Henry Shookman (6:01)

Hey, thanks so much for having me. It's an honor and a delight to get to chat with you.

Dan Harris (6:06)

As a fan, I feel the same way. I was listening to one of your guided meditations on the Waking up app just a few hours ago. So the fandom runs both ways.

Henry Shookman (6:18)

Well, I'm happy to hear found your way to my offerings there. Yeah.

Dan Harris (6:22)

I want to start with a little bit of a biographical question because I noticed in reading up on you that your official bio mentions that you had a. This is a quote, a spontaneous spiritual awakening at the age of 19. When I read that, I flashed back to the first time I read about Eckhart Tolle, the best selling spiritual guru that was back in like 2008 or 9, a time when I was completely new to any of this stuff. And he talks about having a spontaneous spiritual awakening, I think in his 20s. And at that time my mind was so wired for skepticism as a journalist and an anchorman that I completely rejected it and thought, oh, this guy must be a lun. And now it's interesting because I read this about you and I'm thinking, first of all, I'm entirely inclined to believe it. And second, I'm like just totally interested. I want to hear more. So sorry for making that question about me. But just to give you a little context for why I'm asking, I'm very.

Henry Shookman (7:18)

Happy that you do ask that. And it's been a very important thing in my life. I grew up, actually, I still am basically rational, I hope skeptical in the right ways, an empiricist and all the rest of it. I grew up in Oxford. Both my parents were professors. I went to Cambridge and this experience that you just referenced happened when I was on a gap year between A levels in England and I was going to Cambridge to read ancient Greek and Russian. And I was a scholarly type. During my gap year, my dad organized some work for me. He got me a job in Argentina on a ranch, which. One of his colleagues at his college was Argentinian. And I went and worked out there with a friend. And then we backpacked through the Andes. And towards the end of that trip, I found myself alone on a beach as the sun was lowering over the horizon of the Pacific Ocean. And something completely outside anything that I had imagined might be possible or would have had any interest in happened to me at the time. I had no idea what it was. It was only years later that I started to understand I had what was not, in fact, just a weird, random, extraordinary moment that just came and went. I'd had something that was recognized in some traditions as what they call awakening, which means we could get into the terminology in a bit. But what happened to me was that I was just minding my own business, looking at the sunlight on the water as the sun lowered. And I got interested in it because it was very bright. But when I looked more attentively, I realized that actually there were these very bright sort of scales of light moving over the surface of the water. And where there weren't bright scales, the water was incredibly dark. It was a sort of matte black. So what just seemed to me is, oh, that's the bright surface of the sea. It wasn't actually, on closer inspection then I thought, wait a minute. Water's transparent, air is transparent. So this surface is simply the meeting of two transparent media. And then light itself is actually transparent. You see it bouncing off objects. So this emphatically present object, the surface of the sea, suddenly, as I was kind of analyzing my own experience, became less sort of certainly what I'd quite naturally, logically, empirically, rationally imputed it to be. And I don't know why, but suddenly the experience outside of me ceased to be separate from me. It was as if there was one sort of awareness, which is what I really was and what the sea really was. And we were both part of that. It went even deeper because it then became as if all that I was seeing was sort of insubstantial. And there was just a kind of sizeless emptiness. And that's what I really was. And it seemed to include everything. And then it sort of ended. I realized, oh, yeah, it's me again, kind of thing, standing on a beach. Henry, who's off to study at Cambridge and all the rest of it. And there's just had an extraordinarily beautiful experience. And it left me with this. I mean, just a love like I had never felt before. I felt as if I belonged in a way I couldn't have imagined. I'd grown up with really severe eczema from the age of six months, which had made my contact with the world highly problematic. So I felt very sort of isolated and separate through my childhood. I also had some kind of complication around being half Jewish. And in the Britain that I grew up in the 1970s, there was still a kind of undercurrent of antisemitism. So I didn't feel I really belonged in Britain. But actually, I wasn't at all brought up in a Jewish way. I was just. Which was fine by me, But I'd felt an issue that I didn't really belong anywhere. And when this experience happened, it was like, oh, my gosh, I could not belong more. It was like I was discovering I was inseparable from the very world I was in. The sense of belonging and a kind of love, yeah, really a sort of immemorial love that came with that was just incredible. It lingered for days. I mean, not that intensity and weirdness of feeling that I'm seeing clearly somehow, that I'm part of everything, that intensity was gone, but this sense of a huge relief and a kind of blessed love being present bubbling up in my heart out of nowhere. And it felt as if I'd found the answer to a question that I didn't even know I'd been asking about what is this life? I wanted to say again that I really had not had any interest in spirituality, mysticism, no drugs, nothing like that. I was a somewhat tormented but regular kind of guy. Like I said, I brought up in this thoroughly rational, logical, positivist atmosphere of Oxford. And I went on to carry on in that vein at Cambridge and. But this thing happened that was outside everything I ever had imagined or knew, and that came with this powerful sense that it was real, that it was actually more real than the ordinary way I experienced my life. If it hadn't had that to it as well, it would have just been a blip. But it was such a forceful sense of, oh, my gosh, this is more real than the way I normally see things.

Dan Harris (13:31)

I want to try to see if I can understand the order of operations of that awakening moment. As a side note, somebody at a party was asking me the other day, like, to the extent I personally have had any success as an interviewer or a journalist, like, why is that? And I found myself saying, Something I don't know if I'd ever said before, which is that part of. I think what's helped me is that I'm a little bit stupid. And so like I need to understand something really at the most granular level to understand it at all. And so I'm gonna. I'm gonna try to be a little bit stupid with you vis a vis this moment. So if I heard you correctly, which I probably didn't, what I heard was it started with a kind of glimpse of impermanence, this non negotiable truth of change. You're looking at what might seem like a solid mass that we call the ocean, but if you break it down, it's these essenceless component parts, these constantly changing component parts of white and light and water and the interplay thereof. And then somehow that led to an experience of what is sometimes called non separation, non duality, oneness. Although that can be a little bit of a tricky term where you're, you know, you feel completely enmeshed and not in any way separate from everything, the universe. And then that produced love. You know, love is a tricky word. Not like I'm in love with that person over there, but more like I know in my molecules that I intrinsically belong to all of this. Love just arises uncontrived. Is. Did I restate that? With some degree of accuracy.

Henry Shookman (15:15)

That was beautifully done. That was absolutely spot on. The only thing I would add, this is not a change, it's just an interpolation. There was a phase of it when the visibility or perceptibility of the ocean and the sand I was standing on, there was a phase when that dissolved into something that it's very hard to describe, but it was without substance. It was a kind of substance, less, I don't know, fabric that pervaded everything, I assume decades on, that that was some kind of a glimpse of shunyata, as Buddhism sometimes calls it, the emptiness of all things. That there's a level on which somehow if we really break down sense experience, it can sort of come apart, it can particulate, and those particles themselves can even become. It can sort of seem like all of this sense experience is made out of kind of nothing or made out of substancelessness of some kind, some insubstantiality that was in there as well. But I think that was only a refinement of what you were talking about with the non separateness. It was a sort of further step in non separateness.

Dan Harris (16:34)

Yeah. Or an intermediate step between impermanence and non separateness. As I Understand it. And that's always a tricky understanding is fleeting and questionable at best. But as I understand it, this is part of a classic progression in meditation. Although you weren't meditating, where you see, you start to have an increasingly refined view of the changing nature of everything. And it's moving so fast that it. Nothing can be solid in and of itself.

Henry Shookman (17:10)

That's right.

Dan Harris (17:10)

Once you see that, it kind of inexorably leads to, like. Yeah, well, that includes me as the observer. I can't find Henry behind my eyes. And once that dissolves, which can be a little scary sometimes, what remains is the world. What remains is everything. And you're a part of that to the extent that you exist.

Henry Shookman (17:30)

I would go along with all of that. Since that moment, I've studied it, the process, more, my meditation training. And I'd agree with you very much like that. The only thing is that I think there can be an experience where there isn't the world, where the world itself breaks down as well. I think these days you sort of can point to some neuroscience or some, at least cognitive science maybe allied with some neuroscience that does actually support the idea that our experience of the world out there is actually a simulation running in the mind or the various rabbit holes we can go down. And that's one of them. But I feel that at that point, I definitely did seem to see that, oh, my gosh, the world isn't actually here quite the way I thought it was, and nor am I. And we both share in being this substanceless substrate. That language is, of course, well, notoriously difficult for this kind of stuff, but we can have stabs at it. And it was something like that.

Dan Harris (18:35)

What would you say to somebody who's listening to this, feeling confused, like, I want it. It sounds amazing, but I still don't fully understand it or how to get it. So not like, who the fuck is this guy? But more like, how do I have what he's having? Actually, I think one way to get to it would be to break it down to its rudiments, which you do in your book Original Love. And you talk about what you call these four inns I n ins that kind of lead up to awakening. So perhaps the best way to help the confused here would be to walk through this progression so that people can understand it from the bottom up themselves. Does that sound right to you?

Henry Shookman (19:16)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'd love to. Shall I start with the first one?

Dan Harris (19:20)

Yeah. Well, first of all, let me ask you before we dive into the first one, what do you mean by in I n N. Yeah, that was just.

Henry Shookman (19:27)

A fairly poetic word that I brought in. I might have used refuge, which would be a more traditional term. Think of it as a place just this is metaphorically as a place where we can get to develop in certain ways by doing certain kinds of practice. The reason I break it down into four is that they're not all the same. And I think there's a risk of confusion, especially today in the west when there's so much enthusiasm about meditation, which is of course terrific. But there is a risk of eliding different dimensions of the practice. And they really are a bit distinct and there's nothing wrong with that. It's really good. And each of these ins is tremendously valuable. And I would say if it's the only one you want to throw yourself into, that's all good. But it's also good to know about the various possibilities that there are on this spiritual path and recognize that they're not all exactly the same in what they're seeking and what they can help us develop in ways they can help us develop.

Dan Harris (20:31)

Totally agree. And I think the taxonomy is incredibly helpful. So let's start with the first in which is mindfulness.

Henry Shookman (20:40)

Yeah. Actually, Dan, can I go back one step? Because in the book I bring up this metaphor that comes from early Chinese Buddhism of practice being a cart track. And like any cart track, obviously it has at least two or four wheels, so it's got to have two wheel ruts. And this metaphor, which is from a document from the 6th century, early 6th century China, says that the path of practice is a cart track with these two ruts, one for either wheel. The first one is the path of developing in mindfulness, and the second one is the path of. They call it variously principle or reality. And that would mean the wheel rut refers to that kind of awakening experience where we discover non separateness. And it's distinct from the first wheel rut because it's always present. It's a dimension of reality without time, without an all encompassing and entirely one. Therefore it can't be progressive, you can't make your way down it because it's always here. Is this too abstract and confusing?

Dan Harris (21:57)

I just want to be able to see if I can again be a little bit done with you and restate it to you. One thing that can be confusing about contemplative practice is that there is a path, right? There are things to do and there are skills to develop. And that path is taking you to something that's already here. And so understanding that is the key. Am I close?

Henry Shookman (22:19)

That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. And when we what is already here, we can get that on different levels. You know, there could be, in a way, the path of developing mindfulness is discovering that we've already got mindfulness. We just learn to tap into it more. But on that second wheel, right. They're saying it's not just about that. It's about the whole of existence is already here. You can't develop in it in any way. All you can do is get that more and more consistently. It's not a programmatic developmental path. That second rut, right.

Dan Harris (22:58)

The expression that's coming to mind and I'll mangle it. But it comes from a Zen master whose name I'm forgetting. But he would tell his students, you're perfect and you could use a little improvement. And that speaks to the paradox here.

Henry Shookman (23:13)

That's exactly right. It was like, you're perfect is that second wheel rut. You need a little improvement is the first wheel rut. And they're always present. I love that metaphor because there are traditions where they go all in on the non dual and they forget about the personal development. And then there are traditions where they go all in on the personal and maybe more than personal, but on the developmental side, and they forget about the non dual side. So I think it's an incredibly good metaphor to begin with. Like, both are always here. You can forget about the non dual if you're not curious about it. But if you are curious about it and you do go that way, you better do the other side as well, because you're a human being who has to be tended and helped and steered and in some ways trained and tamed. It's a little bit of a cautionary note that we got to have both sides.

Dan Harris (23:59)

And again, just for the people who might be new to this, or maybe not new to it, but still feeling frustrated that they don't understand things. When you use the term non dual, again, you are referring to non separation or what the great spiritual cliche about oneness with the universe.

Henry Shookman (24:16)

Yes. Make me one with everything. Like the old hamburger joke or whatever. The hot dog joke. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That we are already one with everything, but we still have to do a lot of work if we want to be helpful, less harmful, etc.

Dan Harris (24:33)

Okay, coming up, Henry and I dive into the 4ins again. I n s the 4ins on the path to awakening. We talk about loving your obstacles, which is a cool concept. And we talk about whether it's important to have A formal teacher in order to deepen your practice. Thank you for setting the table in that way. Should we dive into. In number one right now with mindfulness?

Henry Shookman (25:06)

Sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. I'm sure a lot of us here today will have some pretty clear sense of what mindfulness means. It always begins with coming back to the fact that we can be aware of our experience right now. And very often we're not. We're lost in thought, and we're filtering experience through all kinds of conceptual and emotional filters. And we can become more aware of those filters rather than being so persuaded by them and caught up in the view that they offer. So mindfulness is the anchor and the foundation of all of it, really being able to come back and be present. It sounds like such a small, simple thing until we start trying to do it. I feel the more we do it, the more we realize, oh, my gosh. I don't know where I was the last five minutes, but I wasn't aware of the room I was in. I realized this when I was a kid. I was walking down the street to school in Oxford, carrying my satchel of books over my shoulder, kicking a pebble down the gutter. And one morning, it struck me I had no idea how I'd got from the last lamppost to this lamppost. Oh, my God, I think I'm awake. I think I'm awake. But am I actually? Maybe half the time in my waking life, I'm just not awake. And then I wondered, well, how awake can you be? Even when I think I'm awake, could I be more awake? I still wonder, actually, where am I on the dial of wakefulness?

Dan Harris (26:52)

Joseph Goldstein, my great friend and meditation teacher, often talks about how we're dreaming ourselves into existence because we're just so often lost in the dream of thought.

Henry Shookman (27:01)

Right, right, right, right, right, exactly. I've done a lot of work with the four foundations of mindfulness, the Satipatthana Sutra. I love Joseph's talks on them. I listened to all of them, actually. I gave something like 49 talks, I think, on that sutra. It's all about mindfulness, and it's beautiful. It often begins with the body coming back to the body, because the body doesn't do time travel, the mind does. I continually come back to those foundations of mindfulness.

Dan Harris (27:34)

I just want to jump in and define a term here just for people new to Buddhism. One of the Buddha's most famous lectures or discourses was called the Satipatthana Sutta. Sutta is just a word for a part of the Buddhist scripture or teaching within the Buddhist canon. And the sativa is it basically means the four foundations of mindfulness, the four ways to be mindful. I'm not going to go through the whole list right now, but the first is the body just being aware of the breathing or various sensations in the body. As you said before, the body's always awake right now.

Henry Shookman (28:09)

Yeah. For me, it was a beautiful thing to come home to my body. Like a homecoming. After I'd had that awakening experience. I then had a number of years, like I mentioned, of being out in the desert. Very unhappy desert, metaphorically, that is, I now live in the desert, actually. But that's physically when I started meditating, it was coming home to being in this body. I took up yoga as well, which was so glad I did. It was really helpful. It went really well with meditation. And in my case, as I became a bit more mindful, I started to realize how unhappy I was and that I was sitting with anxiety a lot of the time. I started doing therapy and I'm really glad I did. And that was critical for me. In other words, my path of mindfulness showed me I need some strategic professional help. I hear from a lot of people who are meditators that they have done or do do therapy at times as well, because it's a natural kind of thing that as we become more mindful, we recognize more how we're doing. It's a barometer as well as it is a methodology for self development and healing.

Dan Harris (29:31)

Agreed. I was intrigued in looking at your book that within this section, again, we're going through the four ins in your book, and the first is mindfulness. And within this section of the book you talk about, in fact, I believe you have a whole chapter on loving your obstacles. What does that mean?

Henry Shookman (29:52)

Yeah. Okay. Well, there's a technical term in Buddhism of hindrances, which are things that hinder our meditation that will make it harder to meditate and may even throw us off the path. And there's a traditional set of five. I don't think we need to go into the detail here, but I don't think there need be only five, actually. I think you could parse them out in any number of ways, but there are common emotion patterns that we get caught in that make it difficult to sit still and be with ourselves. And I think our typical response in life for most of us, myself included, is the first time the moment one of these shows up is to want to not feel it and forget about it and distract myself. I'm Going to go to the phone, I'm going to go to the fridge, I'm going to anything that will just take me away from having to experience this uncomfortable state. So when you're meditating of course it's harder because you're not supposed to reach for your phone and sometimes you're in context where you really couldn't do that so you can't distract yourself so easily. You might dive off into fantasies or thought loops and keep yourself distracted that way, so to speak. But it's much better I think if we can find a way to be with like a hand of cards or these different kinds of difficulties that will come up for us which are essentially emotional states, affective states, if we can learn to be with them. And of course we don't want to be with them. So it's not that easy. But I've come to the conclusion that the key is somehow discovering that we have the innate capacity to. To let them be present, to allow them. And once we do that we have the possibility then of kind of welcoming them, of having a more open hearted recognition and allowing of them and that can actually lead to feeling grateful for them because they stimulate, catalyze some kind of expansion or. Yeah, it may be very small and incremental but just a little bit of a bigger capacity to be with ourselves, be with our experience even when it's difficult. But that is actually being with ourselves in a more accepting and ultimately more loving way. I feel that's a really beautiful thing and I think it's one of the most important things for me it's been on my path of meditation as been learning how to be with what I find difficult to feel in my body, the discomfort of anxiety, for example. And to find that I actually can find within myself a capacity that is warmly oriented towards a difficulty like that. And it's beautiful. I regard it as a way of having a more open heart.

Dan Harris (32:58)

Thank you for waking me up essentially is what the attitude is.

Henry Shookman (33:02)

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then that heart that is resisting life less can become more consistently a thing we turn to and remember to switch on sort of thing. In other words, it becomes a little bit easier to open in that kind of way again when we need to.

Dan Harris (33:22)

Well, we could talk for hours about mindfulness, but in the interest of time let's move to the second in which is support. What do you mean by that?

Henry Shookman (33:32)

Yeah. So in my role as a meditation teacher I've noticed a lot of people tend to think of their practice as their own thing, something they've got to do by themselves and don't recognize how much we are actually uncovering connection and connectedness through practice. Sure. There's a side of it where we need the. I guess the self discipline or whatever it is that helps us form the habit and sustain the habit. Because as you know, most of the benefits come through over time. More like watering a garden than just instantly building something nice. The daily practice and the long term practice are really. But I think that we find more and more that we're not an isolated entity. We discover that we live in a world of multidirectional forms of support that comes in very obvious material or sort of manifest ways. Like we might have a teacher, we might have people we connect with around meditation. And we have people that we don't connect with around meditation, but other things. And they're incredibly important in our lives. And so just kind of wearing down or diminishing the idea that I'm on my own trying to make my life okay and mindfulness is part of my regime. That's an incomplete picture from my point of view because actually we're totally embedded in so many systems. In our very existence is a confluence of an infinite number of systems. And we've got so many systems within us. We're really not isolated entities. And so any ways that we come to recognize that more are going to help us. And again, I think every time I've recognized that in some way I'm connected more than I realize. Whatever ways it might be, it softens something hard within me in a really nice way. And I would hazard the use of the word love in some sense though, that I. It opens me up in some way to something that feels a bit more of a loving way to be in this world.

Dan Harris (35:45)

I agree with your use of the word love. I've expended a lot of calories trying to kind of reclaim the word because it is so freighted. And in our language, you know, we'd have this one word. Whereas in other languages there are many words for different kinds of love. And I think we need to kind of define it down and define it up. It's way more and way less than we're making it out to be. Love doesn't have to just be string music and you complete me in some big scene from a Hollywood movie. It can also just be accepting an itch while you're meditating. And it can be this radical cellular sense of belonging to the universe that you described at the beginning of this conversation. That's love too. But I Want to ask you a more practical question because in the book, in this section of the book or on support, you talk about the importance, and you just mentioned it, of finding a teacher. And this is a question I get from a lot of people, like, how do I find a meditation teacher? And I don't honestly know how to answer that for people is what you're saying, Develop a personal relationship with a great meditation teacher. Follow a teacher you like and go to their zoom sessions. What is it practically you're recommending?

Henry Shookman (36:56)

Yeah, that's great. I mean, there are different ways that we can have a kind of coach in meditation. There are different forms that kind of guidance can take. Actually, I'm part of a little team that's built an app called the Way. It's a single pathway which I leave. I would say start there if you want, because it'll tell you what to do day by day. And you build incrementally in this long pathway rather than having to choose, well, which one should I do today? We just guide you. This is the one you do today. And there's a sort of logical sequence to them that develops your practice. So I'd say, hey, if you're not sure, give it a try. See if you like that. There's many sessions that are free. You could just dip into that. But aside from that, I think in general, yeah, it comes in so many forms. I mean, one form is read a book. I mean, I read Pema Chodron in my late 20s and I absolutely loved it and it was really, really helpful. I love Tara Brack. I. I read you and it helped me. So that's some kind of connection with some kind of teaching. For sure, it's guidance. And then I've also had a long years, long or even decades long relationship with a Zen teacher who I had to meet with regularly to go through a particular kind of training with. And that was an extraordinary privilege and I feel very lucky and blessed that I was able to do that. But that's not for everybody by any means. I think it also depends a lot on what we want from the practice. So we're trying to get wiser about this kind of practice in the west, and it's going to take a while. And when I, you know, I've never met her, but I've listened to Willoughby Britton, you know, from Brown, who talks about catastrophic events that people have through meditation. Usually when I listen to the stories, I think it's just a mismatch. Somebody wanted a bit of mindfulness to dial down their nervous system and they went on a three month retreat. We're not yet sufficiently informed and wise about what are the right kinds of things we need in practice for the kind of reason we have for practice. And that's another reason I've written this book. There's different reasons to do it and there's different forms of practice that will deliver different results. So if you want 10 minutes a day to get a little bit calmer, pick up an app, that's great, you've got what you need. Don't suddenly do Olympic training. If you just want to loosen up and get a little bit fitter and go for a walk every day, you don't need an Olympic training schedule. But if you're really curious about the deepest reality of your existence and who are you and what's going to happen when you die, or what is it to be alive or is there any difference between life and death or huge matters like that, you better go to some kind of training that's going to take you deeply into that. That might be monastic and it probably be some tradition that knows about non dual experience. And you see what I mean. It's like I think we're in the process of getting wiser about all the various possibilities and how to match what we want at a particular time with a certain level of practice and style of practice. And of course that might change over time and three years later we might want something different. And then we get informed on what possibilities are, which is the information is suffusing the world of people interested in meditation more and more these days. So it's going to get easier and easier.

Dan Harris (40:10)

Yes, I agree. So the third in is absorption. Hold forth, Dr. Shukman.

Henry Shookman (40:20)

Oh my gosh. I'm sure lots of people would disagree with me completely. There's a certain state that's recognized in all Buddhist traditions known as samadhi. It's sometimes translated as concentration and it's sometimes translated as one pointedness. And I believe its roots actually in Sanskrit are something like everything held together. Sam is like the Latin sum s U n. So it's everything held together. And the D part is holding, I believe. But anyway, I think neither the word concentration nor the term one pointedness are really helpful. I never found them at all helpful and I still don't. I think it's much more like flow states. Basically when somebody gets into a flow state where there's less sense of effort, there's less sense of self consciousness, there's often less sense of time or time gets weird flow States are beautiful thing, and there's tons of research on them, and people drop into them in all kinds of daily activities. There's that great researcher, Csikszentmihalyi. Clusters of consonants, long clusters of consonants in his name. But actually it's quite. When somebody taught me how to pronounce it Csikszentmihalyi, it got a lot easier. But he talks, you know, he studied flow. He was, I think, an early researcher to really recognize it as a. As a human capacity that we will be doing something and having to concentrate, and it's hard. And then there's a gear shift and suddenly it's easy and we're doing it really well. Time dissolves and suddenly two hours are gone by. My gosh, what happened? Violinists, writers, athletes, musicians, people writing a report, people doing spreadsheets. It can happen in all kinds of activities. You know, that absorption in the activity. So with meditation, I think it's basically the same system in the brain happening. It's just that you're doing it while engaged in a not so external activity. Doing it while you're following your breath, or you're doing it while you may be, I don't know, sitting with any number of practices, and you've been struggling to keep the practice going. I do hear from this quite often with meditators. You know, this weird thing happened, Henry. I've been trying to sit for 12 months, and it's always an effort. My mind's all over the place. And then yesterday, I don't know what happened. It was just so easy, and I was clear as a bell. And I felt so sweet and good, and my mind was so clear, and it was beautiful. Everything was beautiful. That's a flow state. It's part of the meditative canon. We can taste it in meditation. And I believe that meditating can make us more predisposed to fall into flow outside of meditation. And Csikszentmihalyi thought it was really healthy. His research suggested that people were happier and more satisfied with life the more they got into flow states. Yeah, I know lots of people who. Basically their career choice was because it was an activity that took them into flow.

Dan Harris (43:32)

Your story about having this sweet or beautiful or exhilarating experience on the cushion just brings to mind a story where I was on a retreat a couple years ago. It was just me and two friends and a teacher. This is during the pandemic. So the retreat centers weren't open. So some friends and I, we got a teacher to come teach us in the mornings. We would have a session together and talk a little bit about what's happening in our practice. And my friend Josh described this really incredible experience on the cushion. And my other friend Stefan, who's sort of a tall, very serious German man and he just in tones, you will never feel that way again. Meaning you can have these experiences of absorption. I've had them rarely for me, but then the clinging kicks in and you want it again. And that essentially, definitionally, you can't get it if you want to have it.

Henry Shookman (44:28)

Exactly right. Totally agree. That's then the thing is, how do I avoid. How do I deal with the fact that I want it again becomes the next phase of practice. Over time, I certainly have found they come on more for me. It's not always super deep, but it's just, it's enough to relieve the burden. Suddenly it's sweet. It only needs to be sweet and it's good. It's just got to be 51%.

Dan Harris (45:01)

Coming up, Henry talks about what koans are, the ancient Zen practice of koans. We talk about the fourth in which is Awakening. I ask what Henry would say to a listener who finds all of this confusing. And he describes some practices that help us move past our ordinary sense of being a separate self. This show is sponsored by Better Help. Therapy can feel like a pretty big investment of time and money, but in my experience it is definitely worth it. I say this as somebody who's had therapy on and off for several decades, including when I was a child and who is now part of a family where we spend a decent amount on therapy, but it is really worth it. It is incredibly helpful for me, for my relationships, for the people in my family and their mental health. You can look at this in terms of the raw numbers here. Traditional in person therapy can cost anywhere from 100 to 250 bucks a session, which definitely adds up quickly. But better help Online therapy helps you save on average up to 50% per session. So with better help, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and time. Therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury. It really is kind of a human right. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it, and now it's within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. Plus you can switch therapists anytime. Your well being is worth it. Visit betterhelp.com happier today to get 10% off your first month. That's better help if you're running a retail business, don't let disorganized order fulfillment cause chaos.

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Henry Shookman (47:40)

Yeah, so the little rider here would be that the primary purpose of koans is found in the fourth Inn, where it's about catalyzing glimpses of non duality. But they seem to be really good at bringing on flow states as well. They're weird. There's just no getting around it. They are weird and they take some justifying even of people who think they might be curious about it. They'll quickly get frustrated with it quite often. But if you can get past the frustration and stop thinking, you have to find an answer and stop thinking. You have to solve the riddle. But you just sit with it. It's like you bring a little phrase into your mind as you're meditating. Actually the whole koan is, you know, the sound of two hands clapping, but what is the sound of one hand? That's it. So it's an illogical question. It's a little bit like an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. What happens? Actually, a friend told it to me in a slightly more concrete form. Imagine there's a gun that fires an unstoppable bullet. A bullet that can pass through absolutely everything. And there's also a wall that stops anything and everything in the universe. What happens when the unstoppable bullet meets the unpassable through wall? Yeah, you can't compute it. It's the same with a Cohen actually. Not all like this, but many are. You can't compute it. And if you just rest, put aside, the effort to solve can really quieten us and the mind sort of gives up and we become very restful and peaceful and quiet. And we sit in the shade of this imponderable, whatever it is, imponderability. We just sit in the shelter of can sort of cast a mantle of peace and quiet and absorption over us. Perhaps because the mind has given up trying to manage stuff.

Dan Harris (49:49)

As I understand it, the Tibetan term for enlightenment roughly translates into clearing away and bringing forth. And so if you can clear away the conceptual mind, the ego, the me, me, me, am I safe? Does that person like me? What's for lunch? If you can turn the volume down on that, what comes out is, you know, a lot of peace and love. It's like all the. The cliches we dismiss, but we really want them.

Henry Shookman (50:15)

Exactly. What's so funny about peace, love and understanding, as Elvis Costello said are, I think that's what this is all for. People might think meditation's for, well, I just want to regulate my nervous system or I want to have more stamina or I want to be more clear headed at work. I want to be less reactive at work. Man, it's so much bigger. Not in some forbidding, challenging way, just in a lovely way. The way that we really want as human beings. We want love, we want peace, we want harmony. And we can have more of them with just this little investment of tiny bit of time and maybe one cushion, if you're inclined to sitting on a cushion. It's a very small investment. And actually all the apps are actually incredibly good value, I think. And yet really our hearts can be met by what they want and not by seeking it out in the world, but by just having a little time learning how to be with ourselves, how to just be with ourselves, be with our experience and coming home really to this moment and to who we are a little bit deeper down where we may not be able to state it that easily. Who am I when I really look within? But I can sense that all along there's been something which feels like home when I touch it. It feels like me more intimately me and definitely more peacefully and more lovingly me. I don't believe that those are just overlays. The lovingness and the peace. I think they're intrinsic. Somehow deep down we find them.

Dan Harris (52:06)

Would you say we're now in the fourth inn of awakening?

Henry Shookman (52:11)

Yeah, we're definitely making forays into the territory. Yeah, Skirmishes on the border for sure. Yeah.

Dan Harris (52:20)

Well, let's do. Hopefully it's not an unwise land invasion of Russia in the winter, but let's make a full motion now into awakening, if you don't mind.

Henry Shookman (52:30)

Yeah, well, it is always a dramatic shift of some kind. It's like it's out of a way that I've pretty consistently understood life to be into some other way that is unfamiliar, not what I usually experience. Now, it might also bring with it a beautiful sense of a long lost familiarity. Oh my gosh. I know this from long ago. I can't remember when, but this is what it has been all along and I didn't recognize it. That kind of sense quite often comes with it. It's quite sort of radical, personally, but also with students that I've worked with, it very often does not happen while meditating. Certainly of course it can do. But quite often somebody is. They're in a meditation practice and they're practicing regularly and then they're reaching for the frozen peas in the supermarket aisle. And all of a sudden there's just nothing else in the universe. This is the whole of the universe right here. As I reach for the peas and I feel the cold plastic on my hand. I had it once driving a rental car back to Glasgow airport. After piece of work I'd been doing in the Hebrides. I was listening to a song on the radio that suddenly struck me as particularly beautiful. This is many years back. I was in a complicated situation in life at the time and I was feeling these emotions in my chest and suddenly, yeah, it was just, you know, all of this entire scene, all its complexity and richness was just kind of pouring out of nothing into existence. And I could sort of see the nothing from which it came. It was indescribably beautiful. I mean, it was so beautiful I was just weeping. I had to pull over and I was weeping and weeping at the beauty of it. And I took the car back to the rental desk and checked in and went and bought a sandwich. Feeling like I was just made of nothing. And I was walking through a transparent airport and it was so beautiful. I take it still, it wasn't just a random, weird, as it were, psychedelic moment. It was an insight of some kind. Something about the nature of this reality was actually revealed. I might have a hard time defending that with some hard nosed skeptics, but if we really look at it, we don't really know what this is anyway. You'll know as well as I did that consciousness is a very vexing problem for science. And what actually is first person experience? And how is this magnificently rich tapestry of a field of experience, of all the sense experiences we're having right now? And all the inner experiences that are going on as well that I'm conscious of. How is it produced and how does it get to be so beautiful? Of course, it can be very challenging as well, of course, but it seems like we don't have clear answers yet. We're working on it, and that's a grand. We, I mean, great scientists are working on it in different fields, cognitive science, neuroscience, of course. And some people are bringing together quantum mechanics and cognitive science. And that's kind of interesting too. And there's a lot of research going on. But these kinds of, if we could dare call it like some sort of. Seems like metaphysical insight or something, or existential insight, some insight into the nature of existing at all that meditators particularly seen a report on over time, if they keep practicing for the person who undergoes them, of course, they carry a kind of weight, a kind of an authenticity or something. And the more that there are other people experiencing these kinds of things through their practice, perhaps we could start to feel that, well, okay, they're convinced by it, but so are a thousand other people, so are 10,000 other people. It's something worth looking into, whereas 40 years ago a handful of people would dare report on it.

Dan Harris (57:04)

Okay, so let me go back to the question I asked earlier about, like, what would you say to somebody who's confused? And just to clarify, not confused in, like, what is this guy even talking about? But more like frustrated because, you know, again, I'm trying to inhabit the mind of the listener here, but I want this. What do I do? Is my practice jacked up? Because I don't. I don't even know what you're talking about. I've never been in that neighborhood. All I do is sit and try to focus on my breath and embarrassing thoughts come in and carry me away. And then I go back to my breath. But there's been no glimpses of oneness of the universe. Should that person be doing a different kind of practice? What would you say to that person?

Henry Shookman (57:42)

Well, again, you know, one of my reasons for writing this book was to, if it's needed, bring more awareness of the broad categories of possibility that practice contains. My sense was that it is needed because I would often meet people who didn't really recognize one of these inns, as I've called them, of practice. Didn't really know it was a possibility because the traditions have been quite siloed up till now. I think mercifully they're meeting one another a lot, which is really, really healthy. I've known people who are really in mindfulness for 30 years had even had some glimpse of this awakening kind of thing, but didn't have a teacher who could give them feedback on it or mirror it back to them or recognize it or encourage them. It's just like eh, whatever, that's just a blip, go back to your breath. But actually that might be something really important that has just happened to you. And I feel a certain amount of passion, I guess that I want people to know about it. I don't want anybody having to experience what I did when I was 19 of having some glimpse of this non dual state and the massive implications it has for who we feel we are in the world. It's a really important shift. I certainly didn't manage to live it then I collapsed back into miserable, depressive, anxious 20 year old soon thereafter and gradually have picked my way out of that with progressive practice of the kind I outline in the book to get back to being able to live more consistently with an awareness of boundlessness in every moment. Ideally by no means actually, but it is sort of possible when I remember I can come back and oh yeah, I'm sitting on nothing. This is all nothing and it's so beautiful and I'm deeply grounded in it all at the same time. My little act of service, I hope is to let people know there are these different dimensions of practice. And if you've been doing the same kind of practice for 30 years and you don't feel that it's still the right thing for you, it may be because it's a practice that doesn't open up one of these other dimensions of practice, not necessarily the non dual perhaps, you know, it's okay to do some jhana practice. Man, that's amazing where you go into these deep flow states in meditation. It's incredibly cool. It's an amazing system and it's teachable. Or it may be you should think about doing some dance or yoga or something that's going to make you feel more connected with others or open up your soul more. Dream work or shamanic circle or something, it's good to know about these different dimensions of our spiritual makeup and have a flexibility about what's right for me.

Dan Harris (60:36)

Now, if I am understanding you correctly, and this is me maybe reading a little bit into it, but if you do mindfulness, just say that's all you do. You know, the Buddha talked about this. This can lead directly to awakening. You can dabble in mindfulness, support and absorption and it may trip into awakening. It's all kind of heading in the same direction. And there are certain things you can do, tweak your practice, investigate things. But also it's very helpful to bear in mind that if you want it too bad, if you're pushing too hard, if you're clinging to the rope, you will get rope burn. And you will not, you know, it's not going to lead to these tantalizing experiences you're describing. And so generally speaking, the way I've approached this and you please correct me if you think I'm seeing this incorrectly, is. There's an expression from the great meditation teacher Matthew Brensilver, your progress. He tells this to his students, your progress is none of your business. So just do the practices. You know, try to have some intuition around what's the right practice at the right time. Be curious, have an open mind, and these experiences may come.

Henry Shookman (61:48)

Yes, yes, I think that's right. On your progress and perhaps even your assessment is none of your business.

Dan Harris (61:54)

Yeah.

Henry Shookman (61:54)

Just. Yeah. Now, at the same time, there's schools where you're just supposed to keep getting more and more mindful. And if you break your mindfulness, you're back to square one and you've got to build it up again. I'm sure there's great wisdom in that. But that would not be true for somebody who's looking for or hoping for or open to the possibility of an awakening experience. Because awakening is notoriously and infuriatingly indiscriminate. It doesn't actually repay earnest practice. It certainly can do. Robert Aitken, who is a Zen teacher, he said, enlightenment is an accident. I mean, we probably wouldn't use that terminology today, but he said, enlightenment is an accident. Practice makes you accident prone. Yes, yes, I'm sure that's true. But if you think that you've got to maintain this constant thread of mindfulness, and if you lose it, you're back to square one. You've got to start again. Not for awakening, you don't, because it's indiscriminate. It'll come to schmucks who haven't done any practice. But there's another point here as well, which is like, okay, I was just such a schmuck at the age of 19. I got struck over the head by this blow to my existential situation when revealed that I was all the stuff we were talking about earlier, but, man, I couldn't keep hold of a hair of it. I tumbled into misery and a kind of breakdown six weeks later when I went home. Only five years after that did I start meditating and slowly sort of building myself back up as a human being and as a slightly more cheerful person. And then ultimately when I got into practice with Zen, I was given a koan and sat with it for years and didn't trigger anything. And then sometime later I had. I was with another teacher and he gave me this question, who am I to sit with? Who am I? And I suddenly did have another different but kindred kind of experience to that thing that had happened me on the beach. Yeah, we don't write the script somehow. I mean, we can do something. And what we can do is work on these three ins where the first three where we can definitely be developing in ways that are going to serve us greatly in life anyway, but they'll also serve us if we happen to stumble into an awakening experience. They'll help us to integrate it, to have it not just be a random spark that blew in and blew out again, but actually can take root in some way and provide us with the possibility of learning to live in the same way, but also radically different way.

Dan Harris (64:44)

Plus one to everything you just said. And I do want to point out I haven't listened to your app the Way, although I do know my brother Matt is a big fan. But as I mentioned earlier, I have listened to some of your stuff on the Waking up app. In fact, today I was doing a practice, a 30 minute practice on waking up that you were guiding. And it really is specifically designed to elicit this awakening experience to get you to see through the illusion of the separate self. So yeah, it is true. You could advise people to practice mindfulness support and absorption and maybe awakening will happen and there are specific meditation practices and you guide them that really might point you at this thing.

Henry Shookman (65:30)

Well, that's true. And actually what I do in the Way is repeatedly cycle round. So you're getting sort of deeper and deeper in mindfulness, flow, absorption and exposure to awakening. I think the healthy way is to have a well rounded and wholesome practice that covers all the bases. We all know stories of clearly enlightened gurus who really messed up and damaged people and left harmful legacies, but it's not like that's necessary. But it might mean that they didn't do enough work on these more foundational sides of practice because mindfulness can expose a lot of our psychological material in a way that we might more easily gloss over. If we've had a sort of cataclysmic awakening, we think, well, I've seen the answer to everything. I don't need to do any menial psychological mindfulness training and beyond all that, and that would be an extremely hazardous position to occupy.

Dan Harris (66:30)

This may be too much to ask in the final moments here, but can you, given that there are practices, and I will direct people to both waking up and the way and put links in the show notes, but given that there are practices that do really help make us more accident prone, as it were, and help us see through the illusion of separation. We don't have time for you to guide us now, but can you just briefly describe, like, what those practices are like? I'll just say before I shut up here that, you know, in the practice I was listening to this morning, you, you had us imagine our name written on a piece of paper and then the putting a match to that piece of paper and it goes up in flames and like, and it kind of leaves you with, who am I? Beyond the label that I've put on myself and that my parents put on me. And it, it gives you just. For me, it just gives you a scintilla of a sense of the vastness that lies beyond my small self.

Henry Shookman (67:30)

I'm happy to hear that. That's exactly what I was hoping for. Exactly. But there's many like that. Our ordinary sense of separate self is busy fixing, solving. So what is it like right now if there's nothing to solve? What if right now there's nothing to fix? And who really am I, if I look within, if I open up awareness to the space within this body, who is actually in there? Does that space, that spaciousness within, have an owner? Is there a homunculus down in there? Stuff like that? And then there's koans, where you just sit with a phrase like, there's one beautiful koan, actually, where the student asks, what is moment by moment samadhi? We were talking about earlier flow and stuff. And the teacher answers in true Zen, enigmatic style, he answers, rice in the bowl, water in the bucket. That's his answer. So it's kind of, I think, quite beautiful, that phrase and just that recognition of things where they belong. The rice is in the bowl, the water is in the bucket. But what does it have to do with samadhi or moment by moment samadhi, but we just put that aside and we just sit with the phrase. So in a sit, we might repeat that phrase every kind of any way we like. We might repeat it every few seconds, or we might say it once in our minds and then forget about it and just sit in open awareness. But rice in the bowl, water in the bucket. What does the phrase do to me when I hear it? Let me look as I sit more closely. If it seems to have some effect on my experience of being me in the moment, just to hear that phrase in my mind, what actually is that effect? Let me just be with that. The little sort of ripple that seems to come after the phrase. It's as if the phrase leaves a little shadow or a little trace behind. Well, what is that trace? Where is it? Who is it detecting it? We can sort of do those kinds of investigation, and I think they're salutary and wholesome and can be fun.

Dan Harris (70:27)

Yeah.

Henry Shookman (70:27)

You know. Yeah. They can open up a sense of beauty, which is part of this whole thing as well.

Dan Harris (70:34)

And you've. You've called koans little explosives. I mean, literally blowing your mind. And I like that. I will say one last thing in closing here. It's not a question, just an observation about the meditation I was doing this morning. You had us. By us, I mean anybody who's listening. Look for the sensation of self. You said it might be in the chest. It might be like a contracting in the chest. For me, it's kind of the feeling around my face or it gathers around my mouth a little bit that. That's where I feel like that's where Dan resides. But if you look. You look for that sense, you know, it's insubstantial and it's fluxing and changing and. And one of the things you said that I found very poignant. For me, it wasn't so much on point for, like, oneness and more. A little bit more psychological. But you said that sense of self might be the sense of the little guy in there trying to hold everything together. Yeah. I'm not a sentimental guy, but that really. That brought up some, like, self compassion. Like. Yeah, there's. There's some little. It's not a homunculus. It's not a solid little nugget behind my eyes, but there's this pattern, this neurotic pattern of self that is just trying to, like, play whack a mole with life and keep everything in some sort of order. And just seeing that. Having some love for it. Again, love in the. In the way we've been using that term, and. And then also seeing the insubstantiality of it, that it's coexisting at the same moment as hearing and seeing and smelling, and they're not connected. You know, it's like there's an awareness that is way bigger. That, for me is glimpsable you know, on the daily with that said, I do have to jump off and go to a meeting so I'm feeling I've just dumped a bunch of reportage on you.

Henry Shookman (72:25)

Well, I was very happy, happy reporting for me to hear. Thank you. I'm really glad. I couldn't agree more with the compassionate side of that that you draw out. And I love the fact that we can all find that that compassionate. It's intrinsic to us. I'm sure we have that capacity to be kindly towards ourselves and towards others.

Dan Harris (72:48)

And it's no small matter. I do want to thank you for your time today, for your teaching, which I think is excellent. And you know, I'll put links in the show notes to your book original Love to the Way your app to Waking Up App where you have a lot of teachings. So there's a lot of stuff out there from Henry that people should be looking at. Henry, thank you. Really appreciate it.

Henry Shookman (73:10)

Thank you very much indeed for having me. I really enjoyed it and I'm again I'm honored to be with you like this. Thank you.

Dan Harris (73:20)

Thanks again to Henry. Don't forget his app which is called the Way. As I said, my brother Matt, who's a discerning customer, is a daily user of the Way. Also, Henry teaches on the Waking up app and as I've been mentioning quite a bit on the podcast recently, I'm in a phase of experiment experimenting with doing some partnerships with the Waking up app, including this four part eight hour long series on the noble Eightfold path that Sam Harris, Joseph Goldstein and I put together. If you want to sign up for Waking up, just go to wakingup.com 10% T E N P E R C E N T and if you use that URL you will be supporting me and my team. So I would appreciate it. It's a great app, you should check it out. Speaking of great stuff, don't forget to check out danharris.com where paid subscribers will get this podcast episode and every other podcast episode without ads. And you also get the chance to interact with me via these live sessions I do where I guide meditation and take your questions. Lots going on. Would love to have you over there. Final thing to do here is to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Cashmere is our Executive producer and Nick Thorburn from the band Islands Rode our theme.