is very healthy to turn on our mindful awareness.
It sort of dials down stress response, it allows us to see what the stress response actually consists of, the sensations in the body, the racing in the mind, and physical tensions, there may be in certain musculature, and just be aware of that without reacting to it.
And as the nervous system dials down, if that happens on a regular basis, that's terrific, and I think the more well-regulated human nervous systems there are walking around on the planet, the better.
Because you know, we have this really dangerous wiring as well.
It can flash into aggression and ill-will-hate environments very easily, and to be learning how to down-regulate from that, I think is a critical thing.
So many folks were taught from a very young age about this concept of original sin.
The idea that we enter this world inherently flawed or wrongly constituted in some way.
But what if the opposite was actually true?
What if our most fundamental nature is one of lovingness, of wholeness, and undeniable belonging?
Even if we don't feel that about ourselves or the world around us, and what if we could access that deep sense of belonging and connection to everything around us, pretty much on demand?
What if we could feel a profound sense of unity, like your loved and at peace, or what my guest today calls original love?
This is the radical proposition put forth by Henry Schuchman in his new book, Original Love, The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening.
So Henry is the founder of the original love meditation program, former spiritual director at Mountain Cloud Zen Center.
He's also an award-winning author and co-founder of the Way Meditation App, and he has degrees from Cambridge, St Andrews, teaching experiences at places like Google, Harvard Business School, and Oxford, and artistic works featured in everywhere from the New Yorker and New York Times to elsewhere.
But more importantly, he speaks from decades of dedicated, grounded, practical, spiritual practice, and firsthand experience.
So in our conversation, we talk about this concept of original love, and then we start to get granular, and we talk about the how, how do we actually experience this?
Because a lot of people would love to feel it, and Henry shares the critical elements of what he calls the Way, the different pillars that allow us to start to step into and experience this state.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.
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The name of your new book, original love.
I think a lot of folks have probably heard the word original in a two-word sentence in a very different context.
Very often, it's this phrase, original sin.
And regardless of what your faith, tradition, or belief system may be, I think a lot of people, they're familiar with that phrase and may have very strong feelings about it as well.
You introduce this phrase, original love.
Take me into what this concept is all about.
Yeah, okay. Thank you so much for starting right there.
Because I think it's the most important thing almost about our human lives.
You know, I've had some training in different meditation methodologies, one of which was Zen.
And that was a deep training for me.
And Zen, the understanding is that while we're all leading our ordinary lives and interacting with one another, interacting with the things of the world and experiencing stuff, just the way we do, at the same time, there's kind of another side to everything.
And that other side is a single sort of unity that somehow all things meet in this other side, which is always here, but we normally do not see it.
And Zen has various kind of labels for that other side.
One of them is original face.
And there's a famous little Zen kind of parable or what they call a co-an, which is a kind of inscrutable little phrase that can help us experience that other side of things.
And it says, have you seen your own original face that you've had since before even your parents were born?
So it's rather a long phrase.
But the question is inviting somehow a way of opening up to something that we don't normally see, which has no time, and perhaps has no space and has no name.
But it's yet very real. And in Zen, as well in many other traditions actually, a glimpse or an opening to something like that are kind of vast, unbounded, boundless, unifying experience, sometimes known as awakening, you know, is sort of a pivotal, it's reviewed as a pivotal thing in a human life.
So I have been blessed with the occasional glimpse of that other world, so to speak, which is always right here.
It is, in fact, this very world just seen differently.
And every time I've been in a granted a glimpse of it, it's always come with a tremendous feeling of love, of a completely unconditional lovingness or belovedness.
And a sort of utter belonging, and I felt, yeah, they call it original face, sometimes in other traditions it's called original nature.
I think it needs a warmer term, you know, original love.
And yes, I know it could be seen as a kind of critique or repost or something to the term original sin, but personally, I don't like the idea of original sin.
I think it's a very toxic doctrine.
And I think I'm not a person actually of a face tradition.
I didn't grow up in one. My parents were university professors, they were atheists.
I grew up in that milieu.
You know, I feel a very deep spiritual mystical, even life without having a face tradition.
But I sense that the idea of original sin of a kind of thorough going wrongness that's already in me somehow, I think I've wrestled with that actually.
I think it's in our culture, even if you're not strictly in a faith tradition.
And I agree with you. I think it shows up in different ways, whether you use that phrase or not, you know, and I've had this conversation, I'm sure you've had it so many times in different ways as well.
Are we fundamentally good or fundamentally bad?
It's also a bit of a false dichotomy.
Are we neither? Are we an empty vessel which can tilt in either direction from the behavioral standpoint and a given moment in time, which is sort of where I've landed?
But I do agree. I do feel that there are, that people do tend to have strong feelings about this notion and that depending on where that feeling is, is access to any notion of non-duality or oneness.
You know, the experience of like we're all participating in each other in some way is either completely natural to you and you couldn't see things any other way and there's a lovingness to you that.
Or is the strangest thing that you ever imagined and you completely rejected outright?
Yeah, yeah. Well, I feel we're at a remarkable time in human history when, you know, the exponential proliferation of mindfulness as a regular part of, or at least an intermissing part of so many people's lives, has actually done a lot, I think, to allow more and more people to be exposed to the idea that there could be some kind of presence, some kind of consciousness
or awareness that is always here, that is vastly more connected and connective than we would ordinarily imagine to be possible.
In other words, that I think the practice of mindfulness as it spreads is kind of softening us a bit, you know, along with all the other benefits and making it perhaps a little more acceptable to contemplate, there might be far deeper connectedness than we've commonly thought.
And I'm sure there is, you know.
So, drop a little bit more of a straight line from me here because this is one of the early opening conversations that you write about and that you speak about often is this notion of mindfulness which for sure has propagated through culture, you know, over the last probably 10-20 years in a really powerful way.
Mindfulness itself is, I think, for a lot of people a confusing word and for some people a loaded word.
So, when you use the word mindfulness, what are we talking about?
Yeah, thanks. Great question.
Okay, here's my take. The mindfulness is about contacting a kind of awareness we already have which is able to appreciate experience here and now in a kind and sort of non-judging and sort of allowing way.
And that level of awareness is open equally to external experience, what we're seeing and hearing and sensing in our bodies and tasting and touching, etc.
And also to inward experience, meaning thoughts and feelings and emotions essentially.
And because the awareness of mindfulness is so open and non-judging, it can be very healing to contact it and time packs to, you know, reside in it and that's why it's very effective at diling down an over activated nervous system.
It's an immediate kind of portal control panel for the nervous system.
So, it's very healthy to turn on our mindful awareness.
It sort of dials down stress response and allows us to see what the stress response actually consists of, the sensations in the body, the racing in the mind and tense physical tensions, there may be in certain musculature and just be aware of that without reacting to it.
And as the nervous system dials down, if that happens on a regular basis, I call it better toned.
We have a better tone nervous system.
That's terrific and I think the more well regulated, nervous human nervous systems that there are walking around on the planet, the better.
Because, you know, we have this really dangerous wiring as well.
It can flash into aggression and ill will hate environments very easily and, you know, to be learning how to downregulate from that.
Hmm. I think it's a critical thing.
I'm curious. You said, you know, we have this wiring that can flash into everything from anger to raids to all sort of really powerful and I would, I would, are you negative emotions, like if not negative towards other people, then simply being in those states affects us in a negative way.
Is your sense then that because going back to the notion of original love is our natural state then more original love and there's something that pulls us out of that and flashes us into these aberrant moments where that's actually pulling us out of our natural state and mindfulness is a tool or practice to help bring us back to this more grounded, open loving, present
state or is the underlying current more the opposite and the practice of mindfulness is the thing that keeps that sort of like a day or under control to a certain extent so that we can continue to quote reach for more of the stillness, more of the experience of original love.
Yeah, that's a lovely question.
Well, I'm not an evolutionian biologist but I've read, I've read widely in or at least somewhat widely in it and by the way, I got to recommend this guy Brian Hare who's got a book called The Survival of the Friendliest.
It's fantastic. It's all about the domestication of wolves and foxes into dogs and then comparing that with self domesticated species like bonabos and humans, you know, a versus chimpanzees and it's a strong recommendation there but here's one take on it, you know, the hunter gatherer situation seems to have been built on caring and sharing.
There was far less inequality in the way we lived until you know maybe five thousand years ago or something somewhere in between seven and three thousand years ago worldwide that seems that there was a lot less inequality and communities were built on caring and sharing.
Does that mean that that's our kind of default state and then there's these flashes into violence or that our aggressive urges need to be tamed in a certain way.
I'm not sure it matters because I'm a believer in the fact that we need a training actually either way.
I think we humans seem to have evolved in a way that we can do certain amount of you know developmental jumps in the normal way our culture sort of encourages but there are further developments that need training and it could be that some of the more indigenous, the wisdom of indigenous cultures for example were more aware of that and they had built in their developed
ways over the many thousands of years of providing those kinds of trainings where you stop feeling so separate.
You know there is some kind of a developmental leap to develop the separate sense of self that's great that's a developmental step from the infant starts doing that starts recognizing that oh yeah there's other people with their own intentions and their own wishes and so on and then they kind of seem to turn that back on themselves age two or three and realize oh well
I'm here too as they are and I I also have my intentions and wishes and don't like it when they get thwarted and so on and then we live with that sense of self but maybe in all the way but actually there is another step we can take where we're going kind of we don't discard the separate sense of self actually we don't need to discard it but we can also develop to a greater sense
of belonging with all things you know how to really gauge what is most natural versus what needs to be developed I don't know for sure but I'm convinced that we can all benefit from a well targeted training program and mindfulness is one and also though on the other hand I'm deeply convinced that the deepest nature of our reality that we are apparently wired to be able
to experience although it's not automatic is this one of a cosmic unity that is here right now and I somehow think that is more real actually than our ordinary construction of self and world I'm curious you know if we take this notion of a cosmic unity some listeners will hear that and say oh the sense juicy tell me more some listeners will hear that and there will be
an immediate full body eye role in response to that and some people will be one of the other depending on what mood they're in or what's what's going on how well or not well their life is going on you have a moment of time yeah I think we probably all raise our hand for that at some point so take me deeper into what this sense of cosmic unity like tell me more about because I
feel like this is a really ethereal concept to me like this is sort of like out there how do we make a concept like this real so that somebody can say I can wrap my head around this and I'm so compelled by it that I kind of want to actually explore well you know like what does Henry mean by these other trainings or by actually exerting some level effort so I can start to gain access
to this in some way yeah yes thank you I myself if I listen this later I might do a cosmic I'm a major whole body I'm always going off the deep end too soon but here's a stab at it you know what it really on hinges on is actually just being open to understanding our sense of self in new ways we take our sense of being me and by me you know we pretty much mean some kind of corn nugget
inside me than nobody else has and that is distinct from everything else it's my little portion of the universe that is in this body I alone am this and that's okay but if we start analyzing it and the prime sort of laboratory that we humans seem to have developed for studying that is meditation so if we get more practice in meditation maybe have a daily practice and start
getting drawn into meditations that are designed to actually put the sense of self under the microscope we start to see what is made up of and it's made up of stories and narratives and threads of ideas all of which are of course basically thoughts of one kind or another some people would add that there are certain very subtle muscular tensions that also come with the sense
of me being me but if we just stick with the thought part for now actually those thoughts like all others in fact through training and again I really mean meditative training can be interrupted they can just stop and you know who are we when we're not thinking we're anyone and not only that but by becoming more aware of the role of thinking in generating the sense of self
we can start to realize that those thoughts weren't actually referring to another thing called me the way I thought they were they were just thoughts arising now and when I see that the kind of sense of a nugget a core in the middle somewhere that's me evaporates it's just not there and we realized that it was never really there maybe I'm going too fast but at that point
we really arrive in present moment experience without the sense of a thread of the past and a thread into the future that belongs to me we're just fully present without there being any future or understanding that any sense of the future is just another thought any thought we might have about the past and memory is also just a thought arising immediately now so we
land in the actual fabric of here and now very sort of palpably and vividly and when that happens and the sense of self is evaporated or gone or temporarily off the shelf then there is no longer a filter saying I am separate and that's why the sense of a whole unified field flow and flux and field being what this moment actually is comes up yeah on the one hand you know I
think the notion of it's not even who am I without my thoughts but is there an eye without my thoughts on the one hand you could look at that and say well that's incredibly freeing if I can literally if there is just this shared sense of beingness among all of us like once the thoughts you know if you can suspend enough of those thoughts for long enough to experience the pause
and then experience a sense of expansiveness that sounds you know where you're not spinning about the past fretting about the future and deeply focused and stressing out about like what's in front of you at this current moment in time if those were off the plate I mean it sounds it sounds I think a lot of people say that sounds extraordinary and at the same time you
wonder then if my sense of self comes largely from the thoughts that I'm spinning about the past future and present what happens to my sense of self when those hit pause you know is it a blessed vacuum or is it a terrifying you know a best yes that's a lovely thing well an important thing to bring up look as somebody who's been sort of teaching in this field for nearly a decade
and a half it's it occasionally happens and I honestly feel it's very rare that somebody does have a glimpse and is alarmed and of course when we work with it more closely we see that actually in the moment of the glimpse there was no alarm at all it's only immediately after when the sense of self has come back to evaluate and judge what happened oh my gosh what was that you
know but and actually in the absence of an ordinary sense of self there can be no alarm actually because we're finding this one great field of belonging but there can for sure occasionally be alarm on reflection another question I think that was in what you're saying or maybe it's not enough questions in that just in there is like what about my life what about my relationship
so it's like what about me what about like I've built an entire existence around this thing I call like you know capital M me yes yes I guess part of that question is also like well how's that working for you right exactly I mean for most of us it's frenetic and stressful but I'd say I was worried about this when I was going through a certain phase of my Zen training you know
with with couple of marvelous teachers but deeply grateful to you know I had a one particularly you know decisive sort of moment of really seeing soon and it had a lasting impact and there was a further deeper one later but in this particular case I was like yikes I've got a fellowship at Oxford Broce University I've got to be working I've got to be thinking I've got
to you know I was deep in a literary life in those days you know my cognitive equipment and my ambition was important to me I was writing articles for the Guardian on complex topics and I needed to think and I needed to sort of not just have my wits about me but to have that sort of motivation for it all and actually one of my teachers said she'd been in Zen a long time a very
beautiful peaceful wise highly articulate intelligent person called John Rick Rochie actually she just said well just watch you'll probably see that everything that needs to get done gets done and actually she was completely right I used my brain that way when I needed to and I didn't have to fret about it I had more time when I was kind of open not so contracted around
a sense of a me needing to accomplish certain things and frightened of certain other things not happening that loosened a lot and everything seemed to take care of itself and the irony is that this may sound I don't know problematic but actually really we've never actually had the self we thought we had to begin with and everything's been functioning fine we're
brought into I don't know I'm going off the deep end again but in a sense we're brought into believing something that wasn't actually what it appeared to be and still everything happened that needed that we thought needed to happen so actually this is the weird part we're not actually changing anything we're only apparently changing something we're changing
I I guess you could say our perspective we're changing the angle of light so that we see what's going on more clearly and you know also on that side of it too I think it's probably the most beautiful thing you know having a baby falling in love they're wonderful of course and maybe they're wonderful precisely because they they open us up to this dimension the veil gets
a bit thinner the light of original love shines through more when when a birth happens sometimes also when a death happens the veil kind of gets thin I used to work in hospice care and that was a common phenomenon and it is very beautiful to find the freedom and the oneness of all things yeah part of what you're especially the examples you gave falling in love having
a baby sometimes being with someone through the final moments you know there's people often describe that as as experiencing awe and awe is you know we've had the opportunity to sit down with Dr.
Keltner who's like done a lot of research on awe and it is this experience of the model of the world as you knew it no longer exists and there's a sense of fragmentation but also spaciousness it comes through it and then part of that is what do you what do you do with that and part of what I'm hearing you say is like well what if you just spend some time with it and didn't try
to actually immediately reassemble the pieces into a new model that was more concrete that you could then inhabit but actually just breathe into it and therein maybe lies the grace and the more expansive access to this quality of original love am I getting that even remotely right yeah that's beautiful you're right on right on and you know I would say part of his beauty
is that it it opens up our intentionality in such a way that we realize sort of we don't want to package this and make use of it we don't want to instrumentalize it it teaches us I mean this is rather an odd way of putting it but it's as if it teaches us it's own new way of being in the world and it's not like we become unworkable unusable useless blissed out and non-functioning
people I mean occasionally my wife accuses me of that but typically that's not where this goes and one of my another of my teachers is a is a tremendously successful businessman who has high very high up in Mitsubishi securities 30,000 employees under him now is the CEO of a large office furniture company in Tokyo with 3,000 employees under him and he's the deep Zen
master who trains other Zen masters around the world and so he's living this sense of oneness in the boardroom and going over spreadsheets doing all the things he has to do it's very I want to say indiscriminate it sort of applies everywhere because it always applies right here right here now and we'll be right back after word from our sponsors if there's one thing
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with problematic plants bug bites or sunburns sarna offers soothing relief try sarna and experience the difference shot for sarna bug bite patches on amazon or just click the link in the show notes and it's a really interesting point that you make as well i feel like there has been a lot of packaging up of these practices in modern days i think as it they become more
mainstream one of the ways that we often see them proliferate is by saying the more you do this the better you'll be at sales the higher level of performance that you'll have and maybe that's actually true but it obfuscates you know the probably more i don't want to say more true benefits but just you know the notion of but it's actually just an and a state-based opening
to something more expansive that is becomes available to us over time as we say yes to these practices that it sneaks in in little ways but all this you know like you're you have access to as you describe you know the veil things between you and this experience of original love of expansiveness of kindness of just spaciousness but i feel like as human beings we rarely
say yes to investing effort to feel that because it doesn't feel like we can touch that enough but if you tell us there's some tangible benefit to this thing and maybe these are actually really health-based benefits that we really want maybe it's going to help lower your blood pressure maybe it's going to help you do x, y and z and we'll say okay i'll invest in some time
on invest 15 minutes a day in this thing i'm going for that not realizing that sure maybe that actually happens but there's something entirely differently that unfolds that once we taste it even for a heartbeat you're like ooh ooh more of that please yes i think that's very well put in fact there's been some research into i remember reading about this uh maybe a decade
or so ago actually about the wave of mindfulness coming into the corporate world and initially it seemed so good you know people's sort of stamina and motivation increased and they're having a sort of broader awareness of what they're up to and and being more effective and more productive that will seem to go up and then the point came with some people were actually
they started to question the values of the companies they were working for and they found that in some cases motivation started to actually shift change and people started to quit you know things happen that weren't on the original sales pitch.
Memo from the CEO mindfulness is now bad everyone stop immediately it is so interesting yeah the way that it'll create over time shifts that we don't necessarily see coming or it's not the reason that we said yes to yes i have a daily mindfulness practice of over a dozen years at this point and i came to it very much on my knees because i was going through something really
struggling with it that was consuming my mind and this was a hell marry pass for me you know it's like hey i've heard this can work and over period of months it did in fact it has allowed me to be with a source of suffering that's at this point in my life anytime i look forward it's still there but i experience it not as suffering anymore.
It's allowed me to really rewire my relationship with it and it wasn't until probably a few years after that that i started to realize that it was seeping in to the moments to the relationships to all these little ways are like oh i'm just more peaceful right now or i can see the light a little bit differently or i can like the sensation of my daughter's hand in mind is really
landing in a way that i didn't pay attention to before and my senses for those who say yes to the practice for a very particular external outcome or goal that yeah i've come to the place where i think that's fine but often it's the committed practice over a much longer period of time that starts to become the gateway to the state that you're talking about have you seen
that because i know with with so many of the students that you've been teaching.
Oh very very much i mean it's quite common really it was for me too that the people come to the practice out of some kind of desperation not that you use that word.
No that was me for sure. Yeah it was me too in my only 20s i was absolutely desperate and and i'm so glad that whatever twists and turns brought me to meditation of all the things you know i've grown up with a very severe skin condition that i still had when i was 24 you know really really i often hospitalized for it and agonizing itching and burning and you know really very
difficult as well as other traumas in my childhood and the practice of meditation was an initial hope clutching at a straw that might bring some relief to that condition possibly or more likely just to the psychology that it generated you know and in fact it helped with both the psychology that came with that condition and the condition itself and then it started
to do much more that it reignited a sense of an existential quest and curiosity that i'd had when i was much younger and started to yeah i mean open me up to the experience of being alive and the beauty of it in just the most ordinary ways you know go and getting out i was in in London at the time just opening the door on a rainy morning and instead of finding this familiar
British sort of despondency at the weather because it reigns a lot there finding there's a wonderful char light beauty bubbling up at the beauty of a day of rain the soft gray light and the the house is all looking kind of cozy and the rain falling just tasting us a softness you know that was so beautiful anyway i think it's absolutely right that we can't actually know
the well our deeper human possibilities that can be opened up by meditation in a sense it was then you know often talks about not knowing as kind of a good thing you know which is counterintuitive for a lot of us but it's really i think your reference to exactly what you were saying about awe that awe is arises in a moment when the way we can start reality the way we understand things
to be is somehow insufficient you know something is going on that doesn't fit and yet we recognize it's true and therefore if we know it then it's not quite that it's sort of outside on knowing and i think piaja as to the child psychologist had a very interesting way of looking at this he talked about assimilation and accommodation as two processes by which a child
learns and assimilation is basically bringing in new information into an existing paradigm framework of understanding and that's great and then along comes something that doesn't fit with the with the framework and that's when accommodation happens meaning that the existing framework has to break and a new one has to form that can accommodate the new information the new
experience and personally i think the beautiful thing is that that process can continue as adults probably endlessly that we can get surrender break open up to more and more new sort of vistas and understandings of this world we're living in and to me that's a wonderful thing to be open to and again i you know i think of this master of my neomada roche he's doing all
the above while having a very high functioning busy life in his eighties now you know in the highest levels of executive leadership so powerful when you think about it it's um and it's so contrary to the way that most of us live you know and the we open our eyes in the morning and you know that whether we voice it or not or so often the central question in our minds is how
do i make what comes next more certain and then we keep striving for that and striving for it and striving for it you know and you know the fundamental truth of the human condition is you can't and yet we want it so badly that we keep investing ourselves in it and the more that we don't get it the more we suffer and then the harder we try rather than saying what if i actually
train in the art of being uncomfortable with the fact that life is unlock downable and i can still function you know i can live in the question i can just be in a space of curiosity about it but we are so wired towards the opposite and i think so much of our conditioning especially early in life is lock it down lock it down lock it down uncertainty is bad and certainly in certain conditions
it feels really bad you know if you have a like a medical condition and you're going in for surgery or you don't know if the treatment you want as much certainty as possible and i think it's understandable how we have these inclinations and yet for so many other elements of life it's really not a functional response you like it really does just see and then amplify suffering
and yet we still quest after it yes yes that's that i quite agree probably some of it comes out of our negativity bias you know that we're we're so wired to wire and fire and wire with the negative stuff i was just reflecting actually as you are saying that about the well that and maybe this is a little off slightly off track but let's just see that in a kind of surrendering
to uncertainty and uncertainty is a kind of as you said it is a sort of fundamental in our life it really is we actually don't know in the end when we're going to die of course occasionally there's a diagnosis and we do get some idea but even then it could happen sooner or later you know and somebody gets a diagnosis somebody else gets run over the next day you know i mean i
don't want to be morbid but it uncertainty on that most fundamental level is so real and yeah our tendency is to do everything we can to lock it down exactly as you said or to pull away from the experience of uncertainty anyway we can and and some of this kind of training that i you know i brought up that term earlier is precisely around that what happens if i loosen my resistance
to uncertainty or perhaps another way of putting it would be if i just open up a little bit to the possibility of surrendering to fundamental uncertainties if rather than just gotta push those guys away like well what happens if i actually say no come in you're real come in you know so do the opposite the counter intuitive thing surrender drop my resistance what happens
then it could be that something beautiful happens that actually my well gets bigger you know it could be the somehow i feel i am embraced almost by this moment in a new way and to me it makes perfect sense really because if i stop resisting i stop reinforcing my sense of being a separate self it's a beautiful thing actually to be part of this or any moment it's a beautiful
thing to realize the arising of this moment is kind of part of what i am you know and yeah it could be there's even a sort of level where i'm kind of not here and this is what's happening and it's still so beautiful but even showing from that a little bit just just this side of that i'm here and this is here and we belong together you know and being yeah sort of integrated somehow
into the experience of this moment yeah i sense that many of us have actually experienced that in a different way take yourself back to your 22 years old you're in a club with like your favorite music blaring and shoulder shoulder and you're three hours into a dance floor and if somebody looked down from one of the balconies over there they could see you in your body
you know like just having time of your life with your friends but you on the floor you don't exist in that moment we've had our version of that experience maybe you're at a music festival whatever the access point is for you you're for me it often is music where it's surrounded by large numbers of people in a immersive soundscape there comes this moment where you're
just gone you are utterly absorbed into the energy of the moment there's no sense of self regard there's no sense of being self conscious like ooh people are looking at me you just don't care because you don't have that sense of almost individuality more that is you know it's Emilie Durkhan's collective effervescence we all become part of this thing yes you know
and this almost like an organism lost an absorption inflow and this is part of what you write about in the book right this notion of when that happens i think we've touched that in these ways that sometimes we don't think we've touched it we weren't realizing we're like oh that was one of those portal moments that was one of those moments where they're they'll find
exactly exactly and i guess what you know what my mission is to just to try to help you know as many people as interested in to notice them more and sort of let them in and to let them maybe spread through life more there's something about finding this stuff when we're just still inquire it allows it in even more no no that's not right it's fully you're absolutely right
you know i get i totally agree with you about the kinds of events that might bring that on and of course there's also like mountain biking running and painting and playing the violin the piano and writing and you know all these things that might bring on a deep absorption in in in any activity but i think the dance one is a really good example because there's because there's
others there and we're sort of belonging to a collective much more but you know it can come on in quiet what i'm proposing is that anybody who already has a practice could can have a really profound existential moment every day and won't necessarily happen every day of course that's okay sometimes we you know we're we're just dealing with stuff we're overwhelmed
and we just sit and we let it be and it quietened down a bit and that's what we get that day that's great but it can be quite common that we just sit and we fall into the embrace of this moment it's quite feasible to have that become a regular element in life and to me that's pretty profound indeed and we'll be right back after word from our sponsors hey it's Nikali from side
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manufacturing i love that luxury quality within reach go to quince dot com slash style to get free shipping and 365 day returns on your next order quince dot com slash style take me more into you views the phrase training a number of times in our conversation and and i think we referenced pieces of what you're talking about here but just to sort of like make it a little
bit more graspable yeah you know somebody's listening to this like that sounds pretty cool sure i'd like to experience that you know how do i step into this what does the training look like what do these practices look like take me a little bit more into what this looks like and maybe what are and free points for somebody to start to explore these different things yeah
well actually you know along with the new book we've also created an app which is precisely a step-by-step guided zero choice pathway that is designed to step-by-step take anybody through the different core components and key areas of meditative sort of skills acquisition or tools acquisition a lot of which from my point of view actually is probably better viewed
as different ways of letting go different ways of releasing different ways of allowing but essentially i believe there's sort of four core areas that meditation and probably in general spiritual development look at the first and absolutely essential foundational one is mindfulness developing more capacity more frequently to be with what's going on you know
just to be in awareness of what's going on with appreciation with kindness with lovingness with self-love self-care cherishing gratitude you know and openness then there's i think it's really important this actually connectedness because you know it's easy to think of mindfulness as a sort of a thing i do read but i think we're really sort of doing it with everything
we don't live separately our bodies are made of of all the elements you know the chemicals and everything that this this whole world is made out of you know we're we're walking pieces of the earth with animation and all these complex systems that support our animacy but but we're part of it you know so i think just opening up to connectedness and so many different ways
all the networks of relationships ancestry are placing the natural world at all of that is i think really important to open up to and find a sort of deeper life we're part of you know then thirdly i believe that finding flow states which we were just referencing is really man this where is that you know with sense of self is quiet time can go quiet it's very fulfilling
and enriching and i think it's really good for us you know i think it it's good for us in the moment because it feels good and it's good for us in general because it makes us happier to be tasting flow and it gives us more flexibility in life and uh it's a wonderful thing and that can come in meditation as well i i regard meditative flow as something like falling in love with this moment
and then the fourth territory is awakening where we're talking about you know the really seeing through being liberated from the sense of separateness which is usually temporary and can become more consistent can become at least more consistently available i love the fact that all of that is available to all of us and it doesn't require anything special doesn't
require any belief system actually it doesn't require any special paraphernalia doesn't require any complex institutions that have been around for hundreds or thousands of years it's actually just here and now and you can get it you can get all the guys you need on your phone our app is called the way by the way because it has it's a no-choice pathway i'm curious
about that choice to make it a no-choice pathway as well because that oftentimes were you sort of say oh we want options but you've been very intentional and said okay so we're going to take those away because this is the name of you know your technology is literally the way not like you know the thousand potential ways yes talk to me about this this sort of like the the narrowing
of choice when so many of us are sort of like we we think we want the opposite of that yeah well partly it just came out of personal anecdotes my sister for example you know she got the free version of headspace and was loving it for three months as if we're okay i'm going to I'm going to get the premium version i'm going to start paying and suddenly she's had you know 101
choices and actually didn't know what to do and stop using it and we found in our preliminary research that there was a significant number of people reporting decision fatigue didn't want to make choices actually and then i started thinking well i had been thinking for some time in the in the online trainings i've been offering hey there's a logical sequence in which people
could probably most profitably learn this stuff and over the big sweep and in the finer grain stuff as well there are logical sequences so i started teaching in a kind of systematic way i think let's experience this first then we can go to this piece and then this piece we decided we being essentially my my nephew actually jack shukman is a totally brilliant guy and um
we decided to in a marketplace where there's already 3000 or 5000 meditation apps let's do what we really want to do and let's do what actually he was finding really useful himself when i was kind of informally offering some advice and guidance to him so yeah let's let's do this this way you know it is so interesting many years ago i was in in the yoga world and you know
there are so many different schools and flavors of yoga and approaches and thousands of different classes and mixed styles and hybrids and different teachers with their own vibe and so it's great when you find one that really works for you one of the much more traditional approaches to learning the practice of yoga was called my source yes and this is you work individually
with a teacher in one very particular lineage who is progressing you through a predefined set of postures and feeding them to you one at a time and helping you develop confidence with each one and then you add one and then you work the sequence and then you add one and then you work the sequence and you add one and maybe takes years before you get to even this primary sequence
yes and you're not exploring all the different options and all she was like well what if we throw this in said and we're to throw this instead and i think it harkens back to things like that where it's like okay so i'm committed to a path and i know that this path has been developed over thousands of years and that there is something underneath it that ties it together
both in a very literal and physicalized way but also it's connected to something bigger and it always has been and my sense is that when you find something like that you kind of don't mess with it yeah exactly well that's really the background to our app as well is that my own training as i've mentioned was the deepest part of it was in zen which was one i felt i didn't really
know it at the time i had a vague hunch but i felt that in a world where there were many mindfulness options that actually there was something about i mean is that we're surrender again about surrendering to one path that could take me beyond what i might think i wanted in other words my sense of the range of possibilities was limited by my own view but a deep ancient path
would have found more and it's like there's there's various metaphors there's like if you dig lots of wells you might not get down to the water at some point you're going to dig one or in the end you need one ferry to take you across the river you know now actually i loved sampling early on i went to lots of different centers and styles and learned a lot but then i dug in and it
really did take me to somewhere that i vaguely sensed was a possibility though i didn't know what it was i could see that whatever it was my teachers must have been through it because they were really much more at home in the world and at peace in the world than i was i doubted actually that i would ever get there wherever there was because i'd had so much psychological
stuff and i was just a kind of messed up guy basically i thought maybe i'm getting a bit better but i'm not going to go through some real shift like they've been through and i was wrong i just stuck with this one practice and it did actually it took me somewhere i couldn't have imagined where in a way somehow everything was resolved it was quite quite extraordinary for as
an experience but also as a shift you know i really was i said in another book one blade of grass i said it had done the impossible it had changed me and it really had but actually in the aftermath of that when the year sins i kind of sampled a bit again i kind of just like it i'm interested what other technologies are there out there you know yeah i feel like also oftentimes
when we choose a core path and we sort of we commit to it that it has the effect of actually expanding optionally outside of that path and in the domains that actually are outside of that all that you know it's somehow there's you start to doors slide open you know possibilities present themselves to us yes in weird ways that you know my sort of rational science seeking
brain off again i understand i that makes so much sense to me i've found the same thing so the pathway that we've created is it's got some deep roots in Buddhism of course you know it draws on other things too i like to think it's a very well-rounded kind of integrated and sort of wholesome approach it feels like good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as
well i feel like you know the notion of inviting people to explore a path and and maybe it's the path that you're offering maybe somebody here has been exploring or thinking about something else i think also just this notion of sometimes it makes sense to elevate the power of lineage to the same plane as the power of optionality early on when you're choosing a particular
devotion you know that we tend to discount the importance of lineage we strip it out you know we're like i just want choice i don't care about the the lineage the the intelligence the spiritual essence of something and whether it's the path that you're describing whether it's something else it just resonates deeply with you that's you know well thought out and articulated
over you know like a a season of generations generations i think you may find something that resonates differently but is equally powerful for you but just the invitation i feel like is explore that and and what might happen actually if you spend some time dedicating yourself to something like that in the name of thinning the veil more regularly to that experience
of original love right yes yes it's a really beautiful thing to i guess trust a lineage and it's a difficult thing these days when there's so much what were fortunately much more aware of toxic patriarchy and masculinity indeed indeed and on the other hand you know if we can find a lineage that seems to be aware of that that has matriarchs as well as patriarchy for a start
and is i suppose in a sense sensitive to the proper confines of its zone of influence i'm just speaking a little bit now about like the hazards of the spiritual realm you know where you know that we've seen pretty terrible things happen in some cases you know and so there needs to be some i think we're whizing up you know generally speaking and they we're recognizing
that there can be extremely helpful and very profound teachings and invitations that spiritual organizations can offer and they can be kind of peer reviewed they can be you know limited in the scope of their influence in other words they're not if they're trying to take over every aspect of your life including your bank accounts probably should be very cautious
but you know if it's like come every couple of weeks for two hours that's not so hazardous and we're just going to train you in this terrain so it's kind of defined what the project is rather than just we're going to swallow you into our swallow you whole into our organization that would be something to be wary of for sure you know but i think we're getting wiser about it
i think you know i do think we are i think there's a lot more light of day that has been sort of flooding into the space and that's a really good thing so i always wrap these conversations coming full circle with the same question i'll share that with you which is if i offer up the phrase to live a good life what comes up finding the deep love within you and letting it guide
you hmm thank you hey before you leave if you'd love this episode safe they'll also love the conversation we had with Ellen Langer about mindfulness the fine delaying to Ellen's episode in the show notes this episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me Jonathan Fields editing helped by Alejandro Ramirez Christopher Carter
crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Del for her research on this episode and of course if you haven't already done so please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app and if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable and chances are you did since you're still listening here would you do me a personal
favor a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email even just with one person just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those you know those you love those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy tell them to listen then even invite them to talk about what you've
both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action that's how we all come alive together until next time on Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project you
