness. You know, it’s. And then, of course we can. Then we can bring in the heart area and the emotionality, the emotion tone in, in the heart area as well. And then we’ve got kind of a full picture of our inner experience. And we can be more aware and as we’re more aware we can be more accepting of it. So it’s got a lot of knock on benefits, you know.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:32 Yeah. So I’m going to ask you another question about the way the app, or what happens in the app, because what you have people doing early on is. noting mentally what’s happening. So, for example, if I were to just be sitting quietly, I might be like, you know, thought, you know, hearing a sound, feeling a sensation in my body. Right? I’m just kind of watching what pops into awareness.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:03 You have people noting it. This is a nerdy question just for me. But you often have people then repeat it. Like, let’s say I’m trying to focus on hearing externally. It almost sounds like you’re using the noting not just to note what you hear, but to remind you of what you’re trying to pay attention to. Say a little bit more about what’s going on, because it’s kind of a persona, but kind of not.
Henry Shukman 00:11:30 That’s right. It’s some sort of in some ways, it’s like some vipassana. There’s a strong Vipassana teaching from maharshi or in Burma to do this kind of labeling noting practice. There’s also places in the early sutures that they talk about this kind of labeling. But what essentially what it is is it can either be responsive labeling. In other words, when something’s happened, we want to just note to ourselves that it has been happening. That’s really helpful for bringing back our kind of calm, steady presence and mindfulness. But also we can use it to direct our attention in a certain direction.
Henry Shukman 00:12:09 So exactly like your example. Yeah. Yeah, we use it both ways. So for example, if we want to be paying attention to the soundscape, to, you know, what we’re hearing of the world while meditating, just a little light note here. You’re hearing or listening, you know, just occasionally repeated. It’ll just keep our attention on that. And, you know, we can make it can be we can get more and more absorbed in the soundscape if we’re consistently keeping our attention on it and it can become, you know, quite fascinating. We can get more curious about it. So that’s a really helpful thing. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:46 So a couple things really unlocked meditation for me probably 12 years ago or so. I have been doing it. I’ve been doing on and off for 30 years, but there was a lot of off in the on over that time. Right. You know, go back 12 years. It’s before you have a thousand meditation apps. You know what I’m getting, I’m getting from books.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:08 And mostly what I’m getting is meditate for like 30 minutes a day or 20 minutes at a time, that kind of thing. And that was a long time for me because, you know, I’ve joked when I sit down to meditate, it’s like the the dark circus rolls into town, right? Like, it’s it’s not that way anymore. But it used to be that way, you know, like a sort of a and so trying to do it for that long was hard. And it was almost always breath as the anchor, which for whatever reason, is not a great one for me. And one day I heard somewhere, somehow. Go sit outside and just listen to the sounds. And all of a sudden I was like, oh, I get what people are talking about when they say that meditation is peaceful and enjoyable. And like, I had not really much had that experience. For whatever reason, the breath was a fight for me. but all of a sudden, listening to sound and just knowing what came up was pleasant, enjoyable, and it allowed me to steady my attention enough that then I was able to do things like breath, meditation and others. So sound was a really big one. You know, it’s it’s it has a special place in my heart.
Henry Shukman 00:14:24 Yeah, that’s beautiful to hear. I can totally relate to that. You know, there’s a thing about the breath. I mean, it’s it’s it’s standard practice across many traditions. You know, start with the breath. It’s here. It’s kind of very It’s in a way, it’s almost sort of transparent, you know. Yeah. It’s, you know, it’s there’s sort of what’s really there. Of course. Really what it is is just the sensation of the muscular sensation of breathing. But it can be very soothing in time. But it’s not a great it’s not always a great place to start for the for the reason. I mean, it could be a variety of reasons, but one strong one in my mind is that that is right. Where all our emotion is felt in the body is right where the breath is, you know, in the chest, the diaphragm, the belly.
Henry Shukman 00:15:08 That’s our zone of sensations of emotion, you know, the actual muscular, subtle contractions that go with different emotions. They’re right there. So breath will often take us to emotionality, and we may not be ready for that in our practice. It can be, you know, if people have trauma and, you know, probably most of us might do to some degree, you know, and it’ll will be kind of forced to to face it. And that may not be a good place to start. So here’s the thing. There’s so many kinds of meditation. There’s there’s so many approaches. There’s so many framings of it. There’s so many specific practices that that are that are in. You know, especially in Asia, of course, where it’s been a, you know, really much more developed than in the West. And, you know, somebody once I read this somewhere long ago, like to use the word meditation is about the same as using the word sport in the variety of things it could be.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:13 That’s a great that’s a really good analogy. And I agree with you because there are so many.
Henry Shukman 00:16:19 Yeah. So that thing of just one practice. Do it forever. Follow the breath or something like that. You know, there’s there’s pedagogical sense in that in certain ways. And of course, it might not be the breath. You could just listen for the whole of your practice. But on the other hand, there are arguments for having different practices and so on. The way we try to lead somebody through a variety of practices as a kind of foundation, you know, so they’re really building up the basics of, of a meditation practice. And, and I mean, just for one example, there’s one famous manual for meditation in the early Buddhist canon, the early Buddhist sutures, the Pali Canon. And that is, it’s only like a four page or maybe six page document. And it’s got 65 different practices, you know. So you know. So and but we the, our idea in the way is like, let’s get you clear on some of the foundational practices and purposes, the possibilities of meditation.
Henry Shukman 00:17:23 So you’ve got a better grounding then, you know, gradually will develop and keep you moving through them all over the course of the pathway. So you’re getting a better grounding, you know, that’s that’s the logic in my mind that is behind our pathway. Really. You know, it’s that kind of exposure to, to to different foundations of practice.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:44 Well, what I think is really helpful and useful about that is I do think that exposure to different ways is important in the program that I teach used to be called spiritual habits. Now we call it wise habits. There’s a different type of meditation for every week to sort of expose people in the way that you do. But the thing about what I’m doing is basically I’m just dropping this thing in there and going, okay, well, if you like it, stick with it. Like what you’re doing is exposing people in a systematic way to these different things, but also keeping them on a track. Right. And we talked about the part of the problem today is there are a thousand meditation apps, and some of them have tens of thousands of different meditations that you can choose from.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:30 Yeah. It’s similar to the the Netflix syndrome where you you get on and you instead of watching anything, you spend all your time trying to figure out what you’re going to watch. Right. It’s a similar phenomenon. Yeah. So but what what we get with the way your app, what we get is variety, a sampling, but on a path and headed in a certain direction instead of random. And I think it’s that’s really helpful. And I think the other thing that it does is it gives people access to a teacher like you in the way you would have access to a teacher in real life. So, for example, I can listen to nearly any meditation teacher in the world has a few meditations out there, right? I can go listen to them. Yeah. But the thing about working with a teacher in anything, really, is that that teacher takes you along a path, you follow along a path with that teacher, and they’re sort of shaping that for you. I think what people get with the way, what reason I love the way is that you’re leading me on a journey.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:39 You’re not just giving me a meditation or two. You are. It’s like if I were working with you as a student and you’d say, do this now let’s do this. And hey, Eric, for next week, let’s do that. And. And so I think it it really does that very well.
Henry Shukman 00:19:54 That is the hope that it’s sort of a path of training you know. And of course there’s you know I know there’s no perfect way to do it. And you know and it’ll some parts people will like more. Some parts they’re like less. And there’s kind of nothing we can do about that. But if there’s just that incentive to keep going. Yeah. You know, my hope is that if somebody really just followed this, you know, in three years, they’d be in a different place. They just really would be because they’ve had three years of pretty consistent meditation, and they’ve learned a lot, and they’ve studied a lot about their own experience inward and outward. They’ve had glimpses of different dimensions of practice, you know, which is really important because a lot of people meditating, that’s great.
Henry Shukman 00:20:40 And a lot of them think, I just want to use it to dial down my stress, you know? And that’s great. And it can help with that. But man, there’s so much more. It offers, you know, these existential discoveries we can make under the rubric of awakening or getting into deep flow states and discovering more support in our lives. There’s lots of good things in meditation that are beyond stress reduction. So anyway, so I’m glad you say that, because the main thing I wanted was like, here’s why it’s worth keeping going and here’s what you need to do to keep going. Just hit the next one. Step by step. You know, it’s that simple.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:17 That’s that’s exactly it. I mean, you know, the book that I just turned into the publisher, the working title right now is how a Little Becomes a Lot. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about here, right. Is that you do a little each day. Yeah. And the thing about the, the philosophy of or the approach of little by little, you know, little becomes a lot is that those littles have to go in the same direction.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:43 Yes. A thousand different littles don’t add up to a lot unless they’re, like, focused in some way. Right? That’s the thing about it. And that’s what this app does. It allows you to do a little. Yeah, each day that is accumulating in a particular direction. And it’s what you would get working with a good teacher would be the same thing. Right? Each day is a little thing, but it’s headed somewhere.
Henry Shukman 00:22:09 Yeah. But look, it’s exactly it’s like if we if we’re on a program, it’s that much easier to keep going. You know, a program gives us a direction and it’s in many areas of life, it’s the same thing comes up. It’s like someone says, I really want to follow a spiritual path. Well, give me a step by step path. You know, like 12 steps or something. You know that we really have a path to follow. but actually, Eric, I don’t want to. I want to. We’ve been talking a lot about the way.
Henry Shukman 00:22:40 But let’s talk about the Dao, because that, you know, that is also the way. And if I was a complete sort of newcomer to the daodejing and really sort of had heard of it, but really didn’t know a thing about it, I’d really want a guy like you to tell me to show me the way in. Yeah. And I wondered if you might just be willing to speak a little bit about sort of favorite verses from it, you know? Sure. Yeah. And yeah, I’d love to hear more.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:22 I’ll read one. And this is one of the verses that has been my favorite since I picked the book up the first time when I was 18 years old, which was a long time ago.
Henry Shukman 00:23:33 Not that long.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:34 Well, it’s verse nine in some translations of the book. The verses have a name and others they don’t. In this case, I went with the name, and the one I came up with was an exercise in placidity. And it goes like this. If you keep filling a bowl, it will overflow.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:54 If you keep sharpening a knife, it will become dull. Care too much about money and you will never be free. Care too much about the opinions of others and you will bring ruin upon yourself. Do your work and let go of the results. The best path to peace.
Henry Shukman 00:24:13 Beautiful. Beautiful. Wow. Pearls in every line.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:18 Yeah, yeah. I mean, kind of all the way through. But that line about care too much about the opinions of others. When I was young and reading that, that hit me, I was like, oh, because I did. I mean, it’s part of being young, I think because you do care deeply about the opinions of others. For me, one of the benefits of aging and spiritual practice is I don’t care so much. I’m not saying I don’t care. I’m saying I don’t care so much. But I recognized in that line that that path wasn’t that wouldn’t work, you know, and I like the line care too much about money. It’s not about everybody cares about money.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:55 You shouldn’t not care about money. Care too much about it, though, and you’ll never be free. And that’s the idea of enough, right? Because if we don’t know how to say enough and so much of the Tao is sort of about enough, those first couple verses, you know, if you keep filling a bowl, it will overflow. If you keep sharpening a knife, it’ll become dull. That’s talking about not knowing when enough is.
Henry Shukman 00:25:20 Yes.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:21 Right. Yes. Talking about. Just give me more, give me more, give me more. And, I first was introduced to this book when I was 18. It did not stop me from descending into heroin addiction. But looking back, you know, these lines really resonate. I can see like, well, you know, addiction is nothing but really keep trying to fill a bowl, you know, that it’s actually the reverse is it’s kind of you, you keep filling the bowl and it keeps remaining empty, you know, in the case of addiction.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:51 But yeah. So that’s one of my favorite verses for sure.
Henry Shukman 00:25:54 Yeah, that’s absolutely beautiful. It makes me think of, you know, the Epicurean ideal of moderation. Yes. You know, Epicurus was he’s often mis mistranslated or misrepresented as being like Epicurean these days, you know, for a long time has meant sort of gorge. Yeah, yeah. But actually he didn’t he didn’t mean that at all. He. That’s really wrong. He’s just said that it’s okay to enjoy a good meal in moderation. Like it’s moderate. Your your your desire. You know, be in a balanced place. And it’s it’s kind of like the middle way. Yes. You know, in Buddhism like like in I mean, Buddha’s early story was that he was brought up in the lap of luxury and, you know, in the sort of consumerist Paradise, as it were, where you could have everything you could possibly want. Then he he woke up to the fact that he was going to die one day. The stories about how that happened, and then he got into the path of practice and went the entire opposite way to extreme asceticism.
Henry Shukman 00:26:58 You know, he was he at one point, he starved himself to the point. The sutra said he could see his spine through his belly, you know, and and birds nested in his beard and grass grew up through the mats. He was sitting on the mat he was sitting on for meditation. And that didn’t work either. He was about to die. And eventually Sujata, this milkmaid, came and brought him this very beautiful, refined kind of rice milk pudding kind of thing. And he ate it. And he felt better again. And he and he, he then decided to follow the middle way. You know, not extreme luxury and indulgence, not extreme self-denial. Just. And he actually said he wanted to trust his heart. Yeah. The heart he had as a child, you know, just trust it. And sure enough, soon after that, a week later, he awakened in a blaze of glory, you know?
Eric Zimmer 00:27:54 Yeah. No, I love the middle way. There’s a chapter in my book about it.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:58 I mean, there’s a whole chapter about just that idea. And in the whys habits program, we spend a week on it because I do think it’s so, so important now in my life, there are some things that there is no middle way on. Right? So for me, with addiction, I kind of am like, right, I just need the off switch. Yes, but if I wasn’t built that way, I would love I. A glass of wine would be lovely. Yes. Right. Yes. You know, a drink would be lovely. It’s. It’s one of life’s pleasures. It’s just in my particular wiring. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that’s one area I can’t do. The the middle. But so many things. And I think the other thing about the middle way, we talked a little bit about this yesterday about the sort of potentially things that seem like they’re opposite, like accepting right where I am and wanting to be different. And to me, the middle way is you can hold both those opposites.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:56 It’s not always just splitting the difference. Sometimes it’s holding the tension between two things that are different. And I think so much of life, if we look at it closely, is exactly that. You’re holding a tension between two things. I value my children, and I value my job. And those things are intention at times. Yes. And that’s not going to go away. And so becoming comfortable holding these things that seem opposite. And that’s one of the things the Dow does and Coens do too. They constantly flip you into this paradoxical state. Yes. You’re like, well, that doesn’t make any sense. But that training of getting comfortable with certain things, not making sense to me, also helps with the training in life of recognizing that you’re going to have to hold things that are in tension with each other.
Henry Shukman 00:29:50 Yes. That’s beautifully put. And I think there’s a there’s something I don’t know whether you resonate with this, but I feel that there’s when we’ve got two things in tension, the capacity to hold both actually gives us just a little opening to this space of awareness that is, is just a little bit larger than our ordinary sense of things.
Henry Shukman 00:30:15 And that that, you know, this is what koans do as well, is they. They’re often paradoxical or make no sense, but they’re kind of trying to push us in some way, or they have the capacity to just give us a little key that opens a little door that opens up more space. So suddenly. Yeah. Wow. I can rest in a place where these two apparently contradictory things are both true. And I can do that, you know, and I can. I find a piece out of that tension comes this slightly larger capacity that I didn’t know I had, or I didn’t know I was already kind of plugged into but hadn’t recognized it. And that’s the place. That’s a place that is actually dynamically peaceful. It’s kind of energetically energetic and peaceful at the same time. And that’s a great place to hang out, really in life if we can get there. But I’d love to hear more, actually on Dao. Can you can you give us a another highlight for you?
Eric Zimmer 00:31:16 Sure.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:16 I’ll do one more here. This one is verse 44. And it’s going to be similar because the Dow does that a lot, right? It’s not a linear book that you read and it just progresses you through ideas. It’s got these themes that circle around each other and you keep coming back. This one’s called fame and fortune. Fame or self-respect which matters more? Health or wealth? Which is more valuable? Gain or loss? Which is more painful? If you look to others for happiness, you will never be happy. If your well-being depends on money, you will never be content. And here’s my favorite, maybe my favorite set of lines in all of the Dow. If you are content with what you have, you can take joy in what is. When you realize there is nothing lacking. The whole world belongs to you.
Henry Shukman 00:32:08 That are that is glorious. And that’s that’s I think, I can think of many points in Zen that grow out of that, you know, because, as you wisely said in a prior conversation, you know, Zen is a kind of fusion of Buddhism, and Daoism is what happened when I think you put it beautifully.
Henry Shukman 00:32:30 When Buddhism, Daoism met in China in about the fifth, sixth century CE, you know, around about that time. And there’s like this I’m thinking of a line of a verse that was written to a koan, which is like the the holy hermit doesn’t need to be appointed a lord, the holy hermit, already he or she is one who already knows. You know that nothing is lacking. Nothing is lacking. So they have all the wealth in the world because nothing is lacking, you know. And so that’s. Yeah. That’s. I’m. It’s really. It’s. I’d love to actually be more versed in in the daodejing, I must say, because I think there’s, there’s so much in Zen that does come out of Daoism. It does, you know, and even things like the Cohen collections, they are like the koans, you know, as we said, are these little nuggets out of the biographies of great Zen adepts, you know, that became kind of meditation points that people could sort of sit with.
Henry Shukman 00:33:43 And sometimes it’s just a line, sometimes it’s a little dialogue, sometimes a little is an event, you know? but they’re, they, they can really trigger whether subtle or quite dramatic, they can trigger little or large shifts in the way we experience an ordinary moment. And they so they sort of reveal stuff about our ordinary experience that we might not have noticed and just that open that larger space, you know, and but what they do in these collections is they’ll they’ll state the cone and then there’ll be some verse on it, little, little verse, and then maybe a little commentary. That’s very like the E ching, you know, the you get the hexagram. I don’t know if people know it, but you know, the I-Ching, the Book of Changes. You get the hexagram, you get a verse, you get a commentary. It’s the same sort of structure, you know. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there are ancient commentaries that, oh, at least there’s lots of lines of the of the daodejing that get quoted throughout the Zen texts, you know.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:47 Yeah, yeah. And there’s and there’s commentaries on them in the same way from contemporaries or maybe not contemporaries. Exactly. Of of Lao Tzu, who we don’t even know if is one person. Right? Yeah. We don’t know what the Tao is exactly. you know, we don’t know whether it’s written by one person, whether it’s written by many people. There’s some legend around it. and I want to go to koans in a second, but I want to circle back to this verse real quick with this idea of, you know, realizing that nothing’s lacking. The whole world belongs to you. And I’ve had some of the kensho satori type Zen moments, these these moments of enlightenment. In my case, some of them have been longer than moments. But that line when you realize there’s nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you, describes that state to me, to a very large degree. Right? There is this sense that there is nothing lacking at all, and that the whole world belongs to me and I belong to it.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:48 Yes. In this deeply felt sense. Yes. Yes. And so I love this little, little piece here because it points in a direction. Now we’re, you know, to have a moment where we realize that where we truly feel that nothing is lacking. That’s that’s a state that you know, you may get to. You may not get to, but you can get closer and closer to it. Because the way we tend to process everything is let me go get or do X, Y or Z, then I will be happy. And this points to the fact that there’s actually a different way to do that. That all the steps along the way could be cut out. I don’t need to go get X, I don’t need to get Y, I don’t need to get Z. This isn’t saying that there isn’t a realm in which all that stuff is really important, but there’s another realm. There’s another way of thinking, of being where you realize like, oh, I don’t need to do any of that.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:50 Yeah, right. And I think that’s what I think. That’s what the Dow points to. I think that’s what Zen points to. I think that’s what Buddhism in general points to. I think that’s what, you know, the Christian mystics point to is all this idea that from one view. Yes. Nothing needs to be different.
Henry Shukman 00:37:07 Yes. Yes. Yes. I totally agree. Put it beautifully. You could. It’s almost as if, like if we can just really inhabit this present moment, we’ll find that nothing was ever lacking. Yeah. And somehow we get conditioned in this way of not fully inhabiting this moment, because we’re so aware of the past and we’re so looking toward what is coming next. There’s one Zen master. She said. Somebody came to study with her and they asked like, well, what do you what do you teach? And she said, when I sit, I sit. When I stand, I stand. When I walk, I walk. When I arrive, I arrive.
Henry Shukman 00:37:50 And the potential student said, well, big deal, I do the same. She said, no, when you sit, you’re already standing. When you stand, you’re already walking. When you walk, you’re already arriving. When you arrive. You’re already leaving. It’s like we’re just not really in this immediate moment.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:09 We tend to treat most moments as things we need to get through on the way to other moments. And I think it’s important that we just stress real quickly. The the Zen idea. I don’t know if it’s I learned it in Zen of the relative, in the absolute meaning that there is a world in which your job, your your children, your health, all that matters. It’s important. It should be tended to. It needs to be tended to. This isn’t saying like, oh, everything’s perfect just right. But there’s another view where what we’re talking about is this inherent perfection with the way things are. And what, what I, what Zen has encouraged in me is the ability to move between those two.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:58 And then ultimately, you realize they are one and the same thing, but it’s very helpful for me because the thing that happens when people start talking, like you and I are talking about everything being fine the way it is, is that any anybody can manufacture a list off the top of their head of 20 things that are not fine about their lives, about the world as a whole, all of that, and that’s all valid. So I think it’s important. And that’s what I loved about Zen. And this idea of relative and absolute was it told me, you don’t have to give all that up. You don’t have to suddenly think like, oh, starving children. That’s not a problem. The world’s perfect, right? No, it’s not from this view.
Henry Shukman 00:39:40 Yes.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:40 But there’s another view. But most of us live 99.9% in the relative and almost none in that other. And what Zen training does or what, you know, going into the Dao more deeply and studying or taking the way app with you is it allows us to get a little bit more time. In that other view.
Henry Shukman 00:40:01 You put it beautifully. Yeah. There’s there’s a metaphor that’s in an early Chinese Buddhist document of the path of practice being like a cart track, and the cart track has two wheel ruts, you know, one for either wheel. And one of those ruts is the path of gradual development that is basically on the relative side. It’s like, you know, which we need to work on, just like you say, both in terms of our life and even when it comes to practice, we actually need to work on healing our healing our stuff, cleaning up, you know, what do they say? Waking up, but also growing up and cleaning up. You know, we got to do that work. And then the other wheel, right, is actually this absolute side that’s always already here. So you can’t really you don’t exactly get to it. That’s why I think last time we were talking about. Can I go and find it? Well, not really, because it’s already here.
Henry Shukman 00:41:00 Not only is it already here. It’s what you already are as well. You know you already are that. So you can’t really be looking for it. You’re. You are it, you know. But but to have both sides be manifesting in our practice, you know, we can work on the more relative side in practice and in life as we do. But if we’re on the meditative path, we’ll start to get little flickers of that absolute side, you know, and it can show up in a variety of ways. It’s just be it can just be a weirdo. Kindness that I didn’t I didn’t. Didn’t seem to make sense. And it can be even at times I got a lot of troubles and challenges that I’m really trying to work my way through. But I do my morning sit and it just cumulatively, I might suddenly get a moment standing at the water cooler, looking out the window, or getting into my car when suddenly this weird spell of volcanoes just sort of lands on me out of nowhere.
Henry Shukman 00:42:00 And it’s. And it’s beautiful. And it can go deeper as well, where, you know, suddenly I feel I’ll get a flash that in some way that’s hard to express, actually, but I feel it very strongly. I’m not separate from this world. I’m truly part of it. Not as an idea, but as a felt experience. And that can be very powerful. And really, you know, sometimes it’ll have us weeping with the beauty of it and, you know, the kind of revelatory love of belonging in a way. You said it so nicely, actually, you know, that, we how did you put it? The world belongs to me. But. Yeah, but also we belong to the world. Exactly. Yeah. So that that absolute side is a kind of, Man, it’s it’s such a beautiful thing to get to know more. It changes our perspective. And I totally agree with you. But it’s not about denying the relative side. It’s expanding our perspective and our and us, you know, in a sense of love and belonging that we can live with.
Henry Shukman 00:43:10 You know, and again, the middle way would be like, how do I ride both. You know.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:32 What I’d love to do next is have you give us a koan. We’ve talked about what they are. We’ve talked about what they can do. If you stay on the way. Your app, you’ll you’ll get to them, right? You’ll you’ll actually get to, do koans with you, and I think you’ll be modest about this, but in general, a lot, a lot. A lot of people would think you are one of the modern masters teaching the koan. You know, again, I know that you’re humble and you’re not.
Henry Shukman 00:44:06 You’re just you’re in trouble. Then if that’s the case.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:08 You’re going to brush that off. Nonetheless. It’s true. And so, you know, the app will get us to the place where you can. You can try that. But but give us a koan so that people hear one in the same way. We just gave them a verse of the Tao.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:22 Instead of talking about the Dao, we gave them a verse. Now give me a koan or give us a koan.
Henry Shukman 00:44:27 Okay, okay. This is, you know, they come in all shapes and sizes. Okay. So so this one, this is more of a narrative. It’s I’ll just cut to the chase of it. There’s a, there’s a young brilliant scholar called Darshan and he’s, you know, this is China, late eighth century. So he’s, he’s versed in Buddhism and he’s probably versed in Daoism as well, you know, and he’s got it down. He’s particularly big on this particular suture called the diamond suture. He knows it back to front. And he’s been he’s been studying hard, practicing hard. And he believes that you have to go through endless training in order to have a flicker of awakening to this stuff we’re talking about. And he hears about this. He’s he’s not yet a Zen guy. He he’s and he hears about this other school of Buddhism, the Zen school that’s saying, no, you just need to look into your own heart and you’ll find awakening is already there.
Henry Shukman 00:45:29 And he’s thinking, rubbish, they’re wrong. And he loads up this sort of barrow with scrolls and scriptures and commentaries, goes down to meet some Zen masters. And and the first one he meets, he starts having a conversation with him, and it’s in this monastery. And the guy is called Long Tan, which means, Dragon Lake. Actually, it’s the name of the master. He lives near a lake known as Dragon Lake. So that’s what it’s called. And they start talking late into the night, and it goes on and on. And he’s asking lots of questions of this master, and he’s really trying to trip him up and challenge him with all the stuff he knows from his scholarly studies. And eventually the master says long term, says it’s late. It’s late. It’s time we go to bed. And and Darshan sort of pushes aside the blanket hanging, hanging over the door. And it’s pitch black. And he doesn’t know his way around this monastery. He comes back and says, it’s pitch black outside and long time the master lighter paper lantern for him, which is an ordinary, you know, illumination device, like a candle in those days or something like that.
Henry Shukman 00:46:42 He lights it for him and he holds it out. And Diane is reaching to take this little lamp. And just as he’s reaching for it long term, blows it out. He blows out the lamp. And in that instant, Dyson has a profound awakening. And he he. The story is, you know, he’s trembling and weeping and sweating and. Shaking and bows to to this mushroom and says. I’ll never doubt your words again. You know. He’s suddenly seen something he’d never seen before. So. Okay, so that’s that’s the happy story, you know, the next day, Dyson gathers all his scriptures and burns them. And he says, you know it. You could you could master all the all the scholarly works in the world. It’s just like a hair in a vast space, that’s all. It amounts to a scholarly Understanding. So this is a perfect example of the difference between our ordinary sort of human understanding, you know, relative understanding which you can get very refined. But one moment of direct experience of the absolute and it puts it in such a different perspective.
Henry Shukman 00:48:01 So we sit with just that moment. He’s reaching for the lamp and the teacher blows out the lamp. That’s actually the koan. It’s just that. So as a meditator, we would sit, you know, get into our quiet, calm space. The meditation, however it’s showing up. We let ourselves be as we are soft body, loose body slowing down. And we’re starting to just settle in to being present. And then we drop the little story in. The master blew out the light, the master blew out the lamp. And you know, Darshan has probably seen a lamp blown out 10,000 times. But this is the first time he sees it in a most intimate way. In a way, he’s never seen it before. And so we just kind of rest with it, and we just let it gently work in our subconscious, in our unconscious. You know, we might sit with it on and off for weeks, letting it just kind of steep in us, and we just sort of see what happens.
Henry Shukman 00:49:13 We might get little moments that are that was a little unusual. What was that? That birdsong seemed inordinately close or intimate, you know, or wow, that sunlight is suddenly so beautiful. Just little glimmers and shivers of actually another way of being in the world, just subtly touching us, you know. And so, in other words, we don’t need to have the mind blowing awakening Experience that Deshaun had, but we can get little echoes of it. You know and and and it’s all there in just that moment. The teacher blew out the lamp is right there you know. So that’s a that’s an example of a of a koan, you know, and how we would, how we would actually sit with it and let it work on us. You know.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:08 Beautiful. That’s a that’s a great one. I’ve, I was sharing with you. I did, I got through a hundred koans. And when I say get through, what that means is your teacher gives you a koan. You go do what you suggested, which is you sit with it, and then you come back to your teacher.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:24 And something in Zen that’s called DocuSign, and you present your response. And I think that word present is is fairly accurate. Yes, you present and very often what you will get for a while is, you know, if your teacher is kind like mine was, I think you need to sit with that a little bit longer. I think less kind is no right. It’s just just a simple no. Or maybe. Maybe somebody whacks you with a stick, I don’t know. But but yeah, that’s that’s kind of the, the process.
Henry Shukman 00:51:01 Right. That’s what we do in the traditional, you know, student teacher context. But we can also just sit with them on our own. There’s no you know, they’re public property. And Cohen actually means a public case and so on the way people do actually write in and tell us about experiences they’ve had. And we always respond to everything that comes in. But, you know, they’re they’re very valuable just to, to, to to nourish our own sitting just like that, just by themselves.
Henry Shukman 00:51:33 You know, if we don’t have access to a teacher, you know, it works that way too.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:37 Beautiful. I’m going to switch directions a little bit and play a little game here. I’m not known for games, although for Something About You brings out the the, the the trickster in me. I remember when we were in, New Mexico last year, I read a passage from a book you wrote like 40 years ago that was very Zen. And you were like, I wrote that. So something about you makes me want to do things like this. So what I’m going to do is this I interviewed recently, a favorite of mine who is a old sort of new, old and new friend of yours, David White.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:15 Yes. And David has this wonderful book called consolations two and Consolations. One was the same thing. He picks a word and he writes about it. And he’s a beautiful, beautiful, poetic writer. He’s a poet mainly. And the last word in the book is Zen.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:32 So I’m going to read something he wrote about Zen and just let you then say whatever you want Afterwards. Okay.
Henry Shukman 00:52:39 Okay. Lovely. By the way, I actually got an advance copy. He just banged out that essay, and he sent it straight to me. I bet before the book came out, we had great conversations about it.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:49 Yeah. He described to me you guys were friends a long time ago in England. And he said that he at that time was teaching you about Zen. And then he described it as. Then Henry got in a Lamborghini and went tearing past me. And now he’s the Zen master. All right. This is what he wrote. Zen is surprising under its subterfuge. Zen’s biggest surprise is that it seems to have more confidence in the incoherent life we first brought to it than the one we are trying to replace it with.
Henry Shukman 00:53:29 That’s beautiful. Yeah. It’s one of the sort of, one of the little phrases that has come to be better known about Zen is not knowing.
Henry Shukman 00:53:39 Not knowing. There was a Korean Zen teacher who always taught. His book is called only don’t know, only don’t know. Just let go of the confidence that we have in ourselves having the whole picture do. We’re very you know, we can’t help it. We we we’re very convinced that we’ve got the whole picture of what this life is and how we navigate it and what this world is that we’re moving through. And Zen says, can we just even a little bit let go of the certainty that we have the whole picture? What is it like to make that little surrender? Maybe, I don’t know, the whole picture. And in that little fracture, that little crevice of uncertainty, of surrender, There’s a tenderness, there’s a warmth. There’s a promise that this very world as we know it, with all its troubles and challenges, could actually be our very own healing. It’s like there’s a great koan. The whole world is medicine. The whole world is your healing, you know. And what kind of sense does that make? Well, it’s like there’s a possibility coming back to what we were talking about earlier, of discovering that you belong to the world, that you’re really, truly of the world, and the sense of separateness from the world that we all, you know, kind of naturally, automatically almost live with.
Henry Shukman 00:55:25 You know, that is fair enough. That’s the relative side. And there’s another side to the absolute side where we’re simply not separate. But in our world of certainty about our situation, it’s harder for that side to show itself. So the what? I forget David’s language, exactly, but that inchoate confusion that we come in with that might be closer to the not knowing, to the release of my preconceptions and my assumptions that my preconceptions are correct. You know, sometimes I feel it’s like we’re walking on a cement floor, you know, walking through life on a on a bed. A foundation of certainty about the way things are and what koans want to do. What Zen wants to do is, put a little earthquake under us, a little upheaval under us, and suddenly we might find that that solid foundation And isn’t solid. And instead of it being horrifying, it’s marvelous. It can. Well, it can be quite a shock, you know, as well, but it’s a beautiful shock. You know that great teacher Rinpoche, Tibetan teacher, you know, he said.
Henry Shukman 00:56:52 One glimpse of emptiness is so horrifying that compassion naturally arises. And then he added, no one glimpse of emptiness is so marvellous that compassion naturally arises. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:07 I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Henri, you, without meaning to actually cued what we’re going to do in the post-show conversation, which is I want to talk about emptiness. It’s a concept in Zen, in Buddhism, and it’s in the Dao a lot, too. And it’s a confusing one for a lot of people. So you and I and the post-show conversation are going to jump into that. Listeners, if you’d like access to that post-show show conversation, as well as a special episode that I make just for you. That’s called Teaching Song and a poem where I share a poem I love, a song I love, and an idea that’s on my mind. And you want to support the show, go to one. You feed, join and become part of our community. Henry. Thank you again. It is always such a pleasure.
Henry Shukman 00:57:51 It’s been a delight for me. Thank you very much for having me. I’m really honored.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:55 Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.
