EPISODE 20: Henry Shukman
“Using Zen/Meditation to See the Ordinary life as Plenty” with Zen Master Henry Shukman
“Its really just to live an ordinary life, but after all that training and experience and shifts we have been through, an ordinary life won't look the same to us… The ordinary things become… plenty.”
It seems as if the speed at which we live our lives presently, especially in the western world is one at which we cannot sustain. It appears that we are in a mental health crisis, especially in America. With depression, suicide, violent crime, and even gosh mass shootings on the rise, there has perhaps never been a more relevant time to discuss ways that we can reclaim the mental and perhaps spiritual state of mind with which we can soberly and peacefully live amongst each other. This is where meditation comes in. I have dabbled in meditation here and there over the years, and always wished I dabbled a bit more. That sense of serenity and peace one can experience after a good meditation or even a Yoga session is hard to describe and replicate or even describe, as anything but beautiful. And so I hunted down the biggest meditation expert I could muster, Zen Master Henry Shukman to tell us a bit more. Henry is currently a teacher in the Sanbo Zen lineage and has trained in various other meditation schools and practices. After a spontaneous spiritual awakening at the age of 19, followed by a difficult few years, he embarked on a long journey of healing and deeper awakening, guided by Roshis John Gaynor, Joan Rieck, Ruben Habito, and Yamada Roshi, international abbot of Sanbo Zen, who ultimately appointed him a teacher in 2010. Since then he has been leading a growing number of practitioners on the path of awakening, in Europe and the US. Henry has taught meditation at Google, Harvard Business School, UBS, Esalen Institute, Colorado College, United World College and many other venues. He has also been authorized to teach Mindfulness by Shinzen Young, and is a certified dreamwork therapist. His teaching base is Mountain Cloud Zen Center, Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he is the Guiding Teacher.
What I hope you will take away from this conversation is a deeper interest in meditation and a desire to dive into the peace that only it can offer.
A FINAL WORD: Sometimes I finish these episodes fired up ready to climb a mountain, but listening to Henry, I finished with a sense of completion, rest, of being and doing enough. I am always go go go, often living from the idea of being “deficient” in something as Henry and I discussed. But this idea that we cannot be measured is one that is hard to grasp and at the same time quite beautiful. For it seems as if we are always weighing ourselves and weighing our own value against each other. Am I doing enough? Am I being enough? Am I enough? What about him or her, why can’t I be like them? I think there is certainly a way for us to continue to improve ourselves but to not be constantly obsessed with the dangerous trap of comparison. Perhaps that way is the way of Zen.