Good Life Project - How to Feel Like You Belong in This World | Henry Shukman

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

In this thought-provoking episode, award-winning author Henry Shukman reveals the radical proposition of "Original Love" laid out in his book Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening. Discover how committed meditation practice can help dissolve your constructed sense of self, unveiling a profound interconnectedness where you feel inherently whole, loved and at peace with all of existence. Shukman provides an intriguing roadmap for directly experiencing your deepest nature of cosmic unity and lovingness.You can find Henry at: Website | Instagram | Henry's meditation app | Episode TranscriptIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Ellen Langer about mindfulness.Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the WheelVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 in 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, that's terrific. And I think the more well-regulated 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 to be learning how to downregulate from that, I think is a critical thing. 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 you're loved and at peace, or what my guest today calls original love? This is the radical proposition put forth by Henry Shookman 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, St. 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. But more importantly, he speaks from decades of dedicated, grounded, practical spiritual practice and firsthand 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 Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. 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. 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, 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. 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, 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. 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

actually of 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. And I agree with you. I think it you know, 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 the behavioral standpoint at any given moment in time, which is sort of where I've landed. of non-duality or oneness, you know, the experience of like, we're all participating 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 it is the strangest thing that you ever imagined and you completely

reject it outright. 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. 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 that you speak about often is this notion of mindfulness, which for sure has propagated through culture, you know, over the last probably 10, 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? Yeah, thanks. Great question. Okay, here's my take. The 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 reside in it.

And that's why it's very effective at dialing down an over-activated 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 and allows us to see what the stress response actually consists of, the sensations in the body, the racing in 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, I think is a critical thing. 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 argue negative emotions. 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 an evolutionary biologist, but I've read widely, or at least somewhat widely. And by the way, I've got to recommend this guy, Brian Hare, who's got a book called The Survival of the Friendliest. It's fantastic. 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, 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 5,000 years ago or something, somewhere between 7 and 3,000 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 that our aggressive urges need to be tamed? In a certain way, I'm not sure 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 their developed ways over the many thousands of years of providing those kinds of trainings where you stop feeling so separate you know there is some kind of a developmental leap to develop the separate sense of self that's great that's a developmental step from the infant starts doing that starts recognizing that 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 two or three and realize, oh, well, I'm here too as they are. And 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 kind of we don't discard the separate 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. 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. 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. And some people will be one of the other depending on what mood they're in, you know, or what's going on, how well or not well their life is going at any given moment in time. But yeah, 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. At least it's 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, 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? Yes. Thank you. I myself, if I listen to this later,

I might do a major whole body eye roll as well. I'm always 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 corn 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 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. They can just stop. And, you know, who are we when we're not thinking we're anyone? 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 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. 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.

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 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, 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, 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 say that it 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? 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 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. Oh my gosh, what was that? 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're saying, or maybe it's not another question, it's just in there, is like, what about my life?

What about my relationships? It's like, 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? 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, with 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 was deep in a literary life in those days. You know, my cognitive equipment and my ambition was important to me. I was writing articles for The Guardian on complex topics,

and I needed to think. 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 Jenrick Roshi, and 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 me needing to accomplish certain things and frightened of certain other things not happening. That loosened a lot. And everything seemed 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'd bought into, I don't know, I'm going off the deep end again. But in a sense, we'd bought into believing in something that wasn't actually what it appeared to be.

And still, everything happened 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, 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 wonderful, of course. And maybe they're wonderful precisely because they open us up to this dimension.

The veil gets a bit thinner. The light of original love shines through more 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. Yeah, part of what you're, especially the examples you gave, falling in love, having a baby, sometimes being with someone through the final moments, people often describe that as experiencing awe. falling in love, having a baby, sometimes being with someone through the final moments.

People often describe that as experiencing awe. And awe is, we've had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Keltner, who's done a lot of research on awe. 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 do with that? 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 breathe into it. And therein maybe lies the grace and the more expansive access to this quality of original love. Am I getting that even remotely right? That's beautiful. Right on, right on. And I would say part of its beauty is that 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 and other of my teachers is a is a tremendously successful businessman who is um high up in Mitsubishi securities, 30,000 employees under him. Now is the CEO of a large office furniture company in Tokyo with 3,000 employees under him. And he's the deep Zen master who trains other Zen 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, I want to say,

indiscriminate. It sort of applies everywhere because it always applies right here, right here now. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

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It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. 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 level of performance that you'll have. And maybe that's actually true, but it obfuscates the probably more, I don't want to say more true benefits, but just the notion of, but it's actually just an estate-based opening to something more expansive that becomes available to us over time as we say yes to these practices, that it sneaks in in little ways, but you have access to, as you describe, the veil fins 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 you're like oh oh more of that please

yes i think that's very well put in fact there's been some research into i remember reading about this uh maybe a decade or so ago actually about the wave of mindfulness coming into the corporate world and initially it seemed so good you know people's sort of stamina and motivation increased and they're having a sort of broader awareness of what they're up to and and being more effective and more productive that all seemed to go up and then the point came with some people where 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. You know, things happened that weren't on the original sales pitch. Memo from the CEOo mindfulness is now bad everyone stop immediately it is so interesting yeah the the way that it'll create over time shifts that we don't necessarily see coming or it's not the reason that we said yes to 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. I was 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's at this point in my life, anytime 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'm like, oh, I'm just more peaceful right now. Or I can see the light a little bit differently. Or 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 yeah 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 oh very very much i mean 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. No, that was me, for sure. Yeah, it was me too. In my early 20s, I was absolutely desperate, 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 i often hospitalized for it and agonizing itching and burning and 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. 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, getting out, I was in London at the time, just opening the door on a rainy morning. And instead of finding this familiarish 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.

In a sense, Zen often talks about not knowing as kind of a good thing, which is counterintuitive for a lot of us. But it's really, I think, a reference to exactly what you were saying about awe, that awe 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 talks 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 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 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.

So powerful when you think about it. It's, and yet so contrary to the way that most of us live, you know, and 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. And 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 unlockdownable and I can still function? 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. If you have 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. It really does just seethe and then amplify suffering. And yet we still quest after it. Yes, yes. I quite agree. Probably some of it comes out of our negativity bias, you know, that we're so wired to fire and wire with the negative stuff. I was just reflecting actually, as you were saying that about the,

well, and maybe this is a little 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 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 you said, or to pull away from the experience of uncertainty any way we can. And some of this kind of training that 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 got 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, the counterintuitive thing. Surrender, drop my resistance. What happens then? It could be that something beautiful happens, that actually my world gets bigger. You know, it could be that 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 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 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. 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 favorite music

blaring and shoulder to shoulder, and you're three hours into a dance floor. And if somebody looked down from one of the balconies over there, they could see you in your body, just having 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. 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. 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, ooh, people are looking at me. You just don't care, because you don't have that sense of almost individuality anymore. It's Emile Durkheim's collective effervescence. We all become part of this thing. 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. 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.

Exactly. Exactly. And I guess what my mission 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 no it's not right it's fully you're absolutely right you know i 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 the piano and writing and you and all these things that might bring on a deep absorption in any activity. But I think the dance one is a really good example 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. What I'm proposing is that anybody who already has a practice can have a really profound existential moment every day and won't necessarily happen every day. Of course, that's okay. Sometimes 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. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

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Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. Take me more into, you've used the phrase training a number of times in our conversation.

And I think we've referenced pieces of what you're talking about here. But just to sort of like make it a little bit more graspable. Yeah. 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 are entry points for somebody to start to explore these different things? Yeah. Well, actually, you know, along with the new book, we've also

created an app, which is precisely as 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 foundational one is mindfulness. Developing more capacity, more frequently to be with what's going on, you know, 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 easy to think of mindfulness as a sort of a thing I do. But I think we're really sort of doing it with everything. We don't live separately. Our bodies are made of all the elements, you know, the chemicals and everything that this whole world is made out of. You know, we're walking pieces of the earth with animation and all these complex systems that support our animacy,

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 and all of that is i think really important to open up to and find a sort of deeper life we're part of you know and thirdly i believe that finding flow states which we were just referencing is really man it's where it's at 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 is a wonderful thing.

And that can come in meditation as well. I regard meditative flow as something like falling in love with this moment. And then the fourth territory is awakening, where we're talking about 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 thatnalia, 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 all the guidance you need on your phone. Our app is called The Way, by the way, because it's a no-choice pathway. I'm curious about that choice to make it a no-choice pathway as well, because oftentimes

we're 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 the name of your technology is literally the way, not like the thousand potential way. Yes. Talk to me about this, this sort of like the narrowing of choice when so many of us are sort of like, we think we want the opposite of that. 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. I said, okay, I'm going to get the premium version.

I'm going to start paying. And suddenly she's 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 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 nephew, actually, Jack Shookman, who's a totally brilliant guy,

and we decided to, in a marketplace where there's already 3,000 or 5,000 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 do this, this way, you know. It is so interesting. Many years ago, I was 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 competence 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 through even this primary sequence. Yes. And you're not exploring all the different options and offshoots. And well, what if we throw this instead? And what if we 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. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's really the background to our app as well, is that my own training, as I've mentioned, 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, I'm going to use that word 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 various metaphors. There's like, if you dig lots of wells,

you might not get down to the water. At some point, you're going 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 learned 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. 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 as an experience, but also as a shift. 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 one, the years since, I kind of sampled a bit again. I kind of just like it. I'm interested. What other technologies are there out there?

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. Somehow, doors slide open. Possibilities present themselves to us in weird ways that my sort of rational science-seeking brain often can't understand. That makes so much sense to me. I've found the same thing. So the pathway that we've created is,

it's got some deep roots in Buddhism, of course. It draws on other things too. I like to think it's a very well-rounded, kind of integrated and sort of wholesome approach. 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. We tend to discount the importance of lineage. We strip it out. We're like, I just want choice. I don't care about the lineage, 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 well thought out and articulated over a season of generations and 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? 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. Indeed, indeed.

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 wising up, you know, generally speaking, and then 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. But I think we're getting wiser about it, I think. I do think we are. 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?

Finding the deep love within you and letting it guide you. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, say that 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, Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields, editing help by Alejandro Ramirez, Christopher Carter, Crafted Air Theme Music, and special thanks to Shelly Adele 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. We'll be right back. Tell me how to fly this thing. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.