Posted on by

Zen Master Henry Shukman — 20 Minutes of Calm, Plus the Strange and Powerful World of Koans (#560)

5 Comments
Topics: CategoriesThe Tim Ferriss Show
Illustration via 99designs

“Through koans, you can meet in the boundless wonder of this other dimension of our experience.“

— Henry Shukman

Henry Shukman (@mountaincloudzencenter) teaches mindfulness and awakening practices to a wide range of students from all traditions and walks of life. Henry is an appointed teacher in the Sanbo Zen lineage and is the Guiding Teacher of Mountain Cloud Zen Center. He has an MA from Cambridge and an MLitt from St Andrews and has written several award-winning books of poetry and fiction.

Henry’s essays have been published in The New York Times, Outside, and Tricycle, and his poems have been published in The New Republic, The Guardian, The Sunday Times (UK), and London Review of Books. He has taught meditation at Google, Harvard Business School, UBS, Esalen Institute, Colorado College, United World College, and many other venues. He has written of his own journey in his memoir One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir.

Henry has also recently created a new meditation program, Original Love, which aims to provide a broad, inclusive path of growth through meditation.

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Brought to you by GiveWell.org charity research and effective giving, Laird Superfood clean, plant-based creamers, and LinkedIn Jobs recruitment platform with 770M+ users. More on all three below.

The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

Listen onApple Podcasts
Listen onSpotify
Listen onOvercast
#560: Zen Master Henry Shukman — 20 Minutes of Calm, Plus the Strange and Powerful World of Koans

This episode is brought to you by Laird Superfood. Founded by big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton and volleyball champion Gabby Reece, Laird Superfood promises to deliver high-impact fuel to help you get through your busiest days. Laird Superfood offers a line of plant-based products designed to optimize your daily rituals from sunrise to sunset.

My two favorite products are their Turmeric Superfood Creamer and Unsweetened Superfood Creamer. I put one of them in practically everything. Both can really optimize your daily coffee or tea ritual, and a $10 bag will last you a long time. For a limited time, Laird Superfood is offering you guys 20% off your order when you use code TIM20 at checkout. Check out LairdSuperfood.com/Tim to see my favorite products and learn more.

This episode is brought to you by  GiveWell.org ! For over ten years,  GiveWell.org  has helped donors find the charities and projects that save and improve lives most per dollar. GiveWell spends over 30,000 hours each year researching charitable organizations and only recommends a few of the highest-impact, evidence-backed charities they’ve found. In total, more than 100,000 people have used GiveWell to donate as effectively as possible.

This year, support the charities that save and improve lives most, with GiveWell. Any of my listeners who become new GiveWell donors will have their first donation matched up to $100 when you go to GiveWell.org and select “PODCAST” and “Tim Ferriss” at checkout.

This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Whether you are looking to hire now for a critical role or thinking about needs that you may have in the future, LinkedIn Jobs can help. LinkedIn screens candidates for the hard and soft skills you’re looking for and puts your job in front of candidates looking for job opportunities that match what you have to offer.

Using LinkedIn’s active community of more than 900 million professionals worldwide, LinkedIn Jobs can help you find and hire the right person faster. When your business is ready to make that next hire, find the right person with LinkedIn Jobs. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit LinkedIn.com/Tim.

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…

Want to catch Henry Shukman’s last appearance on this show? Listen to our conversation here in which we discuss examining the deep wounds of childhood trauma, how the phenomenon of awakening compares and contrasts with psychotic episodes, Zen tramps, what koans are and how they guide us toward nonduality, why Henry considers the term “non-ordinary consciousness”—when applied to an awakened mind—a misnomer, if someone can have a “bad trip” through Zen, and much more.

#531: Henry Shukman — Zen, Tools for Awakening, Ayahuasca vs. Meditation, Intro to Koans, and Using Wounds as the Doorway
  • Connect with Henry Shukman:

Mountain Cloud Zen Center | LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram

SHOW NOTES

  • How does Henry deal with unexpected curveballs the game of life often throws our way? [05:18]
  • “To name it is to tame it.” What are the characteristics of allowing/not allowing and accepting/not accepting, and how might someone consciously manifest them when trying to identify and correct what’s upsetting their balance? Henry mellifluously leads us through an exercise. [11:46]
  • Things to consider when we’re having difficulty pinpointing and processing the emotions we’re experiencing (to which many men in the West may relate). [25:25]
  • For anyone not familiar with Henry’s first appearance on this show, what is a koan, and how do they work? [35:14]
  • For the healthy skeptics among us: why the states toward which koans are designed to guide us aren’t “woo woo,” but scientifically documented. [47:14]
  • How can the experience of “awakening” be explained to someone who’s never experienced it? [52:01]
  • How many koans are there, and how many has Henry passed? [55:24]
  • What are the checking questions that determine whether or not a koan has been passed? Once someone has passed a koan, are they done with it? [1:00:02]
  • Sitting with Mu and Roger Rabbit. [1:04:22]
  • What isn’t a koan? [1:11:49]
  • There’s no business like Kenshō business. Is it possible for someone to experience something that might be perceived as a psychotic break if they experience awakening but don’t have a framework to make sense of it? [1:16:11]
  • Using koans for meditation. [1:25:31]
  • How does someone who is brand new to Zen separate a legitimate teacher from a charlatan? [1:27:13]
  • What is a Dharma transmission? [1:32:43]
  • Do shared psychedelic visions have anything in common with the “right” answers to a koan’s checking questions? In other words, is someone who experiences Kenshō extending their senses into the same unseen world as someone on, say, an ayahuasca journey? [1:37:42]
  • Parting thoughts. [1:57:48]

MORE QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“To name it is to tame it.”
— Dr. Daniel Siegel

“A koan isn’t an annoying, boring, little, pointless thing. It’s got an incredible purpose, which is sharing this deepest reality of our existence.”
— Henry Shukman

“Inside of many of us, I believe there’s some kind of deep, primordial wound. There’s some deep, ancient grief. [But] … grief is not an enemy.”
— Henry Shukman

“I can’t believe how fortunate it is to be a human being.”
— Henry Shukman

“Koans love the world so much”
— Henry Shukman

“We sit with koans because they can open us up to this boundless reality. Ongoing beyond a first experience, they train us more and more in realizing that our ordinary life and that mind-blowing reality, they’re not separate.”
— Henry Shukman

“Through koans, you can meet in the boundless wonder of this other dimension of our experience.”
— Henry Shukman

PEOPLE MENTIONED

The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than 900 million downloads. It has been selected for "Best of Apple Podcasts" three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it's been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.

Leave a Reply

Comment Rules: Remember what Fonzie was like? Cool. That’s how we’re gonna be — cool. Critical is fine, but if you’re rude, we’ll delete your stuff. Please do not put your URL in the comment text and please use your PERSONAL name or initials and not your business name, as the latter comes off like spam. Have fun and thanks for adding to the conversation! (Thanks to Brian Oberkirch for the inspiration.)

5 Replies to “Zen Master Henry Shukman — 20 Minutes of Calm, Plus the Strange and Powerful World of Koans (#560)”

  3. Another amazing clash between “The Man with all the questions” and “The Man with most of the answers” 😉 Loved your quetion on the Masters’ legitimacy and readiness to teach and lead – If I may share my two cents – it shows to a great degree your bright, inqusitive and sceptic (in the good sense) mind. Imho. But it reminds me of what my Master says (he is in the Hindu domain) – “Faith starts where knowing and proof end”. So for a lot of things in life, proof and argument do not work. It takes Feeling and Faith. One more thing He says “Those who keep preaching, they do not Know (the Truth). And those who Know, won’t tell you”. Guess this is another way to recognize a real Master – They do not “Tell you”. They just help you Know for yourself.

    Reply

  4. Shukman did a beautiful job of sharing and Ferris asked great questions. I hope more people listen to this wonderful conversation.

    Reply

  5. Hearing the mention of Hakomi on the pod brought a smile to my face. Ron Kurtz, the founder of Hakomi, was a dear friend and I had the pleasure of spending a lot of time with him the last decade of his life, working on capturing and cataloging his individual work to share with students. He was one of my favorite humans and hearing you talk about the practice he dedicated his life to opened my heart In the most appropriately wonderful way to receive this entire episode.

    Reply