Henry Shukman
Episodes
Notes
The Kevin Rose Show · Zen: Stop Trying to Quiet Your Mind | Henry Shukman
-
Would Kevin Rose Rather Fly the Plane?
Kevin Rose would rather fly the plane than ride as a passenger, silly as that sounds. Needing to know shows up as a preference for control. He let the preference be, and slowly let not knowing be okay.
He looked at his heart rate on his Apple Watch during the flight. It did not climb above normal. He had no anxiety the entire flight, and the calm felt impressive.
Henry Shukman called him a great practitioner whose practice is growing. If a flight with no anxiety is the only benefit he ever gets, it is enough.
-
How Can Someone Walk and Still Go Nowhere?
Henry Shukman says a student who declared that Bodhidharma never took a step seems to have found a reality where there is nowhere to go. A person can drive all over, fly all over, and walk as much as they like, and in one sense still not be going anywhere. He calls the discovery a deep awakening, and he is simplifying the student's words.
The student stubbed his toe on a rock in open straw sandals. The pain was sudden and bloody, and the shock went right through him. Everything fell away into one openness. Nobody remained and no body remained, a real experience of emptiness. He asked where pain comes from when nothing is left, and yet pain remains. All the reactivity had gone. Pain was only
-
How Does Practice Become a Flow State?
Henry Shukman says flow states might be some kind of preparatory training. A musician already knows how to practice: do the same thing again and again and slowly, gradually make it second nature. Getting to know flow starts in that repetition.
Doing exactly the same thing every day for 10 years suddenly feels easy. The skill has become second nature. The person is on a kind of autopilot, doing it better than ever, with a clarity of mind and a richness in the experience. Baseball players, basketball players, and football players know the same shift.
Music and athletics are not required. Any kind of habitual task works the same way. As the person gets better and the practice skills come toge
-
What Was Henry Shukman's Awakening Like?
Henry Shukman had an awakening as a youth, far from home, so complete that he felt he could die that night because his life had already been fulfilled. Six weeks after he went home, he collapsed in despair and had a breakdown.
For several years he lived with deep shame and despair after losing a priceless treasure and truth he had found by accident. He had not been meditating. The awakening came out of nowhere. One factor he can point to is really difficult eczema from a very young age. Living with it was incredibly hard. The eczema was all over his body for periods of time, never gone, sometimes receded, then bad again, and he was hospitalized a number of times. The eczema was very traumat
-
What Does Rumi Mean by Come Back?
Henry Shukman says Rumi's call to come back, in the translation by Coleman Barks, means returning to now after the mind has wandered off. Many mind parts and reactivity can take someone away from the present, and the drift is okay.
The poem says come back, whoever you are: wanderer, worshipper, lover of leavings. It does not matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Even if the vows have been broken a thousand times, return yet again. A caravan is both the train of camels crossing the desert and the lodges where the camel trains rest at night or every few days. Come here. It does not matter what has been going on. The wanderer is welcome, there is always hope, and no matter how desperate th
-
What Is the Backward Step in Zen?
Henry Shukman says the backward step in Zen is disengaging from outward activity. The step releases a person from activity and brings them back into the space of being. The space of being is very active. Coming back is a kind of innocence. The being people come back to is timeless, so it is always new, fresh, and innocent. Zen talks about beginner's mind because empty being is always new. It is new because it has no great history attached to it and is not dragging around a sack. Empty being is truly at the edge of unfolding.
He aspires to live at the edge of unfolding and sometimes can claim it. He does not try to live there, because trying would be a preference and would push it away. Over
-
Why Does the Great Way Dislike Choosing?
Henry Shukman says the great way is the great reality, one single whole that excludes nothing. It has no size. It is free of time, yet it allows time to happen and lets everything unfold. The poem opens with the line that the great way is not difficult and just dislikes choosing, the same ground as preferences and reactivity.
The line comes from the third ancestor in Chinese Chan, or Zen Buddhism, in a poem called the Shin Shin Ming, or the Shin Jin Mei in Japanese, about three pages long. People have pored over it for millennia. The great way is not something a person sees out there. It is what a person actually is, and what all of us are. It goes beyond self and other and beyond self and
-
What Did Suzuki Roshi Teach About Monkey Mind?
Henry Shukman says Suzuki Roshi, who wrote Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, taught a different way to meet monkey mind. Rather than trying to stop it, imprison it, or grab hold of it, picture a young foal in a field with its mother watching nearby.
As practice deepens, the meadow gets larger. The field of awareness grows, so monkey mind can skip about and keep doing what it is doing while a person stays present. The person is not caught by the skipping and is not so quickly captivated by it. The mother is not trying to stop the little animal running around. She is lovingly becoming more aware of it. The image is a perfect analogy for what happens in practice.
A longer, deeper retreat makes the p