I knew I'd seen the real nature of all things, including myself. It was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to me. And within half an hour of walking through the door of my dad's house, I totally lost it.
It was gone. That was how I really started sitting. I wouldn't have done it had I not been so miserable. I knew that I wanted a place I could continue to come to, but there was always something that I didn't like. And I really wasn't into joining things. I'd always arrive at the very last minute so I didn't have to talk to anybody. And as soon as it was over, I'd be the first one out.
It was an insane amount of sitting. It was overwhelming. I was in pain physically, I was in emotional torment, I was in mental torment. It was horrible.
All of a sudden, it was like a flashbulb went off in my skull. And I just boom. There's no one here. The ship has no captain.
I'm James Denney, and this is the Why I Started Sitting Podcast. My guest today is Henry Shukman. Henry is an authorized Zen master in the Sanbo Zen lineage. He's also the author of the Zen memoir, One Blade of Grass, and of another meditation-focused book called Original Love. And if you listen to Tim Ferriss, you might already know him as Tim's Zen teacher, as he shared several guided meditations on Tim's main YouTube channel. I first read Henry's One Blade of Grass in the 2020 COVID lockdowns, and for me, it was one of the most engaging books I'd ever read about meditation, and it was part of my inspiration in creating this show in the first place. So, it feels quite fitting to have Henry on as my first guest.
We start this story in Oxford in a house where both Henry's parents were secretly spies, then to a beach in South America where at age 19, and stone-cold sober, Henry's whole perception of his experience shifted. And how when he subsequently returned to England, he lost that perspective completely. Years later, we then get on to the moment on his first Zen retreat where after a very challenging first few days on the meditation cushion, he had a breakthrough insight that fundamentally changed his relationship with meditation from that point forward.
This show is supported by The Way, the meditation app which Henry co-founded, and you can use the link at the top of the episode description to get 30 free days of The Way with no credit card required. So, if you want to begin your own sitting practice, or get it back on track, that's a great place to start. And if you enjoy today's conversation, you can head to whyistartedsitting.com, and you can join our mailing list there where we will send you links to more talks and interviews from each guest so you can go deeper into the teaching. Now, here is my conversation with Henry Shukman.
Henry Shukman, welcome to the show.
It is a genuine honor to have you on, not least because you and the team at The Way meditation app have agreed to sponsor this show, but also because your book, One Blade of Grass, which I'll just hold up here, was one of the key inspirations when I was kind of thinking of and developing the concept for this show. And conveniently for me, in preparing for this interview, your whole life story and your path to why you started sitting is laid out quite beautifully in the book, and I highly recommend anyone listening to this podcast to go get a copy of Henry's book because we won't be able to cover everything in the interview today.
But one thing that really jumped out at me as I was reading One Blade of Grass — I think I first read it in the first COVID lockdown back in 2020, which feels like a lifetime ago — but it was just the quality of the writing, that it's so well written, and the fact that I found it to be a real page turner. Over the years I've consumed a lot of Dharma books, and I can't say that all of them were page turners, even though they might have been extremely insightful and useful in other ways. I just wanted to say thank you for writing the book, and thank you for being one of the main reasons why this podcast exists in the first place.
Well, you know, I'm honored to have that role, and thanks very much for reading it, and thanks for sharing it like you just did. That's great.
So, my goal with these interviews is always to try and stick to some kind of chronological order. So, try and progress from each guest's childhood up until the present day. So, there's a lot of ground to cover. So, we'll try and do our best to make leaps appropriately where we can. So, we might as well dive right into it. So, a big part of the first section of One Blade of Grass talks a lot about your parents and your early experiences as a child growing up in Oxford. So, could you maybe help set the scene for listeners by talking about what your parents did for a living and what it was like for you growing up in Oxford.
Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, I grew up in a thoroughly kind of academic environment. Both my parents were professors, and you know, it was logical positivism, rationality, you know, empiricism was the way the world was, and it was the only way to think about it. And you know, my education was very heavily about languages. I learned four languages as a kid, you know, from an early age, right all the way through. And so, yeah, really sort of, I guess, academic and literary background.
However, it came to light later that they were both actually — I know this sounds like a little bit sort of fantasist — but they were actually both spies. And it's not that remarkable in that they were both in Russian studies. And you know, the peak of their careers was right in the middle of the Cold War. And basically, you know, MI5 and MI6 were always hungry for fluent Russian speakers because, you know, the Cold War started and there were very, very few Russian speakers in Britain. And the two of them happened to be in Russian studies, so they were brought into doing fairly kind of low-level little operations. So they were trained in spycraft, you know.
So I'm only bringing that up because there was a level of — and by the way, my mom knew that my dad was because she'd had him recruited, but he didn't know that she was until decades later. So there were levels of secrecy in our household already, you know. And then there was a particularly difficult sort of divorce and remarriage scenario that I don't need to go into now, but that led to a whole — which was very painful, you know, all around actually — but it led to a lot of denial in the household. Nobody talked about it. So I kind of grew up with a rather oppressive sense of shame, you know. There's something wrong with our household. Nobody was talking about it. I thought I knew what it was, but nobody was talking about it, so I didn't really know, but I just knew something wasn't right. And it was quite a heavy atmosphere to grow up in.
In addition to which, I had really severe eczema from infancy right the way through into my 30s even actually, late 20s, 30s, but you know, gradually getting better, but it was very bad. I was in hospital at times. And, you know, somehow the combination of this oppressive family dynamic plus this difficult skin condition pushed me into — so the only thing I could feel at all at peace in was actually when I was studying things I really liked. And one of those things was poetry.
So, aside from the study, the kind of way of coping would have been the classic English stiff upper lip, and don't talk about it, and push the feelings down, and it's all okay, but you know, soldier on regardless kind of mentality.
Yeah, sort of. It's like, it's a nightmare, but if you don't talk about it, they won't notice.
The eczema, I know that forms a big part of the book, and it kind of comes up, you know, again in later parts of the book. But there was one part that caught my attention when you were talking about some of your experiences as a child, when the physical sensation was that uncomfortable or that kind of unbearable, there were these times where you were in bed and you almost went into some kind of meditative state where your perception of your body and limbs kind of almost changed, and you had a different sense of perceiving yourself. Can you maybe say a bit more about what those experiences were like growing up?
Yeah, yeah, thanks for bringing that up. I mean, yeah, there were, you know, very often it was quite hard for me to get to sleep because the eczema would be so itchy, you know, and sometimes painful as well. And, yeah, there were times at night when I would just, you know, be lying awake trying not to scratch, or often my hands were in these big bandages so that I couldn't really scratch, but they'd be itching like mad, and I would just sometimes just suddenly kind of pop into a totally different experience of being there. You know, I had no name for it, and even now, I mean, I know I've got some ideas what it might be, but it was like as if suddenly my whole body became like a kind of glowing light bulb.
So there was a glow all through me. It was incredibly pleasant. My hands would sort of go numb, and I wouldn't be able to tell how big they were or how big my body was. The feeling of the bedclothes around me was intensely pleasant, like a kind of warm cloud. And you know, it was a really different sense of being me, you know, and very deeply pleasant.
And actually, many years later, I did a little course in jhana training. You know, the jhana practices are — they're these eight states that, you know, in early Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism, describes how you can get into them and what they're like. And apparently, the Buddha used to do them a lot. It often says after he'd been teaching, he went off into the forest to do jhana, you know. And I got trained in them, and when I first went into the first, second, and third jhana of these eight states, it was totally familiar. I thought, 'Oh my gosh, this is what happened to me as a kid.' So, you know, in a way, it was surprising. In a way, it's not. I think there's something, you know, we endemically have the capacity to go into different kinds of flow state, and I think this is really one of them.
Mhm. I think one other thing that I just want to touch on. You talk about throwing yourself into study, you know, as a way to kind of cope with some of the challenges and the difficulties that you had as a young man. I think you went to study at Cambridge, and one of the things you described was having this kind of Jekyll and Hyde almost, but you referred to them as Mr. Morbid and Mr. Fun — these two different, competing, conflicting aspects of your personality that you were wrestling with as a young man. So, could you maybe say a little bit more about that, and kind of your time at university, which was undergraduate, which was quite challenging.
Yeah, I mean, I would say I was pretty depressed. I mean, just a tiny little — if I can just wind it back just a tiny bit. Right before I went to university, I spent six months away working in South America and then traveling, backpacking. And at the end of that trip, near the end of that trip, I had a — what I would subsequently realize was definitely a sudden, spontaneous awakening experience. At the time, I didn't know what it was, but I knew I'd seen the real nature of all things, including myself. And it was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to me. It was a sudden sort of revelation, really, that I was not separate from anything, that there was one reality that was completely empty and insubstantial, and it was what the whole universe was, and that's what I was.
And it was a staggering thing to experience. It came out of nowhere. I was stone-cold sober, and I was just staring at the sunlight on the water at the end of the day, one day. And the aftermath of that kind of lingered for a few weeks. It was, of course, not with the intensity of the experience, but a really beautiful sense of lightness, and everything a bit see-through, and I was very conscious of suffering around me, and my heart was very tender and full of love, which I'd never really experienced before, anything remotely like any of that. And nor had I been interested in anything like any of that either. It just came out of nowhere.
So, then I go home, and within half an hour of walking through the door of my dad's house, I had the converse type experience of utter — I mean, I felt almost as soon as I was home, this great discovery I'd made, or that had fallen on me, I totally lost it. It was gone. I was back not just where I'd always been, but I was seeing it for the first time as the misery it had been. As a kid, I'd managed to kind of evolve adaptive personalities that muted how unhappy and traumatized I really was. But when I got home after that time away, my heart was open. I was open. I'd shed these adaptations. And the full measure of the difficulty and challenges and misery of my childhood just overwhelmed me.
And on top of that, I felt I had previously, prior to that, just grown up. So it was a disaster to be suddenly plunged back into all this childhood misery. And I was really in despair for a good few months. You know, I was very, very miserable. I managed to kind of limp through my first year at Cambridge. I almost failed the exams. It's really because I had one kind tutor who sort of waved me through.
But he probably shouldn't have done, you know, in the long run. But anyway, it was an attempt to not completely sort of waste my time at university, really. And the egging on, or the — what's the word? — the sort of badgering from some old friends of mine to try to get me to come out with them and come to the pub and come to the old party. I just couldn't do it unless I had a few drinks and managed to step into this role and this persona of being jolly. You know, and I mean, it didn't always work, it often didn't work, but sometimes it worked, and I could present as somebody who could actually, you know, tell a joke and have a conversation, kind of thing. But it was very artificial. I could feel, you know, this is nothing like real enjoyment. You know?
Yeah. Yeah. Was it during your undergraduate where I think one of your friends introduced you to transcendental meditation? Or was that later?
Yeah, that was a wee bit later, when I was doing a — I was actually into working — I was a post-graduate student at that point.
Okay. Yeah, so for people that don't know, I guess your connection with transcendental meditation was the first time that you connected with a meditation practice of a kind of disciplined and organized sense. But for people listening who might not be aware, could you outline what transcendental meditation is, how it differs from Zen, and the value that you got out of it during that period of your life?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, we're talking about the late '80s, and at that time, and for a couple of decades before that, the most commonly known and widespread form of meditation was transcendental meditation, usually called TM. You know, the Beatles had done it, and Deepak Chopra was their sort of pin-up boy back in the day. And then there was a Harvard professor called Herbert Benson who'd done a lot of studies of people doing TM. So a lot of the early research about meditation generally, and about the neuroscience of meditation, also the biometric stuff that comes with meditation, all that began with TM. You know, talking about the '60s especially, but into the '70s and '80s.
So, I happened to have two friends, one my age, in a similar situation to me, but way happier, and the other was an old woman, a Transylvanian woman who'd been a friend of our families forever. Wise old woman in her '80s. Both of them did TM. And both of them were just incalculably happier than I was. And they both said, 'You got to do this.' And it was actually quite pricey, but they had a special offer at a certain time for graduate students, 90% off. So, you know, it was quite a lot of money, but it really wasn't with 90% off. I think it was 30 quid as opposed to 300 quid, which seemed — I would never have done it for 300. But that was how I really started sitting. And I would say I started because of their urging, but obviously, I wouldn't have done it had I not been so miserable. I needed to do something, you know, and what I was doing in the rest of my life just had no impact at all on how unhappy I was. And I just thought, 'Maybe this will help.' So, I really threw myself into it.
With TM, I think the practice they encourage you to do is 20 minutes twice per day, so 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in the evening. Do you think it was the intensity of that suffering that you were experiencing that was why you were able to commit to doing that twice a day in a very committed and disciplined fashion, which a lot of people do struggle with if they're starting out?
I do. I do. I think I was desperate enough. It can be good to be desperate. But I would say nowadays I actually wouldn't recommend that to people who are totally new to meditation. I think that's a sort of, you know, more than a beginner's dose, really. I think that's more like a moderate dose. You know what I mean? It's like 20 minutes twice a day is great. But I would say typically for somebody who's maybe been doing 10 minutes a day for six months, go up to 20 minutes a day. And then if you can maintain that, you could think about bringing in a second sit. So, I think it's quite a high dosage. But they also had this thing they said to you: 'If you don't do it for 20 minutes twice a day, don't bother doing it.'
They were quite hardline. And I'm actually personally, I'm glad because I did do it. I thought, I'm not going to miss one. I was just desperate enough that I was going to do what they said.
And in those beginning periods, your first six months, did you find that there was quite quickly some relief from the suffering, or was it almost imperceptible? Like, what inspired you to keep going after sticking with this for three or four months?
Yeah, I'd say that it's true. Like early on, I remember having at least one particular time having a very surprisingly peaceful, very beautiful time doing it. That was really nice. But there was another thing as well. As soon as I started my first week beyond the training — that was first a training week where you went every evening for a class, and at the end of that they gave you your mantra, because, you know, it's a mantra-based practice.
But then the first week I was doing it on my own, so to speak, you know, full dosage on my own, I slept insanely. I mean really literally 18 to 20 hours a night. It was like I had flu. I got up each morning to go to work in the university library, Senate House Library in London, and I'd be walking to the tube and I could hardly walk, I was so tired. So I went back and thought, I must have flu, I'll lie down and I'll go in the afternoon, and the next thing I know I'll be waking up at 4:00 in the afternoon. You know, and I'd just sort of make myself a sandwich and then do another sit, and then boom, I'd just go to bed. And I slept prodigiously for seven days and nights. And at the end of it, I got up one morning, did my sit.
And afterwards I got up from the sit, and I wasn't tired. I was clear as a bell like I hadn't been in years. I could sort of hear the rain. I could feel the atmosphere of the city, hear the sounds of the traffic. And it was so peaceful, and so clear. And, you know, it's like I somehow felt I'd come back to life. And so that was a great motivator to carry on.
Yeah, having that kind of concrete, direct experiential reference point that you can point back to, and that really is validating that yes, this is worth doing and worth pursuing. One other thing that I think you mentioned around that time in your life, alongside the TM, you also were introduced to kind of talk therapy, and that became part of your journey as well. And I'd be interested to know what the therapy was offering you that meditation couldn't, and how those two things can work hand in hand for people.
Yeah, well here was another thing that happened through the meditation was that after maybe six weeks or so — of course I can't exactly remember — but I think around that time I started to find every time I was sitting I'd get this strange feeling in my chest. It was very uncomfortable, kind of tight, like an iron bar in my chest or something. It was a very uncomfortable feeling. And the TM people offered you could have two free consultations after the course. So I went back for my first one with the facilitator I'd been trained by. And he said, well, let's sit down and do a sit and see what happens, and he said, and you tell me when you start to feel this, and you know, we closed our eyes, began, and within 10 seconds I can feel it. And he said, well, we've hardly even started, but it's right here, I can tell it's right here. And then he said, well, just feel it and it'll dissolve eventually, and then you pick up the mantra again. So, you know, it just kind of didn't dissolve. Sit after sit, day after day, it was still there.
And aside from being a graduate student, I was also playing in a world music band at that time, and one of the members of the band, she was in therapy. She was like — I was young, I was 24 or whatever, and so was she, and so nobody was really into therapy in my sort of friend group, you know. We wouldn't have wanted to, and we were too young to be interested or whatever. And there was a lot of stigma around it, but she was, and she was very public about it, and she said to me one day, 'You need to do some therapy, Henry.' And I just put the two things together: there's this weird feeling sensation that is really uncomfortable, I don't know what it is, she's telling me I need therapy. She always went to this Saturday morning therapy group, there were people around our age, and I thought, well, I'll go and try it. You know, and that opened the door to getting into therapy.
And really, I just got this sense that I had no idea really what an emotion was. I just knew sometimes I felt shitty, and sometimes I was okay, but I couldn't have said anything more precise than that. And curiosity was in my mind then: I remember there's this strange feeling in my chest, maybe it's an emotion. And you know, luckily I got this parallel journey going, meditation and talk therapy, and it was a great path, actually, for me.
And I think I want to trace the path to the beginning of the thread where you kind of picked up Zen practice. You were introduced to it by Natalie Goldberg. We'll come on to that in just a second. But in the intervening years there, you ended up abandoning your PhD and taking up work as an author, as a travel writer, and kind of moving around in New Mexico. I think you were traveling around the states. Could you maybe say a little bit about that period before you connected with Natalie Goldberg and first picked up the kind of thread of Zen?
Yeah, I mean, I'd got really lucky because I'd written a book when I was really young. And then I got too depressed to work on it or do anything about it. But as I started to get a bit happier, you know, doing TM, doing therapy, I worked on that book. I was very lucky, I found an agent and a publisher. The publisher wanted me to do another book. And that was just great, it's just what I wanted. And I went off to — I was, as I said, I was a musician as well — and I went off actually to play with bands in the Caribbean, you know, soca, salsa, reggae, and soca, calypso, you know, zouk, the different kinds of Caribbean music. It was a great year traveling around doing that and writing a book about it.
Then I guess, and all through that, twice a day, I didn't miss TM, you know. I just didn't miss it. And then after that the publishers wanted another book, and I'd always wanted to go to New Mexico for various reasons, and I came out here, where I am right now. I thought I was going to be here six weeks. I'm here over 30 years later.
And I came out, and I had a really great, interesting, beautiful time, and I wrote a book about it. But while I was here, yeah, I met this writer Natalie Goldberg, who's very well known now as a writer about writing, you know. She's written a great book called Writing Down the Bones, which I think sold millions of copies, you know. I liked it a lot, I found it very helpful. But how the backbone of everything she did was Zen. And she sort of started, you know, telling me a bit about Zen, and I realized early on in our conversations, from something actually that she read to me, that Zen knew what had happened to me when I'd been 19 years old and I'd had that experience when I was far from home. Zen knew about it.
And as soon as I realized that — because all along in the background all these years, it's like, what on earth was that? How do I get back to it? What do I do about it? And so to finally discover there was a whole world of people, these Zen people, who knew about it and who valued it and who seemed to think you could kind of get to know it even better. You know, that was it. I just had to do Zen. So I was nervous about it, leaving TM behind, going to another style. But I just did it. And I brought the same dedication and commitment to Zen.
Yeah. I think it's a shame I don't have the passages to hand, but I think what you were pointing to was a passage from Dogen about mountains walking, and there was something inscrutable or you couldn't quite grasp what it was, but you knew that this somehow feels connected to that experience that I had on the beach when I was 19, and this was motivation enough for you to kind of move forward with Zen. And one of the things that really caught my attention as well, as someone who had somewhat similar experiences on my first retreats, was when you went to your first week-long Zen retreat or sesshin, and you had quite a difficult time in the first few days. So could you maybe tell people what that was like, and the kind of journey that you went through on your first Zen retreat?
Oh gosh, it was so hard. I've been sitting — by that time I'd been sitting six or seven years including the TM, and I'd been doing Zen for a year and a half, and I thought I was pretty kind of settled and, you know, pretty good at this thing. But I hadn't actually done a retreat, a week-long retreat. And I went and did this one way off in the middle of nowhere, and it just so happened that right before I went, a couple of friends — this was in New Mexico — a couple of friends had arrived from England, had arrived in New Mexico just before I was going to that retreat. Said, 'Henry, what do you mean you're going off for a week? We want to see you.' And I totally wanted to see them. I said, 'Well, look, I'll probably leave halfway. I just want a taste of it. I'll do half of it and I'll come down and I'll meet you.'
So, I went there, and it was so hard. I just was in — it was the leap from, you know, what was I doing? Probably 30 minutes in the morning, and maybe I'd do an evening sit 10 or 15 minutes as well. To go from that to approximately nine hours a day of actual sitting, you know, from 5:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., obviously with lots of breaks and stuff, but an insane amount of sitting. It was overwhelming, and I was in pain physically, I was in emotional torment, in mental torment. It was horrible. And added to which I kept thinking, 'What about my friends? You know, I've — and it's in the middle of nowhere, way up a dirt track.' So I've got to figure out how to get a ride out of here, and then I'll have to hitch back two hours to Santa Fe. And should I do it? Should I go? Anyway, so it was a lot of torment and turmoil and pain and discomfort and intense restlessness. Intense restlessness. A lot of doubt. You know, in terms of the hindrances, the five hindrances, I had them all: craving, resistance, aversion, you know, restlessness.
Torment, the lethargy and dullness and sleepiness intensely, and doubt. Lots and lots of doubt. What the hell am I doing here? Who are these people? Why are they wasting their time like this? Who do we think we are, you know? And anyway, something shifted in the latter part. I realized that it was going to be incredibly difficult to get out to meet my friends. And I gave in. I just surrendered to the fact that I'm going to miss them. I'm just going to miss them, and I'm going to stay. And then I can get a ride out at the end. And um, that helped just to make that decision.
Boom. I'm staying, come what may. And then I was sort of... I was lucky. I just happened to have a really interesting experience in the last couple of days when I was having some intense pain in my knee. We were sitting outside for one of the sitting periods. It was a warm, windy day, and I was just hearing the wind sort of crashing through the pine trees at the edge of this meadow. And I thought it sounds like a jet engine at an airport. I was just listening to it. And that listening to the wind in the trees distracted me from the intense pain in my left knee, in the cross-legged position. And I don't quite know how or why, but as I was listening to that sound, all of a sudden it was like a flashbulb went off in my skull. And I just boom. There's no one here. There's the sound of the trees. There's this sensation in the knee, which was no longer pain, just a sensation. And there's nobody on board. The ship has no captain. And it just sort of came out of nowhere. And it's funny, it was very different from what I'd experienced on that beach when I was 19 years old. And this, by the way, was 10 or 11 years later.
But somehow something about it was sort of the same world somehow as what I'd dropped into then. Although the language around it would have been really different, and the nature of what I felt like I'd seen was different. But it was, at very least, it was closely related to that earlier experience. It actually wasn't as intense, and maybe it wasn't as profound, but it was all the same. Totally fascinating, and had that same quality of revelation — that I'd just seen something that was absolutely true that I'd never seen before. Which was that in a certain way I'd made myself up.
And was that at a point where that doubt was eliminated after that experience? Like from that point forward, was that kind of doubt of 'is this worth my time' gone?
100%. It was like, 'Oh my gosh, that's why I'm here.'
Yeah. Very, very interesting. I just think it's funny because in the book you talk about a guy that was on that retreat with you. You were sharing a bunk with or something, and he immediately left on the first day when you were going through the most intense period of your suffering, and that was kind of amplifying the difficult experience that you were having. But yeah, um, really great to hear about the kind of shift that went on there, but...
By the way, we weren't actually sharing a bunk.
