Henry Shukman — An appointed Zen teacher in the Sanbo Zen lineage and guiding teacher of Mountain Cloud Zen Center in New Mexico. He is also an award-winning poet and author, including the memoir One Blade of Grass, and has taught meditation at Google, Harvard Business School, and other venues.
The gist
Henry Shukman traces his path from a childhood of severe, debilitating eczema to discovering meditation, which dramatically calmed his nervous system. He recounts a spontaneous awakening at age 19 on a Peruvian beach, the years of depression and breakdown that followed, and how Transcendental Meditation and later Zen practice helped him heal. The conversation defines awakening as seeing through the constructed sense of separate self to discover one belongs intrinsically to everything, and explains how koans function as gateways to that non-dual realization. Shukman lays out a two-rut model of practice (awakening plus gradual psychological healing) underlying his new Original Love program, and discusses his ayahuasca experiences, comparing psychedelic states with sober Zen awakening (kensho). Tim and Henry agree the two are distinct but may touch similar territory, with Zen offering more support and lower destabilization risk.
Big reveals
- Shukman says heavy steroids were the only effective medical tool for his severe eczema in 1970s Britain, but it was meditation, taken up in his early-to-mid 20s, that made the dramatic difference.
- He links the onset of his eczema at six months old to his mother suddenly leaving to go to Russia (both parents were recruited by MI5/MI6) while he was abruptly weaned, framing it as early trauma.
- He describes his spontaneous awakening at age 19, alone on a Pacific beach, watching a boat appear and disappear in the sun's path of light, when self and world merged into one reality without space or time.
- After the awakening he came home defenseless and had a kind of breakdown, overwhelmed by his unprocessed childhood unhappiness, sinking into a miserable state for several years.
- He found Zen nine years after the beach when writer Natalie Goldberg read him Dogen; a line about 'mountains walking' suddenly made sense from the perspective of his beach experience.
- He recounts a pivotal Zen experience during a retreat where everything (self and world) fell away into emptiness, after which he can durably see everything being born out of nothing.
- He explains he first did ayahuasca in his mid-30s during severe writer's block and depression; despite a hellish, vomit-filled night, he woke renewed and the stuck book unfolded clearly in his mind.
- He argues that awakening experienced stone-cold sober is more undeniable and durable than similar moments during a psychedelic trip, because it isn't induced by a compound that will wear off.
Things worth remembering
- Shukman had chronic, severe eczema starting at six months old and lasting roughly the first two to three decades of his life, sometimes requiring hospital stays.
- He believes deep wounds and deep awakening have things in common, and that the thing we fear most can become the doorway to great love.
- His first meditation practice was Transcendental Meditation in late-1980s London, where TM's tagline was 'life tool for the busy.'
- He was completely sober during his beach awakening and says that dropping acid a few years later felt meaningless and shallow by comparison.
- His teacher Yamada Roshi was CEO of a 2,000-employee company and led Mitsubishi Securities while continuing Zen training and teaching around 75 Zen teachers worldwide.
- Tim explains the etymology linking dhyana (Sanskrit) to jhana, which became chan in Chinese and then zen in Japanese.
- Shukman clarifies that koans are not riddles to be solved by the rational mind; the famous one is properly worded as 'you know the sound of two hands clapping, but what is the sound of one hand?'
- He says he was such a troubled soul that he never believed deep awakening could happen to him, which is why he now teaches that all of us can go through it.
- Shukman recounts the subjective experience of purging for someone else during an ayahuasca ceremony, which Tim notes is a fairly common (if unproven) reported phenomenon.
- His new book and program are both titled Original Love, mapping four zones of practice: mindfulness, deep support, absorption (samadhi), and awakening.
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One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir
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“he's written of his own journey in his latest book one blade of grass subtitle finding the old road of the heart a zen memoir” — Henry Shukman 00:05:11Find it on Amazon
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“in fact my new book is called original love i mean for real nice nice it's a manuscript at this point” — Henry Shukman 01:46:15Find it on Amazon
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