The One You Feed - How to Embrace Original Love on the Path to Awakening with Henry Shukman

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

In this special episode, Henry Shukman and Eric engage in a meaningful conversation in front of a live audience at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They discuss his new book, Original Love, and explore how to embrace this "original love" on the path to awakening. They also delve into the transformative power of mindfulness and the importance of seeking support of others on the path of healing and growth. In this episode, you will be able to: Discover the transformative power of Original Love  Uncover the influence of shame on your self-perception and emotional well-being Explore Zen teachings that reveal a deeper human connection with all things Cultivate mindfulness as a gateway to awakening and experience inner peace and mental clarity Embrace the support and wisdom of community in your journey of personal growth and self-discovery To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Most of this world, almost everything in this world, actually, is kind of just being itself. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about

how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B, as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, we share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engage in thought-provoking discussions that

challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that will resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go-to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. We'll be right back. Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. Follow the Big Take podcast on

the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Thanks for joining us. Listeners will notice that this is a very special episode recorded live in Santa Fe. It's a discussion with Eric talking to Henry Schuckman, a poet, author, and Zen master in the Sanbo Zen lineage. He is co-founder of the single-path meditation app The Way, the founder of Original Love Meditation Program, and spiritual director emeritus at the Mountain Cloud Zen Center. Henry's most recent books are Original Love, The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening, and the Zen memoir, One Blade of Grass. He has taught at Google and Harvard Business School, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Oxford Brooks University, and is the author

of several award-winning books of poetry and fiction. Henry's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Sunday Times, and Financial Times. He has an MA from Cambridge and an MLIT from St. Andrews. Hi. Welcome, everybody. Thank you so much for coming here. Great to see you all. I'm Henry Shookman, and I'm absolutely delighted, really, that this event is happening and that Mountain Cloud has made it possible and the incredible team here, Grant and Kieran and Jeremy and Sarah and many others that brought this together. And also my friend and colleague in the, what would you call it, the healing arts, Eric Zimmer, who's come from Columbus, Ohio, to do this with us. Thank you, Eric.

Eric Zimmer, who's come from Columbus, Ohio, to do this with us. Thank you, Eric. Because, you know, bringing out a book as I'm doing right now here, this is its first outing into the world. It's in some ways a kind of a relief that finally it's out, but it's also a little bit scary. And there's a certain amount of sense of exposure and a kind of vulnerability, of course, that comes with that. And I can't say that I'm feeling very Zen.

Welcome everybody to this hallowed hall, Mountain Cloud. And welcome Eric. It's a great pleasure to have you here. Eric has been running one of the most helpful and actually most beloved podcasts these last dozen years, ten years, called The One You Feed, which we'll hear a little bit more about in a moment. And he's also a remarkably gifted behavior change coach and budding author and a most remarkable human being, actually, who's really given his life to service,

to helping us grow in the ways we need to. to helping us grow in the ways we need to. I was absolutely thrilled when he reached out to suggest that perhaps he could come here when my book came out to do this event. It's been a little time in the making and here we are. Thank you, Eric. Yeah, thank you. This is the event it will be fully, but it's also being recorded. So it will be out on Eric's podcast in time. In time. Shall I take it from here? I think so. All right.

Welcome to The One You Feed. Welcome to all of you to this podcast that will air, as Henry said, some point in the future. And, you know, we are all here to celebrate the release of Henry's new book, Savage Pilgrims. Do you know what your teacher used to get up to? Have you read what's in this book? No, seriously. Original love, which you all have a chance to get after. But there was a passage in here that I wanted to read, and we'll get to the parable in a second. But I read this, and I was amazed that this long ago, you wrote something that still seems really true to a lot of what is in original love. And you wrote,

The little intricacies, the devices and tie-ups in a life could take care of themselves. The important thing was to make room always for the big powers of life, to be wide open inside, spacious and strong. That's really in that book? That's really in this book from like 1995. Yeah, four. Which you probably wrote before that. Yeah. Yeah.

As I was reading it, because I was wanting to read about Santa Fe. Let me see that. Yeah, yeah. I don't believe it. It's true. It's here? It's down at the bottom. I didn't make that up.

My God. My whole idea of my path in life. It's just been shattered? It's just been shattered, yeah. You were already awakened then. Why did you do all this sitting? There was no need. Oh my gosh. All right. So our podcast, listeners will know, is called The One You Feed, and it's based on an old parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of

us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you, what does that parable mean to you in your life and in the work that you do? Oh, thank you. Wow. It speaks right to the heart of it. I believe we are trainable. We human beings, you know, and I think that's something I didn't realize when I was younger.

I thought I was at the mercy of the storms I felt inside myself. Shame, anxiety, mad greed, mad hunger, you know, and raw ambition, and great envy, and competitiveness, and a lot of other ugly things. And I thought also, you know, despair. And I didn't know then as a young man that it wasn't character defects, if you see what I mean. Maybe it was character defects, but I thought they were imprinted. On who I was. On ones that we all have too.

Well, I didn't really believe that. I thought all those other people out there, they don't get messed up like this. That's part of why I'm so despicable. And I gradually, gradually learned that I could nearly always, in collaboration of some kind with others, one other or a group of others or many others, I could actually change. It took me a long time to believe that there could be any kind of a real hump I could go over where it was really my relationship with my difficulties could really change.

I thought I could just manage them better. And that was great, even to know that. But not that the relationship could really change with them and that there could be significant thresholds. I don't think any quite permanent but significant of greater freedom. Greater freedom in response, in responsiveness. Greater freedom in self-love, self-compassion, self-kindness. And kindness, which I'm working on, to others.

So to me, that is a fundamental truth of human nature, that actually we can be trained. We can train ourselves, and we kind of need it. The evolutionary wiring we've inherited makes it essential. And when you look at what's going on today you see you know it's basically social media just ramping up the the bad wolf unrestrained and we can easily fall for it the necessity really of training actually it's funny i just i've been crazy about this book called The Survival of the Friendliest recently, which is all about how wolves became dogs and foxes could become domesticated. It's a fascinating book. Everybody should read it. No, no, read Original Love first. Then read

Survival of the Friendliest. Yeah, well, it's interesting you bring up wolves, given that we started off with a parable about wolves. I want to jump into the book, and I'm going to ask a relatively obvious question to start, but the book is called Original Love. So what does that mean to you? Why is that the title of the book? Yeah, I feel rather strongly about it. First of all, I think the concept of original sin is a really unhelpful one. There may be subtleties to it that I don't understand. There may be theological ins and outs that I can't get my head around. But basically, in the sort of simple way of understanding it, I think it's been extremely damaging in human history, probably. I think the parable of the fall of man is probably a really bad one. Many of you might have read Braiding Sweetgrass, right? And it

begins with that and how that contrasts with another very different mythology, a Native American mythology of the human relationship with this earth. I don't believe in original sin, but secretly I did, I think. I had a lot of shame in my childhood and my youth and my young adulthood, and it took some work to be cognizant of that. But here's the thing. Every time I've been graced with some flash of insight or greater wisdom or greater opening or a greater sense of our true relationship with this planet, every time, and this comes in different forms and different kinds of small awakenings and maybe the odd medium-sized one, you know, they always come with some sense of belovedness. It's just never happened to me where there wasn't this tremble of love in the aftermath because, or even in the midst, usually a bit more in the

aftermath because it's always some kind of revelation that what I thought was my place in the world as a separate, lonely entity stalking the planet was wrong, was wrong, fundamentally wrong. And instead, there is a level on which we're not separate. And actually, it's the most enlivening, affirming, beautiful thing for a human being to discover, I suspect. And it's real. And it comes with a sense of love. What Zen will call that kind of thing is seeing your original face. I mean, some of that anyway, or discovering your original nature. I just wanted to say it out loud, original love. I know it's risky and it

might sound really corny, but I think it's right. So I want to read something that you wrote about this book in general. You say that one of the things you want to get across in this book is that we don't need blinding revelations or massive enlightenment experiences, though they may come, to encounter an unconditional love waiting to be touched in the heart of even ordinary moments. And I think a lot of what you're trying to do in this book is you're trying to take the sometimes Zen called the express train to enlightenment, right? And then there's other paths that are a little bit considered more progressive paths. And you're trying to present those two as equally important and really going alongside each other. And to that end,

there's an analogy that you use about two ruts. Do you want to share that with us? Yeah, I'd love to. So there's in early Chinese Zen from the 6th century CE, there's a short fragment of a tract that likens the path of practice, that's to say meditation practice, to a cart track that has two wheel ruts. You've seen, you know, grassy tracks with two dusty or muddy dirt tracks imprinted in the grass, that kind of image. And it says one track is

Called the four foundations of mindfulness which basically is a progressive path Just as he said of gradually growing in mindfulness Becoming more aware more able to be responsive and yeah the things I've already talked about actually kindness and a bit more Joy and you know being able to handle difficult feelings and difficult problems in life better. That's one path, one rut. And the other wheel rut, it calls principle, which is a bit of a technical term in Chinese Buddhism. We might think of it as just reality.

Or we could think of it as that original nature where nothing is separate, where sometimes it shows itself as a great boundless spaciousness. Sometimes it shows itself as a single fabric that all things participate in. Sometimes it shows itself as just clearly there was never anybody here. Here where I think I am, there's never been anybody here. And therefore, what I really am is just this flux and flow of everything doing what it does. So that's the second wheel rut. Now, the second wheel rut is always here. It actually isn't a progressive path. It's just a fact. But we're human beings. So we need, yeah, we can glimpse that. Sometimes we can really have things knocked away so we sense it quite consistently. But we're

still human beings. We still need tending. We still need gradual cultivation. We still need a chance to, at the very least least grow in ways that make us more permeable to that original nature. So, I mean, for me, it's a perfect metaphor because I don't want to practice that says, you've got to realize you were never here or you're going to be miserable, which is really the sort of non-dual. There are non-dual paths that are kind of like that You just got to see that you don't really exist the way you think you do and all your problems are solved It's kind of true in a way but for the vast majority of human beings I

Actually want to be able to tend this human being I don't want to say you're wrong. You know, you're just wrong no, you're suffering you need need care. And so are many others. And so I believe in a two-rub path. I know it doesn't sound very mellifluous, the two-rub track. But it's true. It's actually, I believe in it. Yeah. Almost 30 years ago now, I got sober, as you know, from a heroin addiction. And there's a line in 12-step programs that I heard then and has been central to everything I've thought about all these years. And it's an idea of being relieved of the bondage of self. And as I was thinking about the two paths, I was thinking

a little bit about the one rut, the progressive, the mindfulness, the support. We'll talk about what goes in that rut here in a minute in the book. That that is a way of, over time, lessening that bondage of self, that dependence, right? More and more freedom. And the other rut is sort of the one where it just vanishes. You realize you were never in bondage. You were never in prison, right? It just didn't exist, right? And I think what hit me about the book and that I really liked is that you can get into a sense where as if I've not had these blinding enlightenment experiences, then I'm doing all of this wrong and I'm failing. And it's a pretty hard grading curve.

It's either 100 or zero, right? And that's not a good way for people to progress and change. We don't tend to do that well in life, right? There's a reason that consistent progress motivates us and moves us forward. So would you say that a way of thinking of that is that as we go along the first rut that we're talking about, we are getting freedom from that self. We are less in bondage to it. I totally believe that. I mean, I'd say almost like the first thing is really, I don't want to speak for everybody, but I think a lot

of people that I've seen as a teacher, and I include myself, we need more self-love. And that's a starting point. So if you're starting with this, because I don't have self-love, because I secretly despise myself, I'll get on board this train that says, well, you're going to realize you never had a self. That can be quite attractive. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Let's get rid of this thing. Let's get it out of here. Yeah. And, you know, actually, I don't think that's either humane or quite a good way of meeting

our real needs. Because I'm talking about free from the bondage of self. I would say if we just go to the place of self-love, we are significantly freed from the bondage of self. Because the relationship's changed. This is a lot of what I talk about, if I may just morph into it a bit, in mindfulness is the vision of it or the way of experiencing it and trying to share it that I have and that I share in the book is

actually, it's basically like a space of allowing. Not like I got to whip up myself to be more aware, I've got to beat myself into mindfulness, I've got to do my reps every day, I've got to try to follow my breath and my damn mind slides off the breath all the time. Actually, the path of allowing, spaciousness and allowing is so much more humane. And if we find the space to allow our experience, that bondage slackens, or maybe it unties itself. So it's not actually that you've got to have a blinding revelation that you've never really been here, which I think is a real thing to discover, but you may never be interested in that. I know a lot of wise people who have never been curious about awakening,

which is what that would be, that revelatory experience. They apparently have succeeded in being wise and kind and quite cheerful without it. It's us morose types that are aiming for it. Exactly. so it's us morose types that are that are aiming for it exactly so let's get into the book the book is about four ends as in uh places that you would stay on the path to awakening we've sort of talked about awakening is that other rut so we'll set it aside for a second yeah what are the three ends that are in that first rut? Yeah. Okay. So the first one is mindfulness. It's the foundation of everything really. And it's not to be sort of skipped over because there's so much that it gives us. If we just kind of get, really get what mindful awareness is for us, even a little bit, it'll change our lives. It's such a,

what do they call it, a superpower. Isn't that what they say? To be able to take that little step back, just a micro shift back, find a bit of space that is aware and that does that thing I was talking about, allowing, that lets this moment be as it is. I think we know when we're getting it. And let me speak for myself. I know when I'm getting it because I always seem to feel something. I feel some little quiver of gratitude or some little hint of maybe a kind of humbleness or some little hint of sometimes sadness that was there unrecognized and that I can now recognize and be with something. To me it's always like a little bit of an opening of some kind. I mean what I argue in this book and take it or leave it, but I think it's always like a little bit of an opening of some kind. I mean, what I argue in this book, and take it or leave it, but I think it's an opening to some little hit of a kind of love

that marks it. Oh, yeah, I've really moved into a place of mindfulness. There's a beautiful line. I'm flying without a parachute now. There's a beautiful line in the book, and I hope I get it right. You're talking about the present moment being enough. And then you say, the world is already fulfilled. I read it and I was like, that's beautiful in there that seems to be something we recognize when we kind of disengage from all our kind of seeking and grasping and machinations and trying to, the constant sort of transactional engagement with life, what will it give me? What can I get? What do I hope not to get, you know, when we disengage from that, which we can do, you know, even if only briefly, when we do disengage from it, maybe it's easier to open up to realizing most of this world, almost everything in this world, actually, is kind of just being itself. There's this human hustle and bustle.

And even we can see sometimes that's just being itself. We could just sort of observe. And somehow there is a way that this very moment is already completely fulfilled, intrinsically. And that's a very good place to start in whatever we might want to do in the world by way of helping it. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

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And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason

Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, Register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. Amanda Mull, who writes our Business Week Buying Power column.

Very few companies who go viral are like totally prepared for what that means. And Zoe Tillman, senior legal reporter. Courts are not supposed to decide elections. Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing our elected leaders. It's for the voters to decide. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. There's a line from the Tao Te Ching that says something to the order of, when you realize that nothing is missing, the whole world belongs to you. Oh, man.

That idea of the world is already fulfilled. Yes, yes. Wow, that's beautiful. I must go back to the Dao De Jing. Yeah, yeah. In the mindfulness section, you use another analogy, that there are different ways that we interact in the world. And one is we're walking slowly down a path. The other is we get on a bicycle. Do you want to pick it up from there? Yeah, yeah. I remember that. There's a passage about traveling down a valley. Like, if we're walking, we sense the pebbles beneath the soles of our feet or shoes and the edges of the potholes, and we hear individual birds and individual insects that might fly by. If we're on a bike, all that texture of the road tends to get kind of somewhat homogenized

into just little bumps, the rubber and air. Maybe we get a kind of tapestry of birdsong, not individual threads. If we're in a car, we don't get very much of that at all. And if we're on a freeway, we kind of are just looking at the clock, and maybe we're listening to something that's really what we're interested in. Destination, mileage, time, and whatever we're distracting ourselves with, by way of an audiobook. Possibly this one. Yeah, I was going to say, it's been released with Henry's wonderful voice. Actually, if it is this one, you're okay.

You're excused. So the idea of the analogy was like, well, actually we can be going in some direction that we want with some purpose or mission or whatever we're driven by, and notice here and now. Not be obsessed and fixated on something down there that is just kind of sucking all our attention. We can disengage that and be present and have a rich experience of this very moment and still be you know kind of pursuing things that we might projects we might want to pursue in our lives it's perfectly possible and what are we missing if we don't do that if it's just one

lurch toward a goal after another one elastic tug so the next thing I've got to get, and the next thing. In the way we've sort of, we've numerated everything now, there's so many things that are with numbers, including meditation minutes. That's great if it motivates, that's fine, but gosh, if it's just chasing numbers and tormented by numbers, this one's going down scarily, and this one's going up, and I don't want it to. Or I want it to go up faster. What a way of living, really. We're so disengaged. We're so engaged in what just takes us out of our actual experience of life. It's sad.

It's really sad when so much is being given to us in every moment. You know, and part of the meaning of original love is exactly that bounty that we're being given right now. You know, light and color and sensations and sounds. I know it's just the sound of my voice but you know but still hearing and feeling things and being among other people you know it's it's all being given and how sad if i'm just thinking about you know amazon ranking or something you know, Amazon ranking or something, you know? Not that that would be happening today. As you were sharing that, I was thinking about an experience that I think we probably all have had something like this, where you've got a lot going on that day and you're in your car and you're driving, but the window's down and you've got the music on and you're there, you're enjoying it. And it can be the same exact experience another day,

and you're like two inches from the windshield, yelling at the people in front of you. And I think we sometimes think that we have to set aside big chunks of our life in order to slow down. And there are ways of slowing down in the midst of what we're doing. How do you think about doing that in a busy life? You know, if somebody's job, kids, right? Lots going on. Not going to set any of that aside, but wants to taste this more. How do we start to interrupt that pattern of being lost as we go about our day?

It's one thing to interrupt it when we're meditating, which is hard enough. But it's another thing to interrupt it when we're in the flow of life, in the marketplace, as they would say in old Zen writings. Yes, that's absolutely right. I mean, I do think of my master, Yamada Roshi, who is a very busy businessman running a company with 3,000 employees in Japan. He sits every morning and every evening, and he also guides about 100 Zen teachers around the world in their practice. And yet, he's able to be running a company with a very busy life. And he's got to the point in his practice where he can actually say, there's no way I could separate my Zen life from my business life. It's just one hole.

And the anchoring I do every morning is enough to sustain me through all of that with the kind of clarity that I'd like to have. You know, I wish I could say something like that. I don't run a big company at all, but I still get lost and caught up in stuff and forget and have to bring myself back. And I think I would say the key is it's really important to have the daily formal sit. And then there are little tactics and things we can do to help bring us back, bring us back through the course of the day.

You know, Eric, I've got a bit that I might read, which is on exactly this topic. Perfect. Eric had asked me earlier if I might want to read a little bit. And there was a bit that came to me to read. So it's not long. I might still put you to sleep. But it's on this subject.

It's called A Crowded Airport, this little section. I used to be sent on many writing assignments in remote and less developed areas of Latin America. Often I flew through Miami. developed areas of Latin America. Often I flew through Miami. And I remember one particular time arriving back in the airport at what must have been an unfortunate confluence of circumstances. Perhaps several jumbo jets had arrived around the same time, or there was an unforeseen shortage of staff. Whatever it was, the place was jammed. Hundreds upon hundreds of people were filing in toward the immigration hall. Even the corridor leading into it was maybe 12 wide with people and hardly moving at all. At first, I had a customary reaction. Oh boy, this is going to take forever.

Standing upright, packed among so many people, all of us trying to get into the hall where our queuing and waiting would really begin. This is awful, I started to think. It could easily have turned into something excruciating. But luckily, I had my practice. I took an inner step back. I became a mute observer. It all flipped. Instead of being a frustration, it became a wonder, a gift, a truly precious opportunity to be among so many exquisite beings. It was a rare privilege, of course it was,

to be pressed among this gathering of wonderful creatures, human beings, who all had plans and things they loved and loved ones in their lives and who all had consciousness and and knew they were alive, and knew how to love. Suddenly, I felt blessed to be among these upright, balanced, and exceptional creatures, just to feel their physical warmth, their intentionality, their innate kindness. It was a wondrous thing to be among that throng. As I shuffled along in my place in the line, slowly creeping toward the immigration counters, I almost didn't want it to ever end. I read that. I told you before I couldn't remember that analogy. Now I remember it. And I remember reading it going, I just flew out here from Ohio and going, boy, I need to practice more.

Because I think that sort of experience is a trying one. It's a beautiful way of sort of that step back and taking a look and flipping. Yeah. It's very possible. It's very possible. I mean, all of us right now flipping. Yeah, yeah. It's very possible, you know. It's very possible. I mean, all of us right now can do it, actually. You know, just some little sense of presence, you know, we just sort of slightly disengage, you know, slightly just come back into yourself, notice that there is being present on a good day. On a good day, yeah. In the book, you talk about the hindrances.

I don't want to go too far into those right now. And there's a line that you say that I wish I could pull up, but it says something to the order of, we don't distract ourselves away from, but we also don't needlessly suffer in. And you were talking about that in the context of meditation, but I wanted to broaden that out. Right. And talk about that when we think about afflictive emotions and thoughts in general, because I think there's always a continuum of what you're saying, which is on one hand, we distract ourselves away, pull out the phone, do whatever it is we do,

get out of here. And then there's the other, which we sort of end up mired in and wallowing in and almost reinforcing and feeding. How do you think about finding a place between those two, if that's even what it is, or is it a completely different place? Maybe it's not even in that continuum. But where we don't go to either of those extremes that we're all familiar with but aren't very helpful. Yes, yes. Well, again, I think there's little tactical things we can deploy.

But primarily, my feeling is it's all about allowing rather than resisting or trying to banish. That if we get into the sort of experience of, let's say I'm really restless in the sit. I don't exactly know why, but I just am. Rather than sort of kind of damn that restlessness, youlessness, stop being restless, don't have restlessness. What if restlessness is the teacher right now? How do I let that happen? Something's got to shift around resistance. I can't do that. I'm resisting it too much. Okay, then something's going to shift around resisting. I'm going to let resistance be present. I'm going to allow the fact that I'm really resisting this restlessness. We can do that. And then we still manage to get the whole picture.

And nothing's had to change, but our experience will have changed. See what I mean? It's like what's going on won't have changed, but the way we feel about it will have changed. So I might have a feeling of frustration and impatience or whatever it is, but rather than I want to get rid of this impatience and this frustration, I want to do something that will make that change. You know, I just don't want it to be arising. Instead, if I just kind of assume it's got something to teach me, you know, and that actually what I think ought to be going on is the thing to tear up. And a go to allowing that actually, for me, that's the pivot. It makes me think of the semi-famous Shinzen Young equation of suffering equals pain times resistance. Right?

Which is, I think in our human lives, there are times we can get rid of a certain pain. And if we can, I think we often should. Right? It's a wise course of action. And there are times we simply can't. Whether it's restlessness in sitting, whether it's a family member being sick, whether it's us being sick. Like life brings its things and sometimes you just can't get rid of them. That's right.

But if we are able to turn down the resistance, which is what you're describing here, turn down that resistance, our suffering level remains lower. Not gone. That's right. But I almost think of it as just like, oftentimes it's about like, how do we not make it worse? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Which I think we are exquisitely good at doing. Yes. By resisting, we tend to make things worse. That sounds really good when I say it or you write it and we read it, but when we're in it yeah that's a harder animal because it seems like yes i just create space in there but the contraction is sometimes so intense yes yes so is it a matter

of just continuing to practice that and meditation being a good laboratory for practicing that that allows us to sort of be able to go from this tight fist to this open allowing yeah i think absolutely i believe meditation is the training space yeah and to do basically exactly that but i would say also that if we're sensing there's a real tight contraction I'm going to try to let that be there. I'm not going to try to make it uncontract. I'm going to try to let it be there. And in doing that, it will actually soften. When I really do that, without wanting it to soften, without wanting it to loosen, really truly letting it be here, which I think is the non-resisting. It will in fact soften.

I know this. I mean, it's very difficult if people we're really close to have really hard things in their lives that are kind of, they're not going anywhere, those hard things. That's a very, very hard thing to be with. And many of us would just sort of jump into trying to fix, jump into trying to manage. Sometimes it won't work. We really can't do anything. How are we going to live with that? And I i've learned a way you know which has come out of all this meditation practice and teaching i think that i've received which seems to be exactly the same really as what we're talking about it's it's non-resisting and that's what

when the heart is really caring about something what would it take basically to let it break and to let it be open and to let it through becoming open become whole? That's what I'm interested in and I think it's real. Hi, everyone. One of the things that I know many of you struggle with is anxiety. And very recently, I shared some tips on managing anxiety in our newsletter. Specifically, I shared a practice on clarifying your values. In the practice, you write down one or two of your core values and then identify one action step that aligns with them. core values, and then identify one action step that aligns with them. I find that taking one positive action towards things that matter to me really helps reduce anxiety. Also, I have a

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listen. So let's move on from the first in of mindfulness, which we could spend the rest of this conversation on. The second in is support. Yeah. Let me say in kind of summary that it's very easy to have the mindset that our, first of all, our meditation practice is something we have to do ourselves. We have to put in the time, like somebody going to the gym and doing reps. We have to do those mindful minutes, you know. And yeah, there's some truth to that but actually i am a real believer that not much by way of growth and recovery and healing and development and maybe even awakening happens in this life without support without connection without others when i look back at all the times i've been most creative all the times I've been starting to go through a therapeutic process there was at least

one other person there yeah you know there's actually is interesting one time that's not true I had an awakening experience as a bolt from the blue when I was 19 out of the blue and I was all alone but i was kind of in love with someone newly in love with someone at the time who wasn't present at all and wasn't going to be for you know a while but i did have that feeling of real strong warmth towards someone and uh so maybe that even there then that was a So anyway, so that the second in is a corrective to the idea that we've got to do it all myself. When we hear that support, the thing that I think a lot of us think of is, okay, we need to go get more support than we have. And that

may very well be true. But a big part part of the chapter and I think is really valuable is Recognizing the support that already exists Right. So talk about that. Yeah. Thank you very much. That's exactly right I think it's so easy in the same kind of mindset to think That we are really thoroughly independent individual that we are really thoroughly independent, individual, non-dependent creatures. And you know, you only got to stop for a moment.

Every single breath you take is an exchange with this planet. Every time you take a step, you're walking on something that's supporting you. Sitting on a chair is supporting you. There's basically not a fraction of a moment in life that isn't given by 10 trillion other things. And this is all stardust and whatever the molecules are, this body, this brain is talking, hearing right now, perceiving. It's all,

and forget the subatomic stuff, just all the molecular stuff doing what it does. And we're getting to experience it. But it's basically a gift to us to be having all this stuff, making us have this, allowing us to have this experience. It's all given somehow, if you see what I mean. We didn't put it all together. And here it is, we're experiencing. So on so many levels, if you start thinking about it, like Thich Nhat Hanh, the great

teacher says, just pick up a sheet of paper. The forest is there. The sun is there. The rivers are there. The clouds and rain are there. All the people who worked in the forest and worked in the farms and worked in the milling station and worked as shipping and transfer, they're all in this piece of paper. And everything that they ate is in this piece of paper. And all their ancestors are in this piece of paper. And the dinosaurs are in this piece of paper. If you go back, everything's in this piece

of paper. The mighty 300-foot-high trees, 600-foot- trees, 30 million years ago or 300 million years ago, whatever it was, they're in this piece of paper. So the idea that we could be isolated as a single strand in all of this, that's what this second in has got in its target. We want to really take a look at that. I think it was Carl Sagan who said, if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you have to invent the universe, right? It's a core idea. I think you've got a line in there somewhere about like our life being a confluence of a million contingencies. I think you and I were talking about this last night. We were talking about how like one little moment, you meet one person sort of by chance and you look back and you can see how your whole life changed by this contingency that could easily have not happened. Yeah, yeah.

And it's just, it's kind of amazing. But I love that idea of connecting to the support we already have. Right. I think about this often with generosity. In one of the programs I teach, we talk about generosity. And the way you could take that is I need to be more generous. And sure, perhaps. But the other way to take it is let me look at all the ways I'm already generous. And can I connect to those? And you're saying we can recognize the support that we already have while we reasonably think about where might our practice of whatever our different types are use more support. Yes, exactly. And, of course, there are many ways that someone like a troubled young man and a troubled young person of whatever gender may feel very reluctant to reach out. Maybe not only young people,

that it takes a certain vulnerability to reach out and say, I need help. I can't actually do this on my own. That's a huge step for many of us to recognize that. And I think that's part of this path of practice in many ways. Yeah, it was a gift to be a homeless heroin addict at 24 because i really didn't have much choice but to ask for for help i mean it it wasn't like i debated it you know it just was sort of like okay that or die and and but

that was a gift to learn that so early yes for me it felt like. Yeah, well, I love the fact that you're open about this and that you have come from that. It speaks volumes about you. And it speaks to what we were talking about at the very start, which wolf wins. And to be on that path of, I'm going to keep feeding the good wolf you know to be able to you know here you are it's awesome let's talk a little bit more about the next in which is absorption yeah yeah this is you know again this is really sort of coming out of different kinds of trainings,

recognizing what's common among them, and speaking mostly about meditation but not exclusively. So one thing that is found among different kinds of meditation and other areas too is tapping into our human capacity to get into flow, to go into flow states. Flow states being characterized typically by a sense of effortlessness, of ease, of a kind of intrinsic fulfillment and peace and energy and time kind of vanishes or goes quiet. And sometimes the sense of self-consciousness goes rather quiet as well. You know, athletes will talk about some incredible shot they did on a hoop and everything seemed to just become like strangely effortless. And,

you know, and musicians go into it and artists because of many stripes may go into it and Lots of other people who aren't doing unusual things like athletics and music etc Also go into it in the course of the day's work you can go into flow doing the washing up and you can go into it in all kinds of things including meditation and One of the things that the meditation traditions like to call out is they call it samadhi, which is kind of absorption or flow, different names. But it's a state of finding an intrinsic, extraordinary peace, quiet, calm, energy, peace, quiet, calm, energy, effortlessness.

It just kind of switches on. And it's really important to call it out in a meditation practice because it's incredibly good for us. It's really healthy for the nervous system. I think there's some research that insofar as when people have a choice, they've gravitated to a profession that's linked to some activity where they would find they could get into flow. You know, Csikszentmihalyi was this great researcher on it. I'm impressed you can say that. I've had some practice back in the 70s and 80s and 90s and at the university of chicago and he said

you know it makes people happier to be tasting flow so um yeah i wanted to call that out and in a way not overlook it not be saying well you're going to have the blinding revelation that you never hear no have that lovely flow you also, yeah, it's not quite the same as the bottom falling out of the bucket, as Zen calls it, where we do really see the world in a radically different way, but it's damn good, you know?

You make the analogy of, as we head into that absorption, that the separations between us and other things and other things in each other begin to get a little more blurry, right? And then there's, you know, maybe if we're fortunate, the bottom falls out, but that this absorption state is giving us this starting to blur, you know, we're not, we're not as separate. One of the things I think is interesting though, is if we look at flow states,

they tend to happen in the way that psychologists are describing them in the midst of an activity that is a certain level of challenging there's the right amount of challenge and the right amount of interest yeah meditation is interesting because you're not exactly doing anything but to hit absorption there is some way in which you're doing enough that you're moving out of the default mode network. How do you do that? Right. How do you do enough that you are able to sort of enter absorption, but not do so much that you're now clamped down on the experience and trying to control it? Yeah.

Yeah. That's a great question. I wish I knew the answer. If you could tell us that, you could bottle it and you wouldn't need to sell this book. Exactly, exactly. I mean, I think, you know, I'd say two possible answers would be one is just sometimes it is easier to stay mindfully attentive to our meditation practice, whatever it might be. And we just stay on it. And suddenly we can, and then it'll just come on. The gear shifts, and it takes no effort to stay beautifully present and aware and richly

absorbing experience. It just somehow happened. then commonly was oh man this is great and then it's gone you know and then we'll say hey i want that back you know just what happened five minutes ago i'm going there again and it won't you know so one factor is not wanting it you know right I think that truly is. Another thing would be, again, I mean, actually it's related to that very point, is the allowing thing. You can get there more from allowing.

Because when you're allowing, the real principle of allowing is allowing anything that arises in our practice. So from that point of view, it can be applied to anything. As we were saying, intense restlessness could even be a trigger of flow if we're really allowing it. Because then it becomes this strange, interesting, tight thing that I can actually be aware of and let it be present. And suddenly it's beautiful. And suddenly everything's beautiful and the thing's still there but it's lost its clenching you know i think i'd still put my money mostly on allowing yeah you know it's interesting to somebody who spent a lot of time doing these various things that

and working with people that are doing them is that there's a state in which we are just allowing because we think if we allow this thing's going to go away I mean it's just a slightly more sophisticated strategy yes right yeah so it almost feels like the Russian nesting dolls it does just allow that don't allow that like just continuing to keep doing it. Exactly. We allow the strategic allow. Exactly.

We should probably move to awakening. I think so. I think so. Let's do it. The heart of our lives, the heart of what we are. Heart of Zen. The heart of Zen, the heart of humans. Because Zen hasn't got a monopoly on awakening. Nothing does.

Nobody does. You can't. No institution ever could. No, nobody does. You can't. No institution ever could. No organization ever could. Nothing could possibly ever pin down what it is, have a fail-safe delivery system. No, no, no. It's not possible.

What it is is actually that cart track analogy isn't really just about practice. It's about life. The one rut is us going through our life, making coffee in the morning, logging on, going to work, doing Zoom meeting, team meeting, whatever, all of that. And meanwhile, there's the other rut, always with us, doing the exact same things, actually. But do we recognize it? What is it? What is it? What is this second run? What is it? Well, you can say things about it, but none of them are really it.

You could say, like I did actually, well, it's boundless. It's infinitely spacious. It's actually nothing at all. It's recognized when the self is gone. Yeah, but it's also actually being the self. It's the tree outside. It's all the trees outside. It's none of the trees outside. What is it? Are you going to tell us? Everyone's waiting now. That's what it is. Ah. Ah. Ah.

That's it. That's it. Ah. Yeah, I think it's as simple as that. It's really just kind of that little pause, space, gap. Just this. Just this. just this,

just this. To talk about it is to make it elsewhere. But it's never elsewhere. It can't be other than this, this. Okay, I'm thinking I ought to say something. I'm not sure I want to mess this up with another question.

I actually think that's a perfect place to wrap up. Yeah. I think that's a beautiful place to end. Thank you. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you, everybody. Actually, I just got the right answer.

Okay. All right. You've got to read the book to find out. Did your publicist just beam that into your ear henry you forgot something yeah you're sure you want to promote this one and not this one oh man thank you so much eric thank you everybody for coming here If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their

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