I was alone on a beach and I was just looking at the sun going down over the water.
It was incredibly beautiful.
And suddenly it was as if I wasn't looking at the scene in front of me.
I was part of it.
It was as if the me that could look at the world and see it as separate just switched off.
And in its place was a sense of total belonging, just being part of everything.
Hey guys, how you doing?
Hope you're having a good week so far.
My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More.
Do you ever feel as if you're too busy to meditate or that you're simply not very good at it?
Well, this is something that so many people experience.
Yet today's guest believes that this is only because of a fundamental misunderstanding about what meditation really is.
Henry Schucman is an authorized Zen master and spiritual director of the Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Over the years, Henry has taught meditation at organizations including Google, Harvard Business School and the Esalen Institutes.
And he's also the co-founder of the Way Meditation app, which offers a unique pathway of training designed to help people deepen their practice.
Henry is also an award-winning poet and the author of several books, including his latest Original Love.
The Four Ends on the Path of Awakening, which explores meditation as a path to compassion, healing and presence.
In this quite wonderful conversation, we explore the idea that meditation is not about success or failure, but actually about rediscovering love.
How even just five minutes of meditation per day can calm our nervous systems, lower stress and help us feel more present.
Why kindness and compassion sits at the heart of health and happiness, and how meditation can help us embody these qualities more fully.
How meditation helps Henry deal with his own severe eczema.
The four ends of meditation mindfulness support, absorption and awakening and simple ways to bring meditation into our busy modern lives.
This episode is a great reminder that meditation is not about adding another chore to your list or trying to empty your mind of all thoughts.
It's simply about reconnecting us with kindness, compassion, and a deeper sense of being alive.
As Henry explains, there's no such thing as a bad meditation.
The only one that doesn't count is the one you didn't do.
The Dalai Lama says that if every eight year old on the planet were to learn meditation, then we would eliminate violence in a single generation.
Do you agree with him?
Basically, yes, I do.
I think if really everybody got this capacity to be still and quiet with themselves and be aware of what's going on within them and around them, it opens up a state of peace.
It just does.
The awareness brings with it peace, calm, presence, and it makes a world of difference.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I've been thinking about that phrase quite a lot because, of course, we're living in a world where, if you were to switch on the news and see what's happening around the world, you would hear a lot of negative stories war starvation, destruction of all kinds.
And that's why I felt that quote from the Dalai Lama is so apt.
What would it mean to change that?
What would it mean to have a kinder, more compassionate world?
And in your book Original Love, one of the things you say towards the end is that In some ways that is the point of meditation to experience love more.
Yeah, I know.
It's not often said, actually.
Most of the things said around meditation are about becoming more aware, becoming more mindful.
And of course, that's great.
But why become more mindful?
And my deep sense, after having done it for these decades I've been doing it, is that in a way, it's always about some kind of taste of love.
And it can be self-love, having compassion for this being that I am who does suffer.
And it can be, of course, love for others, you know, appearing in my life.
And it can be more sort of almost, I'd say, universal or unconditional, just a sense that to be here, to be existing is is such a gift.
You know, it's interesting.
This is the first podcast i'm recording after my summer break and i was in australia and had a few live shows and At the Sydney show.
At the end someone asked me a question.
They asked me, if you could give one pill to everyone around the world to take, what would it be?
I had to think about it on stage and think, well, OK, what would it be?
And I said some version of. it would be a kindness pill.
And I explained my rationale for that.
And the other thing that came out on stage was that I realized that what I do Henry, with my books, with this podcast, with my time with patients on the surface it appears to be about health, but it isn't.
It's actually about kindness and compassion, because why do you want to be healthier?
Why do you want to be happier?
I think those things are downstream.
Does that make sense to you?
It totally does to me.
I think deep down we really are.
There's a whole world of research now around what happened when humanity started farming and inequality started to come in in a much bigger way.
And prior to farming, 10,000 or so years ago, it was hunter-gatherer bands.
And they relied on caring and sharing.
This is the theories that you'll hear from a lot of researchers on it that caring and sharing, In other words, love and justice.
You know they're deep in our wiring.
We were hunter-gatherers for whatever, 300,000 years or something, they're now thinking.
And that's not counting the you know the millions of prior times they ate to know how to be fair and to know how to care.
It's part of our makeup.
And unfortunately, it's not all we've inherited.
We've got wiring that can get really aggressive and do hate and fear and violence.
But actually, it's not like we've got to get something new on board to love.
I think it's deep in us.
Yeah.
It's kind of super interesting, isn't it?
You mentioned hunter gatherers and our evolution.
And I often wonder about... traits like competitiveness and comparing.
Some people say that's who we are.
Others say no, love and kindness, actually, at its core is who we are.
And I guess one way of thinking about this for people who are stumbling across this conversation Henry, is how might somebody know if they could benefit from a meditation practice?
And might it potentially be that if...
We can see certain egoic traits in ourselves.
So comparing ourselves with others, trying to compete with others, never feeling that what we've got is enough.
Are those signs that we may benefit from a practice of meditation?
Yeah, 100%, absolutely.
I think the thing about meditation is that It can take us to marvelous new ways of experiencing the world.
That's, I think, a given.
It really can do that.
Again, there's tons of research on that.
It can be profoundly helpful that way.
But it also helps us be with how we are, rather than I might get this new way of being, a new kind of kindness and calm and clarity or whatever energy.
But actually, it also just helps me be with myself as I am.
And so the first step is that it allows us to notice what's going on, to check in with ourselves.
And once we're doing that, we're not so dominated by what's going on.
You know, if there's, if i'm feeling agitated and frustrated and irritated or something, i can actually recognize that rather than just acting it out.
So to learn how to be still and aware and sort of come back to ourselves and just be with what we're experiencing.
So that's the sort of bedrock of meditation.
That's the foundation of it.
It's just to be with myself.
And sometimes I'm restless and I'm impatient and I don't want to be still.
Okay, can I be with that?
In other words, just expanding my capacity to be with what goes on in me.
It's a way of kind of defusing my potential for harm.
Yeah.
Make the case, Henry, if you will. for meditation to the skeptic who's listening right now.
The skeptic who is like, Henry, listen, you're a Zen master.
It's okay for you.
I've got a busy life.
I've got a partner.
I've got some kids that need feeding and looking after.
I've got an elderly parent to look after.
I'm constantly rushing around.
I never have enough time for myself.
It's all very well you talking about these love and compassion benefits, but that doesn't fit into my life at the moment.
What would you say to that person?
I meet them all the time.
I'd say look, it's not, don't think of it as another chore on the to-do list.
Everybody can find five minutes, everybody can, and just let it be five minutes of you being you, five minutes for you, not for i gotta do this thing called meditation.
It's just for you.
Five minutes, Just being with yourself.
Everybody can do that.
And in my own story, you know, I had a really difficult skin condition from early childhood right into early adulthood.
And it was a very severe eczema.
Sometimes I was hospitalized.
But it made me Really uncomfortable in my own skin, literally.
You know I I couldn't sit still.
It was a sort of family joke almost.
Henry can't sit still.
So I was the worst possible candidate, in a way, for meditation.
But I was also the best possible candidate in a certain sense because I so needed it.
But it was the last thing I wanted to do was sit still.
But actually.
Once I was given tools that would help me sit still, my eczema started to get better for the first time.
It really started to, it was a long gradual process, but it started to release.
And I'm sure it was because I was intervening in the way that my nervous system had been functioning much of my life, which was on a kind of hyper drive constantly, you know, over activated nervous system.
You were intervening, as I hear that, really far upstream.
One of the things I've realized in my career as a doctor is that a lot of what we do in medicine is downstream okay.
Well, I mean, I've heard you describe your eczema.
I mean, this isn't just a little bit of bad eczema.
This was horrific.
You know, you felt like you were burning up on the inside.
District nursing needs to come around and bathe you and put things around you, right?
It's pretty incredible.
But what do we do with eczema generally in medicine?
There's multiple things we'll do, but in essence we try and give you something like a steroid cream to get rid of the itching right.
Yeah.
But that's downstream.
That's not the cause of your X-Men.
Of course, there are multiple causes.
There's multiple things that contribute.
But there's something really quite profound in there.
I think it's the forward to original love. where I think, is it Rick Hansen who wrote the forewords?
Yes.
He quotes Tara Brach saying, all sickness is homesickness, which is just beautiful.
Like this separation from who we are, or certainly let me give you my interpretation when I read.
That was like Once there's a separation in who we really are, who we are being in the world, compared to who we actually are.
It's in that void, it's in that gap where all our problems start.
And that could be health problems as well.
Yeah, I think that is right.
I'd say there's sort of multiple levels of homecoming.
You know, for me when I started meditating, just to be sitting still and able to get these little moments of being aware oh, I'm sitting still, it's okay.
It's okay.
I was so used to being in this hyperactivated state where basically, I was anxious almost all the time.
It was such a gift, this little instance of it's okay.
Right now it's okay.
And it was me finding it.
It wasn't somebody telling me that.
That was critical.
And all that I had to.
This is the other side of meditation.
It's so insanely simple.
It's just sitting here, there's nothing, there's kind of nothing to it.
Yes, it helps to have a few little methods and we we can get those, but basically we're just not doing anything.
And i started to find, in the midst of this sort of storm of Itching and anxiety and stress and worry.
It was kind of almost constant.
I started to find it's okay.
Right now it's okay.
And then I'd be back to the storm.
It reminds me a little bit of...
Ellen Langer, do you know Ellen, the mindfulness professor from Harvard?
I think you'd love her work.
She wrote a book called The Mindful Body.
She's written multiple books.
And one of the things I think she writes about in that book is let's say someone's in chronic pain.
Okay, so you had chronic itchiness, probably pain as well, having said that, right?
Yes, yes.
It's easy, she says, for people with chronic pain, you know, I'm always in pain.
But one of the things I always remember from my conversation with her was this idea that you're not actually always in pain.
It's there a lot of the time.
But once you're really mindful and you notice that oh, I'm not in pain at the moment, you create a separation.
It's not you being all encompassed by pain.
It's the awareness that, yes, sometimes I'm experiencing pain and sometimes I'm not.
And she has shown with her research incredible benefits and improvements for people just when they start to notice that subtle difference.
That's very interesting.
And I totally agree.
And it was the same for me with the itching that I started.
I've been so identified with it.
I was just who Henry was, was he itched and he couldn't sit still.
That was who I was.
And to start getting these.
Gaps in another sense, a little space where, oh my gosh, that's not who I am.
The itches arising is present, but I'm not it.
I am, I have my own being.
And somehow that was another key insight and help with dealing with my skin affliction as I started to meditate.
It gave me that little gap.
And I think that's exactly right.
Mindfulness shows us that there's a quality of awareness that we can have that is its own thing.
And so the difficulties we have are viewed from the.
We can learn to view them from the perspective of that awareness, of mindfulness, rather than being totally tied up in them.
Yeah.
In your latest book, you write about these four ends on the path of awakening.
I think it's just such a beautiful way to lay out a path that one might wish to take if they choose to meditate.
Before you actually articulate these four different ends throughout the book, you wrote something which I've been meditating on, actually awakening right.
You say awakening has a potential like nothing else to heal the destructive divisions of this world.
And then you sort of say, so how do we get there?
Basically, we learn to meditate and we learn to love meditating.
Now, I'm fascinated, Henry, as to why people struggle to make changes that actually last, you know.
People often listen to the show for guidance on how they can live healthier happier, more compassionate lives.
And people will follow something for a bit and then fall off track.
Looking at that through the lens of meditation, I feel and I used to have this as well myself that people meditate to get something right.
So, oh, I read this study that meditation can help with anxiety.
I should meditate.
So they're meditating, because they feel they should.
Oh, at some point, I'm going to get something out of this practice.
That's very different from the second part of that phrase, which is to learn to love to meditate.
And I think I really wanted to explore that because there's a different energy behind that.
If you're meditating because, oh, you know, I know this is going to help me.
God, I tried it last year.
Couldn't make it stick.
Man, I'm going to try and do it this year.
It feels like a struggle.
And that struggle means at some point, I would imagine. they're going to fall away from it.
So what's the difference and how do you go from that to learning to love to meditate?
Yeah, that's a really great.
I've forgotten I'd written that actually, so thanks for reminding me.
And it's a really great question and it's critical actually, because I think our general orientation in life that we've been conditioned to have and it's, it seems, very natural that we would have it is sort of trying to get what we want and avoid what we don't want.
And of course that makes total sense and that's fine and good that we do that.
But when it comes to meditation, we're actually Opening up the possibility of simply being.
It's like a shift from wanting to get X, Y and Z, well and good, fine.
But what if there's something already here?
That we just need to sort of fall into the arms of kind of thing.
It's already here.
And when we get even a little taste of it, it feels good already.
And it makes us realize that.
Yes, I'm absolutely right in having these goals and these things that I want to either achieve and accomplish and also simply acquire, and also things that I really want to avoid and be free of and perhaps get over.
And I've heard that meditation may help with all that.
So in other words, bringing the same mindset that I've got for everything else to meditation.
It's very natural and it's okay.
But there's something else each of us can find for ourselves which is really different, where we actually drop the search and quest and struggle to get what we want.
We drop that.
And it's a little...
So there's maybe a little knack to it, a little something, and we'll get it more and more the more we meditate.
Because what happens in that shift is that we find there's something already here that we love.
Yeah, I love that.
I mean, you've already said in this conversation that even five minutes a day can have a profound effect.
And there's a section in the book where you talk about tips for practice.
You say, number one, not too long.
So consistency is more important than duration.
So five minutes a day is better than 20 minutes once a month kind of thing.
Way better, way better.
And I think we've all got five minutes a day.
And you also talk about establishing a regular time.
You say, yeah, for many people, for most people, dare I say, the morning is the best time.
But you also spoke about things like straight after a shower or when it gets to dusk or before beds.
Can you talk to us a little bit about the more practical nature of how we can actually, you know, implement this practice into our daily lives?
Yeah, i'd say the the biggest thing is to make the decision.
I'm doing it every day for a month or something like that, put a time limit on it and decide that you've made the decision, So you don't have to make the decision each time.
Shall I do it or not?
You've already made that decision.
I remember hearing two economists wrote a book about dieting.
They'd been having a lot of big lunches and they wanted to do something about it.
And they said the same point.
They said, just decide no dessert.
It's just off the table.
So you don't have to keep remaking the decision.
It's like brushing the teeth.
We don't really make a decision about it or about showering.
We just do it because actually we made the decision long ago.
And we're just stuck with it.
So, if it can be like that, and then you stack it with some other activity, that makes it a bit easier.
You know, like a shower after you've been working out or something.
Or you know just before a morning walk or just before breakfast or just before the first cup of coffee, you know, stacking it while the kettle's boiling if it's just five minutes and let the kettle sit, you know.
So you stack it with something else and and but again the the why yeah that, of course that can help if you've got a strong reason, and i mean, for me the biggest reason is to be alive.
And that may sound a bit crazy, but we're so busy doing from, you know, we get up and we just do do, do that we don't get a moment to recognize I'm actually alive.
I'm being given the gift of being alive and aware of being alive, and somehow I think that's the biggest thing about meditation it gives us a chance to actually know that we're alive.
Is there something unique about meditation and the reason that I?
I asked that question, Henry, is because I will often talk about the benefits of solitude.
And I do strongly believe that in 2025, for most people, a daily practice of solitude is probably the most important thing they can do for their health wellbeing, their happiness.
Because we're living in a world where there's so much noise we can constantly consume from the outside.
So it gets very hard for us to actually listen to what's going on on the inside.
But solitude, of course, comes in a variety of different forms.
You can practice solitude by sitting in meditation.
But you can also practice solitude by journaling or by doing some breath work or by going for a walk in nature.
So if we think about solitude as a practice, Do you feel that there's something unique that meditation offers that those other practices potentially don't offer?
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I love all the ones you mentioned.
I do them myself, actually.
And I think they're very, they've been critical for my development, my wellbeing.
The difference with meditation is that we're not really doing anything.
I would say stack it with one of those.
If you're doing one of those solitude practices, walking in the woods, yeah, journaling, lovely.
Just add five minutes, put in five minutes somewhere where you lay down the pen, you sit on a log, on a branch, on a bench, and you're just still.
And you just let yourself be.
Because the big thing about it is not doing.
If we didn't think of it as meditation, we just call it not doing.
That's all we need to say.
We're not moving.
We're not walking.
We're breathing.
And we're aware.
And gradually, in time, it's like this tide of commotion within us.
It just starts to settle.
It's not that it does it within every meditation session.
But if we're doing it every day, over time, over a month, two months, three months, you'll start to feel it.
The tide of commotion just recedes.
The sense I got from reading Original Love is Well many things, but one of the senses I got was this idea that it's about the practice of meditation, not necessarily the outcome of the meditation.
Some days you'll experience calm and presence.
Other days it will be a busy, hectic mind, but that's all okay.
So instead of judging on the outcome, I mean, don't judge it at all.
But if you're going to judge it on anything, judge it on whether you're actually sitting down and practicing every day.
Do the five minutes.
I mean, you're the Zen master.
So tell me if I've got this right.
But that's my sense.
That's exactly right.
And actually, we say on our app, the way we say.
There's no bad meditation.
Or the only bad meditation is the one you didn't do.
Just the very fact of sitting down with the intention of being still and quiet.
That's it.
It's absolutely true.
Because here's the thing it's like.
Again, with that outcome focus, we're back to that frame of mind where I've got to try to get what I want in life.
I've got to try to get what I want.
And it's very understandable.
But meditation really isn't about that.
And for most people, when we start, it is.
And that's okay.
It was for me.
I didn't know what I needed.
I just desperately needed something different when I was anxious and really uncomfortable.
One of the things I've been thinking about on my summer break is this idea of things that we want.
How do we even know that what we want is what we truly want anyway, right?
Because that's the truth.
It's like, we think we want things.
Exactly.
Yeah, but where's that even come from?
And how do you even know that getting what you think that you want It's what you really want or what you need right?
That's exactly right.
It's like that's part of a system.
It's just one system of there's me in here seeking things out there that me in here thinks he wants.
But if I can see that as a system...
That's just a kind of, it's almost like it's a game going on.
But there's a wider view.
There's a larger perspective where I can see Henry's been trying to get this, Henry's been trying to get that, Henry's been trying to avoid that.
But who is it that's seeing that Henry's doing all that?
Isn't that Henry too?
And it's such a different perspective.
So the thing with the getting from meditation is exactly, we can start to get more calm.
We totally can.
But we get it not just by creating more calm through the meditation.
We get it through patience.
Patience starts to grow.
We start to let ourselves be as we are.
And so it's... it's kind of a little bit paradoxical.
It is.
We get what we want because we're okay not getting it.
You see what I mean?
Yeah.
And that sort of highlights another theme throughout your book, throughout what I've been thinking about recently, which is why I think the timing of this conversation is perfect.
And I have I think I've posted about this before this idea that the most important things in life we gain through experience.
Yes, you can learn things.
You can read a book about something.
You can get guidance on the importance of meditation.
But you only really get it when you experience it.
And then, when you've experienced it for yourself in some ways, it doesn't matter what the people around you are saying, because you know that truth.
I couldn't agree more.
And that's what I'm always trying to convey with the meditation you know, is like I can say this, feel this, feel that and find deep states of absorption and flow that feels so good.
It's meaningless unless you're getting it yourself.
And when it's your own...
It doesn't matter what I'm saying, you know, because you've got it.
That's where I'm trying to, you know, help people win.
Well, you really are.
I mean, you mentioned your app, The Way.
It is bloody fantastic, honestly.
It's such a beautiful app and the way you've curated a journey.
A meditation journey for people is phenomenal.
I've been using it myself for the past week and I'm looking forward to continuing that journey with it.
It's really, really great.
What you just said about.
It's the act of.
Sitting there and, in many ways, doing nothing, reminds me of something you wrote in your book, where you say meditation is the great adventure of a lifetime, even if all we do is sit still for a few minutes a day.
I mean, it's a beautifully evocative statement that.
And.
In so many ways it is the polar opposite of how we've all been brought up, particularly in the West right.
And I see it in my children from the minute they start school.
It's about do, do, do.
Some of the kids at school, schools are so over committed and over busy.
And you know, I respect everyone's right to their opinion.
And maybe for certain outcomes, it is a good thing.
But to me, I'm thinking all we're doing is training children from a young age that they can't just sit and be.
You have to constantly be doing something and moving on to that and doing this task and this activity.
I think that's a problem, right?
I'm not convinced that that's the right approach.
That's why I call the book Original Love.
Because originally there's love and it's here right now.
And if you have a concept like original sin, the Western foundation of its Judeo-Christian spiritual system, you're wrong.
You start bad.
You start needing to prove yourself, needing to become worthy, needing to...
And then you add that, the whole industrial and post-industrial work ethic, work, work, work.
You're not okay until you've achieved and accomplished whatever it might be.
I don't agree.
I think we start okay.
We're built in already okay.
Wanted, belonging, beloved even.
You know, just by the... fact of existing the the universe wants us here or we wouldn't be here in some sense you know and so original love is what we can come back to not not having to escape some shame state original sin not having to escape that and prove that we we deserve our place on this earth yeah no no we it's it's the opposite of that it's just by being You know, we can we can break the again.
I'm not saying don't do anything, you know, but have space in your day when you're not doing a thing.
Yeah.
When you're just being.
Yeah, it's kind of interesting in a world now where people are saying that wellness is the preserve of the, the wealthy and the middle classes.
But if we think about what you're saying at its very core yes, you have an app which is very reasonably priced, so people want to, you know, engage in it.
Okay, at the same time, What you're simply saying is sit for five minutes a day and essentially do nothing.
That is accessible to every single person.
It doesn't matter your income level. where you grow up in the world.
Everyone has access to that, but you almost have to stop the doing.
And I think this is one of the reasons why people in the West struggle with meditation.
It's like, okay, I'm going to do it to get this.
And I think I used to do that.
But the truth is, Henry, I love meditating.
I didn't at first.
It was a struggle.
But there is just this luxurious feeling of bliss and calm sometimes when I sit in meditation.
That's not a chore.
That's like, this feels amazing.
Exactly.
And I think everyone has the opportunity to experience that.
I do too, just by virtue of being a human being.
We already have access to it.
The problem is just we're so conditioned in not... knowing that we have access to it.
It's just like a faulty imprinting on our consciousness that our society has given us, our culture has given us.
You must be doing, you must be achieving, you must be avoiding what you don't want to face.
And actually...
It's really sad in a way.
I mean, it's beautiful in the, oh my gosh, we've all got it.
We just got to learn.
It's sad to see children being conditioned out of it.
It is.
That's something I find deeply sad because it's like, no, no.
They've already got it.
They're born with it.
I'd love to know your views on happiness.
Actually, I believe happiness is our default state.
And one of the bits of evidence, as it were, that I would use to support my case is just look at children, look at a two-year-old, a three-year-old.
Look how present calm, in the moment they are.
Exactly, you know exactly, and they're exploring and creating.
Yeah, that's who we are before societal conditioning.
Yes, So on the subject of happiness, I mean, what's the relationship between meditation and happiness?
And is happiness our default state?
I believe it is.
Again, original love is like coming back to a profound well-being that's really always here.
Honestly, even in difficult situations, when we've got something complex, challenging going on and we're stressed around it, Even then I believe actually there's an unconditional well-being that's actually present.
And I've known it myself.
I've found that in times of difficulty when suddenly it flips and suddenly I can see.
Henry's in this difficult situation.
Yeah.
But there's a larger perspective that I sense, you know, that is at peace.
Yeah.
And it's already well, even while there's the challenge going on.
Yeah.
So I do think it's like...
Is it a default setting or is it that there's just this slightly wider perspective?
I feel there's always a bigger picture, you know, and in the slightly wider perspective, that's where we see wow yeah, there's a lot of turmoil and difficulty and trouble, and still there's an okayness yeah, that's able to to see from from that larger perspective.
Yeah, Let's get into these four ends and the path of awakening.
Mindfulness, support, absorption and awakening.
It's one of the first times I've actually seen a roadmap laid out on the kind of journey one could take if they participate in meditation.
And it's a journey that I'm thinking, yeah, I'm ready for this journey.
The truth is I'm already on this journey because I've been meditating on and off for years.
I particularly probably want to focus on the final two, absorption and awakening.
If you wouldn't mind just giving a brief overview of each one, what they are, just so people can follow along.
That would be super helpful.
So, you know, what are these four ends and why did you choose them?
Yeah, okay.
Well, I think these are the primary dimensions that meditation practice can open up for us, that they deal with.
And I wanted to write this and lay it out like this because there's a lot of confusion around it.
Meditation has grown exponentially in the globalized Western world over the last 20 years.
That's a good thing.
It's a very good thing.
Okay.
But it's all new here and there's still confusion around it.
So people hear the term awakening and they hear mindfulness.
Are they the same thing?
They might think, well, this teacher said they are.
This one said they're not.
I don't know.
I'm confused.
So here's, I want to say, this is a basic map of, of the ground, of the territory.
And I'm not sure it's entirely comprehensive, but it's pretty good.
It covers pretty much all the basics.
So the first mindfulness yes, about becoming more aware, able to recognize what's going on inside me thoughts and feelings emotions, moods can be very happy, can be not so happy, and talk in the mind, images in the mind, the experience of thinking very common for all of us.
Energies in the body.
Being more aware of that and also being aware of hearing, hearing the sounds, seeing sights and colors and shapes and faces and everything.
And body sensation, physical body sensation, being more aware in all those ways.
That's mindfulness and it can help to dial down our nervous system.
It can really help to interrupt when our nervous system is on overdrive.
When the sympathetic nervous system is firing up, we're in subtle stress or strong stress, it can dial it down and we come back to a baseline.
We open up the parasympathetic nervous system more rest, rest and digest, coming into a calmer state.
And so it really helps to kind of tone and balance the nervous system.
And before we go to the second end, just on that first set of mindfulness, if that's the only one that we ever focused on.
Those things you're talking about are pretty incredible.
They're enormous.
Moving your system from the stressed out, burnt out, chronically exhausted state that many people find themselves in into that more peaceful, relaxed state, which is also going to impact your sleep how calm you feel your guts.
All these things are going to improve.
Even that alone, that first in, has huge benefits, doesn't it?
It totally does.
I mean, I'd say most of the first few years of my...
Meditation practice was all about that.
I did twice a day every day, you know, without fail because I was desperate enough that I needed to.
Because of your skin.
Because of my skin and the anxiety that came with it.
I slept insanely.
The first week I was sleeping 18 hours a night, 20 hours a night, literally.
Like a lion.
I was so exhausted and I didn't, I hadn't realized I was.
And then, and then I, I, I, Paid off my sleep debt, as some people called it.
And I suddenly was awake.
I love the fact that you shared that.
One thing I've noticed people will contact me.
You know, we go through something and often people will yawn.
And there's often confusion, you know, say, oh, it's making me tired.
It's not making you tired.
It's just you're stuck in a stressed out, adrenaline driven nervous system the whole time.
When you actually relax, your body is realizing how tired and chronically exhausted it is.
So the process isn't, making you tired.
It's just uncovering what is actually there within already.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And I always say like, it's a barometer meditation.
It shows us how we're doing.
And sometimes we're just exhausted and we need to sleep.
I always tell people, if you start meditating and you get really sleepy, lie down and sleep.
Count the nap.
If you need a nap, count it as meditation.
That's kind of interesting.
Even if the meditation teaches you that you're chronically exhausted and need to rest and instead of completing the meditation, you nap, That's still a benefit, because had you not done that, you probably would have kept doing doing, doing and pushing through and kicking the can down the road.
That's exactly right.
Where it just gives you the opportunity to go, oh, I need to rest.
Exactly with ourselves, coming back to ourselves, seeing how we're doing.
It's critical.
Okay, i think you mentioned this in the book, but again, is it?
Are we looking for that path up to the top of the mountain?
And Along the way, on this path of meditation, we pass these ends.
I mean that sort of makes it feel as though it's a linear journey, which of course I don't think it is a linear journey.
But is that useful for us to look at it like that?
I think early on, it is useful.
It's good to feel that we're on a journey.
We build this into the app, by the way, so that people because it's a single no-choice pathway we have on the app which moves through these four ins, but it does it cyclically.
But it helps us to know that we sort of feel like we're going somewhere.
And in some ways we are.
But on the other hand, as I think you're suggesting, really these are more like dimensions of our being.
They're not exactly sequential.
They may be somewhat. but they totally don't have to be.
I guess for the purpose of this conversation, to really land the concepts, I guess we can think of it a little bit linear.
So the first in we pass on the way to the top of the mountain is mindfulness.
You just covered that.
The next N is that of support.
Yeah, support, connection, connectedness.
So this is critical because, you know, now there's millions of people now doing mindfulness.
And, just like we've already said in this conversation, they very often feel kind of I've got to do my mindfulness.
It's like going to the gym and doing my reps.
I've got to do my work with the mindfulness.
That misses...
A critical point from my point of view, which is that actually as we settle, we get more connected.
We're more open to relating.
We're more open.
We become more receptive.
We're ready to receive connection and support.
And the way this can happen is in the world of meditation, for example.
Simply having guidance can be really helpful early on on the meditation journey.
I mean meditation guidance.
Having somebody actually guide your sitting.
So from a teacher, from a class that you attend, From an app like your app, for example, where you're giving us the guidance.
And there's obviously I don't know how many meditation apps out there.
Yes.
But this all counts as a sort of guidance and support, does it?
It totally does.
Yeah.
So don't feel that it's just down to you on your own.
Just reaching out for a little bit of support in any of those ways or with a friend who's trying to meditate.
Is this potentially one of the reasons why we fall off these practices?
Let's say, someone hears this podcast and goes yeah, you know all those benefits of mindfulness.
I quite fancy that.
And so they start meditating or they download your app and start using the way.
And it's the risk that you'll do it for a little while as a solo pursuit.
But at some point it will just get too much, because it's always down to you and your motivation and your discipline and your desire.
Help me understand support, right?
Because fundamentally, unless someone has access to a class nearby, they kind of are doing it themselves in their living room or in their bedroom, aren't they?
So what does support mean in that context?
Yeah well, I mean, you've laid out the problem exactly, that people, If they're falling off, they'll think I must push myself harder or it's down to me.
One phone call to a friend who's also trying to meditate will do far more.
It's like suddenly you're not alone in it.
And that makes so much difference. or one yoga class where there's meditation at the end.
Just being in a context of other human beings.
Even if it's remotely?
Yeah, even if it's remotely, totally.
Yeah, absolutely.
So don't do this by yourself.
Have a little bit of a connection with some community or some person that is already doing it.
We typically think it's down to me to make something happen, especially with a new habit formation, something like that.
But actually, and it is, it is but one little sense of connection to somebody else who's also trying to do it will make often far more difference than me trying to push myself.
Is that is that it's surprising how that works.
You know, I think I mean, I used to find this as a writer.
I started writing very young and and, you know, it's how I made my living for a long time.
And and I'd get stuck and I'd be trying to work it out, trying to work it out.
Then I happen to run into a friend who's an artist or another writer and we just chat for 10 minutes, or we go and have a cup of coffee, chat for an hour and suddenly I've got a whole new orientation.
The problem is different.
And you know you're not alone, or the struggles you're having are the same struggles they're having.
Exactly.
You just feel this connection to... what it means to be human.
When you talk to other people, you go, oh, you're struggling with that as well.
Yeah, so am I. Suddenly you have this new energy and enthusiasm just when you know you're not alone.
That's exactly right.
That's precisely it.
And that's really important on this journey of meditation.
Just also to say that There's ways in which we're just totally supported already.
And meditation, I believe, is about finding some of those.
You know, we wouldn't be here without breathing.
The atmosphere is every breath, every moment.
We're being supported by the atmosphere.
We wouldn't be here without fluids.
We need to drink.
We're made of, you know, whatever it is 70 sea water.
Wherever we are, you know we're we need.
We're totally dependent.
You know we think we're independent and isolated, But we're not actually.
The flesh of my body is everything I eat has made it and I'm made of this earth.
And the warmth of the sun keeps me alive.
And so the point is just rediscovering that we're kind of embedded in this world.
We're not...
We're not isolated.
That's another aspect of this second in of support.
It's rediscovering that I'm not actually totally independent, isolated.
You can't be.
We're made of this planet.
Yeah.
You know, this table in front of us is made of wood.
Someone would have had to chop the wood down, carve it, varnish it, put it here in front of us so that we can now have this conversation.
Exactly.
And they themselves had to eat.
And that came from the wheat fields and the fruit and the vegetables.
Can we think of support also in terms of our ancestors?
100%.
I write about that in the book.
You know, what we are has come down from these millions of generations of living beings of different kinds.
Yeah, it's kind of interesting.
One of the things I've been talking about in my sort of recent live shows is about my relationship with my dad and dad's life a little bit, and what's happened since my dad died and how, Although it was over 12 years ago now, I think about my dad, probably now more than ever.
And I still feel that he's here.
And actually, I now see my dad's death as a gift to me.
In the sense that the things that I've learned through my dad's death I don't think I would have learned if my dad was still alive.
And again, just to be clear, I'm not expecting anyone else to reframe their parents' death in that way.
I certainly wasn't doing that in the first year or two after dad died.
Yes.
I remember at my dad's funeral after the cremation there was a religious ceremony.
It was conducted by a Hindu priest.
And a big part of it is acknowledging your ancestors and praying to ancestors.
I don't think I quite realise the importance of that. until quite recently.
But I think it speaks to support this idea that we're not just here in isolation by ourselves.
There's so many different things that are necessary in order for us to be here.
And I kind of feel a lot of people come to because they want to help with that depression or that anxiety, right.
But one thing I've noticed in my clinical career Henry, is that many people, let's say, with depression or with a diagnosis of depression, are very isolated, right.
They're living, For a variety of reasons in a very me world.
And if you can help people get out of that I world and me world and volunteer and connect with others and feel that actually you're part of this kind of rich tapestry of human experience, everything starts to change.
Yes, it 100 does exactly.
I think um, and i think the point about ancestors is is absolutely right that we're not.
It's not just uh sort of horizontal, uh connectedness in the world, it's vertical, it's across time And to feel, you know, I have this sometimes on meditation retreats I've felt like I've seen many, many ancestors, you know, standing behind me.
And their lives are what have enabled me to have this life and this very moment.
And my mother and my father, without them, I wouldn't be here.
And to feel that, just as you say, it brings on a kind of humility that is...
Sweet you know and make it can make us grateful for every moment.
And I totally agree with you about the, the isolation that is a very common thing these days actually, and how to cut through it, and and Again.
It's like this support, this inner support, is a sort of corrective for the mindfulness.
I've got to do, I've heard that mindfulness can help with depression.
Indeed it can.
But with caution and with careful use and guidance of mindfulness with depression.
But not to the exclusion of being open to others.
You know, and how do I?
What is the vulnerability I need to feel in order to be able to open to others?
And what's the vulnerability I need to feel in order to say I need help?
You know, that's very scary for a lot of us.
Please help me.
Reaching out.
Yeah, you know many of us don't really want to do that.
We've been ingrained in this culture of I've gotta manage and cope myself and There's a resistance we have.
I think I'm speaking for myself.
I had a lot of resistance and to being able to reach out and ask for help when I most needed it.
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I think in my case there was a lot of shame.
I grew up with a lot of shame about the way I looked with my skin condition.
People don't want to hear from me.
It was kind of the mindset I had.
And depression brings shame.
I was depressed when i was a young man, as well as anxious.
You know, depression brings shame, stigma.
I i felt so bad that my mental health wasn't good.
You know it's not only did i have really feeling bad bad, not good.
I was ashamed of feeling bad.
You thought you should be able to feel good.
Yeah, it was a sign of my total incompetence as a human being and my failure as a human being that I wasn't feeling good.
I wasn't feeling...
I knew I could and I wasn't.
I was feeling down and unmotivated and you know I was kind of going through the motions of a postgraduate degree actually at the time.
But I wasn't, my heart wasn't in it and I felt bad about that and i didn't in some way i felt unworthy, you know, not good enough.
And so again, it was when i started to meditate that i just began to find little cracks in that mindset starting to happen.
Little hearing, that little ray of light would come in just for a moment.
A lot of cracks in the story, the story you're telling yourself that you believe to be real.
It's like we said before about when you're in chronic pain.
You're not in chronic pain 100 of the time.
And as soon as you understand that and see oh, I wasn't in pain there, I wasn't in pain there, it starts to break through the cracks right.
Yes, exactly.
In probably a very similar way.
Exactly, exactly.
The light just a little bit started to come in and I could reach out for help, and it was what I needed to do.
And you know so I mean personally.
My journey has been very much about.
I sort of do my part and for the keystone habit of my life has been meditation.
But I also learned to reach out, especially when I least want to.
Yeah.
You know.
How much do you meditate these days?
Well, it's daily and it varies.
Sometimes, if I'm on retreat, It's quite a lot.
I don't want to scare anybody.
You don't have to do 10 hours a day, but I have done 10 hours a day at times for quite a lot at certain times in my life.
But my average is about an hour a day.
In one go might be, or it might be half an hour in the morning, half an hour later.
You're quite fluid and flexible, but you will do it.
Yeah, I'll always do it.
And what about something I wanted to ask you about?
Well, we'll get back to the inside a minute.
We've covered the first two mindfulness and support and you know there's plenty more in original love about those two ends, right?
We're just covering the surface here.
But one of the things I think people struggle with these days they're kind of stuck in a loop where they're stressed out, they're busy, they've got too many things to do.
They don't feel they've got time to meditate.
They hear about the importance of sleep right.
And therefore it's like yeah, hold on a minute, but how am I going to fit this in to an already busy life?
Okay.
And I was thinking about this idea that, if you I think it was when I spoke to Sadhguru on this podcast a few years ago the Indian mystic.
Amazing guy, yeah.
I think he was talking about this idea.
Well, if you're not creating a load of stress anyway, you need less sleep, right?
So if you're living a calm existence, there's less to recover from when you sleep, right?
So I was thinking, well, hold on a minute.
Maybe if we all meditated more and were less stressed and calmer well, maybe a lot of us would get by with six hours of sleep a night.
Maybe we can't look at how much sleep we need without looking at the context of our entire life.
So do you feel sometimes that if you meditate regularly you perhaps can get away with less sleep?
I do believe it can be a deep form of rest.
You know they talk about non-sleep deep rest.
Yeah, nsdr and meditation definitely is is one way that we can bring on that deep rest, and in some meditation traditions they They would claim that in meditation it's a deeper rest, more rest than sleep.
And so, yeah, there's some schools that say, hey, if you're doing...
In TM, for example, Transcendental Meditation, which was a popular form years back and is what I did at first.
They'll say if you're doing your daily dose 20 minutes twice a day, you need less sleep.
And I think it's true once you've paid off a sleep debt.
And if you've got a sleep debt, you'll know, because it'll show up as fatigue and then you've got to pay it off with rest.
But once we're in a steady habit with meditating, I do think it's actually true that we need a bit less sleep.
Certainly I mean people on a, an intensive meditation retreat, where you are meditating, let's say, 10 hours a day.
You need much less sleep.
And we're actually creeping into the third in.
Let's do that.
Let's creep in.
So the third in is flow in meditation or samadhi, it's called, or absorption.
It's where we get into these beautiful states of mind.
And they call it, the traditional name is Samadhi in the meditation world.
Sanskrit word?
Yes.
And it's something about everything held together, everything unified.
It's very...
It's energized and it's peaceful and it's calm and it's clear and it's effortless.
The most common way people find it is in activities actually, because it's not exclusive to meditation.
The flow states have been really thoroughly researched since there was a guy called...
Csikszentmihalyi back in the 70s and 80s, he began pioneering research on flow sticks.
And you know people athletes will get into it musicians, actually anybody will get into flow now and then while engaged in some kind of activity.
And it can be from a very challenging activity, like you know basketball, or you know getting in the zone painting, or something you know an artist or a musician.
But it can also be just simple repetitive tasks will get into a flow state.
Is that different from getting into a flow state whilst meditating?
Because the things you mentioned are about doing something right.
And we spoke about doing already.
So we're surfing, mountain biking, playing guitar, painting, right?
So we're doing an activity where we switch off.
Well, it feels as though time stands still.
We're fully immersed, body and mind.
There's no separation.
That feels as though it's different though from reaching that state by just sitting there.
Or is it different?
It's a great question.
And I've thought I've wondered about this a lot.
When flow comes on in an activity, because it becomes effortless and time stands still, exactly as you said, and there's much less sense of self.
You know, we're not so self-conscious.
It's almost like we're not doing for some other purpose.
We're just doing the thing we're doing.
And that's enough.
It's for its own.
We're doing it for the sake of doing it.
You know, and it's fulfilling.
So in meditation, just transferring all of that to meditation, the great difference is that we're not doing an outward activity.
That is the big difference in meditation.
So we're getting into similar states with our own being, with our own being.
And it's where meditation really is starting to kick in and show us what it's been about all along, which is not for other purposes, just for its own sake.
We're doing it without a kind of ulterior motive.
But it is similar to flow in other areas because it's got the same sort of characteristics.
It's effortless.
I would say for me, if I think about my own experience, I can experience traditional flow, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would describe it, in all kinds of activities.
So if I'm playing my guitar and I've got an idea for a new song and I'm sort of lost in that I could be there for 90 minutes and I'm like, oh wow, I didn't realise.
Wonderful.
But I feel when I get it or when I have experienced it in meditation, it feels quite different.
And I imagine they're both things that we want, ideally.
I think about life a lot through the lens of dependencies.
How dependent am I? on externalities in order to feel a certain way, right?
The words of other people, acquiring things, the weather to be right, whatever it might be.
And I used to be very dependent.
I would say these days, not so much.
But you can almost argue that flow from an external source also has a dependency attached to it.
I need to be playing my guitar in order to get the flow.
I need to be on my mountain bike in order to access that flow, which is all fine, right?
Nothing wrong with that at all.
But it feels really quite empowering to know that Yeah, but I can also do that with nothing.
That's exactly right.
I find it just amazing how fulfilled we can be by not doing anything, by just sitting still.
That's the beauty of flow in meditation, is that we're finding...
That, instead of needing stuff, needing anything external, just in our own being, we can be completely fulfilled at peace alive energized clear calm, but not docile.
We're sort of really awake.
And totally fulfilled without anything.
I find that just so beautiful.
Yeah.
In that section, you write, we never knew we needed so little to be happy.
Exactly.
Beautiful.
Exactly.
Because again, going back to cultural conditioning, that is not what most people believe.
They believe they need things, right?
They need a certain job title, a certain office, a certain salary.
And listen.
I'm saying this with compassion and sensitivity, because I understand that there are people who are struggling to buy food to feed themselves okay.
So that I also recognise at the same time.
But I think for many people let's say you've got enough to feed yourself and pay your mortgage and whatever that number is.
I think a lot of people still think that happiness comes from something outside of themselves, whereas this state of absorption or samadhi or flow, I guess it teaches us that the happiness is already there.
It's inside of us.
Exactly.
I mean, I was really lucky.
When I was 12 years old, I met this tramp, an old kind of hobo type of person.
He used to come through the valley where we lived in north of Oxford.
And he was so different from everybody else I knew.
My parents were both professors at Oxford and I grew up in that very rational privileged, middle-class world.
And this guy.
He was called Speedy.
He'd wander into our valley every spring and put up in this ruined mill about a mile away from where our house was.
And I got to know him.
And he basically... he pretty much had nothing.
He had two dogs fishing lines no rod, you know and he lived off fishing and setting traps for rabbits and he'd go door to door when he needed to.
And... But he used to... He said...
He taught me a lot, actually.
It was over several summers I got to know him.
But he would sit every day.
He said he called it stopping still.
And he would just sit in the woods somewhere.
He'd just sit and be still.
And he said, you know, people are running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
They don't realize, they don't learn what they would learn if they just sat still.
And some of that somehow landed in me that he was a person who was at home everywhere.
He lived in the countryside.
He didn't live in a house, but he had so little.
And he was alive in a way that was unlike anybody else I knew.
He was really alive.
Yeah, I love hearing things like this, right?
Because whenever you talk about things like this, there's often the socioeconomic arguments, right?
And yeah, if you look at the data for sure people in certain areas of the UK your life expectancy, for example can be up to 10 years different if you're living in an area of low socioeconomic status compared to high.
So this stuff is real for sure, but when we think about happiness and wellbeing, there is still a view that your financials hugely matter.
And I'm not saying they don't matter, right?
Just to be clear.
But I've also had the experience of every other summer, as a child, we would go to India, to Kolkata, for six weeks, right.
I have seen and been with people and chatted to them in India, with very little, who seem to have a joyful essence, who are happy, they sort of seem to get life.
And I find that really inspiring to go.
Well, hold on a minute.
When this happens, when we get the A-levels, when we get the job, when we get the promotion oh, when that happens, we get this amount of followers or this amount of downloads.
Oh, yeah, there it is.
So hold on a minute.
Some people I've spoken to in India, they don't have those things.
Yeah, I would argue some of them are happier than most of us are.
Yes.
Right?
They've found the unconditional well-being.
Yeah.
And that is the key.
That's what meditation is actually really for.
So...
Thank you for bringing that up.
And I totally agree with you also not to discount the difficulties of being underneath a certain poverty line.
It's incredibly hard and we're not discounting that.
But what if there's a wellbeing that we're missing in our pursuit of conditions, material conditions that we think we need?
All kinds of conditions that we think we need.
What if there's actually an unconditional as well?
You know, unconditional okayness.
And that's the inspiration that I find in what I traditionally thought of as a spiritual life is that it's not based on the conditions of our lives.
There's so much I want to go deeper into that.
Before I do, let me just put my head into the mind of some of the listeners who might be thinking this is all great right.
But how the hell do I get there?
I think, you know, I've covered mindfulness on the show before.
You have your own unique way of describing it, to be fair, in Original Love.
But I think you know, there may be an understanding of the importance of mindfulness, the importance of support those first two ends.
But this kind of flow state that we can experience in meditation, if someone has never experienced that before and are thinking yeah, that sounds great, I want some of it.
How do they get it?
Yeah, well, you know, I'd have to say just keep doing your meditation and it starts to come on.
Yeah.
You know, our app is actually trying to help people find that.
It's very much trust the process, right?
It is.
It's show up for the daily meditation and you will find at some point that these states start to appear.
Yeah, exactly.
It's sort of like if I would say to somebody who's not quite sure what we're talking about.
I would say think of a time when suddenly you just felt really good and there was a shift.
You don't know why it happened, but it wasn't to do with accomplishment or it wasn't to do with something you were actively doing.
It just sort of came on by itself and you felt sort of somehow life was smooth and easy and and rich and fulfilling, and time didn't seem to matter so much.
If you think of something like those little magical moments that I think everybody will have had some taste of, even if it was only in childhood, some sense of a kind of spell fell on you and everything seemed okay.
That's what this is like.
And the activity of non-activity.
The time set aside for meditation of just not doing will attract that.
It's almost more like a magnet.
We're not...
Trying to grab it.
We're just by virtue of making space for just being in our lives.
We attract it.
It just comes on unpredictably by itself at times.
And so it's a fairly, I want to say, you know, we can just about promise it.
We can just about promise it that if you do keep doing this thing regularly consistently, you'll start to get a taste of it.
One of the things I believe happens with people is that because they're so busy doing all the time and not tending to their internal worlds, if they ever stop doing, all the stuff that they haven't processed starts to come out.
Because they're scared of that, they just shut it down and stay busy again.
No, no, no, no.
Do the practice.
Meditate daily.
Let it all come up.
Let it all come up.
And maybe, once you've almost burnt it out, you'll experience the calm and presence that was sitting there all along.
Yeah, I believe that's a great way to look at it.
And then if you're doing it regularly, you're processing the daily stuff that's come up.
So you're sort of keeping ahead of it.
I think that's why the consistency is so important.
But I think that's exactly how we are.
You know if you've done let's say you've been for a long drive and you put your head on the pillow at night, close your eyes.
You see how you see the road.
It's sort of like that.
We're busy in our days.
So of course when we stop, we're processing what we've been doing.
And when people come to a retreat, You go to a retreat, first day, you're dealing with your life.
Recent life.
And then sometimes old life stuff comes up as well.
But you're letting... Actually, it's so healthy.
You're just being, You're letting this stuff on, you're sort of letting your mind digest your life and it's all this stuff comes up and you just let it move on and that's that's how we settle down.
That's what settling down actually means for me is letting all the stuff that's been going on in my life just Process itself and release.
You know, then we find this deeper layers of Calm and clarity and fulfillment.
Yeah, there's so much more about absorption.
I want to talk to you about Cohen's and deposits of beauty, and Maybe I'll just park those for a moment because I want to make sure we have time for the fourth inning awakening.
And what's really interesting to me and I know you talk about it, you write about this in the book is that these first three innings mindfulness, support and absorption are still all done under the realm, where we still have a self right.
And I guess, you know, for people who need some meditation, maybe just start there, right?
Maybe you don't need to come to this point, right?
But this is what I'm really, really interested in.
So I want to go in here, if that's okay, and to enforce this idea, where the first three are great, But there's still this idea that we have an identity, that is, a self, whereas an in four there's a loss of self, isn't there?
So I don't know how you want to tackle this, but can you explain to us what is this fourth in of awakenings?
It's a difficult thing to talk about actually, because it's a discovery that we can each make about who we really are, who we've been all along.
And it may sound weird.
It may not make a lot of sense to hear about it.
And, on the other hand, there may be people who hear about it and think, oh my gosh, that's what that was.
Some moment I had as a kid that I've never forgotten.
Some moment I had as a youth that I've never forgotten.
When it was as if I discovered that I wasn't separate from the world I live in, that my sense of being me contained within my skin, that i, i inhabit this body that i think of as mine, and what i am is something within this body, some little core nugget, or core that's me that i know so well.
I've i've been with it as long as i can remember, But suddenly it was as if that wasn't there, that wasn't here.
And instead, I was part of everything.
It's a sudden glimpse of a different way of experiencing ourselves now. in this world?
I don't think I've ever covered non-duality on the podcast to date.
So perhaps the best way to start this is with you describing what happened to you when you were backpacking at 19.
I don't know, what do you think?
I think so too.
I think it's probably easier to get it if I try to describe it.
So as I said, I'd grown up in Oxford.
I had this terrible eczema.
I went away when I was 18, 19 on a gap year.
And I worked actually in South America.
I worked on a ranch for several months.
That was through my dad.
Somebody in his college was from Argentina and I worked there and then I backpacked.
And towards the end of the trip, I was alone on a beach.
And I was, it really was, it was an empty deserted beach.
And I was just looking at the sun going down over the water.
It was incredibly beautiful, you know, and I was studying the water and the light on the water.
And I was.
I was just standing there, very absorbed in this beautiful scene, with Nobody around real, profound solitude.
It was just so beautiful.
And suddenly it was as if I wasn't looking at the scene in front of me.
I was part of it.
It was as if the me that could look at the world and see it as separate just switched off.
And somehow I discovered, it felt like a discovery, that I had always been part of everything.
I wasn't a separate observer.
The sense of being the separate me who is moving through the world as a separate entity.
That separateness just switched off and in its place was a sense of total belonging, just being part of everything without exception, and it felt like, In a certain way really, it felt like I was part of the whole universe and I'd never not been.
And it wasn't an idea.
It was a palpable sensation.
It was as if I could.
It really felt for a moment as if my my fingertips were reached to the end of the universe.
My, the tip of my nose was pressing against the beginning of time.
And the end of time, it was as if what I really was and always had been, was part of everything.
Is the term outer body experience relevant here, or is it almost too reductionist?
Yeah, I mean to me outer body suggests that.
You know, when people describe NDEs where they're sort of up looking down, they can see their body.
I think it was totally different, actually, because it wasn't the, here's my body, I've left it.
It was the, here's my body, it's everything.
Or that my true body is everything.
That's what it felt like.
But the me when I say my true body, it didn't feel like mine, in the way that I normally would knew.
The sense of me that felt like what i really was, was everything, part of everything, and it was very i mean, i don't mean to say like i was huge or something no, it wasn't.
It wasn't sort of Was it almost like you just blended in with everything.
Yes, it's more like that.
It's more like the boundary between me and the world was gone.
These non-dual experiences, okay?
Are words inherently limiting in our attempt to describe it?
Yes, it's an unfortunate thing.
It can't do it.
Because some people, they're just a sort of play, not devil's advocate, really, but for...
I guess there'll be some people listening Henry, who are on board with the benefits of meditation and totally get those first three ends, because of course they're all predicated on this assumption that there is a self right.
So how do I improve the self?
How do I improve myself?
Yeah, I get better at mindfulness and noticing my experiences and my feelings and my mind.
I make sure I reach out for support, that it's not just me, like everything I do is dependent on other people and other things.
And then can I reach flow states?
Yeah, I can reach flow state and my favorite passion.
But yeah, I can also.
Perhaps if I meditate enough without expectation and I follow the process, maybe at some point I'll start to experience this intrinsic flow state that doesn't need me to be doing anything.
I reckon for those interested in meditation, they're naturally going to be on board with that right.
I think now going into the fourth end, Awakening.
Now I'm on board to be clear.
I'm trying to put myself in the mind of someone who's going, hold on a minute.
I get the first three.
I'm interested in those three.
What the hell is this that you're talking about?
About awakening that there's no boundary to my skin, that I'm part of everything.
And you must get this a lot, right?
I do, I do, I do.
I feel the problem here is very real, that it doesn't make.
It only makes sense once we've had a glimpse of it.
It's difficult to make it make sense through cognitively just thinking about it and conceptually.
But there's a few ways we can try a little bit conceptually.
One is, I mean just right now, you know, being aware that you know wherever you happen to be.
You know, we two were sitting in this room with seeing one another.
There's the walls there's, you know lights mic, stand this beautiful, very beautiful actually, table between us.
All of this is arising for each of us in an awareness, right?
All of it is contents in an awareness.
Maybe that makes a kind of sense, right?
So what is that awareness?
And how big is that awareness?
And where does it end?
Where does it begin?
The awareness is actually really hard to put dimensions on.
The awareness itself, we can put dimensions on the wall, on the space between us.
But the awareness itself, within which this whole experience of this room and this conversation, within which it's arising, the awareness that's hosting this it's impossible to know how big it is.
It's impossible to know where it begins and ends.
Is this put through another lens?
Who is the seer?
Who is the person that's experiencing the table?
When you get that separation in meditation, Let's say you're feeling anxious and you think the entirety of you is anxiety.
But a meditation or some practice where you just separate and go no no, but who is it that's experiencing the anxiety?
You just start to open up a crack of separation.
Something I think about a lot is well, I don't know how old I was, how many days old I was, when my parents gave me the name Rangan.
I can't remember.
I know, for example, in some Indian cultures, there's a naming ceremony at day six, right?
So day six, is when you're given your name officially, right?
Yes, yes.
So then if you just play this out, let's say I was given the name Rangan at day six from my birth.
Well, who the hell was I for the first six days?
Because I wasn't Rongan then, because I hadn't been given that name.
So there was an awareness.
There was an essence of who I was that existed before I was called Rongan. exactly is this in the same realm as non-duality or is this something completely different no it is it is i mean and whoever that was those first five days yeah what's happened to him is he still here if it's he even is that not still here somehow?
You know, is there, like if I, if you think back to a childhood experience being on the beach, age seven or something, you know, the water, the sounds, the smells sun lotion sand, you know um, What was?
Is there something that was there then which is here right now?
Is there some sort of essence of you, of awareness, of beingness, of aliveness that was absolutely present then and is exactly present also now?
Isn't there something, you know, that who you were before you had a name is still here now?
And what is that?
Is it possible that it just doesn't do time?
Yeah.
And it doesn't even do space.
It's without dimension.
It's without time.
Isn't it possible that there's something already happening? always here yeah of course right okay so that's that's coming up what we mean by this exactly it's a very dry term non-duality it doesn't convey How heartwarming and beautiful and intimate and close this actually is.
Where did that term come from, non-duality?
Well, I think actually, I think it might be India because there's the term Advaita.
Right.
Non-two, non-dual, Advaita. and so there's Advaita Vedanta is an ancient Hindu school of practice around this and that's what when like the word Buddhism actually means awakening-ism the word Buddha means awakened and it's the heart of what Some say Buddhism is really about Buddhism is not.
Some would say it's not really a religion.
It's a practice.
But the heart of the term Buddha awakened or awakening, is to wake up to I'd say, wake back up to reality.
That's been here all along.
Would you say that people who have experienced this non-dual state?
And what's really interesting about your experience at 19 is that you weren't a meditator then.
You weren't trying to attain in number four on the path up the mountain.
You'd rest on your gap year, having fun traveling, backpacking around, watching the sunset, and then boom yeah, you've experienced something.
Yes yes, which i think is also quite interesting because you, on your app and in your book, offer a path that we can follow yes, and if we follow that path, at some point we may get an awakening.
We may be more open to seeing an awakening yes, But you got one without doing any of that.
Well, I know.
But I then found, and then I was really unhappy afterwards.
Like a few weeks later, I went back home.
Because you didn't understand it.
I didn't understand it.
And also when I went home, I was open for the first time in my life.
Wide open.
And all the difficulty, challenges, unhappiness in my childhood, I couldn't help but feel them.
In my childhood.
I'd done my best not to feel the challenges in my childhood because I felt they were overwhelming.
So it almost cracked you open.
It cracked me open.
So when I went home, I was swamped by childhood unhappiness that I'd never really let myself feel before.
And you needed therapy, didn't you?
I did.
You saw therapists who helped you.
Yeah, but later, I mean, I struggled for several years.
And then I started meditating.
And then I found a therapist.
And I was very, very lucky to be able to do that.
But the point, just coming back to the...
It's unconditional.
That awakening, you can't create it through conditions, but you can make it more likely.
And so any path of meditation that knows about that, acknowledges it and is open to it can create the condition where it's more likely to happen, but it can't make it happen.
But at the same time, the beauty of it is it's kind of a law unto itself.
It doesn't, like in my case, as you said, I wasn't practicing, but it showed itself.
But only when I started to practice was there any chance of learning to integrate it into how I live.
So it wasn't a flash in the pan.
And what happened with me on my own meditation path this is why I'm trying to share this with others, you know is that I started out meditating and it was incredibly therapeutic and healing and so helpful for me.
And at a certain point.
I was like, well, what about that thing that happened on the beach when I was 19?
It had seemed the most important moment of my life, because I saw something about what my life really was that I'd never seen in any other way, in any other context.
And nobody seemed to sort of talk about it.
And then the reason I got into Zen is that...
I recognized, I met somebody who did Zen.
Actually, it was quite popular, you know, in America.
And I was working on my third book at the time and I was in, I'd gone to New Mexico and a new friend of mine, a great writer, called Natalie Goldberg.
She started reading some Zen stuff to me and I just recognized Zen.
Oh my gosh, these people know what happened to me on the beach.
They know about it.
And so I got into Zen and sure enough, they totally knew about it and they actually valued it.
They recognized how important it was.
And through training you know, a long time in Zen I actually met well, I was very lucky to meet some fantastic teachers who'd gone even beyond it.
They knew about it.
And I had some more. experiences Not the same, but same territory.
Other kinds of non-dual experiences.
I hadn't known it could show up in different ways.
The one that I had, where everything's just one, and I'm part of that oneness.
That's one way it could show up.
Another way it showed up was this...
In a way, there's nobody here.
It's all happening by itself.
I wonder if regularly spending time in nature and experiencing awe perhaps could help with this, in the sense that you know if you are somewhere incredibly awe-inspiring in nature.
Yeah.
And you really, you know, you're not distracted and you're not sort of doing something else.
If you actually think about it and you know, it is a wonder that this sort of beauty exists, that we're even here on this vast, incredible planet.
I mean, it's, you know, It really is.
It is.
I think beauty can be a way in.
And actually that's why I believe the third in that we were just talking about flow and absorption.
This isn't always pointed out about it, but it's a lot of beauty we sense in the third in.
Somehow...
You know, again, somebody on a mountain bike, totally absorbed in it, suddenly getting into flow.
It's beautiful.
It's really beautiful.
And that beauty can actually serve as a gateway to non-dual experience.
Where we're overwhelmed by...
The wonder.
I agree with you.
It can be a gateway.
In that third end section in the book, one of my favourite bits was the stuff about beauty.
There was one section entitled Beauty in a Sick Room.
You say in any moment we can find what we need.
I thought that's lovely, in any moment.
And you actually illustrated that point from recollection with a mum whose child was quite sick yes she's the child was in a lot of trouble with you know addiction issues and yeah she was watching waves on a beach she described this to me so beautifully i wanted to share that you know she was just watching these waves in the evening Coming up the beach, withdrawing, coming up, withdrawing.
And suddenly she noticed how beautiful it was.
And then she realized she could feel the beauty at the same time as feeling all her sorrow and worry about her child who was in such a hard, dark place.
She could feel the tremendous parents' grief and caring for their child who's in trouble, and also the beauty of the scene before her.
And then she suddenly realized that both the beauty and what she felt about the beauty she was seeing and the the worry, they were like notes in a in a single experience, And even the worry was beautiful.
So this is really interesting.
Okay.
So the appreciation of the deep beauty in the ocean and the waves, it didn't make her child not be struggling with addiction.
Correct.
But it changed her experience of how she related to her child struggling with addiction.
Exactly.
She could see... that there was even a beauty in that.
When you can't change a situation, you're forced to change yourself.
Exactly, exactly.
And she made that little shift that's so huge to a bigger perspective.
Do you think sometimes, you know, surfers might experience these kind of states?
I'm not talking about flow necessarily.
Surfing's front of mind, because I've just been in Australia and I would just sit on the beach and watch surfers.
These tribes of surfers just go.
And I thought it was the most beautiful thing.
There must be some sort of deep connection, not just flow state, but that you're literally riding on this wave that has no end.
It goes probably, you know, if you follow that body of water goes all the way around the world, doesn't it?
Yeah yeah, i mean, i think actually i used to.
I used to teach a zen to a group of surfers in southern california, pre-covid right.
They were fantastic at meditating and they were so into it because they were that bit closer to getting this non-dual message.
Because I think exactly what you're describing, that you're riding this body of water, that's doing this particular energetic thing of the wave and that's your motion.
Your motion is the wave's motion.
And actually just with the wave thing one of the old metaphors in several spiritual traditions to get this non-duality idea is exactly a wave, as it were.
Thought it was its own thing, this little shape of water.
This is me and didn't recognize it's part of the whole ocean.
That's very like non-duality.
In other words, our sense of me I think I'm just this body.
I don't see that my little cup of consciousness here is part of the great ocean of consciousness.
It's like that.
So we're not denying this consciousness, this consciousness and, but the ego says it's mine and it doesn't know how to recognize.
Actually, it's part of a vast, a vastness, a boundlessness.
It's part of it and yes, it's made this shape called henry or rungan you know each of us.
It's made this being that seems to be its own thing, but in non-duality, we recognize the great ocean that has formed into this wave.
We've recognized the great ocean.
So that's why the term non-duality does not convey how beautiful, how mind-blowingly beautiful it is.
Because when we find that you know all our maybe just for a moment, All our worries are gone, because they all came from the conviction that we were just the wave, not the whole ocean.
That's why it's so important.
I think it's the most important thing, because when we find it, we find what our life has been all along.
We actually find something that feels like the truth.
Relating that to health for a moment. or, you know, traditional health, as it were.
Because, you know, it's kind of interesting, we have this conversation.
I've said for years this is not a health podcast.
It may seem like a health podcast, but it isn't, because health is everything you know.
Health isn't just in the realms of health.
Health is related to happiness.
Health is related to your relationships.
Health is related to how you feel about yourself and your ability to interact with the world in a loving and kind way.
One of the problems I've always had with Western allopathic medicine.
All the benefits I would say it's way too reductionist.
Everything is kept separate, separate body parts, separate diseases.
It literally makes no sense at all to me.
And it actually makes no sense scientifically or physiologically.
Everything in the body is connected.
But bringing it back to you, and you had this chronic, debilitating eczema and not necessarily a non-dual experience, but meditating per se helped you to heal your eczema.
Is that correct?
It is.
I believe that really.
Yeah.
And I've seen that and similar patterns before in patients.
Okay.
So I'm really interested.
Yes, on the path to meditation on those first three ends for sure.
But let's just go that final step.
For people who do experience a non, I just don't like that term, non-jewel experience, right?
But this kind of awakening experience.
I like awakening.
Yeah, if they have the tools to integrate it into their life, as you did not when you were 19, but you do now.
Do you see that people often see an improvement in their health and their wellbeing as well?
I do, actually.
I do.
Because there's so much less stress.
And they've learned, they've discovered an unconditional well-being.
Therefore, whatever they're doing is a choice.
They're choosing to do it.
And typically they reorient more to lives of service.
It's more important to them that what they be doing is of service to others.
And that also brings fulfillment, so that they're just, they're just happier and and yeah, of course they'll still get diseases as they get older, you know, and and they'll still get flu now and then.
But handling it in a way that's much easier, that doesn't put additional stress on the system, I think it makes a big difference.
One thing that going deeper into non-duality, or allowing non-duality to be more part of our experience.
It actually changes our relationship with death.
We don't think about death in the same way.
It's almost like it's part of life.
Death is part of life.
It's not something to be afraid of.
It's already here.
And here we are.
So I think that's one of its beautiful consequences.
We know when we've really sort of got it.
Because fear of death has gone.
A fear of life has gone.
And we can't be afraid of it.
Fear is gone.
In fact, there's a Zen center that I've sat in in Japan for retreats a number of times, where one of my Zen masters lives.
And it has this calligraphy above the altar at the end of the room which says I don't read characters.
You know what do they mean.
Bringing no fear.
Bringing no fear.
And I find that...
A beautiful kind of motto for life.
What if we could get to a place where we're just not afraid?
Fear has gone.
And I think the most profound way for me for finding that has been this, this kind of opening more and more deeply to the reality of being not the wave, the ocean, or not just the wave but the whole ocean, to being part of the whole ocean of existence and not separate.
Because if I'm not separate, there's nobody to be afraid.
Yeah.
I love that, Henry.
So beautiful.
And I guess, on my own inner journey spiritual journey, if you will, probably since dad died, I realized that somewhere along the way my fear of death has evaporated.
I can't pinpoint an exact moment.
There wasn't like, oh, this happened.
There wasn't this linear thing.
Oh, I did this.
And then the fear has gone.
No, just as part of, it's a bit like this whole thing, right?
You follow the process, okay?
You follow the daily practice of meditation and you'll find there's a whole variety of different outcomes.
That will just happen as a consequence, not by focusing on the outcome, but by focusing on the process.
Henry, I think Original Love is just a beautiful book.
It's so well written.
It does provide this lovely framework on what we might be able to experience as we meditate more and more.
I think the way app is brilliant.
I can see why it's so popular.
I'm enjoying it.
I love the fact that there's no choice that you just turn up and it makes it easy.
This is what you have to do today.
It's It's a fantastic idea.
I think it's brilliant.
I've thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with you.
I certainly hope we get the chance to do a part two at some point.
But just to finish off, for that person who has made it this far, who's listened to the conversation and feels that yeah, you know what?
Meditation, I think is what I need right now.
And perhaps the fourth stage of awakening feels too far just at the moment.
But they're thinking, yeah, I want a bit of mindfulness.
I want support.
I want that flow state from meditation.
But I don't know where to start.
What would your final words be to them?
Yeah well, I don't want to be self-serving, but the Way app is a great way to get into it, because it lays it out for you so you don't have to choose.
So that's one option.
And there's a ton of other great apps, Headspace, Calm, you know, they'll help as well.
But the biggest thing is just give yourself five minutes alone with yourself.
Being still, being quiet.
If you don't even want to touch an app, fine.
Just sit down alone for five minutes.
Just see what it's like.
Can you let yourself be still and quiet?
Just be.
Just be you.
Because all you're doing is coming home to you.
It's not some grand thing that you've got to get, you've got to do, really.
It's coming home to you.
Can you just give yourself that?
One minute a day.
If you can't do five, do one.
Henry Shookman, it's been an absolute pleasure.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thank you very, very much for having me.
A delight and a real honor.
Really hope you enjoyed that conversation.
Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life.
And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else.
Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information.
Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five.
It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness.
In that email I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I'd be consuming and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect.
And i have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving.
So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every friday, you can sign up for free at drchatterjeecom.
Forward slash Friday Five.
Now, if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics happiness food stress sleep, behavior change and movement, weight loss, and so much more.
So please do take a moment to check them out.
They are all available as paperbacks, eBooks, and as audio books, which I am narrating.
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Thank you so much for listening.
Have a wonderful week.
And please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android.
All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app and always remember.
You are the architect of your own health.
Making lifestyle changes always worth it.
Because when you feel better, you live more.
