In this episode, Henry Shukman discusses how to embrace the chaos and find clarity through meditation while exploring themes of self-development and self-love. Henry emphasizes the balance between effort and acceptance in spiritual practice, highlighting the interplay between sudden insights (satori) and gradual progress. He also discuss the importance of understanding one’s motivation for meditation and how a clear “why” can sustain long-term practice. The episode encourages listeners to embrace all aspects of themselves and appreciate the journey of personal growth.
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 here: www.oneyoufeed.net/theway
Key Takeaways:
- The transformative power of meditation in personal growth.
- The balance between effort and acceptance in spiritual practice.
- The relationship between sudden insights (satori) and gradual development in meditation.
- The importance of understanding one’s motivation and purpose in maintaining a meditation practice.
- The role of structure in facilitating spiritual growth and practice.
- The significance of embracing all aspects of oneself, including less desirable traits.
- The dualities present in spiritual practice, such as self-improvement versus self-acceptance.
- The concept of “wu wei” or effortless effort in meditation and life.
- The value of recognizing life as a gift, even amidst challenges.
- The interplay between various meditation traditions and their contributions to a well-rounded practice
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:
How to Embrace Original Love on the Path to Awakening with Henry Shukman
How to Find and Follow a Healing Path with Henry Shukman
Effortless Mindfulness with Loch Kelly
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Episode Transcript:
Eric Zimmer 00:01:01 After ten solid years of daily meditation, I found myself drifting. My habit didn’t fall off, but my Y did. So in this two part conversation, I turned to someone who’s helped thousands rekindle their inner fire. Zen teacher, poet, and friend Henry Shukman. In part one, we talk about why effort can be the very thing that chases transformation away, how structure can actually liberate, and how to navigate the dance between ambition and acceptance. Henry is the creator of The Way, a unique meditation app that’s designed as a single unfolding journey. There’s no skipping ahead if you’re looking to reconnect with what matters without having to chase it, you’ll find something real here. I’m Erik Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Henry. Welcome to the show.
Henry Shukman 00:01:52 Hi, Eric. It’s really great to be with you.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:54 I’m very excited to talk with you. I always love our conversations together. We prepared very little for this one because I remember when I saw you last year in New Mexico, I was there to help you launch your book with a book launch party. You and I went out to dinner the night before, and the experience I had was like of words just falling out of both of our mouths for like, two hours straight with like, no thoughts.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:18 So I was like, all right, I think we’ll be fine. Just trying that that approach again. So I’m really happy to have you on for this two part conversation. And we’re going to be talking about things that are all kind of tied together. You’ve got a wonderful meditation app called The Way we’re going to talk about that. I have a new project around the book, The Daodejing, that we’ll be talking a little bit about, and then we’ll obviously cover Zen, because Zen is what happened when Buddhism from India met Daoism in China, and Zen sort of emerged from that. So I think there’s lots of crossover here, but I think we do need to start the way we always do and give you a chance one more time to answer the parable. So in the parable, there’s a grandparent talking to their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:18 And the grandchild stops to think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Henry Shukman 00:03:33 Yes. Thank you. And it’s really nice to have another chance to reflect on that, you know, and see how it’s changed. I’ll tell you, the thing that resonates most for me at the moment is, you know, in Tibetan Buddhism, they talk about feeding your demons. And I feel now that, basically my, as it were, the good wolf is very, very welcoming of the not so good wolf. That’s the whole thing is like, what is it in me that is totally capable of welcoming what is not so easy in myself and in the world to be welcoming, not in the sense of like letting it have free rein, but of giving it the home its always needed of being that, you know, that warm, welcoming host that can really accommodate all of me and all of this world, you know, and that doesn’t that not that we want the wild wolf, the dangerous wolf, the the the destructive wolf just running havoc, wreaking havoc and running wild.
Henry Shukman 00:04:42 But by actually loving it and giving it, in a sense, the love it’s always needed, really, it becomes a source of goodness itself, you know, and it it opens us up more. That’s where I’m at, really, with it. It’s gotta love it.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:58 Yeah. I was reflecting on something the other day that’s sort of similar to this, and I was reflecting on my relationship to certain parts of myself or internal voices, etc., that, that are just they’ve been around a long time. I don’t really have a whole lot of expectation that they’re going to completely disappear, but I relate to them so differently. And I like that idea of like, I more or less can well, you know, I figured that I finally figured that sort of balance out. I’m not saying all the time and I’m perfect, but I’ve I’ve gotten better at saying like, okay, I’m not going to fight you. Come on in. But you don’t have the run of the house either, right? Like we got certain rules here.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:41 And within there you can. You’re welcome. And and I heard people say this for a long time that your experience doesn’t necessarily change. It’s how you relate to your experience that changes.
Henry Shukman 00:05:51 I totally agree, and I think that’s that’s, you know, a big part of this path of meditative development. You know, that I’ve been on for, wow, an awfully long time. Yeah. You know, but it’s really it’s really is about that. And, and because we actually at certain phases in a meditation journey, we might think we’re going to just get to the mountaintop and rest there, you know, just being bliss the rest of our lives. But that’s not a full human life. You know, in my view, you know, so actually having but having, being able to be with all of life, you know, and more and more open and all of life, you know, both within and without, you know, both inside us and outside us, that’s really the richness. And indeed it means being able to relate to it differently in order to have that kind of openness.
Henry Shukman 00:06:46 Yeah, totally.
Eric Zimmer 00:06:47 Yeah. I remember Adi Ashanti once saying something? I think it was in one of our conversations, but it could have been elsewhere, I don’t know. He was talking about freedom. And we talk about, you know, freedom and liberation and the spiritual path and all of that. But he said, it’s not freedom from things. It’s freedom to experience things. And that was a that that really landed with me. I was like, oh, this isn’t freedom from sorrow. This isn’t freedom from difficulty. It’s that I can feel free to actually feel those things, allow them to be, not fight them.
Henry Shukman 00:07:23 Yes.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:24 And be with more of my experience.
Henry Shukman 00:07:27 Exactly. I’d say, what I see in in many people that I’ve, you know, I’ve been privileged to help guide a little bit on their, on their own paths. You know, there can be these watershed moments, these thresholds that, that we can cross where, you know, some cluster of attachments, you know, that have been Being binding us and making us relate to the world and experience in certain ways.
Henry Shukman 00:07:54 They can fall away and experience stays the same. Exactly like I was saying. But but the the way we respond is so different. We’re free now to respond to them our own way. And we’re not being we’re not being sort of tethered by the attachments that we’ve, we’ve, we’ve taken for granted and in many cases not even recognized we had because they’re so ingrained in us and so conditioned in us, you know. Yeah. So that’s a great way to put it. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:26 So this raises a question I would like to talk about your meditation app the way I think it’s incredible, by the way. It is so good. And one of its defining features is that there is one path through and you cannot skip ahead. You, you you just have to go at one by one by one. And you were telling me ahead of time that it’s three. You have it’s a three year journey. And that you thought that was kind of how long it would it took to sort of set the baseline.
Eric Zimmer 00:09:01 And this got me thinking about a debate that happens in, in spiritual circles sometimes between sort of the epiphany, the satori, the instant enlightenment, and then this really long, gradual path. And I, you know, I’ve just got done, turned a book into my publisher that right now the title is how a Little Becomes a Lot. So it’s about this gradual path. And yet Zen does prioritize to some degree, these satori moments, these flashes of insight. And I’d love to talk about how those two seem like they’re different, but on a deeper level, they’re actually not. Or at least it seems to me they’re not. But I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
Henry Shukman 00:09:48 Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s a great that’s a great point. I mean, here’s here’s one way that it’s it’s been talked about traditionally is like, if you haven’t got the gradual slow little bit every day, the little, the little by little part, then if or when some major shift or even even minor shift, you know, but a shift happens.
Henry Shukman 00:10:14 It’s as if it’s like a beautiful seed that’s landed, but it needs good soil to growing, you know, and that gradual cultivation is is essential. And the way I see it these days is something like this. Like there are there are many people, I think who and there’s traditions, you know, that they’re really only interested in the gradual cultivation and that’s that’s just fine. And, you know, gradually, gradually, Actually, you know, one whole branches. Then the Soto side of Zen, you know, they they talk about Soto as the farmer. They’re gently, you know, they’re tilling the soil, they’re pulling weeds. They’re really caring for the the plot. They’re like a farmer just tending to it, you know, day by day, you know, and that’s that’s great. And gradually the invasive weeds get sort of weeded out, and the beautiful flowers and crops that we can eat and stuff, the nourishing stuff starts to grow and that that can be just lovely. But on the other hand, there are traditions that really are all about, hey, just realize what it’s what it’s all about.
Henry Shukman 00:11:27 Realize what’s really happening. Non-dual traditions like advice to Vedanta and other side of Zen. Zen, you know, puts more emphasis on that, you know, and that would be sudden discovery of a reality and awareness. A nameless, unnameable, a door. You know a way, you know. That’s actually always here. And can’t not be here. But somehow fundamental to all of experience. Perhaps to all of existence. But you can’t really get to it. Gradually. Because it’s a shift in perspective. It’s a sort of it’s a sudden seeing things. Not differently in that they change. But differently in that the vantage from which anything, everything is perceived has changed. Such that we’ve touched into something that’s always been here. That, you know, we could get into some of the things that this doesn’t do. Time. It doesn’t do space. It lets space happen. It lets time happen. But it itself isn’t sort of caught by them. You know, that has to be a sudden shift because you can’t really cross the ravine in two steps.
Henry Shukman 00:12:39 It’s just a sudden sort of leap. You know, a sudden shift in how we’ve seen. But if that isn’t, then landing in a life where we’ve got this steady practice, it can be a flash in the pan that doesn’t actually get integrated and doesn’t change how we live, you know? So it’s critical, I think, to at the very least, we want the gradual side. But the gradual side can be so enlivened and defied. You know.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:11 That’s a great word. We got 800 episodes plus. I don’t know if anybody’s ever used that word. Defied. Okay. Carry on.
Henry Shukman 00:13:21 It’s a good one. You know, we can suddenly, you know, make this discovery about our the nature of our existence, the nature of our life that we hadn’t somehow noticed before, even though it’s always been here. And it will have the possibility of actually changing our lives for the better, you know. So that’s I think personally I think it’s it’s really good that we know about that as a possibility.
Henry Shukman 00:13:48 You know, this sudden shift to the non-dual. But we don’t want to be chasing it too much because it’ll it’ll recede if we’re pursuing it, you know. but it’s okay to be aware that it’s a possibility. Meanwhile, we just do our steady practice, you know, and. Yeah, if that call it a flash of lightning, call it a seed, call it a fertilizer, whatever it is, if it drops in, fantastic, you know, and it will sooner or later, because it’s always here.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:19 Yeah, I think about it in a, in a couple of different ways also and, and a few analogies that you use. Right. Like you can’t jump the ravine in into jumps as you said, but you got to be near the edge of the ravine to jump it. Right? Which is what I think often gets missed in the just, you know, just wake up now idea, right? Is that the people who tend to wake up I’m not saying it happens all the time.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:45 You had an you had an experience that came out of the blue when you were a young man. And to your point, it didn’t really have a chance to land in any sort of fertile soil at the time. So it can happen. But for most people, it seems to be that they’re kind of at the edge of the ravine. They’ve worked to get there. And then I also sometimes think about it like a sort of like a baseball analogy. Right. Which is like you could say to a kid, like, all you got to do is put the bat on the you got a major league pitcher throwing it, you and all you got to do is put the bat on the ball and it’ll go out of the park. But more often than not, that kid might end up with like a, you know, a traumatic brain injury versus a home run because he’s he hasn’t practiced. And so and then the last thing I’ll say on this topic is, I’ve joked before that if you put the 24 year old version of me in my brain right now.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:38 He would think he was enlightened. He would. Because the shift would be so dramatic to him. Yeah. And so I think that’s the other thing that sometimes can happen to us on the gradual path is, yes, we have shifted. We’ve had big shifts. We just haven’t noticed them in the same way because they came about gradually, whereas the moments we’re talking about are very sudden and dramatic.
Henry Shukman 00:16:02 Yes. Yeah. I love that analogy, that idea actually, of bringing in, you know, I think of my own younger self, you know, 17 year old or something, putting him inside this experience. Now, he would be astonished by the peace, the quiet, the ease, the energy, the sort of smooth, not frantic. Yeah. You know, it’s a really it’s a really nice point. And I totally agree. So we’ve got to be we’ve got to be careful about, you know, how change happens, that it can be very subtle and gradual and powerful nonetheless. Yeah, and sometimes it can be.
Henry Shukman 00:16:40 Yeah. Blazing revelatory epiphany. Yeah. And that, you know. Of course. Well, that’ll really impress us, you know. Like, wow. This is really. Man, I didn’t know this was possible to see things so differently. And it’s. I feel like I’ve understood everything now and, you know, but actually that also has to be backed by such long integration and, and and all of that. So it’s, it’s really just I believe great to be kind of open to both.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:09 Yeah I agree. So I’d like to talk for a second about why to engage in a meditative or spiritual practice. I think it’s gotten to the point in our culture, and certainly people who would listen to this show where most people would say, well, I should be meditating. And that’s not a very useful framework anymore, right? Should be is not not really motivating. And this is actually relevant to me because after a decade or so, I mean, I’ve been meditating on and off for 30 years, but after a decade of really solid practice, I’ve noticed my practice get very wobbly.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:48 And I know all the stuff about getting a habit back on track, right? Like, it’s what I teach. It’s kind of my bread and butter. And what I’ve realized recently is that’s not the problem. The problem is back to motivation. And motivation has gotten a little bit of a bad word in the behavior change habit space because you don’t want to. They say you don’t want to rely on motivation, which is true. If we use motivation to mean whether I feel like or not feeling like doing something in the moment, but on its deeper level, motivation is why. And so I’ve thought we might talk about why practice? Because I think I need that refresher after having a really clear why on it. I think it’s gotten obscured for me.
Henry Shukman 00:18:37 Yeah. Yeah, that’s that’s beautiful. Thank you. I you know, it’s it’s a really good thing to come back to, I think quite regularly is why am I doing this if I have got a whatever I might be doing long term, why am I doing it? You know, a couple of reflections pop up right away.
Henry Shukman 00:18:55 I mean, the first actually is to the point about some kind of ebb and flow in enthusiasm for it and commitment to it. I think that’s a given. There’s just going to be more enthusiasm and motivation and there’s going to be less. I feel that too. You know, I get times when, oh, wow, I kind of just I want to be a different me that doesn’t meditate for a little bit, you know, just give me a little break, you know, and and to be able to accommodate that without having to stop would be my formula, you know. Like, how do I accept you? Quite rightly. I kind of had ten years of this. I need a I need. I need a little breather. I’m just not so into it right now. How do we accommodate that while not stopping? But to get to that, we’ve also got to have established why we’re doing it in the first place, what the longer term picture is. And I would say that on that side, there’s there’s a couple of different things also that come up.
Henry Shukman 00:19:57 One is the basic idea in Buddhism and probably, I would guess, most spiritual traditions, if not all spiritual traditions. And it’s really actually the heart of your your podcast name is that, you know, we need some training. We humans just need a bit of training because we can be quite destructive if we don’t have it. You know, all the research on the ancient evolutionary wiring that we still carry for being able to dehumanize other people. We can be very compassionate in a circle of concern, and that circle of concern can be made to have a really hard border. And the people that are outside it, they’re not only undeserving of our compassion, they’re undeserving of our wrath and our hatred and our aggression and our violence. A lot of research points into that is not really cultural. It’s human. That dehumanizing potential that we have, it’s part of our makeup, and it can be so damaging and destructive. And of all the creatures that have been dangerous to human beings over the last million or 2 million years, none has been so dangerous as human beings.
Henry Shukman 00:21:18 Right? You know, it’s all very well to feel good and say, no, I’m immune from my. Actually, we carry wiring that can be turned on. That dehumanizes other human beings. So what can we do to diminish the power of that to get a handle on, you know, if it’s developing? How do I manage that and not have it turn into vengeful destructiveness? You know, that’s part of it, to recognize there’s stuff in me that needs training. You know, and I always think, you know, I remember learning this in, in anthropology when I studied it, that indigenous cultures generally are kind of better at understanding and regulating and taming the negative side of us. They don’t just think, let’s propitiate the good. There’s a great God out there. Let’s propitiate him or her or whatever. No, there’s actually there’s other forces that aren’t so good. Let’s also propitiate them. You know, and that’s really wise to be. Again, coming back to that feed your demons thing to to not be just splitting off the dark side and say it doesn’t exist or, you know, we’re not interested in that.
Henry Shukman 00:22:32 Much better to be interested in it, to be aware of it and to be, you know, recognizing the shadow in young terminology and working with it. Otherwise it can be destructive. So that’s a whole training side. Right. And I, I just think that meditation is, you know, there’s many other ways of course, but meditation is a really good way for that because it’s cheap and it’s easy to do. You don’t need a lot of equipment, you know, you basically just need a chair or cushion, you know, and you need not a lot of time really. You know, even 20 minutes a day is going to I mean, I think even five minutes a day, if you’ve never done it before, will change things for you. You know, it’s good on that scale. But also, aside from that, the sort of training and taming kind of side. There’s this, you know, there’s this big matter of us being so engaged in our busy lives, in our activities and they may be great ones.
Henry Shukman 00:23:29 You know, they may be projects that we love, relationships we love, and all the rest of the good, good stuff. Or they may be not so good, but either way, we’re so invested in, you know, our outward lives that we miss. I mean, I talk about myself as well, you know, it’s so easy to miss this really important underlying fact of being alive, being able to just recognize the gift. Yes, it of course it has lots of challenges, but the gift of having this experience called life and to be able to unwrap that gift and receive it, yes, with its difficulties as well. But I mean, it’s incomparable from my point of view. You know, there’s no gift possibly greater than it, but if we never recognize it, it’s kind of a shame.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:50 I heard you say something along those lines somewhere else, which is, you know, it’s about being able to really receive the gifts of life. And that’s that’s quite something, as you’re saying, to like, really put a point on that, because I don’t know that most of us would experience life as a gift.
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Eric Zimmer 00:25:13 And to your point, this is not like Pollyanna, like everything’s always great kind of thing. But there is a there is an experience of being alive and if we can receive the gift of it is a really powerful and transformative thing. I’ve also heard you talk about meditation as a way of accessing an underlying well-being that’s not contingent on circumstances, and we’ll talk about the Dow in a little bit. But the the I was exposed to both Zen and Daoism around the same time in high school. I don’t think I understood a lot of it, but I but I somehow intuited that what you’re saying there. Right. I intuited that this was a system of being okay, having some degree of okay ness in a world that many times did not feel okay to me as a 17 year old. And I think I that that made it great sense to me because I was like, well, it’s obvious to me. Bad things happen in the world and they happen to everybody like it was pretty. You don’t have to be paying too close of attention to get that.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:25 You know, maybe I was more attuned to it than your average 17 year old, but that idea that there could be a way of being okay, even when things from a surface level weren’t okay, I think is what got me into all of this and probably keeps me in it.
Henry Shukman 00:26:44 That’s absolutely beautiful, actually. You put it so beautifully. I think that’s that’s in a way, that’s the heart of what I was trying to get at with that. Second, why for meditation is exactly that, that that we can we can greatly cultivate and develop our access to a fundamental. Okay, you know, which which it might sound like something I’ve got to create, I’ve got to develop a way of being okay regardless of conditions. But I think I think you’ve you’ve already just been nodding to this, that in the idea of the Dao and of the way, as it’s often translated in the Buddhist world, same concept basically, is that actually it’s always already here. So it’s not something that we develop, but we might develop our access to it.
Henry Shukman 00:27:38 You know, we might get more open to it. We might get might get more skilled at sensing it. So, so I always think like, yeah, I mean, you’ve heard me talk like this before, but I sort of think there’s two sides of meditation practice. One is kind of more conditional. It is developing ourselves and getting more mindful, getting more able to hold, you know, our difficult emotions, our stress or anxiety, our sorrow and grief and loss and fears and, you know, and also our joys when they come, you know, being getting better at sort of appreciating them and being with them. That can happen, but at the same time. On another hand really? It’s it’s actually more about uncovering an openness. It’s hard to say this because I can think of many times in my own life when I would never possibly believe this, but in a sense, even in the worst of conditions, it’s still present, you know? And I think of one Zen teacher, Blanche Hartman.
Henry Shukman 00:28:42 And she was in the in the late 60s. You know, she was she was in a, an anti-Vietnam riot. And she was right at somehow got pushed right to the front line, actually up against the riot shield of the riot police who were banging on their shields, yelling and screaming. And she found herself suddenly right in front of one of these policemen, you know, yelling in her face, beating his riot shield, pushing against her. And she’s jammed there at the front. And, you know, there’s a very intensely difficult, you know, situation that could have been highly traumatic. Somehow at that moment, she just got this flash. There’s no separation between me and him and and there’s no separation because we’re all part of one unfolding. We’re part of one reality that I don’t normally see. And now I’m. I’m seeing it. And so that, you know, that was a satori moment, you know, that was. Yeah, was an important step on her Zen path at Kensho, you know, and it happened in very difficult circumstances, you know, and I’m very moved by it really that we, we have that offered to us and we have that capacity as humans to, to taste a fundamental wellness of well-being.
Henry Shukman 00:30:10 Yeah. And I sometimes call it love, you know, because it is like a love to discover that level of belonging, you know, regardless of conditions. And but I also think it’s really important that we don’t sort of neglect conditions. We need to work on the conditions as well. You know.
Eric Zimmer 00:30:28 We’re talking about these what we could think of as dualities. We’ve talked about them a little bit here. We’ve talked about the gradual versus sudden. we just talked about being okay in any kind of condition and yet really caring about conditions. And there’s another one that you point out, and you talk about it when you talk about the fruits of being present and you talk about self-improvement as one outcome of that and self-love is the other. And I just got done writing my book, as I told you. And as it went on, it became clearer to me that that’s a lot of what I was talking about, about how we want to be the books about change, right? We want we change because we want to be better, different, etc. and how valuable and important that is.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:20 But at the same time, there’s an equal tension on that of allowing ourselves to be just as we are in this moment, allowing this moment to be just as it is. And I think that’s the same thing you’re pointing to here about the fruits of being present self-improvement and self-love.
Henry Shukman 00:31:36 Yes. Yes. Yes. That’s a great point, Eric. Exactly. Because on the one hand, there’s there is some self-improvement that we can work on. And even while we’re doing that, with more or less success, there’s also opening up to more self-love. And the paradox is that somehow the self-love accepting ourselves as we are can actually lead to more change.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:04 Right?
Henry Shukman 00:32:05 Yes. Even though we’re not asking for change, you know. Yeah. You know, if you see what I mean. So when we combine the two some self-development with self-love, the self-love makes the self-development so much easier, you know, and the self-development may open up more self-love or self, we could call it also, I guess self-acceptance, you know.
Henry Shukman 00:32:32 Right. But it could a deep a warm self-acceptance, not a not a kind of neutral. Well, I accept it, but actually really, I accept it. You know, there’s a there’s a tender warmth in there. Yeah. Some sort of some kind of I always think there’s a little bit of surrender. It’s like I, I surrender to the fact that, you know, I am the way I am. It’s I’m not fighting it so that I. Then the love can flow, you know.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:58 Yeah. I find that that balance such a important one in my own life. And I look at it even beyond like self-improvement, like a given example. So I am a guitar player and I play guitar at this point for no possible reason. It’s not going to give me anything else in life except what it gives me, which is to play music. And yet I find myself wanting to get better. And so there’s a part of me that’s like, oh, you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t do.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:31 You shouldn’t want to get better. You should just enjoy it. But then I came back. I come around to. But it feels good to get better, right? Like the actual practice of improving, of mastery. I’m nowhere near mastering anything in that department. But at that point. And so even in there, I find that I’ve got the blend right. There’s the I’m just doing this because I want to do it. And I also want to get better at it. And and for me, the thing I’ve been able to see the guardrail between the two. If there is one at all is the one of frustration. Meaning, if I suddenly am upset or mad or frustrated because I can’t play a certain passage. Okay, I feel pretty certain I’ve crossed the line. For me, my line of okay. Now you’re into the sort of self-improvement that isn’t actually helpful, and it is not very self accepting. But as long as I’m on the other side of that line and I’m still kind of playing, yes, then that desire is is I feel like it’s part of me and I, I want to let it be.
Henry Shukman 00:34:46 Yes. I love that. I think that touches on a little bit. You know what we’re talking earlier about the different relationship to experience. And I was saying, you know, we can have some some of our attachments can, in the course of practice, slacken or release that that would be one of those. There’s like or maybe that this relates to that. You know, the yeah, I do enjoy seeing improvement in my guitar playing, speaking for you. but I haven’t got this attachment lassoed around it like it must. I must be getting better. Then the frustration kicks in. If I don’t, I think you put it. I think it’s beautiful what you’re saying there, Eric, I really do. And I think that’s a kind of in my mind. That’s the sort of that’s like an x ray of healthy, happy, wholesome life that, you know, I’m not too demanding on myself or on life. Yeah. And, you know, and I’m appreciative appreciative of it sort of happening at all.
Henry Shukman 00:35:47 And I love seeing it get get better. Yeah. For me and for others, you know.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:54 Hey, friends, after over a decade of talking with world class teachers and trying just about every meditation app out there, I finally found one that actually takes you somewhere deeper. It’s called The Way. Unlike other apps that might offer a large variety of meditations. The way was designed by Zen master Henry Shukman, and it leads you along a clear, step by step path. Each session builds on the last, gently moving you towards something real. Peace, clarity, even awakening because you’re part of the one you feed community the way is offering you 30 free sessions to get started. Just go to one you feed net. Either way, it is truly the best meditation app I found. And Henry is the best teacher I know and I don’t say that lightly. Thousands of others feel the same. So feed your good wolf and join me on the way by visiting one you feed net. The way I think if we want to reference the Dow here is also this is a is a time to do it.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:59 And we’re talking about your meditation app the way. And then this project that I did with an organization called Rebind, where I created my own interpretation of the Dao from about 15 different sources. And then I teach about it and via AI you have a conversation with me about the Dao. It’d be like sitting down and having a conversation with me about the Dao. One of the things in the Dao that shows up again and again is the concept of wu Wei, or more accurately translated as effortless effort. And I think that’s partially some of what we’re talking about here, too. And it’s paradoxical right on its surface, like, well, it’s effort, but it’s effortless. It’s, you know, so I think but I think it kind of ties right in here.
Henry Shukman 00:37:44 I totally agree. Yeah. And by the way, Eric, I’ve, I’ve you kind of sent me a sort of, you know, a beta or a sort of work in progress of that. And it’s absolutely beautiful. I just love it.
Henry Shukman 00:37:59 And I want to have more time digging around in it, but what I’ve already seen was just marvelous because you’re you’re really very steeped in it. So it’s second nature for you to be talking about it and reflecting on it. And you very quickly clarify concepts that, that that I’ve had some exposure already myself in my life to, to the Dow and the Daodejing. But man, you really were clarifying things even, even I was getting. Oh yeah. Yeah. Lovely. That’s that and that, just that with hearing you talk about it and I threw a few questions at you. I Eric I loved what.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:35 How did he answer?
Henry Shukman 00:38:36 They were great. They were just. Yeah. You you were great. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:41 The minute they gave me the thing to test out, like. Because what you can do is you can read the Dow and then you can ask it a question like I did the minute I got it, I was like, all right, I want to make sure this thing can’t go off the rails.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:53 So I’m like, Does Eric Zimmer have a secret love child? Does Eric Zimmer run a termite farm is, you know, just all the crazy questions I could come up with. And it it stays in its lane. It’s like, I’m sorry, I’m not going to speculate on Eric Zimmer’s personal life. So, but it is uncanny to me that this thing answers as I would now. There’s a reason for that, because I probably recorded about 12 hours of me talking about the Dow that got fed into this thing. So there’s a reason it sounds like me. It’s it’s learned a lot about me, but nonetheless, it’s still really fascinating to the whole eye. Thing is I this was my attempt. I’m a big believer like technology never goes backwards, no matter how much we might want it to. And so if AI is here, what are its possible good uses? And I felt like this is one of them, right? The ability to engage with teachers and education that you normally don’t have access to.
Henry Shukman 00:39:54 That’s that’s a fantastic point. Yeah. I wanted to ask you what would be your dream? User of it or your dream reader? You know, would it be because I could imagine little chunks, a little chunk a day, you know, like, I mean, somebody might want to devour the whole thing, but, you know, like with a koan in Zen. Yes. You might just take a nugget and chew with, chew that for a day and then another nugget or something like that. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Eric Zimmer 00:40:24 I do. I mean, I the ideal person would probably just be somebody who’s been interested in the Dao and has maybe even picked it up and been like, what am I reading here? Because it’s a strange book. You know, it’s much more a collection of poems than it is anything else in a certain degree. And in the same way, with poetry, you don’t. I mean, you can just read one poem, then the next poem, then the next poem, then the next poem.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:53 But it’s the slowing down that allows the poem to work on you. And so the way that I’ve engaged with the Dao over the years, and that’s why I chose that book, it’s probably my longest, most true book companion for the last 30 years. Like, it’s probably the book for me that I’ve, you know, gone back to most often over the years. And, and that’s how I use it is I just pick it up and I read a verse.
Henry Shukman 00:41:22 Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:22 Yeah. Or, you know, you could call it a verse. You could call it a chapter, you could call it a poem, but it’s, you know, it’s anywhere from, like, anywhere from like 30 words to 200 words. I don’t know, something like that. Yeah. and then read it and. Yeah, just kind of sit with it. So I think it can be used as a daily reflection type of thing if you want. It can be used as a I’m struggling with something right now.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:45 Let me pick this thing up and see if it has anything to say to that. and then there is a way, I think, that you can appreciate the, the thing as a whole and what it actually is. But I think that’s probably the best way I would approach it. I approach it like a poem. Yes, because it is so poem. I mean, that’s part of why I wanted to do an interpretation of it. And I use that term clearly not translation, because there are probably I at this point, I have one of the largest collections of Dao translations, probably in the in the country. I’m. That sounds ridiculous, but I’m sure there are some scholarly places that have a lot. But I’ve probably got 15 of them. Or 20 of them. There’s so many of them, and you read them and they can be very different from each other. And so this one was just my version. Yes. It’s not correct. It’s just my version. And I certainly lean on trying to keep the poetic where I can.
Chris Forbes – 00:42:43 The Dao. If you want to check it out for yourself, you can grab the interactive Dao experience Eric built with Rebind at oneyoufeed.net/tao. That’s one you feed.net/tao. It’s a really interesting way to actually talk with the verses and with Eric as you read.
Henry Shukman 00:43:04 Hey I just had a thought. Did did we get to woo way. You brought it up beautifully a little earlier in our conversation. And I think you, you, you know, you invited a response from me and I’m not sure. Did I ever give a response to the woo way matter, did I do you think I did?
Eric Zimmer 00:43:21 I know, I think we kind of pivoted into the book and what it is. So I’d love to hear your thoughts on wu wei for sure.
Henry Shukman 00:43:29 Yeah. I mean, I think because it’s very central to Zen, this effortless effort. In fact, there’s a great, you know, these just to reference a koan right now that talks about it, talks to it to that topic, by the way, for for people who might not know a Cohen is a little phrase or little dialogue or little Action that’s come out of the biography of some Zen adept.
Henry Shukman 00:43:56 Usually in Tang dynasty China, which was 600 to 900 approximately in China. In some cases they come out of very early Buddhism in India. They’re a kind of an integral part of the sort of lore of Zen, or Chan, as it was called in China. And there’s one of them, a famous Zen teacher called Jiaozhou in Tang dynasty China. He was, when he was a young new student, talking to his master, he he asked him, what is the way? And his teacher was called Nanshan. He said, ordinary mind is the way. Your ordinary life, your ordinary experience, that is the way. And then Jiaozhou, he was said to be 18 at the time, a bright young guy. He said, well, well, should I, should I turn towards it? In other words, should I try to be? Should I be trying to find it? Should I be looking for it? Trying to find it. And his teacher says if you try to find it, you go against it.
Henry Shukman 00:45:02 So? So so then Jojo says, well, what should I do? How will I ever know if I have found it? Found it. And the teacher says it’s not about knowing or not knowing. It’s beyond either having it or not having it, knowing it or not knowing it. And so that’s actually that little dialogue is really nice illustration of woo way. He doesn’t say give up, don’t be here. Don’t be practicing. Don’t be on a path of meditation training. He just says, don’t be trying to find it. Yeah. Because you know if you do, you’re going against it. You’re sort of automatically, in a sense, pushing it away or you’re automatically looking the wrong way if you’re trying to find it. And so I think this almost ties together, like the Wu Way, as an approach to effortless effort. We’re not really trying, but we’re not disregarding either, you know? Right. And it also ties in the enjoying the guitar playing and enjoying getting better.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:06 Yes.
Ad insertion 46:34
Eric Zimmer 00:46:34 I don’t know how you say this word. I’ve never heard it said. I’ve only seen it written. Sinologist. For somebody who studies ancient China. Do I have that?
Henry Shukman 00:46:41 Yes. I’ve heard it as sinologist.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:43 Sinologist? I’m not even going to pronounce his French name. Bellator is the last name he says. Woo way is a state of perfect knowledge of the reality of the situation, perfect, efficacious, and the realization of a perfect economy of energy. Now, I don’t love the word perfect in there because I don’t, I don’t. I don’t know that such a thing exists, but I love this like it’s, you know, the reality. You pick the most effective approach and the one that uses the least amount of energy.
Henry Shukman 00:47:17 that is beautiful. And I got to say that that went deep into Zen. That that. Yeah, that’s what you said. I’ve, I’ve actually never heard that puts a perfectly in that particular formula. Yeah. But it reminds me of a story of one Zen master who was woo men.
Henry Shukman 00:47:36 Woo men. Waka. He was he was he was asked there was a severe drought in a region of China, and he was invited to come. And what he was actually hired to come and help with this drought situation. And he was supposed to do what a sort of spiritual guy would do at that time, which was kind of chant, certain dance. Yeah, little dance, the rain dance, you know. And he instead he just sat there and the people who made him, you know, brought him all this way to help them, you know, said, what are you doing? You’re just sitting here. And he said, I’m busy not influencing anything. So that’s that’s exactly it. He’s he’s he doesn’t think he’s sort of just idly wasting his time. He’s not doing anything and that is his doing. So it’s also sort of woo way that’s deployment of perfect or minimum energy. Yeah. Total assessment of the situation in his mind anyway. He knows what he’s vibing into, let’s say, or something climatological or whatever.
Henry Shukman 00:48:49 And, It’s the most efficacious thing. It’s like. I don’t know. I know it sounds a little bit. Definitely weird and abstruse, but. But actually, I think he felt he was doing those three things at that time. The efficacy, the, the deployment of energy and the understanding, the knowledge of the situation. You know, it’s all right there just in his being, right?
Eric Zimmer 00:49:16 Yeah. I think there’s this other element of of Wu Wei in a, a more direct way of thinking about it, which is around recognizing that we often make things worse. Listeners have heard me joke before that if I was going to market what I do in its most honest form, it might simply be how to not make things worse, which I’m not sure is a good selling point or not. But when you realize our infinite capacity to make things worse, you actually go, oh, that’s actually kind of a big deal. and so I think of that as we also is recognizing that sometimes the action we’re going to take is going to make things worse.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:02 And in that way, this can be a way of of just holding that back a little bit.
Henry Shukman 00:50:07 Yes. That’s beautiful. I’m reminded of some of the recovery, you know, mottos and slogans like, I’ll never miss an opportunity to keep my mouth shut. And stay in my lane, you know. Yeah, I think I think that’s absolutely right very often. I mean, I tell you, this is one thing that was a big part of my early training in Zen, actually. I remember feeling like somehow, I mean, my life was a mess when I first got into this stuff. You know, I was really depressed, I was anxious, I was doing something that I was I was doing a PhD that was I didn’t want to be doing. And it was really sort of an enormous task. It was beyond me. And I also had really bad eczema that I’d had it right through my childhood, and it sort of came back and, you know, while I was at college and postgraduate and the moment I started meditating, I mean, almost to the day, you know, actually the first thing that happened was I slept a lot, an awful lot for a week, clearing off a kind of sleep debt.
Henry Shukman 00:51:12 but I could I could almost feel life subtly rearranging itself around me. That’s just because I was being still, you know, twice a day for a period of meditation. Gradually I started to see life more clearly. And I could see, man, this is not the right thing for me to be doing. You know, I need to get my emotionality under control and need to get more regulated. It just sort of subtle shifts compared to the obvious big elements in her life. They just started presenting themselves, either happening or needing to be brought about by me in generally in the way of just dialing things down, you know, and dining things back. And so that was a kind of discovery. I would never have named it. I mean, I did, you know, at that time I didn’t even know the term wu Wei. And even if somebody said, hey, you’re getting a little bit of familiarity with effortless effort, I said, what are you talking about? I don’t know what that means.
Henry Shukman 00:52:16 You know, but actually, I can see in reflection it was getting a little more open to that. It was it was coming to a place where it’s not so much the doing that sorts things out. It’s actually a reorientation, you know, Within that changes attitudes, that changes perspective. And then what? What one does then do is actually more efficacious and beneficial.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:51 Beautiful. Beautiful. We’re near the end of time. But what I’d love for you to do, for us now, is talk about effortless effort in the context of meditation. And maybe if you want to reference the way your app, but because I think this is another of those paradoxes that we sit with, like we show up at meditation for some kind of reason. We want to do our best with it. And as you as we’ve sort of explored, sometimes that grasping at the thing chases it away. So how can we apply this woo way to our meditation practice?
Henry Shukman 00:53:31 Yeah, thanks. It’s a great it’s a great question.
Henry Shukman 00:53:34 It’s kind of at the heart of what meditation might be all about, you know? So, I’ll speak a little bit to about the way, actually, because it’s very relevant here. You know, we, we, we were finding in our research before we built this app that of course, we know, you know, millions of people want to meditate, millions of people try. And whatever the number of millions is that have tried, it’s a much smaller number that actually stick with it in a consistent way. And one thing we also found was that a lot of people were finding that the meditation apps were overwhelming in their choice. Yeah, they have tons of micro courses you can do. And how do I know which one I’m supposed to do? You know, some of them have an introductory course and then they throw you, throw you out to find your way through a huge library of content at different teachers. Different. Yeah, different topics, you know, different courses and so on. So we said let’s just let’s just strip away any choice.
Henry Shukman 00:54:37 We’re just going to make it really easy. You don’t have to choose. We’re going to guide you. And the principle of that was kind of taking out the effort of choosing. Yeah. You’re just going to show up. You know, the effort is that you will show up. The effortless is you don’t have to choose. Yeah. And so it’s some you know. So there’s a top there’s a word here that I brought it up earlier I think that is relevant, which is that little piece of surrender. Yeah. That a little piece of trust. I mean, trust and surrender are almost two sides of a coin. You know, I say, okay, okay, okay.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:20 The thing it makes me think of is a phrase that I’ve always loved, which is that structure can liberate, structure liberates, right. That structure. We think of it as confining, but in many, many ways it’s liberating and I think that’s what your app offers. It’s the same thing I would get if I went on a if I go on a week long Zen retreat, a session, right.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:40 One of the things that is great about it for me is if when I to the extent that I can, I just relax into the form. I don’t have to decide anything. I just do that. You’re supposed to do this, then you do this, then you do this, then you do that. And I’m not saying that’s what I would want for my entire life to have all my choices made for me. But in certain areas, it’s a lovely thing to just have those choices make. And I think this is one of them.
Henry Shukman 00:56:09 Yes. Thank you. That’s that’s exactly right. I could totally, totally resonate with the sesshin experience, those Zen retreats where. Yeah, every minute basically, you know, you just surrender to it and it carries you if you just surrender. So this is a little bit like that in slow motion, stretched out by, you know, little activity day by day. It’s also, It’s also the, you know, that you can leave it to us, so to speak, to, to have set out a path that’s going to take you through all the primary things that you can.
Henry Shukman 00:56:45 You really it’s best to know and have some familiarity with and have some. Yeah. Skill with in a meditation training. You know, one of the things is that there’s a lot of a lot of these there’s a lot of different traditions and, and typically they’re strong in a certain area, those traditions, you know, but actually there are several key areas that I believe you need to practice in meditation, or at least have some awareness of and openness to in order to have it be maximally helpful in your life. And I’ve trained primarily for sure in Zen, but also in Theravada and and in modern mindfulness and and Transcendental meditation. Some advisor as well. So I kind of I, I feel that I’ve got a fairly well rounded grounding in the possibilities. And so we lead you through a sort of a program really that is introducing it a different concepts, different skills, different experiences. So you’re going to get, you know, by by by releasing into the program, you know, letting it take you, you know, you will be cultivating that ground we talked about at the start for sure.
Henry Shukman 00:58:05 And you’ll also be inviting certain openness to fertilization, you know, unexpected ways. And the woo way is letting that happen, you know, doing it, but you let it happen.
Eric Zimmer 00:58:18 Yep. And I think, you know, shows like the one you feed, provide a service to the world. Obviously, I love what I do, and I do it for a reason. and we make certain things more difficult. And one of the things that shows, like the one you feed in, the fact that there’s a lot of other ones just like it, is that you can be exposed to every spiritual, psychological, philosophical tradition under the sun. Lovely. Except when it comes to having a path to follow, in which case you can get very confused. I get myself confused. It’s why I years ago decided to to really focus in on Zen because I was just like, well, I’m going to do this. I could do that. Why should I do this? What I just lost. You know, and so having a path I think is enormously, enormously valuable.
Eric Zimmer 00:59:08 And your app does that. We’re at the end of our time for this session. We’re going to have another conversation. And in that conversation, I want to come back to the way, because despite having been meditating for 30 years, taken all kinds of meditation courses, I. a couple of weeks into your app had I was you said something that I had never heard said in this way and it opened a big door for me. So in the next conversation, we’re going to talk about what that door is. but for now, Henry, thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure.
Henry Shukman 00:59:44 Eric, I’m just thrilled. Delighted and honored to to get this time with you. Thank you so much.
Eric Zimmer 00:59:50 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. Share it 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.
Eric Zimmer 01:00:07 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.
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