Know Thyself - E185 - Henry Shukman: A Zen Master With 40 Years of Practice on Who You Really Are

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

Zen teacher and author Henry Shukman offers a clear and grounded introduction to the heart of Zen practice. We explore how awakening is not an escape from life, but a deeper participation in it — a realization that dissolves the illusion of separation and reveals a boundless field of awareness and love.Henry shares his own spontaneous awakening experience at 19, the profound insight that life is not divided between self and world, and the difficult healing journey that followed. From mindfulness and meditation to flow states, jhanas, koans, and the role of trauma in spiritual growth, this conversation maps out a path that integrates awakening with emotional healing.Download SAILY in your app store and use our code KNOWTHYSELF at checkout to get an exclusive 15% off your first purchase! For further details go to https://saily.com/knowthyself Go to https://thewayapp.com/knowthyself to begin your journey with 30 free meditation sessionsAndré's Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list___________00:00 Intro01:26 An Introduction to Zen13:10 The Premise of Original Love17:14 Training the Mind Like the Body20:54 Freedom From Identification With Thought27:50 What Are the Jhanas?32:50 Ad: Saily33:54 Tasting Awakening for Yourself45:17 Awakening vs Psychological Healing50:17 Awakening as an Ongoing Path54:54 The Distinct Path of Zen59:13 Koans as a Path to Insight1:13:53 The Enlightenment of the Mundane1:20:07 The Freedom of Emptiness1:26:16 The Necessity of Meditation Practice1:34:32 Sweeping the Yard (A Zen Poem)1:43:33 Beauty, Ethics, and Interconnection1:47:33 The Journey to a Whole Heart (A Poem on Heartbreak)2:02:58 Original Love in a Fragmented World___________Episode Resources: https://www.instagram.com/henryshukman/https://www.instagram.com/theway_app/https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

This life is a movie, and the purpose of life is to turn around and see the projector. So much of the modern mindfulness movement is focusing on mindfulness as a thing that I do. And it doesn't really point us to the total connectivity of our lives. It's not a path out of the world. It's a path deeply into the world. And I think this is a really important flavor of Zen. Now, I'm going to just, can I tell you a quick story? personal. When I began the path of meditative training nearly 40 years ago, I had no idea.

You don't need to have practiced in order to have realization or awakening. It's so easy for us to think it's down the road, but it can't be. There is only now. But also, I think it's really true. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. In other words, the pain of heartbreak can open the heart. When the heart is open, we're really alive. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today is an authorized teacher in the Sambo Zen lineage. She is a poet, a novelist, creator of the Way app, and an incredible voice in the space of Zen. Henry Shookman, thank you for being here.

It's great to be with you, Andre. Your voice has an incredible sound, especially for guided meditations. I am looking forward to having this episode be a solid introduction into the world. of Zen, which I think has become quite commercialized, that term. However catchy it is, has been put on many different packages as a branding for well-being. And I would love to dive deep with you today. So to start very simply, what is Zen? Yeah, that's a great question that Zen itself has been trying to answer for thousands of years, because the heart of it is unnameable. But at the same time, it's this very moment exactly as it is right now.

So Zen, in a slightly less obscure way of putting it, it's one of the many forms of Buddhism. It's a form of Buddhism that has got Taoism in it as well. And what that means in practical terms is that among the various kinds of Buddhism that there are Tibetan, you know, Theravada, Vipassaner, and so on, many, many forms of Buddhism, actually. Zen, I think it's fair to say, is the simplest. Simplest in the sense that there's very little kind of extraneous material. You don't have a lot of beliefs.

There aren't, you know, pantheons of bodhisattvas and Buddhas and sort of semi-divine and divine entities. it all comes down to the practice. That's really what Zen focuses on. And the practice is, number one, meditation as the growth point, as what allows us to grow as humans. And number two, life, ordinary, daily life, as a kind of extension of the meditation. And in a way, Zen almost doesn't really want to exist

And there is a view that when we really get Zen deeply, Zen kind of self-destructs. You know, like Mission Impossible tape. It vanishes. When we really get the message, what is trying to communicate, it's kind of not there anymore. The Zen part is not there anymore. So I don't know, that's probably rather obscure, but that's... No, that's direct. How would you articulate the goal of Zen and Zen practice?

What is the promise that it brings? Yeah, so I've got to acknowledge there are different kinds of Zen. Okay, so they're probably all answer that differently. Yeah. In the school that I've trained in, mostly, Samba Zen, they're fairly explicit about it. There's the hope, there's the possibility that we can go through a radical realization, where we discover that what we've been all along is not invalidated, but it's a small part of the overall picture.

that, you know, the sense of I being basically inhabiting this skin bag, this particular body, you know. Me too. Right, exactly. This is not what I am fundamentally. Yeah, I totally, you know, this body, mind, heart, this is what I think of as me. But at the same time, the sense of this body being separate from all else is an illusion. and it's actually possible for us humans, and many traditions recognize this, of course.

It's possible to recognize a much deeper self that is all-inclusive, that is timeless, that is spaceless, that is infinite, that has always been here, and is unnameable, actually. You can't, there is no word for it, but you can experience it. And Zen, as I've known it, trusts that all of us can recognize that.

And, you know, we call it awakening, some or realization, some or recognition, some might call it enlightenment, but I don't know, we're a little tentative with that word because it sounds quite grand. But we can recognize it, and it's often a turning point in a life to do so.

But that's really, in a way, stage one, because the next part is how do we live it? How do we manifest what we've realized in our daily life? And that's the, in a way that's more important, you know. So that would be a very headline, top line level of stating what it's all about for Zen. Yeah, we'll dive deeper into the iceberg that's under the water, so to speak. but for a bit more context in terms of the origination of Zen before it kind of bifurcated into many different disciplines

could you give us the spark notes of how it came from India to China to Japan and the many different forms it took was just like the overview of how it came to be yeah totally so there's history and there's a bit of mythology and they're really hard to tease apart but basically between about the So Buddhism develops, you know, in fourth or fifth century BCE in northern India with Shakyamuni Buddha and Sudata Gautama and his rigors and his training and his realization of the middle way and his coming to a profound awakening, becoming the Buddha, the awakened one.

And in Zen's view, the heart of what he realized got transmitted or transferred from India to China in about 500 or 527 officially they reckon in CE, you know, the common era. And it was this figure called Bodhi Dharma who is said to have sort of brought the practice of Zen Buddhism, which was called Dianna Buddhism. This is their view. It's really about meditation, meditation Buddhism. brought rather than lots of practices and liturgy and sutra studies, doctrinal study, just the core practice of sitting still as a human being.

That was brought from India to China. This is the Zen official biography kind of thing in around, yeah, 527 CE by Bodhi Dama. In China, Bodhi Dama, there's various adventures and epicentre. episodes in his life. But the fundamental one was that he sat for nine years on his own in a cave. And that was how he planted this Zen form of Buddhism in China. This is a call is all, you know, legend slash history, something. And out of Bodiedama's practice, you know, he had various disciples and they started to spread this form of Buddhism. There had already been Buddhism coming into China

and probably actually really Zen was the culmination of that process over several centuries but I think it emerged as a kind of distinctive expression of Buddhism probably around 600

which is founded on this real simplicity that you don't need a lot of beliefs you don't need doctrine in the end you don't even need scripture sutras. You just need to examine your own experience and you can come to know it in a new way. You can come to understand the relationship between me and the world in a radically different way

that relieves a lot of the pains of the human heart. You know, and it allows our hearts actually to grow exponentially and be much more open. And yeah, we will be concerned and motivated by compassion for the sufferings in this world. So it's not a kind of withdrawal. It's very much about a deeper engagement with the world coming out of the realization that we can have. Sorry, is that a, you know, actually I could carry on. I got it to China, but then it spreads.

You know, it spreads to Japan, it spreads to, Korea, it spreads to Vietnam. You know, there are other forms of Zen that exist to this day. This is not just the Japanese expression of it. You know, in China they called it Chan, actually. So, you know, it's, yeah. And like I said earlier, it's got a mix in it of Taoism, you know, which has perhaps more emphasis on, as a result of that mixture,

there's more emphasis on, say, artistic expression. One of the things that attracted me to Zen as a poet as a writer was that it has such a great, rich history of poetry, of landscape painting, of calligraphy, you know, and of tea ceremony. It's got these artistic expressions kind of woven into its history. And as a, you know, 20th, 21st century writer and poet, for me, that was like a natural kind of meeting, meeting ground that I found in Zen that I wouldn't have found so strongly in other kinds of practice.

Do you think that's by in part your sort of inherent resistance to authority and tradition, there's something beautiful about the directness of the path and how it doesn't require often parsing through a lot of dogmatic language or even tradition in times to just sit with the directness of the experience it's offering.

That is exactly right, yeah. And, you know, I'd had a, I mean, I grew up in a fairly convention-bound culture already in the UK, you know, back in the 60s and 7th, when I was a kid. England was still quite, I don't know, it was quite a kind of conformist convention-based kind of society

compared to, say, California or something at the same time. And I didn't need to adopt another one. I didn't want to go into another set of cultural trappings. I actually really wanted something that could meet, you know, my own experience directly. and wasn't exactly, as you say, it wasn't going to require kind of a whole slew of doctrinal study, which is really kind of adopting yet another culture.

I didn't really want that. I thought it, and Zen didn't offer that. It was just about meeting human experience directly, this very moment, coming back to it again and again, you know. I would love to fast forward. and jump straight into the heart of your work, your most recent book, original love, and the premise of what that is. Because I think that we have culturally programmed the opposite,

that we are fundamentally sinful creatures in the Western Abrahamic fates, at least the way they position it. So what is the proposition not only of the Zen tradition in which you share, but of so much of your work, about who we are? Yeah, yeah. I mean, what I've come to to find, you know, and is that, is that, you know, we've got our surface sense of self

that's trying to manage its existence in the world. Underneath that, we've got a kind of a deeper soul self that has a calling and that is kind of wired to grow and wants to grow and loves to grow and loves enriching experiences and loves love, and it's fearless, and that's beautiful. But deeper still, there's what is sometimes called original nature or fundamental nature.

And that's what I really mean by original love. It's a discovery that we're not separate. We're not separate from anything. There's a different order of experience. always right here, where, you know, at the same time we're exactly who we think we are, this body, this mindless heart, but we're also, yeah, boundless, timeless, infinite. And without size, without dimension, without history, without future, although history and future are allowed, you know, but fundamentally they're just happening now.

And in this kind of primordial present moment, because we're not separate in any way, because we're part of a great reality that is all-inclusive, it's like love. To find it is like discovering an ultimate belonging. And it just fills the human heart with relief and joy and love to know it. And it also can reorient us to lives of love. service and compassion, probably always imperfectly, but it can make that reorientation

happen. So, man, it's not just an original nature, it's an original love. That's what I feel. So, yeah, to bring that back to the notion of original sin, you know, I don't accept that that fundamentally, you know, we're wrong, defective. bad and that we've got to be redeemed from that. I actually just, I just don't believe that. I think maybe superficially we could use some help, you know, and certainly I have done and continue to actually, and I think this is an important point. But deep down what we are is already,

you know, an infinite, boundless, nameless reality, one of who's who's one of who's aspects is unconditional love. So that's a long answer, but that's really what I think it comes down to, an unconditional love that is in our deepest nature. And finding that is like, it's the journey of a lifetime. It's such an amazing thing to get to know that this isn't some thing I've achieved because of my arduous, you know, self-mortification or my rigorous spiritual practice, practice, it's always been here. It's not an accomplishment. Yeah. Welcome aboard via rail. Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and stretch.

Steep. Flip. Or that. And enjoy. Via rail, love the way. I think an amazing doorway into starting to glimpse that nature, our true nature for ourselves, which is the most important, instead of studying in a book, reading it, reading it, hearing it in a podcast, is first off to examine how scattered our minds are. And I think a lot of us understand the notion of bodies that are in shape, that are fit. You know, we have full industries, multi-billion dollar industries focused on getting people in shape from the gyms to the wellness institutions, and we get that. But the mind, because it's more invisible in nature,

we don't understand that it needs the same level of attention, especially this day and age, maybe even more so. They're fundamentally connected. But what is the connection there you think between working with the mind, our identification with our thoughts, and then deeper on the path getting to glimpse our true, original nature. But start us a bit earlier on the journey. Most of us feel really swayed and identified with this voice in our head. Yeah, it's so true. Yeah. Well, I think, you know,

in my book, Original Love, actually, I parse out these four main areas of development that we can go through in our spiritual lives. And of course, this could be sliced and diced many ways. I totally acknowledge that. But I think these four, I call them inns like refuges, I think they are a reasonable way of looking at it. And the first is mindfulness. And mindfulness means becoming aware of what's actually going on around me and within me. And most of us and myself totally included, you know, when I began the path of meditative training, you know, nearly 40 years ago, I had no idea that I was actually listening to a voice in my head so much of my waking hours. And it was not a very friendly, kind, supportive, helpful voice.

It was doing a lot of, like, you've got to do this, you fail at that, you're no good, you know, and this is awful. And all that kind of, you know, disturbing language was going on. And even when it wasn't disturbing, it was still. still chattering away, commenting and, you know, a running commentary. To become aware of that is a big shift because the moment we notice, oh, I'm aware, here I am aware, and there's this voice that's already created a little bit of a gap between me and the voice, whereas previously, just exactly as he said, Andre, I've been totally identified with it.

Somehow this voice is me being me. Well, it's not. It's thought arising in a verbal form, which happens a lot for a lot of the time, for a lot of people. So becoming mindful allows us to be aware of that voice and to have a little break from it, gap from it, distance from it, and space around it. And we start to find that we can actually inhabit that space,

rather than the voice. It's a great relief. I think such a liberating aspect of that is when you start to have some distance between you and your thoughts and emotions, you feel more free in your life. And so much of what we thought we were going to externally gain and would be the cause of our freedom externally, whatever sort of arrangements, career, relationships, what not,

we can approach those things less under the illusion they're going to provide us the solace we won't thought they would. And so let's keep going down these ends. So what would be the next in, so to speak? Yeah. Yeah. Can I just add something to that? No. It's like we get so locked into this world before us and we're so preoccupied with it. And then when we stop doing something, we get preoccupied with the cloud of thoughts that come up. So it's finding that actually we can let go a little bit. We can put down the tasks. We can put down the thoughts. And there's this great space. So that's right on. Okay. Second in is, yeah, it's about really I needed to state this. It's about support and

connection. And I needed to state it because so much of the modern mindfulness movement is focusing on mindfulness as a thing that I do. It's just for me and it's just my own soul responsibility. And it doesn't really point us to the total connectivity of our lives, that we're already in a great field of connections and of support. You know, look at a human body, all the factors that have to come together for a human being to exist. All of that is a form of support and infinite connection, allowing us just to exist.

Then, you know, we've all got families. We may have varying relationships with them, but we are part of a family. We're also part of the whole human family. We're also, you know, nourished every minute by breath, by the food we take in, by the water we drink. Yeah, and the air we breathe and, you know, we stand on, all of that and the warmth that we need, constantly every moment of our lives, we're actually bearing the fruit of so much support. We're expressing so much support that is making us exist. So to be acknowledging that seemed to be really important. So mindfulness too is not an isolated solo pursuit. It's not like me just going to the gym and doing reps, you know, It's actually helping me recognize that I'm part of infinite networks and that I'm not alone.

And that's why in the old traditional Buddhist view, yeah, there was practice. Doing your practice is critical. But so was community, what they call Sangha. It's the third refuge. And there's places where the Buddha said, he was asked, is Sangha, like, I've heard. heard you say, Buddha, somebody said to him, Ananda said to him one of his disciples, I've heard you say that Sangha is half of the holy life. Would you agree with that? No, Sanga is the whole of the holy life. It's all about community and connection.

So for us to just remember that, that's why the second inn is in. And that is in my scheme and my book original love. And also, by the way, on the app, we work through these inns, we call them zones in the app in the same way. But let me just say that that is not only in the visible and kind of material level of connections we have with friends and guides and coaches and whatever, therapists, whatever we might have, you know, teachers, mentors, it's also in a kind of less tangible form, well, I believe, which some call the archetypal realm.

You know, shamanism can take us to it, dream work can take us to it. Meditation actually can open us up to more receptivity to a kind of archetypal, imaginable realm, or some call it, which is a little bit like Jung's collective unconscious, where there's levels of connectivity that we don't see, but we're truly part of. and I think that's really important. I feel it's like soul work, recognizing a deeper part of ourselves that has, as I said earlier,

has its calling in this world, in this life and wants to grow and, you know, this art comes from it and self-expression of different kinds. You know, I think that's a really important side of our spiritual lives. And we don't want to get too sterile, like kind of,

slightly dry mindfulness, you know, just, no, it's a rich thing, you know. So that would be the second in. Yeah. Amazing. We'll keep riding the train. What's the third stop? Yeah, the third stop is like, it's actually, it's what Buddhism calls samadhi or sometimes translated concentration. I don't think that's a good translation myself. It's more like absorption. And it's when we get into flow states, basically. It could be flow states from activities, but it can also be if we're, if we have a practice of meditation,

in meditation you can drop into these really beautiful flow-like states where, you know, and even novice meditators will know this, where, you know, we're being, we're used to finding it a bit of a grind, kind of hard, and what am I supposed to do, follow my breath, I can't do that, be aware of the present moment, oh, no, I'm just lost in thought.

But then we'll suddenly get these moments when we don't exactly know how or why, but suddenly we're clear, we're calm, experiences very rich and beautiful. And it's like we're effortlessly doing the practice. It's suddenly, oh my gosh, this is what it's all about. I never knew I could find this clear, free, easy awareness that's really attentive. That's samadhi, that's flow states in meditation, and it's beautiful. What are Janas? So how does that go in here?

Yeah, they fall into this category. Janice states are these, it's a set of slightly different flavors of, of absorption that you can learn to bring on in meditation. There are some subtle kind of slightly technical methods for getting into Janus states, which are progressively more refined and powerful states of absorption. Would you rank them, I suppose, it's futile to, but on levels of deepness or profoundness of experience,

I'm curious to hear your, maybe it relates to your own, personal experience in altered states, but what are a sample platter of these different states one might find themselves in as they do this work? Yeah, well, you know, I've got to say right off the bat that I believe these are real natural human states. They're not like... Altered in the sense, yeah. Yeah, in a way they're not. They're built into us, I think, to be able to drop into them. I had them as a kid. I found out later when I did some Jana training. I said, oh my gosh, this used to happen to me. I had very severe eczema as a kid right through my childhood, chronic and severe,

and I was sometimes hospitalized for it, and, you know, like skin problem. And it was very, very difficult to live with, actually. It was, you know, the itch, the pain, the burning, it was very, very difficult. But at times, usually when I was in bed at night and couldn't go to sleep because of the itching, I would suddenly find myself in this different state where it felt like I was kind of held in this sort of glowing cloud or something like that and that all the pain and all the itching would have stopped. And it was beautiful and very, very peaceful.

And when I first did Jana training, many, many years later, and suddenly the gear shifted and I was in this beautiful, glowing, peaceful state with this sort of rippling field of energy all through me. And when I described it to the trainer I was working with, the meditation teacher I was working with, I said, oh, hey, this thing happened that used to happen to me as a kid. It's so beautiful. And he said, oh yeah, that's first Jana and second Jana. And so that's how I.

I knew that these aren't artificial or something. They're real deep in us. Just a note on that, I think it's really, it's an important point that these actually aren't altered states. They are from the perspective of an identified conventional self, but from the perspective of our true self, these are natural states, and actually the identification with her ego and thoughts

is actually the altered state. That's beautifully put. Thank you. Exactly. Right on. And, you know, they can get more refined. So the third, Janers, it's all about this joy and well-being. It's very peaceful.

It's forced Janer. You know, you're in equanimity, and it's all pervasive. And then you get, those are the first four, and then there's another set of four that are considered the formless Janers, because one is about boundless space, one is about boundless mind. And they get emptier and more refined as he go. Could we dive into one? So boundless mind or boundless space. Yeah. From the subjective intrinsic experience of that, what is that experience like?

How would you describe that? Yeah, it's very beautiful. Boundless space. There's a sense that, you know, you can feel that from your heart outward, there's just one space and it has no limit. And it's a very, the heart is always engaged, actually, because it's so big. beautiful and you feel it's all everything's encompassed in one great space you know and and and then boundless mind is everything's encompassed in one consciousness it's also very it's sort of moving i find i i almost get a little tearful in them because they're so beautiful and it's amazing to me

that so much peace and joy and love could come with so little Like, it's not because you're in a, you know, much as I love a fabulous home, it's not because you're in one. You could be sitting in a hut and find this. You could be, you know, virtually penniless, and you could find such deep contentment in your very own being. I find that so beautiful. Hey there, quick share.

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It also has built-in cybersecurity features, things like web protection and malicious ad blocking, so you're not just connected, you're protected. If you want to check it out, go to the link in the description and try Saly for your next trip. To do so, you can download Saly in the app store or by scanning the QR code on screen. Use code know they self at checkout to save 15% off your first purchase. The details are in the description. I hope you enjoy back to the show. Yeah, we just had one of the, like, one of the most prolific,

Vita Vedanta teachers on Swarmi, Sabra Prananda, and he was sharing about, there's this great non-dual book called I Am That. That book is actually in my loo. I read it every day. Oh, amazing, yeah. Srinasarata Maharaj. And he had this experience where he went off to the Himalayas and had this enlightening experience and realized he doesn't need to be up

there, he'd go back into the slums, which is, you know, stricken with poverty and actually there's nothing wrong with it and live the rest of his life in that place, in that state. And the deepening of these genres and having it more be imbibed in your day-to-day experience, home is in a place that you try to seek externally. It becomes more and more the place in the presence you are wherever you go. And I think the most important thing on the spiritual path is to actual have a taste of this. Not just reading the menu, but having the meal. It's like in the intrinsic experience of this, where it becomes self-evident, maybe

you're looking at a view, you're out looking at the horizon, and suddenly this experience of someone perceiving something outside of yourself dissolves and it just becomes one thing, which I know you've had, obviously, I'm sure many, but earlier on as well with a sunset experience. Yes. Yes. Well, look, we're jumping ahead a tiny bit. Now, because in my view, these JANA states aren't quite the same as realization, which is the fourth in. But I need to get to the fourth in to explain why.

We'll keep on going then. Should we do that? Yeah, so the formless Jannas. The formless Jannas are getting, that's as close as you can get to realization or awakening. without awakening. Okay, that's Henry's view. And it's pretty consistent with a lot of Buddhist views as well. It's a little complex because the word samadhi has got different meanings.

In the Vedic world, there are at least three levels of samadhi, and only the first one is the Buddhist view of samadhi, where samadhi is, you haven't yet realized, you haven't yet had realization, but you're in a very deep, beautiful state. And whereas in the Vedic view, yeah, there's the two other forms of samadhi are the same as realization. So the terminology gets a little tricky.

And it also gets tricky because these are all very refined states of mind anyway. But here's the thing. In the four thing, there's a decisive thing that happens, which you don't need to have happened for the Janna states. You've seen through your sense of self. It's not just that the sense of self has gone quiet,

which it definitely does in Janna, but you've seen through it. You've seen that it was actually never here the way you thought to begin with. And this can happen, this can happen in different ways. I mean, the first thing actually I've got to say about realization is it's actually not contingent

on practice, which is a pretty radical thing. You don't need to have practiced in order to have realization or awakening. You don't, even you can practice a lot and not have realization slash awakening. It's a different order. Now, I'm going to just, can I tell you a quick story, personal? Again, no. Yeah, let her rip. You know, when I was 19, before I'd done any practice at all,

I had a moment of quite significant realization, awakening, that landed on me. And I had no idea what it was, except that it was the truth. It was the truth of my life. And I was, yeah, I was standing on a beach watching the sun go down. And I was looking at the light on the water. and I noticed that it wasn't just one brightness. It was like pieces of brightness, scales of brightness on the water, moving over this totally black surface of the water,

bright and black, and I couldn't, is it bright, is it dark, I couldn't, just trying to figure it out. And all of a sudden, me and what I was looking at stopped being two things. there was only one world, one reality. And both the water and any sense of Henry were both that reality. So the distinction had gone. And actually I dropped right in then to this unbounded, empty substance. There was no substance.

That was what the universe was made of. And I knew to the bottom of my being, all through my bones, that I was made of the universe, and I was not separate from it, and never had been and never could be, never could be, because we were one thing that was not really a thing. But it was absolutely one. And I sort of emerged from that, you know, realized there was a person standing on a beach again.

and and then I was just enveloped by the sense of all of this, this whole life, this whole world, all of us, it's a dream, a most beautiful, sublime dream, and it's all made of love, like an immemorial love, just enveloped everything. And, you know, it was, it was, I knew it was real. And I was so blown away by it that I felt I had fulfilled my life. That whatever the purpose of this life had been,

which to be honest I'd never thought about really before. I'd never really thought, what's my purpose? I'd just been following what I was told, studying and sports, gymnastics I did, whatever, you know. But in this moment, suddenly it just was like a wave of love just enveloped me right after that experience, you know, and it was like, I've had a purpose in this life. It was to realize exactly what I've just realized. And actually, years later, I heard Yogananda saying,

in an old documentary, you know, this life is a movie. It's a motion picture. And the purpose of life is to turn around and see the projector. And when I heard that, I thought, oh my gosh, that's so beautifully put. That's exactly how I felt when I was 19 and this thing happened. But, you know, what I really want to say is really important here. for me is that actually my life didn't end then. I could have died happily that night, knowing my life was fulfilled.

But it didn't end. And a few weeks later, I went back home. I'd been far away from home when this happened. I went back home, and it was when I went home that actually I got overwhelmed by the unacknowledged trauma of my childhood, which I had put a lot of effort into suppressing. I'd evolved these adaptive personalities, sub-personalities, parts, so that I could deal with the very difficult aspects of my childhood,

traumatic, complex childhood trauma that I grew up with. But I'd managed to kind of avoid feeling it because it was too much through my childhood with adaptations. when I went home at 19, after this experience, all those adaptive strategies had been ripped away. I was wide open, which was very beautiful. I was so open and full of love and very aware of suffering in the streets when around me. I was in South America at the time and so on. As soon as I got home, literally almost walked through the door of my father's house.

actually an hour later I was just overwhelmed by these terrible memories and emotions in my body of my childhood that I had not been able to feel as a kid had avoided

suppressed, buried but the awakening opened me so I could feel them but at that time I had no resource and I didn't want to feel them. I thought it was a catastrophe

that I could be feeling these terrible things and I thought I'd lost that marvelous awakening and I went into despair. And I think this is, I really feel this is a crucial part of this whole process

that we humans can go through of awakening. It's also healing. It's always I think going to be both, awakening and healing. because for me, I was a very reluctant sort of client, patient, needer of healing. I didn't want to know about it, even then at 19. And it took me, well, several years, three years, four years of being really unhappy,

drinking, you know, university and kind of dragging myself through life, gradually finding a little more joy with music. actually I was a musician and writing again and you know but then I found meditation and almost as soon as I started meditating I realized man I'm unhappy you know and I started therapy and I started dealing with all the trauma in my childhood and you know it's been a kind of twin journey of awakening and healing how to live more consistently and get actually even more deeply into whatever that was that I opened up to, but also be dealing with this suffering, troubled, traumatized human being. And I think the mercy of this path is that it doesn't leave either behind.

I think a lot of us are under this assumption that these two things are fused, that like the spiritual or contemplative work will solve the parts work, the healing work, the growing up. And I think they are intrinsically linked, very complimentary, but not the same. And, you know, it's something we talk about quite a bit because I think it's really important to have a holistic understanding of what awakening means, right? And under just the meditative, contemplative lens, we can wake up beyond the idea of being identified with our thoughts and emotions. We can have these more formless, jauna state experiences.

and it doesn't fix the, in some ways it can make it even harder to take seriously, these like characterological stuff. I think it makes it easier to work with because we're less reactive to them. In your case, it made space for that to come to the surface, right? Yes. But any other thoughts you have there on the importance between the two and how they're both essential, but they don't necessarily solve one another? Yeah. I think it's really important to state like you, because I think, you know, in a therapeutic context, I've never been in a therapeutic context that really deeply understood awakening.

But they didn't really know that they didn't really understand it. And I've also been in meditative, contemplative context that didn't really understand trauma and thought that they were the first. fix for everything. So I love this. There's in early Chinese Buddhism from the 6th century, there's a document that talks about the path of practice as a cart track, not a path. You know, we talk about like, often talk about like spiritual paths, it's the path up the mountain or something. But this, this idea, the cart track, says, no, it's not a path. It's a track. It's a track, meaning there are two wheel tracks. And it says the first wheel track is the foundations of mindfulness. And by that it means this early Buddhist training, you gradually develop your mindfulness.

And it expands. It gets deeper and deeper. You get into Janus. Maybe you get realization. But it's a gradual cultivation of the human mind, body, heart system. the second wheel track running parallel to it all along just like a cart track is awakening so rather than it being a journey to the mountain up the mountain awakenings alongside all the way which i think is accurate it's also because it's always here and it also it's not affected by in a certain way it's not affected by the practice the gradual cultivation and development that we we probably all need to to some degree, which is a beautiful thing as well. But what happens is that the more we're working on the gradual developmental side, the more open

we become to maybe having glimpses of the awakening side, the more we might glimpse the awakening side, the more space there is to work with the gradual, I call it, healing side. And somehow I think this is a really helpful. metaphor. It's not a single journey to the destination. In a certain way, all the old traditions are right, the destinations here all along. But to actually glimpse it and integrate it, we probably need to do all this gradual work basically on ourselves and on our relationships and on our trauma, on our history, on our collective trauma, and our ancestral trauma, let alone, of course, personal trauma. And so I feel that coming back to purpose, you know, I feel in some way,

purpose of my life anyway has been to clarify the deepest level of who I really am, but also to work through all the things that I would think of as obstacles to that, because they're part of the path. They're not obstacles. They're the meat of the path. They're the they're the nourishment of the path is all a trauma yes my personal trauma but also collective but and now also in a certain point in my path it became i was called i was asked actually by my teachers to start sharing and teaching myself so it's also been part of my path to be sharing this you know to the best of my ability and in full humility because i'm still a student as well yeah no it's great it's easy to simplify awakening to a bumper sticker you know but in many ways it's been

said the matured intellect is the capacities to hold paradox conflicting ideas um and what i love the way that you phrased what you just shared is that it's like awakening is the path that is the two tracks it it is the process instead of this one place you'll get to one day yeah it's always here it's it's all inclusive. Your purpose isn't some day when or just in relation to the world, but it is your being, your presence.

And I think that when you shared your sunset story, that moment of insight and awakening, like that level of fulfillment, that ontological experience of completeness, of wholeness, of undividedness, you could say is integrity also. Yes. The root of integrity being integritas,

you know, the undivided whole, sense within. And I think so much of our endeavors and life are in pursuit of that, whether or not we articulate it. Yes. And so I love that we acknowledge that because the reality is it's so easy to hear this on a podcast, read it in a book, go back into our life under the presumption that things aren't the way they should be. I think this insight equips us to meet life fully and the inevitable challenges and health issues and societal troubles and suffering and some sorrow with an open heart and actually more capacity to be an effective agent of change in the world. Yeah, I totally agree. And I found on my own journey that how I show up as hopefully

an effective agent of change, that's changed. That itself has changed. I mean, for example, for 10 years, I was just, you know, hardcore running a Zen Center in Santa Fe, Mounted Cloud Zen Center. I thought I'd be doing that until I died. But COVID came. The center shuttered. Right around then, I had a head injury, which really affected my cognitive capacity, actually. I also had a very difficult, you know, situation with somebody who's very dear to me getting into a very, very, very challenging, long-term, life-threatening, difficulties. situation, which was heartbreaking. And all of these, they all happened at the same time. And I

had to change how I was teaching. And that's where I came up with this terminology, original love, and that map of practice, which, of course, it comes out of the traditions, but it was a slight simplification and reforming of the view. And I couldn't, um, I couldn't, um, I was much less, I just had to live from my heart. I couldn't live from my head anymore because it had had a blow struck to it. And my heart had had a blow struck to it. I just had to get into my heartbreak and live from my open heart. And that's what I aspire to be doing.

You know, really, I aspire to do it all the time. Yeah. You know, I have my moments, but I have moments both ways, you know, doing it better and worse, you know. But, you know, that wasn't what I was doing for 10 years of teaching. Kind of some of it was there, because I'd been through quite a deep other realization experience in the course of my Zen training, which was different from that beach moment. I had a number of, yeah, a number of significant milestone moments, but one of them blew everything away. It was just everything, everything just totally gone.

And thereafter, every moment, being a new world arising, arising, arising, you know. And that was very heartfeltful as well. And that's why I was asked to become a Zen teacher, actually, really, because this was a real shift. I really knocked away a lot of my neurotic trouble was actually really blown away by that. and I thought that was it till I die but I was wrong because then the COVID stuff and the head injury and the heart blow

it took me to another place again which is living from my heart fully or aspiring to as I said so there are innumerable paths to come to that realization I'm curious as somebody who is one of the few teachers authorized in your lineage out here in the West

and who understands through that lens more than most people I'm curious how do you articulate what distinguishes Zen as a path what is like what's truly its flavor comparatively as there are so many different conversations and lineages and disciplines that we explore on the show what would you say is really the heart

of what distinguishes Zen and Samo Zen? Yeah, you know that's I'll try to do that with the caveat that I don't know the other traditions as deeply. And so, because a lot of them, the deeper you go, you know, they're so complex and there's nuances. So I don't want to caricature any other tradition. But I'll say this about the Zen that I've been training, it has this view that all of us can have these moments of realization and that that's not the end, that you can get them more

deeply. There's a sequence of pictures called the ox herding pictures in Zen, which mark out a path of practice and spiritual development. And, you know, the first one, the ox herder recognizes that they've lost their ox. And so the second one, they go looking for it and they pick up the hoof prints of the ox, and they follow the hoof prints. The third one, they catch a glimpse of part of the ox, like the hindquarters showing out of a bush or the horn, over a fence or something. And suddenly they know there's a living being. That really is a living being.

And that's a moment of realization of awakening. There's a there there. There's a there there. There's then called a Kencho, seeing your original nature. Kencho. Sudden staggering moment. Oh my gosh. It's real.

But it's only a glimpse and it's only part of the beast. There's a long process of training till you get to see the whole ox and you get hold of it. You just saw the ass. You just saw the ass. Exactly. But now you see the whole thing. And it doesn't go away.

And that for me was what happened with that deeper experience I was talking about. It became present and accessible always. Then you train it. That's the fifth picture, actually. We got to in the sixth one, you ride it home. And then the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth, no more ox.

The ox disappears from the pictures. It's become second nature. and you're no longer concerned with the journey of awakening, you're concerned with a journey of helping and of service in this world. Whatever, however that, however you may be called to express that. And I think there's such deep wisdom in that notion that actually, because it seems all-encompassing to get this deep awakening, be able to live with it.

That seems like a total path in itself. But Zen sort of says no, that's a phase, and you can go beyond that. One of my Zen teachers actually is a great guy from the Philippines, Ruben Abito Roshi. He always would say it's like toy story, Buzz Lightyer, to infinity and beyond. And the beyond is right this, this here now, us having this conversation, which is both ultimate reality right here and exactly. this, you know, I'm a little bit thirsty, I'm going to have a sip of water, we're dialoguing, talking about the 10 oxalding pictures right now, who knows what we're talking about next,

but, you know, this is it. It's a real emphasis on not checking out. It's not a path out of the world. It's a path deeply into the world. You know, and I think this is a really important flavor of Zen. It's not I'm going to escape. this world of suffering. No, I'm going to realize it's true nature and re-enter it ever more deeply. How do koans as a technology come into the picture here? Thank you for asking that. I was hoping we might get to them. Yeah, me too. It's a really, it's a, yeah, co-ons, they're a, they're a distinctive features and they're not

unknown in other traditions, but let me say just a tiny, a koan is a little phrase, sometimes a question, sometimes it's a phrase describing something that somebody did from the history of Zen and early Buddhism. So you have koans from the time of the historical Buddha, and you have coans from the early great days of Zen, the 6th century, 7th, 8th, 9th centuries in China, mostly they're from those time periods. And what they do is they kind of encapsulate one practitioner's deep awakening. But they do it in very paradoxical ways that make no sense to the intellect, to the ordinary mind. So for example, there's a famous one.

You know the sound of two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand? what is the sound of one hand now you know people might I've had people you know when I was teaching with co-ons people might come and go there that's the sound of one hand no it's okay that's fine

you know you've presented something but that's not what this coin is about some people can clap with one hand too yeah right but this is it's actually like it's a paradox it's inviting us into awakening basically is what it's doing

is inviting us into this actually this undivided organism of this present moment where nothing's separate so one hand two hands 10,000 hands you know it's actually all one but it's inviting us to realize that for ourselves

so that was so that's just one example there's hundreds of them what would you extract from that what is the sound of one hand and you're because as as a teacher in this lineage you've had to pass hundreds of koans to sort of be like authorized it to teach in the way you do And the way that you're describing it is like these paradoxical Puzzles seeming you know phrases don't make sense to the intellect but they point to once you're in the state

sort of an obvious realization becomes self-evident as to the nature it's it's referring to or pointing to Yeah, so in that example what how would you how would you, if I was your teacher and I proposed this co-on a thousand years ago, what would be an answer that you would give to that one? I have to be a little carefully. Okay. Because we don't, there's a sort of protocol. Not being too public about it.

We can talk about them and around them a lot. But I can tell you this, I would need to show it to you. not talk about it. I'd need to show you. And in the way I showed it, you as a teacher would be looking to feel that I'm really presenting my realization of all the world and me as being one thing.

There's nobody here. There's exactly this body, mind, heart here, and it's all inclusive. So I'd need to show you the sound of one hand in a way that you could feel as a teacher my realisation. That's sort of the... Yeah.

So it's a little strange because Co-in's a words, but in almost every case, when you meet with a teacher with them, you have to embody it. And you don't, you don't, occasionally you show it with words, but it's got to be an embodied experience.

Usually, you show it with something you actually do as a movement, as a gesture, as something. You usually show them with your body because they're about embodying realization. So this is actually another special feature of Zen. It's like awakened charades. It sort of, sort of is.

Not to bastardize a thousand-year-old lineage, but I'm trying to picture what it means. It can seem that way. But when you do it, when you do this presentation, this embodied presentation of it, you feel it. You feel, oh, you're back in awakening instantly. And that's the value of this training, is that it's like, yes, you've been graced and blessed

with a moment of realization, but how is it going to become part of your life, integrated into your life? And that's what the current training is for, is to embody it. So you don't do it by thinking about them. And, you know, they'll thwart, every avenue of thinking.

Somebody's trying to understand a coin. And it's very natural sometimes you get given one and course you start thinking about it and you're meditating, thinking about it, you get nowhere. And then all of a sudden, when you're not thinking about it,

you suddenly have some insight into it and you feel it in your body and you know what to do. And when you next see the teacher, you just do it. And you feel this is how it's been for me in my training you know

you feel that you and the teacher are somehow you know it's a single field the room you're in you the teacher the coan it's all becomes one and you just know

the rest of the world drops away and you got it you know and then you know you have a chat and you go on to the next one and so it brings you back to embodying awakening repeatedly. And that's, I think, precious.

It's something about the body being involved. It's so critical. Yeah, I think a lot of people might think, here or go on and think of it from the way we've been trained, think of education, especially in the West. It's like a multiple choice. There's a right answer to give, right?

as opposed to a phrase written in English shared verbally that dissolves into a state of experience that is a level of embodiment. Beautifully put. Well, I want to pass the baton back over to you because I think you're sharing this wonderfully. So, yeah, I would love to hear more in your experience of how the koan as like a technology brings you into these states and these experiences and awakenings. Maybe we could share a couple more and I'm just so fascinated. Yeah, there's a view that, you know, there's a handful of early co-ons, which are called breakthrough co-ins. And, you know, once somebody's had a significant opening with one of them,

then they can start working on the whole long, you know, there's four or five books of co-ins actually that we work through. So then somebody can start doing that because they've had the critical breakthrough of realization. To some degree, they've got some glimpse of it. some of those early ones are like across traditions you know who am i who am i that's that's taken up as a co-ad sometimes it's refined a little bit to like who's hearing who's seeing you know like you know who we are you know we're we're gazing at each other as we have this conversation but who is actually the seer you know like very clear what is being seen

But who is it the seeing? We can ask ourselves that. Who is really here doing the seeing? And the more we look back into that, we might find it's not so easy to answer. Well, there's this little sensation that I think of as me, but it's just a sensation. Well, there's an idea, a narrative in my mind,

a story of me who I think I am as being through the experiences that, you know, this being has been through. That's me. But it's just thoughts. Who really am I? And we can ask that sort of, you know, deeper and deeper. The lens can get perfectly aligned on this sense of me.

And suddenly, boom, I don't want to say, actually. But suddenly we might just suddenly see. It's not what I thought. You know, and so that's great. And then we would come to the teacher and describe what we've experienced. They say, yes, yes, that's an important realization. Great opening you've had. Let me give you another comment,

and then you'd work through all these different comments if you wanted to. One is make Mount Fuji take three steps. Make Mount Fuji take three steps. Yeah, yeah. So there's one. How else do I do that? That's crazy. but actually after a moment of realization

we might we might think about it and still not really get it but we might just know what to do or it might come to us I'm going to try that so you try that lo and behold yes the teacher says yes yes I see it

I'm seeing it as you do that I'm experiencing the reality of this coin and you get it as well oh my gosh This is, I'm embodying realisation in what I'm doing. So, okay, is this kind of landing? This is making some sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know it's weird. There's tons of them. There's one where there's this master called Dongshan. And he was, the story is that he was sitting in a kind of granary in the monastery, in the monastery, maybe at a table, counting out, weighing out hemp. and the student it seems the co-ang goes

what is Buddha or what is awake in nature what is Buddha and Dong Shan answered three pounds of flax three pounds of flax so he thought that he was probably

in this granary weighing flax and it just hit the three pound mark so he just said three pound of flax because it's exactly the moment that is in right then and there. So, you know, because it can't be, it can't be something other. It's always this. So, you know, what is Buddha? Lifting glass of water. Glass two thirds full. This is Buddha. You know,

beautiful, actually, very beautiful glass, you know, or it's warm sock. In other words, it's bringing us back to this moment. So, so. So, so. So here's a little point I just made to summarize this. It's like, co-ons are not trying to get us to some other place where they are. They're an invitation pointing us back to our own experience now, always here and now. How many co-ons have you passed as a part of your practice? Well, I've been through. they say there's 670 in our curriculum.

I don't know exactly if that's right, but some 600 or something. But, you know, I've done them multiple times with different teachers. And then I've done them with students, and I've talked about all of them. So I've been kind of working with them all a number of times, not just once. What does it feel like from the perspective of the teacher when you give a co-on to a student and they pass? What does it feel like for you? Oh, gosh, it's amazing. because, you know, basically it's like, you know,

most people would start like with the first one of those early breakthrough cards. And, you know, who knows how long they'll sit with it. But, you know, usually what happens when somebody's had a breakthrough is that they'll come and see the teacher, you know, and they don't know what just happened. If it's on a retreat so it's fresh, or it may have happened a week ago or something, they come and

and you can feel right away very kind of open and light when they walk in you can just feel it in your own body and mind and heart and they'll say God this totally weird thing happened I can still feel it actually it was so so strange

I don't know what it was well tell me about it what was it like and they'll always have a specific time well I was in the supermarket I was in the frozen aisle and I was just reaching for this bag of peas and all of a sudden

it's like it wasn't me doing it it was like the whole universe was reaching for the I don't know what to say Henry I can't describe it it was really like everything was there and there was nowhere else

and it was like this is what it had always been just as I was reaching for the peas I don't get it and that okay that's a breakthrough experience where suddenly the ordinary sense of self with its narrative

is cut, it's interrupted. And instead there's this infinite, boundless reality. But people will be often just really kind of like, but I don't know what it was. But when they're describing it, you can see, oh my gosh, you're seeing it's all one, there's no self, there's actually maybe all empty, there's no time, there's no space, everything's here.

these kinds of things. So it's thrilling. It's thrilling as a teacher because you realize they suddenly realized, recognized something fundamental about who we are. There's something very refreshing in the way that Zen phrases a lot of this path to awakening

where you're sort of, I would say literally, dying into the ordinariness of experience. Like a lot of, especially maybe on the more shamanic path, or psychedelic paths, even through the study of the eight limbs or various different yogic traditions, there can be this early on presumption that, like, there is a state once I achieve, I will then be enlightened, and it can almost further the perception of duality.

Yes. And whether it's the three-pound flax or the two-thirds cup full of water, there's something so profound in bringing this insight into the everyday, mundane ordinariness of washing dishes, of folding your laundry. And where else could it be found? That's beautifully put. That's exactly the point. Where else could it be?

It's because it's so easy for us to think it's down the road. But it can't be. This is only now. There is only now. There really is only now. And I was just teaching a retreat with an old dear friend and mentor of mine, Roshi Joan Halifax. And she came up with this phrase that I just love, actually,

the organism of the present moment. When we join the organism of this, of now, it's undivided. It's undivided. It's all inclusive. Nothing's, you know, in this very now here, I mean, I'm talking about this one, not some theoretical one, I'm down there,

this very moment. everything's here and it's undivided. It's one reality. And, you know, an opening, a breakthrough, a realization, an awakening is recognizing that. This very now is all there is. And Tickat Han, there's Vietnamese, there must say this. There is only the present moment and everything is here. It's so beautiful.

You know, it's such a mercy. Because, you know, we think we've got to earn and get to this marvelous place called awakening or something. Liberation, realization. We think we've got to get there and earn it. No, it's already here. It's much more about releasing, letting go, allowing, you know, not fighting, not reaching, not reaching, grasping, not resisting. It's much more about dropping stuff. You know, the many things that we don't recognize we're carrying, ideas and body sensations,

emotions, just to let it all be is actually the, that's what opens us up. You know, and so I sometimes wonder with Zen and with other parts, like, do we have methodologists, try to do this, try to focus on a co-end? try to focus on your breast just to keep the mind busy so that reality can sneak in around the back and come in and show itself because we're not trying to find it. We're trying to do the practice.

Yeah. Therefore, the reality of this moment could show up. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it makes total sense and I feel like many meditative practices are giving the mind, which is a dog or a monkey, a toy to chew on, you know. Exactly. yeah and then the the real dog owner can show up

all of this moment right yeah yeah and then practice becomes and meditation becomes less of something we do more of something we are but the the beauty of having a practice that you're devoted to and your discipline with allows more of these spontaneous moments to appear like they become like you're providing more and more opportunities for these realizations to come in because you're less distracted with the doom scrolling and our perceived problems and all of these things. I totally agree.

And I think it's also about the, when you've got a path of practice, you've got something to bring them to. It's like there's a, you've already got this medium into which you can start. integrating. So that's like me when I was 19. I had no path of practice to which I could bring what I'd realized. It was just this thing that had happened, but I had nothing, no way of grounding it and integrating it, you know? And I sometimes think like, at times I felt, man, I'm so grateful to my path of practice for all it's given me. And I remember there's a point, I don't know,

20 years ago or something. And I suddenly thought, no, I'm so grateful to my path of practice for what it's let me give it. All the things I've been able to let go of and hand over to this path of practice, that's equally valuable. That is, it's this, yeah, it's this, it receives all this stuff from me that actually I kind of need to let go of. or I can let go of and I didn't know I could. So it's a reduction, not an acquisition. I think that's pretty much true, actually, of this path.

Yeah. We're so programmed to view from the lens of acquisition, though. Yes. Like more means more things, more acquisition, more money, more followers, whatever it is, right? Yes, yes. Yeah, who would have thought how much we gain, by losing.

Yeah. Yeah, and it's one of those counterintuitive things where it's like from that state of realization, I personally feel like there's actually nothing to gain and nothing to lose. Like I'm... Yes. And I find more and more freedom

in making space for emptiness, both internally and externally. Right. Anything that doesn't serve a purpose that isn't intentionally placed in my home, give it away, sell it, get rid of it. And that And I also think of like

The value of any room is actually not the stuff that it's filled with But the actual emptiness in the space of the room Which makes it so we can sit down and have this conversation You know it's and so like having that like empty emptiness first as a kind of viewpoint from how we build our home to Even our email subscription lists Like every every area of life we can I like the phrase

reduce it to its maximum, you know? That's beautiful. Actually, I've got to say, Andre, just, you know, having a little glimpse of your home, it expresses that beautifully. I can feel that intentionality

with everything that's present that actually helps the space to show up. I agree with that. There's a, you know, there's that, Janice Joplin song, Freedom's just another word

for nothing left to lose. I think it's really, really true. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. You know, I remember the first time I went to a retreat with my Japanese master, Yamada Ryotan Roshi, this was now nearly 20 years ago. I've been training with my other teachers by then anyway and they were part of the same Sambo Zen world. And the first talk he gave you saying, you know, the point of the Zen is this, that we're all busy trying to get the things we want so we feel okay. And that's, of course, it's material things, but it's also relationship, it's sort of some status,

you know, nice watch, whatever. But we're trying to acquire things to be okay. The trouble with that is that we know we're liable to losing them. And at the end with death, we know we'll lose them. We're going to lose the nice house, the lovely relationship when we die. Zen's solution is not to adjust that a little bit and try to assuage it a little bit. No, Zen's solution is to realize that we never really had them to begin with. I love the way that's phrased. there is this, the old story of Socrates going through the market at Athens and just seeing so many vendors and so many things and saying, who knew there were so many things in this world

in which I do not need, you know? And like, that's, that's real power in my perspective and it's what you're speaking to and that level of freedom, you know? It's, and it's cool to be able to look at things from the many different lenses. Like, I love the path of Yonah Yoga to be able to intellectually. walk through this. You can get there through the intellect, you can get there through your emotions and the devotional practice, through the non-dual practices,

through many different avenues. I think it's cool to also look at it from like the biological lens, how the sense of individuality, which we so strongly held the presumption of before, dissolves, the more we realize we're inhaling what the trees are exhaling. They're inhaling what we're exhaling.

The mycelial network that, you know, makes life possible and it keeps on anchoring in this insight that there actually is no strict demarcation line between self and other

and I know that part of why I love doing this podcast so much is because I get to talk with people that are steep in various different disciplines that get to be an entry point to whoever it might resonate with. Zen I think has been something that clearly

in the way that it was brought to you, just really resonated with your being. And there's so many amazing other traditions that resonate with people in different ways. And it's cool to be able to see the golden thread that weaves them all and how they're essentially speaking about the same source of true nature. Yes, yes, yes. I know in my own case, I actually have trained in different traditions as well that I found so rich and helpful. And my first meditation path was transcendental meditation for five years or so. And I would have stuck with it.

I loved it, except that I happened to stumble into Zen through a friend, and I knew that Zen knew about that experience I'd had when I was 19. It was like front and center in Zen. That's what Zen is really deeply concerned with, is helping us all come to a realization like that.

And I'm sure I could have found that in TM. I just didn't. You know, it was very therapeutic. and kind of almost medicinal for me and man, I needed it. But in Zen, they talked about it explicitly. No, they talked about it in poetic language that made it explicit. I knew, oh my gosh, they know about that. And somehow it's central to what they're trying to express.

So that's what got me to find. But since then, yeah, like I've done the Jana training. I've done, you know, some vipassanhas, some mindfulness, this skeptical philosophy and, you know, and, I mean, I was into the Greeks as a young man. I read ancient Greek, actually, and I started a PhD in ancient Greek. And so I had some grounding in the Greek philosophy, and man, they're wild, beautiful. Just one more note here on the importance of Sadna, of a practice of meditation, as somebody who has founded the Way app, which is really beautiful.

The necessity in this day and age is that having a practice, like you said, allows reality to kind of sneak in through the back door. There's something inherently pleasant about the concentrated mind. And the reality is we live in an age more than ever where it's we have so many ways to become distracted. Yeah. So much technology and, ideas about the world and things that are pulling us from the political lens that can if we allow

it to pull us away from awareness of who we are. And so any other note there on how important it is for many of us to cultivate a practice of meditation, whether it's once a day, whether it's twice a day, and eventually it goes down deeper into these Jonna states and where it dissolves into the awakening and it becomes less of, again, something you feel like you might. you know, you need to do. I know for me early on it was much more like of a militant practice. Like I need to stick with this thing. And then it, you know, sort of dissolves into less of me doing a thing and it's part of the way in which you are. But somebody who's obviously such a prolific meditation teacher through your app and through in-person retreats, any words on

the importance of cultivating a practice for everyone who's listening right now? Yeah. I mean, one way I used to think about it and I still do and when I started out I got this was the sense of like you know basically I want to have a shower every day and my mind needs a shower it needs hygiene and it's a kind of mental hygiene to um to check in with myself to give myself some space um to and I could feel it as soon as I started meditating regularly I got it there's this kind of cleansing process that just a single sit, it may be a really distracted sit, but the fact that I sat still for 20 minutes or 10 minutes, whatever it is,

and was devoted to sort of not doing anything outwardly. Yeah, my mind might have been active. It doesn't actually matter. The fact that I sat still and was kind of dedicating that little period of my day to my life, not to my activities, to my existence as a being. That provides, even if it's a very distracted sit, just a tiny grain of perspective, which is a kind of mental hygiene. And of course, if we're doing it daily with consistency, it just tiny, tiny incrementally builds on itself.

and that little grain of perspective over days, weeks, months, it grows into just a bit more awareness. And you just start to feel it and you miss it if you don't do a day. And I don't know. I mean, I know there's a lot of nice things, of course, people do that are kind of meditative, going for a walk in the woods, probably great to do the swan or a coal plunge, you know, whatever. that there are things we can do that are in the same territory. But the particular value of meditation is that you're not doing anything. It's really just inviting being to recognize your own being.

And that's, that has a particular kind of wholesomeness that you and yourself, You're giving yourself an opportunity daily to gradually and then sometimes suddenly, you know, discover that you've got your very own being is already okay. You know, whatever turbulence and trouble maybe in your own personal world, you know, in your professional world, in the collective that we're living in, there's still the raw fact. of your own being that is deep down is okay. And meditation is helping us align with that and getting to know that. So it's a, I mean, I see this, you know, with so thousands of thousands of students, you know,

that it does actually work. But you kind of need to be consistent. and it's far better to do 10 minutes a day than half an hour once a week. Far, far, far better. In a way, in a way, if I just talk about the app for a moment, that's why we built it

was we wanted to help people get into the daily habit and we thought that our radical thing on our app was that there's no choice. You do not have a choice about what to do. You follow this pathway and it's going to train you

in these different inns that we've been talking about, in mindfulness, in connection, in absorption, and hopefully in awakening. And we kind of circle round through them, these four aspects of practice, going deeper and deeper as we go. And what our kind of philosophy was that if you know about these different benefits,

it's a motivator to know that there are these different things that can happen. and they really do happen over time. So it actually makes sense to be on a journey that's training you in these different aspects of practice. So number one, you know there's fruits down the road, even though we're talking about they're not down the road. Actually, these things do develop over time.

Number two, we know that we know a journey that makes sense, this logically develops and is consistent and you incrementally develop your practice and we can train you on it. And it's not like you open up and there's a hundred different courses you can do. No, there's one pathway. And if you just consistently follow it,

you're going to start seeing different benefits in each of these different dimensions of practice development, a spiritual development that a human being can go through. So it's super simple, but it's actually deep. And we think we're still the first app

that is doing this. It's not a library. It's a pathway. And people, you know, the feedback has been insane. And our growth has been, I mean, really, really awesome. And it's very heartwarming to see

that people are resonable. with it in the kinds of numbers that they are. But anyway, have I gone off track now? I think I'm still on track. This is about the path, the sad anna, the cultivation, which is valuable in and of itself, and it might open us up to the realization that's always here. Hand in hand, I would love to get your perspective on

as you awaken to these realizations, you increase your sensitivity, so too does your capacity for noticing beauty and life. I'm so glad you bring that up. I think beauty is critical. And actually, that's another aspect of Zen that really drew me. It totally values beauty. I don't know whether we want this, but I'm a poet.

I could share a poem. I would love that, yeah. Yeah, why don't I just share a poem? Okay. I would love that. This one's called Sweeping the Yard. which is kind of a Zen thing. Daily chores, elevated as sublime, you know, sweeping the yard.

Sweeping the yard. When I sweep the yard in the morning, I don't do it for myself because I like it tidy. I don't even do it for the yard's sake because it enjoys being clean. I do it for the shy one. I do it for the shy one who lives inside me, who loves this world better than I ever will, who has nothing to prove, whose innocence is beyond understanding, and who I only ever know in glimpses that leave me breathless with longing, with hope that goodness is still possible, is still somehow present in this world.

His sweetness shines on the earth, so the earth loves itself again. He knocks away all my ideas about who and what I should be. So we pick up the broom again, he and I, and we send the old leaves skittering across the patio, and the dust smoking over the tiles, and we make the little heaps that we gather in. This is how he wakes up. This is how his wakefulness turns our little yard into the bright place I call home.

This is how he wakes up. This is how his wakefulness turns our little yard into the bright place I call home. beautiful indeed sweeping the odd i found poetry obviously has this capacity to speak to

reality in a way that prose can't quite make contact with right so such as the nature of metaphor analogies and story um and I uh I want to continue to get your perspective on the heart of that poem

and as it relates to our ability to notice beauty in life. Like that capacity and sensitivity radically changes the more that we start to get beyond our own dramas in our head. And that, of course, has many different implications on what we think we need to do, should do, must do in order to extract joy, beauty, love

from the external world, right? You're inherently recognizing it in the very thing in front of you. as you. So any other words on beauty? Yeah, it's like, you know, it's like if we can unplug from our surface life where we're desperately trying to manage things. You know, we've got some notion of this line that we're living, this linear time line that

we're on and we've got to get to that and we've got to avoid all these other things we don't want. If we can get, that's just a construction. And if somehow we just drop a tiny bit below the surface of that, we find beauty here and now waiting to show itself. And you can find it in the strangest of places. You know, I've found it on a freeway, just driving along and, oh, I just want to get to the exit, you know, 50 miles away and get to my destination or something. No, just sitting in this vehicle, the hills, the other cars with other people in it, the shine on the surface of the road, the shine on the steering wheel. It's actually all pouring into existence, being this very moment here and now. And it's beautiful. It's not exclusively nature. Of course, nature is a

obvious place where it's easier for us to find beauty. But I think the key is that it's, you know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that it's here to be seen. And it's just whether we can just get that little bit of release from our attachment to the surface life, just drop an inch or a foot or a meter deeper. And we find that there's this part of us that intrinsically recognizes beauty in the world. I find it amazing that we do have the experience. of beauty. You know, because it's like, what's the evolutionary advantage of that? I mean, maybe I guess

there could be a reproductive one, for sure. But we don't just limit it to other potential reproductive mates. We see it in the world. Why? There's a great nature film I once saw where there's this line of like four or

five big guerrillas sitting, staring at a bush. They're just sitting there, captivated. And what is it? It's a little beetle, bright green, traveling from leaf to leaf across this bush. And all of them are just staring at it. Like, is that, you know, primate experience of beauty? I don't know. But it sort of looks like it could be. I think there's stories of chimpanzees go into a waterfall and just gazing at it. It's a special place and they

recognize it, you know. I think we've got an inherent capacity to recognize something about our relationship with this world and appreciate our participation in it and it shows up as beauty. And I think it's kind of important. You know, they say the journey of Zen, actually, it began in India where the fundamental question was, was what is all this? It moved to China where the fundamental question in the Confucian society of the day was how to govern, how to organize society harmoniously. And you can see some of that reflected in like koans are somehow trying to recognize our participation in the wholeness of experience or something like that. then it goes to Japan among other places but in Japan the question was what is beauty and there's so many ways tea ceremony you know calligraphy landscape painting true it came from

China as well but in Japan it got it got refined even further beauty matters you know and it doesn't mean being able to buy expensive things that's the beauty of this world standing in the sunset, looking at that reddish hue on the green hill that develops, being out, I walk, almost every morning I go out early and watch dawn come. And it always blows my mind. How can something this beautiful be, no matter what the disasters in the world going on, and the crazy politics and the machinations of war and trade war and all the things going on, there's still this beauty and it's totally free.

Nobody can buy it. Nobody can sell it. Nobody can own it. And yeah, I live in a beautiful place, Santa Fe right now. But I see the beauty of dawn kind of wherever I am. Walk out before it comes and to see the early light arriving. The clouds, the way they look at the end of night with light coming, shadows suddenly appearing.

it's a display of just such extravagant beauty and you know and you can't buy it and it's kind of amazing to me that the gift that's given of beauty every day yeah it goes from this experience we have maybe with only the natural world of like a big waterfall or the northern lights or a

extravagant sunset that lights up the clouds to increasing our sensitivity to the for me in the tea ceremonies you know it's like the the smoke that comes off the cup and the and the tea leaves that are swirling around at the bottom and something so simple so small can be filled with so much yes that's a that's an incredibly obviously beautiful place to live life from because it changes your orientation towards life when you move from that place of fulfillment and recognition of beauty and it also I think rewires our notion of ethics because I think historically like ethics are something that needs to be taught from the outside in rather as seen as an extension of yourself like when you experience the self as other,

you don't need to be taught to not harm it in a similar way you don't need to be taught to cut off your own hand, right? Yes. And so I think sometimes some of these teachings can be perceived were like, okay, then what about all the horrific things that are happening on the world

and the list of all the corrupt leaders that are coming out and the genocides and all these things? And at least in my experience, and I'm curious to hear yours, this insight does not remember remove you from involvement towards very needed humane rights and action in the world, but rather it can actually allow you to meet it more fully and be more equipped.

That's beautifully put. I totally agree. I think it, they've, you know, they often say in Buddhism, like the two wings of practice of wisdom, which can mean insights in all kinds of ways, such as we've been talking about, and compassion. And, you know, we might, might say, realization and love, you know, and wisdom and love, you know, and that love is the call that precisely as you've said that comes from our recognition of our non-separateness. The beautiful thing about these realization experiences when they happen is that you can't get one without realizing that you're part of it. It's not like you see it. the way you see other things.

It's not like, you know, there's a beautiful painting, now I'm seeing it. Or, you know, there's that power station. Actually, and in the sunset, it's looking so beautiful. It's not like that. It's your part of it. You're implicated. So that, with that said,

it is exactly natural that you've started to feel love for the world. And actually, you feel the sufferings the world more intimately, but you're more resourced. You've got a capacity because the heart is open. And compassion is a motivating thing. They talk about the difference between there's some research on this between empathy and compassion. Empathy is feeling with, which is obviously a beautiful thing to do, but it's not motivating.

Compassion is motivating, energizing. Compassion actually is a part. positive emotion. Yeah, we care about the suffering that we may see going on, but we're motivated to help. And that's a positive thing, if that may sense. So I think that's intrinsically what all of this is about. Square knows that in hospitality, efficiency is everything. That's why our system lets you take payments. Track sales, handle inventory, manage staff, send invoices, and keep up up with finances all in one place. Fly through orders with zero mistakes. Get the data you need and keep everything working together.

So you're ready for whatever's next. Learn more about their customized little plans at squareup.com. I've heard you talk about the distinction between breaking your heart, opening your heart, and the whole heart. And I think that goes hand in hand here because there's no shortage of heartbreaking things when we turn on the news. And then in our own very, you know, various moments of our life, we're going to have those moments where our heart breaks. And I would love to just hear your thoughts on the progression there.

Yeah. Actually, I'm tempted to offer another shorter poem, if I may. I love it. Which is about heartbreak and how, well, you'll see. That is how, what a difference, how it can change us in actually be, you know, they talk about post-traumatic growth. And I think, heartbreak can be taken that way. This poem is called Frozen Lake. And the image in it is of a frozen lake, you know, that we can walk across or maybe fall through. So that's the notion in the poem. And it's got a little epigraph, which, like a little quote at the top, which is from a Sufi poet and wise fellow called Sheikh Abu Saeed, who called himself Nobody, son of nobody. And the quote is, Allah says, God says, the broken ones are my beloved.

Frozenly, the broken ones are my beloved. When I think of friends who've been through the worst, through the dread love lives with, through the terrible fear anxiety can only dream of. I feel sorry for the rest, for those who had it all as they'd hoped, who crossed the frozen lake from one side to the other, never guessing the great dark beneath. But those for whom the lake cracked and opened, who fell into its unspeakable night while still walking upright in the light of this world,

whose hearts burst and met its waters. For them there is no consolation, nor is any needed. Nor is any needed. That's about being cracked open, about the heart breaking and therefore breaking open. It's really about, in a sense, trusting grief. You know, grief is a thing all of us naturally don't want to feel because it's so painful. When we have the cause of grief, in our personal lives, people we love very much, going through very hard times, losing people.

We may have grief. Some people have climate change grief. Some people have what they call polycrisis grief. The world is in all these different crises. crisis folding upon one another. Why wouldn't we have grief around it? But if we trust grief rather than try to avoid it, it can be a doorway that opens us up even more.

So the broken heart can become an open heart. In other words, the pain of heartbreak, if we don't resist it, if we surrender, it can open the heart and then yeah the heart's more tender and it's going to feel more but it's open

and when the heart is open we're alive we're really alive we're really feeling this life you know a life without feeling it's not a full life and when our heart

is open we know sort of this is my real life you know and that leads to a whole heart we become wholehearted and i don't know that we can get to wholehearted i don't know without heartbreak maybe we can and i don't know it but for me heartbreak has been maybe it's been the great teacher you know in different ways at different points in my life. And I've been very resistant to it.

I've been partially open to it or I've been wide open to it. It seems like there is this inherent feeling that breaking open our heart, it's like it's a death of sorts. And so much of our fear in life is the fear of death of some form, whether it's our physical body, whether it's an identity, who we thought we were, what we thought something would be, a relationship or family situation. And I'm curious how you think about death and heartbreak and how they go hand in hand. Yeah, I think that's a beautiful point, a beautiful observation.

I guess I feel that we go through many deaths, you know? Maybe some say we're dying a death each moment, you know. I know that I've, you know, looking back on my life, I see, yeah, they've been chapters. There have been chapters. And in a certain sense, the time each chapter ended, it was a kind of death. There's also, you know, I think I referenced this a tight, a little bit before, but there was a moment in my Zen training when I definitely seemed to go through some kind of something that was more of a kind of annihilation than I'd ever been through before.

And in that moment, the very one who'd been seeking enlightenment or seeking awakening just was totally gone. And along with that one, everything was just gone. It was a, there was just nothing, actually. It was really, and there was nobody seeing the nothing. there was no seeing of the nothing there was just nothing and in that nothing I only recognised it after it was like I went through this

it wasn't an experience in a sense it was a kind of ending of experience and then after it kind of very disoriented sort of pieces started coming back and and for days afterwards the only thing I could say was thank you. And obviously I didn't physically die, clearly.

But there was a more thorough kind of death of something than I'd ever experienced before or since. And it was a turning point in my practice. It was after that that I was no longer sort of in it. out of it, in it out of it, you know, I got it, I lost it, I got, that was over with that moment because the person who had been trying to have a good practice and be more awakened and recognize sometimes, I'm awake now again, oh, I'm more deluded now, that person had gone, and there just was no need to try to be more this or more that or anything because that was

all gone. So that was, to me, that was, I guess that was the real fruit of my Zen training for me, was that actually happened. And until that moment, I'd always thought, yeah, clearly, you know, I'm really lucky. I've been graced with some of these moments of awakening, you know, and I've had great teachers. But I'm never going to be like my teachers because I still default to, or I at least repeatedly come back. as this traumatized mess, you know, maybe slightly less of a mess, but, you know, somewhat prone to anxiety, stressing about stuff, fretting about stuff. I keep coming back to that, even though I can also recognize, you know, something boundless and beautiful and vast. But after that moment,

it wasn't like that anymore. It was no longer back and forth. It was no longer wanting some state over another state. It just was sort of gone. And I know that there's, I don't really want to claim anything with this because I'm, you know, it's still a mess. You know, I'm still doing my work. But it was really decisively different.

And I think there's a saying in Zen the real way is beyond being caught in the many things and being awakened. The real way is beyond both of them. It's not about one or the other. It's beyond and includes both. And this is important for that cart track metaphor as well. It's not one or the other. It's both.

you know and they say that first there's the 10 trillion things and then we see that they're all empty and one but that's not yet the end of the path and maybe sure there's no end but the two the 10 trillion and the empty oneness they're exactly the same thing and until they're exactly the same thing there's some kind of duality between them You know, initially there's the duality of everything being separate from me and everything separate from other things. With awakening, that duality is gone. We discovered the non-duality. Somehow all things are encompassed by one great awareness, non-dual. But we'll still usually, most of us have a duality between recognizing that and being back in the old view. Back and forth,

back and forth. I want to get that all the time. Keep practicing. And eventually the second duality between awakened awareness and non-awakened awareness, that can be gone. That's very, very beautiful. It's very, very beautiful to find that there's this, you know, it's unnameable, it's indeterminemable. You could say it's totally empty, but on the other hand it's all things.

You can say it's all of this just as it is, but on the other hand, it's utterly empty. And you can't choose between them. It's so beautiful. And for me, you know, so far as there's still the thread of biography that I can recognize, that was a total turning point

to somehow drop into that. Again, it wasn't an experience I had. It was somehow an ending of experience. And it's all been a little different since then. Yeah, I think it goes hand in hand with the sometimes often overused analogy of the chrysalis and the caterpillar and the butterfly, right? Like there is the death, the transmutation,

the ending of one form we're taking into this goo of unknown, of nobodyness, into whatever is going to emerge next. Trusting that life is way more intelligent than we could ever, you know, choreograph in our own minds. Yes. That it knows what it's doing. I also think about the, sometimes the paradoxical contemplation on the progressive path of awakening. versus the direct path. You can have direct insight,

and yet it seems like we have this meditation practice, like it seems like we're doing this to get somewhere. And I love the Zen phrasing of water heats gradually and boils suddenly, you know, that we have these little moments and these mini awakenings and ahas and realizations and insights into reality until the point where the water boils. and then it stops becoming a duality that we return to. Yeah, there's so much here.

I feel like we could talk for days and days, and I'm sure this is the first of many conversations that will to come. I'm curious, though, as we start to wrap up, take your time to think on it if you want, but if you had 60 seconds to share a core message, one truth to the heart of humanity, what comes to mind?

You are love. You are love. You know that movie, I don't know how big it is in the US, but there's a UK movie called Love Actually. I don't know whether you know that one. Yeah, I think it might have. It's got some stars in it. You know, I think, I can't remember the name.

Hugh Grant's in it, I think, and Emma Thompson and some of those British stars and a few American stars as well. Love Actually. And I've also thought, why is it called Love Actually? And it suddenly came to me, maybe it's the answer to a question. What really matters? Love, actually. Or what's it all about?

Love, actually. What, you know, what is our purpose? Love, actually. Like, it's almost like we're reluctant somehow to say it. It's a tiptoe around the word love, because, of course, it can mean so many things, and it's got so many associations. But fundamentally, what if, in the end, we really are, is love.

It's been a beautiful through line throughout this whole conversation. And I think conversations and messages like you share so often about our true nature being that original love is it's really something that we need to hear, I think, now more than ever. as there's just increasing moments of depression, anxiety, meaning crisis, loneliness, epidemics. We're constantly reminded of our fracturedness, our fragmentedness, our separateness. So, yeah, I highly recommend anybody he's listening if they want to stay connected with Henry's work.

Check out the Way app. Go on that journey of those insights and meditations. Any other thoughts you want to share and where people can stay connected with you and your work? Yeah, I mean, if anybody's curious, I got this book that's a kind of storyline of my own path of practice called One Blade of Grass. And there's the book Original Love,

which is speaking to a lot of this as well. And, yeah, the way app.com has all you need on the app. But above all, you know, try to just give yourself 10 minutes a day of stillness and quiet. And if our app helps you with that, fantastic. If another app does, fantastic. If no app does, fantastic. Just being still and quiet every day for that little bit of gradual lessening of stress,

softening the body, letting go. It'll change a lot. for sure. And if more of us are doing it, it'll change the world. Henry, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to connect. I'm looking forward to hopefully joining you and meditation on somebody retreats one day, diving more into your work, maybe pouring tea for you. I would love that. I would absolutely love that, Andre. It's been a great, great joy and honor, you know, privilege to get time with you like this. Thank you. Likewise. Everybody's tuning in to this episode.

I'm curious. Let us know in what ways this episode has resonated with you. I think there are various conversations on this podcast that feel, they have like a different energetic kind of resonance to them. And they're speaking to aspects of self beneath the analytical and they're more of heart shares and I think that was self-evident in the way that you shared and also through your poetry. So big fan. Big fan of this episode. And until next time, be well. Take care.