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.
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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. 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 Shuckman, 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 Time. He has an MA from Cambridge and an emlet from Saint Andrews.
Hi. Welcome everybody, Thank you so much for coming here. Great to see you all.
I'm Henry Schuckman, and I'm absolutely delighted really that this event is happening, and that Mountain Clouds 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 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 is 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, you know. Welcome everybody to this hallowed hall, mountain clad 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 and 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 the most remarkable human being actually who's really given his life to service to helping 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. There'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 books?
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 then 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 this book from like nineteen ninety five. Yeah, which before that, Yeah, yeah, as I was reading it because I was I was wanting to read about Santa Fe And yeah, it's true.
Is it's down at the bottom.
I didn't make that up.
My God, My whole idea of my path in life has just been.
You were already awakened.
Then why did you do all this sitting?
There was no need?
Oh my god? 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?
No, thank you, Wow, It's 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 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, you know.
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 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 and 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, you know. And when you look at what's going on today, you see, you know, it's basically social media just ramping up the bad wolf unrestrained, and we can easily fall for it.
The necessity really of training. I see, that'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. Then read the Original Love first Survival of the Friendliest.
Yeah, well, that's interesting you bring up wolves. Given that we stir it 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 a 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 Grading Sweet.
Grass 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 greater sense of you know, our true.
Relationship with this planet.
Every time, and there's come 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, you know, And instead you know 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 then, we'll 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 in 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 revelation 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 subtype 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 this, Yeah, I'd love to.
So there's in early Chinese Zen from the sixth 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 and printed in the grass, that kind of And it says one track is called the four Foundations of Mindfulness, which basically is a progressive path, just as you said, of gradually growing in mindfulness, becoming more aware, more able to be responsive. And yeah, well, 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 as just reality all.
We could think of it as that original nature where nothing is separate, where you know, sometimes it shows itself as a great boundless spaciousness. Sometimes it shows itself as a single fabric that all things participated. Sometimes it shows itself as just clearly.
There was never anybody here here where I think I am, and 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 RUP.
Now, the second wheel RUP is always here and actually isn't a progressive path, it's just the fact. But we're human beings, you know, 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 you know, at the very least growing 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 care, and so are many others.
And so I believe in a two rough path. I know it doesn't sound very mellifluous, the two rout track, but it's true.
It's actually I believe in it.
Yeah, almost thirty years ago now I got sobers, you know, from a heroin addiction. And there's a line in twelve 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 is a way of over time lessening that bondage of self, that dependence, right, more and more freedom, yes, 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 whereas 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 grating curve. It's either one hundred 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. You know. 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 said, 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 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 free from the bondage of self because the relationships changed.
This is a lot of what I talk about.
If I may just morph into it a bit in mindfulness, is that of it or the way of experiencing it and trying to share it that I have 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, my damn mind slides off the breath all the time.
And you know, it's actually the path of allowing spaciousness, and allowing is so much more humane, you know. And if we find the space to allow our experience, that bondage slackens, you know, or maybe it unties itself, you know. And 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, you know. I know a lot of wise people who have never been curious about awakening, right, you know, which is what that would be, that revelatory experience. They apparently have succeeded in being wise and kind and quite cheerful.
So it's some morose types that are that are aiming for it exactly. So let's get into the book. The book is about four inns as in places that you would stay on the path to awakening. We sort of talked about awakening is that other rut, So we'll set it aside for a second. What are the three inns that are in that first run?
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?
You know, to be able to take that little step back, just to micro shift back, find the 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 then speak for myself, I know when I'm getting it because I always seem to feel something. I feel some little 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 am.
Give in this book and you take it or leave it, But I think it's an open to some little hit and a kind.
Of love that marks it. Oh yeah, I've really moved into a place of mindfulness.
You know, 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. It just jumped out at me.
Yeah, well, I hope I can remember. I think I know there's something in there that seems to be something we recognize when when we kind of disengaged 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 when I hope not to get?
You know, when we disengage from that which we can do, 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, you know.
And that's a very good place to.
Start in whatever we might want to do in the world by way of helping it.
There's a line from the Dowday 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 Dowday Ching. 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 others 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 of the potholes, and we hear individual birds an individual insects that might fly by.
If we're on a.
Bike, all that texture the road tends to get kind of in somewhat homogenized into just little bumps the rubber and rubber in air. Maybe we get a kind of tapestry of bird song, 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 whatever.
An audiobook possibly this work.
Yeah, I was going to say it's been released with Henry's wonderful voice.
So yeah, 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 you know, lot 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 time, So the next thing I got to get and the next thing. And then in the way we've sort of we've numerated everything now, you know, there's so many things that are with numbers, including meditation minutes. You know.
I mean, it's great if it motivates, that's fine, But gosh, if it's just chasing numbers, you know, and tormented by numbers. This one's going down scarily, you know, and this one's going up and I don't want it to and you know, or I wanted to go up faster.
You know, 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. Where 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, you know, but still hearing and feeling things and being among other people.
You know, it's all being given.
And how sad if I'm just thinking about you know, Amazon rank something, you know.
Not that that would be happening. 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 with the windows down, you got the music on it, you're there, you're enjoying it, and it could be the same exact experience another day and you're like two inches from the windshield, you know, 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, 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 interrupted when we're meditating, which are enough, but it's another thing to interrupt it when we're in the flow of life. In the marketplaces, they would say in old Zen writings.
Yes, that's absolutely right.
I mean, I do think of my master Yamana Roshi, who is a very busy businessman running.
A company with three thousand employees in Japan.
He sits every morning and every evening, and he also guides about one hundred 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 called up in stuff and forget and have to bring.
Myself, 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, which you'd perfect. Erica 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, right, 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, 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 that 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 twelve 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.
Ah, 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 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, yeah.
It's very possible. It's very possible.
I mean, all of us right now, I 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, and 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, 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 those 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 city, I don't exactly know why, but I just am, rather than sort of kind of damn that restlessness, you know, stop being restless, don't have restlessness. What if restlessness is the teacher right now?
How do I let that happen. Something's going 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've still managed 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 in patience 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 then actually what I think ought to be going on is the thing to tear up and a goda allowing that. Actually, for me, that's the pivot.
It makes me think of the semi famous Shinsen 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 then if we can, I think we often should, right, it's wise course of action. And there are times we simply can't, whether it's restlessness and 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, right. But I almost think of it as just like oftentimes it's about like how do we not make it worse?
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, 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 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 you know, 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, you know.
And I know this.
I mean it's very difficult if people were really close to have really hard things in their life that are kind of they're not going.
Anywhere those hearts. That's a very very hard thing to be with.
And you know, many of us would just sort of jump into trying to fix, jump in to trying to manage. Sometimes it won't work. We really can't do anything. How are we going to live with that?
You know?
And 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. You know, 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. I find that taking one positive action towards things that matter to me really helps reduce anxiety. Also, I have a reflection question, what positive experiences have you had today that you could focus on instead of your anxiety. Every Wednesday I send out a newsletter called a Weekly Bite of Wisdom for a Wiser, Happier You, and in it I give tips and reflections like you just got, And it's an opportunity for you to pause, reflect, and practice. It's a way to stay focused on what's important and meaningful to you. Each month we focus on a theme. This month's theme is anxiety, and next month we'll be focusing on acceptance. To sign up for these bits of weekly wisdom, go to Goodwolf dot me slash newsletter. 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 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, this actually is interestingly, one time that's not true, I had an awakening experience as a bolt from the blue when I was nineteen, 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 a while. But I did have that feeling of real strong wolves towards someone, and so maybe that even that then that was that.
Yeah.
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 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, non dependent creatures. And you know, you only got to start for a moment. Every single breath you take is an exchange with this planet.
Every time take.
A step, you're walking on something that's supporting you sin on a chair, it's supporting you. There's basically not a fraction of a moment in life that isn't given by ten trillion other things, you know. And this is all stardust and whatever the molecules are. You know, this body, this brain that's talking, hearing right now, perceiving, it's all forget the subatomic stuff, just all the molecular stuff doing what it does, you know, 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, you know, And here it is. We're experiencing so on so many levels. You know, if you start thinking about it, like ticking that Hahn, the great teacher says, you know, 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 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, you know, they everything's in this piece of paper.
That mighty three hundred foot high trees, six hundred fot high trees thirty million years ago or three hundred million years ago.
Whatever it was, they're in this piece of paper, you know. So the idea that we could be isolated as a single strand in all of this, that's what this second in is.
God is in its target. We want to really take a look.
At that as 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 is a core idea that 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 it could easily have not happened. Yeah, and it's just it's kind of amazing. But I love that idea of connecting to the support we already have. 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 then I get that support. 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 supports.
Yes, exactly, And of course there are many ways that someone like a troubled young man and trouble young person of whatever gender, may feel very reluctant to reach out. You know, maybe not any young people that it takes to certain vulnerability to reach out.
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.
You know.
Yeah, it was a gift to be a homeless hero addict at twenty four because I really didn't have much choice but to ask for help. I mean it wasn't like I debated it, oh, you know, it just was sort of like, okay that or die. And but that was a gift to learn that so early 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're talking about at the very start, which wolf wins, you know, and to be on that path of I'm going to keep feeding the good wolf, you know, to be able to you know, hear it's awesome.
Let's talk a little bit more about the next in which is absorption.
Yeah, this is you know again, this is really sort of.
Coming out of different kinds of trainings, you know, 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 kind of intrinsic fulfillment and peace and energy and time kind of vanishes or goes quiet, and sometimes the sense of self consciousness goes.
Round 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 could cause it. Many stripes may go into it, and lots of other people who aren't doing unusual things like athletics and music, et cetera, 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 samadi or you know, which is kind of you know, yeah, absorption or flow, different names, but as a state of finding an intrinsic, extraordinary piece 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.
You know, it's really healthy for the nervous system.
I think there's some research that in so far 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, Chick sent me high was this great researcher on it.
Impressed.
You can say that.
I've had some practice back in the seventies and eighties and nineties and at the University of Chicago, and he said, you know, it makes people happier to be tasting flow. So yeah, I wanted to call that out and in a way not overlook it, not be saying well, you've got to have the blinding relation that you never hear, no, have that lovely flow, you know. And also, yeah, it's not quite the same as the bottom falling out of the bucket, as then 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 befo, we're fortunate the bottom falls out, but this absorption state is giving us this starting to blur. You know, 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. 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 we could, you could bottle it. 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 yet 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 and then it'll just come on that just the gearshift, and it takes no effort to stay beautiful, present and aware and richly absorbing experience. It It just somehow happened and then commonly was like, 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 that.
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 aflow 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 it.
Suddenly is beautiful, and suddenly everything is beautiful and the thing is still lab but it's lost its clenching.
You know. I think I'd still put my money mostly on allowing.
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 is going to go away, right, I mean, it's just a slightly more sophisticated strategy. Right. So it almost feels like the Russian nesting dolls. Just allow that, don't allow that, like just continuing to keep it doing it exactly.
We allow the strategic allowing exactly. We should probably move to awakening.
I think so, I think the heart of our lives, what we are, the heart of humans, because then hasn't gone a monopoly on awakening? Nothing does, 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 can't track. Analogy isn't really just about practice.
It's about life. That 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 bad, it's infinitely spacious, it's it's actually nothing at all. It's recognized when the self is gone. Yeah, but it's also actually being the self.
You know.
It's it's the tree outside, it's all the trees outside. It's none of the trees outside. It's what is it?
Are you gonna tell us? Everyone's waiting now.
Ah, 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. To talk about it is to make it elsewhere, but it's never elsewhere. It can't be other than this this. Okay, I 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, Thank you everybody.
Actually I just got the right answer.
Okay, all right.
You've got to read the book to finally.
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.
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