We’re taught from a young age about the concept of “original sin” – the idea that we enter this world inherently flawed or wrongly constituted in some way. But what if the opposite is true? What if our most fundamental nature is one of lovingness, wholeness, and undeniable belonging? Even if we don’t feel that, about ourselves, or the world around us? And what if we could access that deep sense of belonging and connection to everything around us? On demand. What if we could feel a profound sense of unity, like you were loved and at peace, or what my guest today calls “original love.”
This is the radical proposition put forth by today’s guest, Henry Shukman in his new book Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening. Henry is the founder of the Original Love meditation program, former spiritual director at Mountain Cloud Zen Center, award-winning author, and co-founder of The Way meditation app.
Henry has an impressive background, with degrees from Cambridge and St Andrews, teaching experiences at places like Google, Harvard Business School, and Oxford Brookes University, and artistic works featured in renowned publications like the New Yorker and New York Times. But more importantly, he speaks from decades of dedicated spiritual practice and firsthand experience.
In our conversation, we talk about this concept of original love, then we start to get granular and talk about the “how.” How do we actually experience this? And Henry shares the critical elements of a path he calls The Way.
You can find Henry at: Website | Instagram | Henry’s meditation app | Episode Transcript
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Episode Transcript:
Henry Shukman: [00:00:00] I’m deeply convinced that the deepest nature of our reality that we are apparently wired to be able to experience, although it’s not automatic, is this one of a cosmic unity that is here right now? And I somehow think that is more real, actually, than our ordinary construction of self and world. What it really all hinges on is being open to understanding our sense of self in new ways. So if we get more practiced in meditation and maybe have a daily practice and start getting drawn into meditations that are designed to actually put the sense of self under the microscope, we start to see what is made up of.
Jonathan Fields: [00:00:53] So many folks were taught from a very young age about this concept of original sin. The idea that we enter this world inherently flawed or wrongly constituted in some way. But what if the opposite was actually true? What if our most fundamental nature is one of lovingness of wholeness and undeniable belonging? Even if we don’t feel that about ourselves or the world around us. And what if we could access that deep sense of belonging and connection to everything around us? Pretty much on demand? What if we could feel a profound sense of unity like your loved and at peace, or what my guest today calls original love? This is the radical proposition put forth by Henry Shukman in his new book, Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening. So Henry is the founder of the original Love Meditation program, former spiritual director at Mountain Cloud Zen Center. He’s also an award winning author and co-founder of the Way Meditation App, and he has degrees from Cambridge, Saint Andrews, teaching experiences at places like Google, Harvard Business School and Oxford, and artistic works featured in everywhere from The New Yorker and New York Times to elsewhere.
Jonathan Fields: [00:02:10] But more importantly, he speaks from decades of dedicated, grounded, practical spiritual practice and first hand experience. So in our conversation, we talk about this concept of original love. And then we start to get granular and we talk about the how how do we actually experience this? Because a lot of people would love to feel it. And Henry shares the critical elements of what he calls the way, the different pillars that allow us to start to step into and experience this state. So excited to share this conversation with you. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.. The name of your new book, Original Love. I think a lot of folks have probably heard the word original in a two word sentence, in a very different context. Very often it’s this phrase original sin. And regardless of what your faith, tradition, or belief system may be, I think a lot of people, they’re familiar with that phrase and may have very strong feelings about it as well. You introduced this phrase original love. Take me into what this concept is all about.
Henry Shukman: [00:03:23] Yeah, okay. Thank you so much for starting right there, because I think it’s the most important thing almost about our human lives. You know, I’ve had some training in different meditation methodologies, one of which was Zen, and that was a deep training for me. And in Zen, the understanding is that while we’re all leading our ordinary lives and interacting with one another and interacting with the things of the world and experiencing stuff just the way we do, at the same time, there’s kind of another side to everything, and that other side is a single sort of unity that somehow all things meet in this other side, which is always here, but we normally do not see it and then has various kind of labels for that other side. One of them is original face, and there’s a famous little Zen kind of parable or what they call a koan, which is a kind of inscrutable little phrase that can help us experience that other side of things. And it says, have you seen your own original face that you’ve had since before even your parents were born? So it’s rather a long phrase, but the question is inviting somehow a way of opening up to something that we don’t normally see, which has no time and perhaps has no space and has no name. But it’s yet very real. And in Zen as well, in many other traditions, actually a glimpse or an opening to something like that, a kind of vast, unbounded, boundless, unifying experience sometimes known as awakening, you know, is sort of a pivotal.
Henry Shukman: [00:05:28] It’s reviewed as a pivotal thing in a human life. So I have been blessed with the occasional glimpse of that other world, so to speak, which is always right here. It is, in fact, this very world just seen differently. And every time I’ve been, you know, granted a glimpse of it, it’s always come with a tremendous feeling of love, of a completely unconditional lovingness or belovedness and a sort of utter belonging. And I felt, yeah, they call it original face. Sometimes in other traditions it’s called original nature. I think it needs a warmer term, you know, original love. And yes, I know it could be seen as a kind of critique or riposte or something to the term original sin. But personally, I don’t like the idea of original sin. I think it’s a very toxic doctrine, and I think I’m not a person that I actually have a faith tradition. I didn’t grow up in one. My parents were university professors. They were atheists. I grew up in that milieu. You know, I feel a very deep spiritual, mystical, even life, without having a faith tradition. But I sense that the idea of original sin, of a kind of thoroughgoing wrongness that’s already in me somehow I think I’ve wrestled with that, actually. I think it’s in our culture, even if you’re not strictly in a faith tradition.
Jonathan Fields: [00:07:17] And I agree with you, I think it shows up in different ways, whether you use that phrase or not. You know, and I’ve had this conversation. I’m sure you’ve had it so many times in different ways as well, you know, are we fundamentally good or fundamentally bad? It’s also a bit of a false dichotomy, you know. Or are we neither, you know, are we an empty vessel which can tilt in either direction from a behavioral standpoint at any given moment in time, which is sort of where I’ve landed. But but I do agree, I do feel that there that people do tend to have strong feelings about this notion and that, you know, depending on where that feeling is, access to any notion of non-duality or oneness, you know, the experience of like we’re all participating in, in, in each other in some way is either completely natural to you and you couldn’t see things any other way. And there’s a lovingness to that. Or does the strangest thing that you ever imagined, and you completely reject it outright?
Henry Shukman: [00:08:15] Yeah, yeah. Well, I feel we’re at a remarkable time in human history when, you know, the exponential proliferation of mindfulness as a regular part of or at least an intermittent part of so many people’s lives, has actually done a lot, I think, to allow more and more people to be exposed to the idea that there could be some kind of presence, some kind of consciousness or awareness that is always here, that is vastly more connected and connective than we would ordinarily imagine to be possible. In other words, that I think the practice of mindfulness as it spreads is kind of softening us a bit, you know, along with all the other benefits and making it perhaps a little more acceptable to contemplate. There might be far deeper connectedness than we’ve commonly thought, and I’m sure there is, you know.
Jonathan Fields: [00:09:19] So draw a little bit more of a straight line for me here, because this is one of the sort of the opening conversations that you write about and you speak about often is this notion of mindfulness, which for sure has propagated through culture, you know, over the last probably ten, 20 years in a really powerful way. Mindfulness itself is, I think, for a lot of people, a confusing word, and for some people a loaded word. So when you use the word mindfulness, what are we talking about?
Henry Shukman: [00:09:48] Yeah, thanks. Great question. Okay, here’s my take that mindfulness is about contacting a kind of awareness we already have which is able to appreciate experience here and now in a kind and sort of non-judging and sort of allowing way. And that level of awareness is open equally to external experience, what we’re seeing and hearing and sensing in our bodies and tasting and touching, etc. and also to inward experience, meaning, thoughts and feelings and emotions essentially. And because the awareness of mindfulness is so open and non-judging, it can be very healing to contact it and time perhaps to, you know, reside in it. And that’s why it’s very effective at dialing down an overactivated nervous system. It’s an immediate kind of portal control panel for the nervous system. So it’s very healthy to turn on our mindful awareness. It sort of dials down stress response. It allows us to see what the stress response actually consists of, the sensations in the body, the racing and the mind, and physical tensions. There may be in certain musculature and just be aware of that without reacting to it. And as the nervous system dials down, if that happens on a regular basis, I call it better toned. We have a better toned nervous system. That’s terrific. And I think the more well-regulated nervous human nervous systems there are walking around on the planet, the better. Because, you know, we have this really dangerous wiring as well that can flash into aggression and ill will hate and violence very easily. And, you know, to be learning how to downregulate from that.
Jonathan Fields: [00:12:07] Mhm.
Henry Shukman: [00:12:08] I think it’s a critical thing.
Jonathan Fields: [00:12:10] I’m curious, you said, you know, we have this wiring that can flash into everything from anger to rage to all sorts of really powerful. And I would, I would argue negative emotions like if not negative towards other people, then simply being in those states affects us in a negative way. Is your sense then that because going back to the notion of original love is our natural state, then more original love, and there’s something that pulls us out of that and flashes us into these aberrant moments where that’s actually pulling us out of our natural state. And mindfulness is a tool or practice to help bring us back to this more grounded, open, loving, present state? Or is the underlying current more the opposite? And the practice of mindfulness is the thing that keeps that sort of like at bay or under control to a certain extent, so that we can continue to, quote, reach for more of the stillness, more of the experience of original love.
Henry Shukman: [00:13:14] Yeah, that’s a lovely question. Well, I’m not an evolutionary biologist, but I’ve read I’ve read widely in or at least somewhat widely in it. And by the way, I got to recommend this guy, Brian Hare, who’s got a book called The Survival of the Friendliest. It’s fantastic. It’s it’s all about the domestication of wolves and foxes into dogs. And then comparing that with self-domesticated species like bonobos and humans, you know, and versus chimpanzees. And it’s a strong recommendation there. But here’s one take on it. You know, the hunter-gatherer situation seems to have been built on caring and sharing. There was far less inequality in the way we lived until, you know, maybe 5000 years ago or something, somewhere in between 7 and 3000 years ago worldwide, that seems that there was a lot less inequality, and communities were built on caring and sharing. Does that mean that that’s our kind of default state? And then there’s these flashes into violence, or the are aggressive urges need to be tamed in a certain way. I’m not sure it it matters because I’m a believer in the fact that we need a training. Actually. Either way, I think we humans seem to have evolved in a way that we can do certain amount of, you know, developmental jumps in the normal way. Our culture sort of encourages. But there are further developments that need training, and it could be that some of the more indigenous, the wisdom of indigenous cultures, for example, were more aware of that. And they had built in there, developed ways over the many thousands of years of providing those kinds of trainings where you stop feeling so separate, you know, it’s some kind of a developmental leap to develop the separate sense of self.
Henry Shukman: [00:15:28] That’s great. That’s a developmental step from the infant starts doing that, starts recognizing that, oh yeah, there’s other people with their own intentions and their own wishes and so on. And then they kind of seem to turn that back on themselves, age 2 or 3 and realize, oh, well, I’m here too, as they are. And I, I also have my intentions and wishes and don’t like it when they get thwarted and so on. And then we live with that sense of self, but maybe in all the way. But actually there is another step we can take where we’re going to kind of we don’t discard the separate sense of self, actually, we don’t need to discard it. But we can also develop to a greater sense of belonging with all things. You know, how to really gauge what is most natural versus what needs to be developed. I don’t know for sure, but I’m convinced that we can all benefit from a well targeted training program. And mindfulness is one. And I’m also though, on the other hand, I’m deeply convinced that the deepest nature of our reality that we are apparently wired to be able to experience, although it’s not automatic. Is this one of a cosmic unity that is here right now? And I somehow think that is more real, actually, than our ordinary construction of self and world.
Jonathan Fields: [00:17:15] I’m curious, you know, if we take this notion of a cosmic unity, some listeners will hear that and say, ooh, this sounds juicy. Tell me more. Some listeners will hear that and there will be an immediate full-body eye roll in response to that.
Henry Shukman: [00:17:30] Yes, I know.
Jonathan Fields: [00:17:32] Um, and some people will be one or the other, depending on what mood they’re in, you know, or what’s, what’s going on, how well or not. Well, their life is going at any given moment in time. And I’m, you know, I think we probably all raise our hand for that at some point. So take me deeper into what this sense of cosmic unity like. Tell me more about, because I feel like this is a really ethereal concept to me. It’s this sort of like out there, how do we make a concept like this real so that somebody can say, I can wrap my head around this, and I’m so compelled by it that I kind of want to actually explore, well, you know, like, what does Henry mean by these other trainings or by actually exerting some level of effort so I can start to gain access to this in some way?
Henry Shukman: [00:18:16] Yeah. Yes. Thank you. I myself, if I listen to this later, I might do a cosmic. I’m a major whole-body eye roll as well. I’m always going in or going off the deep end too soon. But here’s a stab at it. You know what it really all hinges on is actually just being open to understanding our sense of self in new ways. We take our sense of being me and by me. You know, we pretty much mean some kind of core nugget inside me that nobody else has. And that is distinct from everything else. It’s my little portion of the universe that is in this body. I alone am this. And that’s okay. But if we start analyzing it and the prime sort of laboratory that we humans seem to have developed for studying that is meditation. So if we get more practiced in meditation and maybe have a daily practice and start getting drawn into meditations that are designed to actually put the sense of self under the microscope, we start to see what is made up of, and it’s made up of stories and narratives and threads of ideas, all of which are, of course, basically thoughts of one kind or another. Some people would add that there are certain very subtle muscular tensions that also come with the sense of me being me, but if we just stick with the thought part for now, actually, those thoughts, like all others, in fact, through training and again, I really mean meditative training can be interrupted.
Henry Shukman: [00:20:17] They can just stop. And, you know, who are we when we’re not thinking we’re anyone, you know? And not only that, but by becoming more aware of the role of thinking in generating the sense of self, we can start to realize that those thoughts weren’t actually referring to another thing called me. The way I thought they were, they were just thoughts arising now. And when I see that the kind of sense of a nugget, a core in the middle somewhere that’s me evaporates. It’s just not there. And we realize that it was never really there. Maybe I’m going too fast, but at that point, we really arrive in present moment experience without the sense of a thread of the past and a thread into the future that belongs to me. We’re just fully present without there being any future or understanding that any sense of the future is just another thought, any thought we might have about the past. A memory is also just a thought arising immediately now. So we land in the actual fabric of here and now, very sort of palpably and vividly. And when that happens and the sense of self is evaporated or gone or temporarily off the shelf, then there is no longer a filter saying I am separate. And that’s why the sense of a whole unified field, flow and flux and field being what this moment actually is, comes up.
Jonathan Fields: [00:22:30] Yeah. On the one hand, you know, I think the notion of it’s not even who am I without my thoughts, but is there an I without my thoughts? On the one hand, you know, you could look at that and say, well, that’s incredibly freeing. If I can literally if there is just this shared sense of beingness among all of us, like once the thoughts, you know, if you can suspend enough of those thoughts for long enough to experience the pause and then experience a sense of expansiveness that sounds, you know, where you’re not spinning about the past, fretting about the future, or deeply focused and stressing out about like, what’s in front of you at this current moment in time. If those were off the plate, I mean, it sounds it sounds I think a lot of people would say that sounds extraordinary. And at the same time, you wonder then, if my sense of self comes largely from the thoughts that I’m spinning about the past, future and present, what happens to my sense of self when those hit pause? You know, is it a blessed vacuum or is it a terrifying, you know, abyss?
Henry Shukman: [00:23:45] Yes. That’s a lovely thing. Well, an important thing to bring up. Look, as somebody who’s been sort of teaching in this field for nearly a decade and a half, it’s it occasionally happens. And I honestly feel it’s very rare that somebody does have a glimpse and is alarmed. And of course, when we work with it more closely, we see that actually in the moment of the glimpse, there was no alarm at all. It’s only immediately after when the sense of self has come back to evaluate and judge what happened there. Oh my gosh, what was that. You know. But and actually, in the absence of an ordinary sense of self, there can be no alarm, actually, because we’re finding this one great field of belonging. But there can for sure occasionally be alarm on reflection. Another question I think that was in what you were saying. Or maybe it’s not another question, it’s just in there is like, what about my life? You know, what about my relationships? It’s like.
Jonathan Fields: [00:25:02] What about me? What about like, I’ve built an entire existence around this thing I call, like, you know, capital M me? Yes, yes. I guess part of that question is also like, well, how’s that working for you?
Henry Shukman: [00:25:15] Right, right, exactly. I mean, for most of us, it’s frenetic and stressful. But I’d say I was worried about this when I was going through a certain phase of my Zen training, you know, uh, with, with a couple of marvelous teachers who I’m deeply grateful to. You know, I had a one particularly, um, you know, decisive sort of moment of really seeing the student. And it had a lasting impact. And there was a further, deeper one later. But in this particular case, I was like, yikes. I got a fellowship at Oxford Brookes University. I’ve got to be working. I’ve got to be thinking, I’ve got to, you know, I was deep in a literary life in those days. You know, my cognitive equipment and my ambition was important to me. I had to I was writing articles for the Guardian on complex topics, and I needed to think, you know. And I needed to sort of not just have my wits about me, but to have that sort of motivation for it all. And actually, one of my teachers said she’d been in Zen a long time, a very beautiful, peaceful, wise, highly articulate, intelligent person called Joan Rick Roshi. Actually, she just said, well, just watch. You’ll probably see that everything that needs to get done gets done. And actually, she was completely right. I used my brain that way when I needed to, and I didn’t have to fret about it. I had more time when I was kind of open, not so contracted around a sense of a me needing to accomplish certain things and frightened of certain other things not happening.
Henry Shukman: [00:27:01] That loosened a lot. And everything seemed to to take care of itself. And the irony is that this may sound, I don’t know, problematic, but actually, really, we’ve never actually had the self we thought we had to begin with and everything’s been functioning fine. We bought into, I don’t know, I’m going off the deep end again, but in a sense, we bought into believing something that wasn’t actually what it appeared to be. And still everything happened that needed to that we thought needed to happen. So actually, this is the weird part. We’re not actually changing anything. We’re only apparently changing something. We’re changing our, I guess you could say, our perspective. We’re changing the angle of light so that we see what’s going on more clearly. And, you know, also on that side of it, too, I think it’s probably the most beautiful thing, you know, having a baby falling in love. They’re they’re wonderful, of course. And maybe they’re wonderful precisely because they they open us up to this dimension. The veil gets a bit thinner. The light of original love shines through more. And when a birth happens, sometimes also when a death happens, the veil kind of gets thin. I used to work in hospice care and that was a common phenomenon. And it is very beautiful to find the freedom and the oneness of all things.
Jonathan Fields: [00:28:51] Part of what you’re, you know, especially the the examples you gave falling in love, having a baby, sometimes being with someone through the final moments. You know, there’s people often describe that as, as experiencing or and, or is, you know, we’ve had the opportunity to sit down with Dacher Keltner who’s done a lot of research on or and it is this experience of the model of the world as you knew it no longer exists. And there’s a sense of fragmentation, but also spaciousness that comes through it. And then part of that is what do you what do you do with that? Yes. And part of what I’m hearing you say is like, well, what if you just spent some time with it and didn’t try and actually immediately reassemble the pieces into a new model that was more concrete that you could then inhabit, but actually just breathed into it? And therein maybe lies the grace. And, you know, the more expansive access to this quality of original love. Am I getting that even remotely right? Yeah.
Henry Shukman: [00:29:49] That’s beautiful. Yeah. Right on, right on. And, you know, I would say part of his beauty is that it? It opens up our intentionality in such a way that we realize, sort of we don’t want to package this and make use of it. We don’t want to instrumentalize it. It teaches us, I mean, this is rather an odd way of putting it, but it’s as if it teaches us its own new way of being in the world. And it’s not like we become unworkable, unusable, useless, blissed out and non-functioning people. I mean, occasionally my wife accuses me of that, but but typically that’s not where this goes. And one of my, another of my teachers is a is a tremendously successful businessman who has, um, high, very high up in Mitsubishi Securities, 30,000 employees under him now is the CEO of a large office furniture company in Tokyo with 3000 employees under him. And he’s the deep Zen master who trains others and masters around the world. And so he’s living this sense of oneness in the boardroom, going over spreadsheets, doing all the things he has to do. It’s very, um, I want to say indiscriminate. It sort of applies everywhere because it always applies right here, right here, now.
Jonathan Fields: [00:31:18] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. It’s a really interesting point that you make as well. I feel like there has been a lot of packaging up of these practices in modern days. I think as they become more mainstream, one of the ways that we often see them proliferate is by saying, the more you do this, the better you’ll be at sales, the higher your level of performance that you’ll have. And maybe that’s actually true, but it obfuscates, you know, the probably more I don’t want to say more true benefits, but just, you know, the notion of but it’s actually just an estate-based opening to something more expansive that is becomes available to us over time. As we say yes to these practices. Um, that it sneaks in in little ways. But all this, you know, like you’re, you have access to as you described, you know, the veil thins between you and this experience of original love, of expansiveness, of kindness, of just spaciousness. But I feel like as human beings, we rarely say yes to investing effort to feel that because it doesn’t feel like we can touch that enough. But if you tell us there’s some tangible benefit to this thing, and maybe these are actually really health-based benefits that we really want, maybe it’s going to help lower your blood pressure, or maybe it’s going to help you do x, Y, and Z. And we’ll say, okay, I’ll invest in some time. I’ll invest 15 minutes a day in this thing. I’m going for that, not realizing that, sure, maybe that actually happens, but there’s something entirely differently that unfolds that once we taste it, even for a heartbeat, you’re like, ooh, ooh, more of that, please.
Henry Shukman: [00:33:15] Yes, I think that’s very well put. In fact, there’s been some research into I remember reading about this maybe a decade or so ago, actually, about the wave of mindfulness coming into the corporate world, and initially seemed so good. You know, people’s sort of stamina and motivation increased. And they’re they’re having a sort of broader awareness of what they’re up to and and being more effective and more productive that all seem to go up. And then the point came with some people were actually they started to question the values of the companies they were working for. And they found that in some cases, motivation started to actually shift and change, and people started to quit. And, you know, things happened that weren’t on the original sales pitch.
Jonathan Fields: [00:34:09] Memo from the CEO. Mindfulness is now bad.
Henry Shukman: [00:34:12] Yeah, exactly.
Jonathan Fields: [00:34:14] Everyone stop immediately. It is so interesting the way that it will create over time shifts that we don’t necessarily see coming, or it’s not the reason that we said yes to it. Yes, I have a daily mindfulness practice of over a dozen years at this point, and I came to it very much on my knees because I was going through something, really struggling with it that was consuming my mind. And this was a Hail Mary pass for me. You know, it’s like, hey, I’ve heard this can work. And over a period of months it did. In fact, it has allowed me to be with a source of suffering that at this point in my life, any time I look for it, it’s still there. But I experience it not as suffering anymore. It’s allowed me to really rewire my relationship with it, and it wasn’t until probably a few years after that that I started to realize that it was seeping in to the moments, to the relationships, to all these little ways where I was like, oh, I’m just more peaceful right now, or I can see the light a little bit differently, or I can like the sensation of my daughter’s hand in mine, is really landing in a way that I didn’t pay attention to before. And my sense is, for those who say yes to the practice for a very particular external outcome or goal, that I’ve come to the place where I think that’s fine. But often it’s the committed practice over a much longer period of time that starts to become the gateway to the state that you’re talking about. Have you seen that? Because I know with with so many of the students that you’ve been teaching.
Henry Shukman: [00:35:47] Are very, very much I mean, it’s quite common really. It was for me, too, that people come to the practice out of some kind of desperation. Not that you use that word.
Jonathan Fields: [00:35:59] No, that was me for sure.
Henry Shukman: [00:36:01] Right? Yeah, it was me too. In my early 20s, I was absolutely desperate. And. And I’m so glad that whatever twists and turns brought me to meditation. Of all the things you know, I’ve grown up with a very severe skin condition that I still had when I was 24, you know, really, really often hospitalized for it and agonizing itching and burning and, you know, really very difficult as well as other traumas in my childhood. And the practice of meditation was an initial hope, clutching at a straw that might bring some relief to that condition. Possibly, or more likely, just to the psychology that it generated, you know, and in fact, it helped with both the psychology that came with that condition and the condition itself. And then it started to do much more that it reignited a sense of an existential quest and curiosity that I’d had when I was much younger and started to. Yeah. I mean, open me up to the experience of being alive and the beauty of it in just the most ordinary ways, you know, go getting out. I was in, in London at the time, just opening the door on a rainy morning, and instead of finding this familiar British sort of despondency at the weather, because it rains a lot there, finding there’s a wonderful childlike beauty bubbling up at the beauty of a day of rain, the soft gray light and the the houses all looking kind of cozy. And the rain falling. Just tasting a softness. You know, that was so beautiful. Anyway. I think it’s absolutely right that we can’t actually know the well our deeper human possibilities that can be opened up by meditation.
Henry Shukman: [00:38:10] In a sense, it was then, you know, often talked about not knowing as kind of a good thing, you know, which is counterintuitive for a lot of us. But it’s really, I think, a reference to exactly what you were saying about all that all is arises in a moment when the way we construct reality, the way we understand things to be, is somehow insufficient. You know, something is going on that doesn’t fit. And yet we recognize it’s true. And therefore, if we know it, then it’s not quite that. It’s sort of outside our knowing. And I think Piaget, the child psychologist, had a very interesting way of looking at this. He talked about assimilation and accommodation as two processes by which a child learns. And assimilation is basically bringing in new information into an existing paradigm framework of understanding. And that’s great. And then along comes something that doesn’t fit with the with the framework. And that’s when accommodation happens, meaning that the existing framework has to break and a new one has to form that can accommodate the new information, the new experience. And personally, I think the beautiful thing is that that process can continue as adults, probably endlessly, that we can get surrender break open up to more and more new sort of vistas and understandings of this world we’re living in. And to me, that’s a wonderful thing to be open to. And again, I, you know, I think of this master of mine, Yamada Roshi, he’s doing all the above while having a very high-functioning, busy life in his 80s. Now, you know, in the highest levels of executive leadership.
Jonathan Fields: [00:40:15] So powerful when you think about it, it’s um, and yet so contrary to the way that most of us live, you know, and the we open our eyes in the morning and you know that whether we voice it or not so often the central question in our minds is, how do I make what comes next more certain? And then we keep striving for that and striving for it and striving for it, you know? And you know, the fundamental truth of the human condition is you can’t. And yet we want it so badly that we keep investing ourselves in it. And the more that we don’t get it, the more we suffer, and then the harder we try. Rather than saying, what if I actually trained in the art of being uncomfortable with the fact that life is unlocked downable and I can still function, you know, I can live in the question. I can just be in a space of curiosity about it. But we are so wired towards the opposite. And I think so much of our conditioning, especially early in life, is lock it down, lock it down, lock it down. Uncertainty is bad, and certainly in certain conditions it feels really bad. You know, if you have a, you know, like a medical condition and you’re going in for surgery or you don’t know if the treatment, you want as much certainty as possible. And I think it’s understandable how we have these inclinations. And yet for so many other elements of life, it’s really not a functional response like it really does just seed and then amplify suffering. And yet we still quest after it.
Henry Shukman: [00:41:46] Yes, yes. That’s uh, I quite agree. Probably some of it comes out of our negativity bias, you know, that we’re we’re so wired to wire and fire and wire with the negative stuff. I was just reflecting actually, as you were saying that about the well, that and maybe this is a little off slightly off track, but let’s just see that in a kind of surrendering to uncertainty. And uncertainty is a kind of as you said, it is a sort of fundamental in our life. It really is. We actually don’t know in the end when we’re going to die. Of course, occasionally there’s a diagnosis and we do get some idea, but even then it could happen sooner or later, you know, and somebody gets a diagnosis, somebody else gets run over the next day. You know, I mean, I don’t want to be morbid, but it uncertainty on that most fundamental level is so real. And yeah, our tendency is to do everything we can to lock it down exactly as he said, or to pull away from the experience of uncertainty any way we can. And some of this kind of training that I, you know, I brought up that term earlier is precisely around that. What happens if I loosen my resistance to uncertainty? Or perhaps another way of putting it would be if I just open up a little bit to the possibility of surrendering to fundamental uncertainties, if rather than just gotta push those guys away, like, well, what happens if I actually say, no, come in, you’re real, come in, you know? So do the opposite.
Henry Shukman: [00:43:43] The counterintuitive thing. Surrender. Drop my resistance. What happens then? It could be that something beautiful happens. Then actually, my world gets bigger, you know, it could be the. Somehow I feel I am embraced almost by this moment in a new way. And to me it makes perfect sense, really, because if I stop resisting, I stop reinforcing my sense of being a separate self. It’s a beautiful thing, actually, to be part of this or any moment. It’s a beautiful thing to realize the arising of this moment is kind of part of what I am. You you know? And yeah, it could be there’s even a sort of level where I’m kind of not here, and this is what’s happening, and it’s still so beautiful. But even shying from that a little bit, just, just this side of that, I’m here and this is here and we belong together, you know, and being. Yeah, sort of integrated somehow into the experience of this moment.
Jonathan Fields: [00:44:59] Yeah. I sense that many of us have actually experienced that in a different way. Take yourself back to your 22 years old. You’re in a club with your favourite music blaring and shoulder to shoulder, and you’re three hours into a dancefloor. And if somebody looked down from one of the balconies over there, they could see you in your body. You know, just having the time of your life with your friends, but you on the floor, you don’t exist in that moment. We’ve had our version of that experience. Maybe you’re at a music festival, whatever the access point is for you. You know, for me, it often is music where it’s surrounded by large numbers of people in immersive soundscape. There comes this moment where you’re just gone. Mhm. You are utterly absorbed into the energy of the moment. There’s no sense of self-regard. There’s no sense of being self-conscious like oh people are looking at me. You just don’t care because you don’t have that sense of almost individuality anymore. That is, you know, Emile Durkheim’s collective effervescence. We all become part of this thing. Yes. You know, and this almost like an organism lost in absorption and flow. And this is part of what you write about in the book. Right? This notion of when that happens, I think we’ve touched that in these ways that sometimes we don’t think we’ve touched it or we don’t realize, and we’re like, oh, that was one of those portal moments. That was one of those moments where the veil thinned.
Henry Shukman: [00:46:24] Exactly, exactly. And I guess what, you know, what my mission is to is to try to help, you know, as many people as are interested in it, to notice them more and sort of let them in and to let them maybe spread through life more. There’s something about finding this stuff when we’re just still and quiet. It allows it in even more. No, no, it’s not right. It’s fully you’re absolutely right. You know, I get I totally agree with you about the kinds of events that might bring that on. And of course, there’s also like mountain biking, running and painting and playing the violin and piano and and writing and, you know, all these things that might bring on a deep absorption in a, in, in any activity. But I think the dance one is a really good example because there’s, because there’s others there. And we’re sort of belonging to a collective much more. But you know, it can come on in quiet when I’m proposing is that anybody who already has a practice could, can have a really profound existential moment. Every day in won’t necessarily happen every day. Of course. That’s okay. Sometimes we, you know, we’re we’re just dealing with stuff. We’re overwhelmed. And we just sit and we let it be, let it quieten down a bit. And that’s what we get that day. That’s great. But it can be quite common that we just sit and we fall into the embrace of this moment. It’s quite feasible to have that become a regular element in life. And to me, that’s pretty profound indeed.
Jonathan Fields: [00:48:16] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Take me more into you’ve used the phrase training a number of times in our conversation. And, and I think we referenced pieces of what you’re talking about here. But just to sort of like make it a little bit more graspable.
Henry Shukman: [00:48:35] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:48:36] If somebody’s listening to this like, that sounds pretty cool. Sure. I’d like to experience that, you know, how do I step into this? What does the training look like? What do these practices look like? Take me a little bit more into what this looks like, and maybe what our entry points for somebody to start to explore these different things.
Henry Shukman: [00:48:56] Yeah. Well, actually, you know, along with the new book, we’ve also created an app which is precisely a step-by-step guided zero-choice pathway that is designed to step by step, take anybody through the different core components and key areas of meditative sort of skills acquisition or tools acquisition. A lot of which, from my point of view, actually is probably better viewed as different ways of letting go, different ways of releasing, different ways of allowing. But essentially, I believe there’s sort of four core areas that meditation and probably in general spiritual development. Look at the first and absolutely essential foundation. One is mindfulness, developing more capacity more frequently to be with what’s going on, you know, to to be in awareness of what’s going on with appreciation, with kindness, with lovingness, with self-love, self-care, cherishing gratitude, you know, and openness. Then there’s I think it’s really important, this actually connectedness because, you know, it’s easier to think of mindfulness as a sort of a thing I do. Right? But I think we’re really sort of doing it with everything. We don’t live separately. Our bodies are made of of all the elements, you know, the chemicals and everything that this, this whole world is made out of. You know, we’re we’re walking pieces of the earth with animation and all these complex systems that support our animacy. But but we’re part of it, you know. So I think just opening up to connectedness and so many different ways, all the networks of relationships, ancestry, our place in the natural world, all of that is, I think, really important to open up to and find a sort of deeper life we’re part of in a then thirdly, I believe that finding flow states, which we were just referencing is really man, it’s where it’s at.
Henry Shukman: [00:51:27] You know, my sense of self is quiet. Time can go quiet. It’s very fulfilling and enriching. And I think it’s really good for us. You know, I think it it’s good for us in the moment because it feels good and it’s good for us in general because it makes us happier to be tasting flow and it gives us more flexibility in life. And ah, it’s a wonderful thing. And that can come in meditation as well. I regard meditative flow as something like falling in love with this moment. Mm. And then the fourth territory is awakening, where we’re talking about, you know, the really seeing through being liberated from the sense of separateness, which is usually temporary and can become more consistent, can become at least more consistently available. I love the fact that all of that is available to all of us, and it doesn’t require anything special, doesn’t require any belief system. Actually, it doesn’t require any special paraphernalia, doesn’t require any complex institutions that have been around for hundreds or thousands of years. It’s actually just here and now, and you can get it. You can get all the guidance you need on your phone. Our app is called The Way, by the way, because it has it’s a no-choice pathway.
Jonathan Fields: [00:52:55] I’m curious about that choice to make it a no-choice pathway as well, because I oftentimes where you sort of say, oh, we want options. But you’ve been very intentional and said, okay, so we’re going to take those away because this is the name of, you know, your technology is literally the way not like, you know, the thousand potential ways.
Henry Shukman: [00:53:19] Yes.
Jonathan Fields: [00:53:20] Talk to me about this. This sort of like the the narrowing of choice when so many of us are sort of like, we, we, we think we want the opposite of that.
Henry Shukman: [00:53:27] Yeah. Partly it just came out of personal anecdotes. My sister, for example, you know, she got the free version of headspace and was loving it for three months and says, okay, I’m going to I’m going to get the premium version, I’m going to start paying. And suddenly she had, you know, 101 choices and actually didn’t know what to do and stop using it. And we found in our preliminary research that there was a significant number of people reporting decision fatigue, didn’t want to make choices, actually. And then I started thinking, well, I had been thinking for some time in the in the online trainings I’d been offering. Hey, there’s a logical sequence in which people could probably most profitably learn this stuff. And over the big sweep and in the finer grain stuff as well, there are logical sequences. So I started teaching in a kind of systematic way. I think, let’s experience this first. Then we can go to this piece and then this piece. We decided we being essentially my my nephew, actually Jack Shukman, who’s a totally brilliant guy. And um, we decided to in a marketplace where there’s already 3000 or 5000 meditation apps, let’s do what we really want to do, and let’s do what actually, he was finding really useful himself when I was kind of informally offering some advice and guidance to him. So, yeah, let’s let’s do this this way. You know, it.
Jonathan Fields: [00:55:06] Is so interesting. Many years ago, I was in, in the yoga world and, you know, there are so many different schools and flavors of yoga and approaches and thousands of different classes and mixed styles and hybrids and different teachers with their own vibe. And so it’s great when you find one that really works for you. One of the much more traditional approaches to learning the practice of yoga was called Mysore. Yes. And this is you work individually with a teacher in one very particular lineage, who is progressing you through a predefined set of postures and feeding them to you one at a time and helping you develop confidence with each one. And then you add one, and then you work the sequence, and then you add one, and then you work the sequence and you add one. And maybe it takes years before you get to even this primary sequence. Yes. And you’re not exploring all the different options. And you say, well, what if we throw this instead? And why don’t you throw this instead? And I think it harkens back to things like that where it’s like, okay, so I’m committed to a path, and I know that this path has been developed over thousands of years, and that there is something underneath it that ties it together, both in a very literal and physicalized way, but also it’s connected to something bigger. And it always has been. And my sense is that when you find something like that, you kind of don’t mess with it.
Henry Shukman: [00:56:37] Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s really the background to our app as well. Is that my own training, as I’ve mentioned, was the deepest part of it was in Zen, which was one I felt I didn’t really know it at the time. I had a vague hunch, but I felt that in a world where there were many mindfulness options, that actually there was something about our needs that were surrender again, about surrendering to one path that could take me beyond what I might think I wanted. In other words, my sense of the range of possibilities was limited by my own view. But a deep, ancient path would have found more. And it’s like there’s there’s various metaphors. There’s like, if you dig lots of wells, you might not get down to the water at some point. You’ve got to dig one, or in the end you need one ferry to take you across the river. You know, now, actually, I loved sampling early on. I went to lots of different centers and styles and learnt a lot. But then I dug in and it really did take me to somewhere that I vaguely sensed was a possibility. Though I didn’t know what it was, I could see that whatever it was, my teachers must have been through it because they were really much more at home in the world and at peace in the world than I was.
Henry Shukman: [00:58:20] I doubted, actually, that I would ever get there wherever there was, because I’d had so much psychological stuff, and I was just a kind of messed up guy. Basically, I thought, maybe I’m getting a bit better, but I’m not going to go through some real shift like they’ve been through. And I was wrong. I just stuck with this one practice and it did. Actually. It took me somewhere I couldn’t have imagined where in a way, somehow everything was resolved. It was quite, quite extraordinary from as an experience, but also as a shift, you know, it really was. I said in another book, One Blade of Grass, I said it had done the impossible, it had changed me, and it really had. But actually, in the aftermath of that, when the years since, I kind of sampled a bit again, I kind of just like it. I’m interested what other technologies out there out there, you know?
Jonathan Fields: [00:59:25] Yeah, I feel like also oftentimes when we choose a core path and we sort of we commit to it, that it has the effect of actually expanding optionality outside of that path in the domains that actually are outside of that all, you know, it somehow there’s you start to doors slide open. You know, possibilities present themselves to us. Yes. In weird ways that, you know, my sort of rational, science-seeking brain often can’t understand I.
Henry Shukman: [01:00:00] That makes so much sense to me. I’ve found the same thing. So the pathway that we’ve curated is it’s got some deep roots in Buddhism, of course, in a it draws on other things too. I like to think it’s a very well-rounded kind of integrated and sort of wholesome approach.
Jonathan Fields: [01:00:22] It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. I feel like, you know, the notion of inviting people to explore a path, and maybe it’s the path that you’re offering. Maybe somebody here has been exploring or thinking about something else. I think also just this notion of sometimes it makes sense to elevate the power of lineage to the same plane as the power of optionality. Early on, when you’re choosing a particular devotion, you know, we tend to discount the importance of lineage. We strip it out, you know, we’re like, I just want choice. I don’t care about the lineage, the the intelligence, the spiritual essence of something. And whether it’s the path that you’re describing, whether it’s something else that just resonates deeply with you, that’s, you know, well thought out and articulated over, you know, like a season of generations, generations. I think you may find something that resonates differently but is equally powerful for you. But just the invitation I feel like, is explore that and what might happen. Actually, if you spend some time dedicating yourself to something like that in the name of thinning the veil more regularly to that experience of original love, right?
Henry Shukman: [01:01:36] Yes, yes, it’s a really beautiful thing to, I guess, trust a lineage. And it’s a difficult thing these days when there’s so much we’re fortunately much more aware of toxic patriarchy and masculinity.
Jonathan Fields: [01:01:52] Indeed, indeed.
Henry Shukman: [01:01:53] And on the other hand, you know, if we can find a lineage that seems to be aware of that, that has matriarchs as well as patriarchs, for a start, and is, I suppose, in a sense, sensitive to the proper confines of its zone of influence. I’m just speaking a little bit now about like, the hazards of the spiritual realm, you know, where, you know that we’ve seen pretty terrible things happen in some cases, you know, and so there needs to be some I mean, I think we’re rising up, you know, generally speaking, I think we’re recognizing that there can be extremely helpful and very profound teachings and invitations that spiritual organizations can offer, and they can be kind of peer reviewed. They can be, you know, limited in the scope of their influence. In other words, they’re not if they’re trying to take over every aspect of your life, including your bank accounts, probably should be very cautious. But, you know, if it’s like come every couple of weeks for two hours, that’s not so hazardous. And we’re just going to train you in this terrain. So it’s kind of defined what the project is rather than just we’re going to swallow you into our, swallow you whole into our organization. That would be something to be wary of for sure, you know. But I think we’re getting wiser about it. I think, you know, I do think we are.
Jonathan Fields: [01:03:37] I think there’s a lot more light of day that has been sort of flooding into the space, and that’s a really good thing. So I always wrap these conversations coming full circle with the same question. And I’ll share that with you, which is if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?
Henry Shukman: [01:03:55] Finding the deep love within you and letting it guide you.
Jonathan Fields: [01:04:03] Mm. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you loved this episode, Safe bet, you’ll also love the conversation we had with Ellen Langer about mindfulness. You’ll find a link to Ellen’s episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project. in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did. Since you’re still listening here, would you do me a personal favor? A seven-second favor and share it? Maybe on social or by text or by email? Even just with one person? Just copy the link from the app you’re using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better. So we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen, then even invite them to talk about what you’ve both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.