Henry Shukman is a poet, writer and Zen teacher. He has written a best selling Zen memoir called One Blade of Grass. He is a guiding teacher of the Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In this episode we talk about grace: the grace of acknowledging and living from the perspective that everything is gift. We address the tension of practicing with money, success and failure and working skillfully with our many motivations – all in the context of grace.

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[00:00:03] Marc Lesser: Welcome to Zen Bones. This is Marc Lesser. Zen Bones is a bi-weekly podcast featuring conversations with leading teachers and activists and an exploration of Zen teachings and practices. Please support our work by making a donation at marclesser.net/donate. My guest today is Henry Shukman, who is a poet, writer, and Zen teacher. He’s also the author of a best-selling Zen memoir called One Blade of Grass. Henry is the guiding teacher of the Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In today’s episode, we talk about grace, the grace of acknowledging and living from the perspective that everything is gift. We talk about the tension of practicing with money, success, failure, and working skillfully with our many motivations, all in the context of grace. I hope you enjoy today’s episode. I’m very pleased to be here with my new but good friend, Henry Shukman. Henry, welcome. Nice to see you.

[00:01:24] Henry Shukman: Hey, thank you so much for having me, Marc. It’s an honor and a joy.

[00:01:29] Marc: As I mentioned, I really enjoyed your book, One Blade of Grass, the Zen memoir. I read it some time ago and I read it kind of dove in again yesterday, and I really, really appreciated it. As I mentioned, the word that I want to start this morning talking about is grace. I think there’s something about, I don’t know that people usually associate Zen practice with grace, but I do. It sounds like you do. I often, when people ask me, “Well, what is Zen?”

There’s many, many answers, but to me, it’s a code word for being fully human, being fully human, and maybe I would add to that, and living with grace. I’m curious about how you decided to end your book with talking about grace.

[00:02:28] Henry: Yes, Marc, my first response to that particular question that you just posed is that I can’t remember actually how and why it went that way at the end but I can certainly resonate a lot with the idea that deep practice, probably of any kind, a deep spiritual practice must include space for grace. It must include an awareness of grace as a– we should get into what we mean by it exactly, but definitely that our very existence is a kind of grace. It’s a gift. I think that etymologically grace comes gratia, which is all about gratitude and thanks and that grace seems to be a condition of various kinds where we recognize something is freely given.

That could be, of course, insight or certain kinds of experience on the spiritual path, but it could be all manner of things, that really all of our life is, in the end, a gift, which is not to say that it always is easy, not at all, but from the practitioner’s point of view, I think to recognize more and more as we go along, that it is all to be experiencing at all, that anything that we’re experiencing somehow, the very fact of experience, is just a mysterious gift, is a mysterious giving somehow.

[00:04:16] Marc: There’s a beautiful talk from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, I think it’s called God Given, where Shunryu Suzuki just so beautifully describes how, as you’re just doing beautifully right now, that everything has been given to us. We take for granted these consciousness and our bodies and minds are these hands, these hands of ours, or these noses of ours, and that everything is gift.

I think that’s the– maybe that’s the real, the Zen magic or the Zen trick is to take that concept and embody it to make, and again, I think for me, that’s an ongoing practice rather than being upset or complaining about things or feeling anxious or fear and somehow taking even all those worries and emotions and putting them inside the context of those are gifts, too. Even those are gifts.

[00:05:30] Henry: Yes, yes, I fully agree. Somehow it seems to me that I can’t do that without some kind of shift in perspective, or if I try to do that, it invites a shift in perspective. If I remember to do that in a time of overwhelm or time of anxiety or frustration or disappointment or something, if I remember this too is a gift, it’s inviting this, I feel like it’s a critical kind of shift in perspective so that we’re inviting in a wider view, something like that, that is more capacious, that allows for more or potentially all of our humanness.

[00:06:20] Marc: I want to come back to this concept of grace. I wonder what is bringing grace to your life these days? What are you up to? I know you have a lot. I know you’re writing. I know you are doing some really interesting things in the work world. I’m not sure how much of that you feel ready to talk about, but I’m curious about what’s happening in your life these days, and particularly through the lens, maybe through the lens of grace or through the lens of challenges or anything that feels most alive for you right now.

[00:06:58] Henry: Well, thank you. That’s a lovely invitation. Actually, I am working on a new book, which is very nearly at copy editing stage that will come out mid-next year. That’s a very sort of, actually a very grace-filled project. It really was a book that felt like it came by itself and it found its own way, it’s been finding its own way into the world, so to speak, although it’s not there quite yet but it was pretty much one of those books that I had to just receive and accept that it wanted to be the way it wanted to be and I was its servant, I was its humble scribe kind of thing.

It more or less felt more like that. I’m very happy to have been able to help this particular work and come into the world. It’s not, as I said, fully there yet, but it’s on its way. That’s one thing that I’ve been up to, but I’ve also been, well, something like many of us in the world of teaching meditation, I’ve been much more sort of online these last three years and teaching online courses for the first time. I’d never done such a thing before actually until COVID came and lockdown came along in early 2020 and Mountain Cloud Zen Center, where I’d been the spiritual director for 12 or 13 years or so, pivoted quickly and we went online.

It was a revelation really how effective it could be. Of course, it’s different but it has its own place that online forum but has led us to the point where we’ve got into position where we’re building an app and that’s a whole new thing again and how to get the core of the teaching I’d really like to try to convey into app form is a challenge and there’s lots of iteration has already happened and we’re in the earliest days. It’s quite a thing actually to be wrestling with. I look forward to discussing with you actually, Marc, at some point. I’d really love your wisdom on this kind of thing and there’s a great team that we’ve got actually.

I’m more or less twice the age of everybody else in the team and there’s a lot of dynamic positive energy around it but how to succeed in making it do what I really would like it to do is very challenging.

[00:09:50] Marc: Yes, no, interesting how it’s a little bit difficult in some way. COVID, there’s so many deaths and so much suffering, so without glossing over that, at the same time, it’s changed for people like us, for people who teach and do courses. I too I would say that my world was 100% in-person prior to COVID, and now it’s almost 100% online, although I’m just starting to do some in-person things. Today after this discussion, I’m teaching an online course, a mindful leadership course with 60 people from all around the world.

I have to say I miss the in-person contact and at the same time talk about grace and possibility quite something. I’m curious to learn a lot more, both I look forward to seeing more about your next book and wonder if it must have a title, it sounds like, and also to learn more about this app project. Spreading the dharma, using technology to spread grace, to spread the dharma.

[00:11:09] Henry: Yes. Actually, the book is called Original Love, and in a certain sense, it’s all about grace actually, so it’s a fortuitous thing that we landed on that topic or that you did. Thank you for that. I won’t say a whole lot about it right now, but the app. I mean, I think I just heard Richie Davidson a few months ago giving a talk at one of the mind and life sessions in Santa Fe, actually at Upaya, saying that clearly tech is part of the modern problem with all the rampant things that go on on social media and elsewhere but it also must be part of the solution and how it seems that we’ve simply got to find ways of scaling what these practices have to offer for human nervous systems.

The planet needs that, and this scaling that we need, what could really do it more swiftly and effectively better than tech? I think there’s as we know already, of course, there’s a great market for meditation apps. We’re hoping in our little one that there’s a market for a different kind of meditation app that is more concerned with sort of, I hope it’s doesn’t sound too bragging or something, but deeper practice, not just treatment for particular kinds of effectively minor mental health issues. I think that’s immensely valuable and fantastic, and I’ve benefited very much from that myself.

But there is the deeper path as well, and I believe that something of that can actually be conveyed without being in person. I don’t know that you can, well, it remains to be seen how far you can go without some in-person contact, but I believe that there’s some way that you can go.

[00:13:29] Marc: Yes. As I’ve been thinking about the courses that I want to offer for next year, I’m noticing I’m starting to cook up what I think of as hybrid events that are primarily online, but that do have an in-person component to them. I don’t mean to be dismissive about the world of online meditation apps, but I’ve been referring to them lately as the gateway drug to meditation. I think for a lot of people, the apps that are available online are an introduction, get people introduced to meditation practice. I’m really curious to learn more about what you’re doing this aspiration to go deeper.

I think there is a real need and possibility of, you have this question, and it’s the question I’m often asking myself when I’m teaching online is, how can I create depth connection, intimacy in this online world? It’s easy to just say, “Oh, it’s not possible,” but who knows what’s possible?

[00:14:52] Henry: Yes, exactly. Really, we’re dealing with another human being, whether it’s 60 online or whatever, or 6,000 on an app, or 600,000 or 60 million in the case of headspace or something. It’s still human beings and they’re making their own discoveries about what it is to be human and what it is to be conscious and who am I and what is my relationship with the world. Each of those human beings can be making those explorations and yes, there’s nothing like sitting in a silent Zendo together.

True, but on the other hand, there’s something that can be conveyed person to person through the voice, through shared stillness wherever you are, because we are all in a sense here somehow the here that we’re each in is somehow the same here on some level.

[00:16:01] Marc: I think that you’re in Scotland right now, right?

[00:16:05] Henry: [laughs] Yes, I am.

[00:16:06] Marc: I’m in Northern California. I wanted just to put a go back and you mentioned the name Richie Davidson, and not everyone listening might not be familiar with him. He is one of the leading scientists who’s been studying mindfulness and meditation now for many years, runs an organization out of University of Madison, Wisconsin. I got to know Richie some, he was on my board when I was CEO of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, and very special, smart, sweet man.

[00:16:41] Henry: Yes. Quite a deep practitioner himself, I would say, he’s done a lot of Tibetan, I think Dzogchen practice.

[00:16:50] Marc: It’s interesting, the first book that I wrote, it was called ZBA, Zen of Business Administration. In the first chapter is called, We Are All Zen Students, and We’re All Business People, and that there’s no avoiding being a Zen student because basically, Zen is about how to be a human being and we’re subject to birth and death and we’re all business people in that we all have to live in the world of money and paying the bills. Business basically, I would define business as how we serve people through products or services.

I’m feeling like you’re about to step more into even more into becoming a business person. You’re launching this thing, which I’m sure there’s a business plan and there’s financial projections, and maybe influence projections. How’s that feeling as you’re stepping into that world more?

[00:17:55] Henry: Yes, it’s definitely a shift. I’ve been, I think I probably kidded myself that I wasn’t a business person in terms of what you were just saying, for much of my life especially in the last decade and a half or so, while I’ve been primarily teaching meditation. A chunk of that time I really was deeply in the nonprofit side and happy to receive the support I received and felt that I was just giving what I could give of the dharma as I had received it the best I could and happy to do so. It was great to get some donor, it was great to get support, but I wasn’t thinking of it as a exchange exactly.

But now, with venture capital and with team and the salaries and actually, I’m not yet taking a salary myself, but I’m going to have to, I think next year as I’m more involved. Wow, it’s different. There is this sense that I think the hardest thing for me actually that I’m wrestling with really, and this is something that I would love to delve into your wisdom around at some point, is really the difference between just freely offering and because it’s an offering, it’s really free. I can do what I’m moved to do in the moment and not feel too restricted in the forms or the way I am offering things.

Let the dharma come through the way it wants to kind of thing. I love being able to do that. Whereas in this case, it’s got to be more strategic than, I don’t exactly know who’s going to be in the receiving end. I could do certain things that just will put people off and we don’t want that. There’s more thought about how to make this work for a wider range of unknown people, but I still feel I want to just trust it’s human to human, which it is, but it’s somehow there’s something I’m wrestling with about. Some piece of the equation is different in a way that I haven’t yet found my way to be fully comfortable with. That’s a challenge point that I’m working on.

[00:20:30] Marc: Well, it’s interesting. Even in my experience, and I’m curious of yours in writing a book. Even in some way, it’s art, right? It’s just completely expressing oneself without any real, like, “Oh, is this going to– how is the world going to receive this?” But we are writing the book for the people who are going to receive it out in the world.

[00:20:58] Henry: Yes, yes.

[00:21:00] Marc: Any art that has interesting tension around pure expression, pure offering, pure grace. Maybe it’s not as pure as it looks or nothing is– There are many, many motivations for whatever– whatever we do, I think has many motivations. I think a beautiful thing about, in some way, meditation practice could be described as putting aside one’s motivations. There may be motivations that bring you to the cushion, but once you’re on the cushion, you let it go.

Maybe that’s similar to writing or doing an app, and finding that place of letting go and seeing what happens, but also then stepping back and seeing, “Oh, how is my practice going? How is my meditation practice? How’s it working? How’s my writing going? How am I doing as a parent?” Those kinds of ongoing reflections. I do think I saw a study recently, I think this was by one of Daniel Kahneman, who wrote, Thinking, Fast and Slow, that as soon as we save the word money, the word money primes people toward greed or primes us away from grace in a way.

I think this is part of real deep Zen practice is to how to undo that, how can we because we have to work in the world of money and getting things done, and how can we transform that kind of priming to be much more graceful, much more one of offering to bring awareness to the multiple motivations, but to keep bringing forward the motivation grace, the motivation of one’s offering. While at the same time recognizing that there are other– not to suppress or pretend that there aren’t other contexts, other motivations that we need to at least be aware of.

[00:23:48] Henry: That’s very beautifully put, thank you. The reminder that even in that weave of multiple contexts and motivations of context, there can be that– coming back to– it’s a gift, it’s an offering. Whereas you’re right, it’s so clear to me as a writer and as a meditation teacher in the context in which I’ve done it up till now, I think it’s just a little bit of VC pressure. I haven’t quite done to navigate. It’s new. It’s just very new.

[00:24:22] Marc: Yes. Well, one of the lessons I’ve learned is it’s about finding the right VCs, partnering with people whose primary motivation is about offering and grace and whose off secondary motivation is about the financial piece. That’s tricky.

[00:24:54] Henry: Actually, I must say that’s really tricky. I think we’ve actually been extraordinarily lucky in that regard. We’ve got a wonderful company, True Ventures, and they’ve just been spectacular. It’s more me that I’m just– it’s something in my psychology being handed this large check and got to be somehow got to, “I’m working on it, I’m working on it.” I bet that’s a really good reminder to keep coming back, that it’s just an offering. It is. You’re absolutely right.

[00:25:29] Marc: I think that there’s something really useful about that merging of that sense of responsibility having to course in the world of success and failure without getting caught by the world of success and failure. I think that is a really important part of practice. I’m still very involved with the San Francisco Zen Center. I get involved with looking at board issues, financial issues, and strategic issues of a Zen community. It’s nice as a newer student to come in and not have anything to do with any of those and just practice.

There’s a way that I think senior people can protect newer people from all of that. At some point, as we mature and grow and develop in our practice, there’s a way of– the aspiration to transform all of those issues into practice, I think is a beautiful thing. Part of this practice of grace is transforming. There are many, many motivations, but staying with as much sense of grace and offering, right in the world of venture capital and money and success and failure.

[00:27:13] Henry: Yes, that’s wonderfully put. Thank you. That really is getting closer to the reality of things when we stay grounded in our practice and wow, in the turmoil of the marketplace. That’s it really, isn’t it?

[00:27:40] Marc: Yes, and it’s hard. Many years ago, I started a publishing company called Brush Dance, and we had many ups and downs. I do feel like Zen practice, the practice of grace really did get me through some very, very difficult times when we launched a .com, right as the .com the era of about the year 2000 was imploding. It was a really, really painful, difficult time for me working with my investors and the world of success and failure. It’s always great to look back at it like, “Wow, that was so valuable, I learned so much.”

When I was in it, it was hard. There was a good deal of tears, stress, and anxiety that I experienced within hard to keep the perspective of practice and grace while in it. A little bit like getting tossed out of one’s raft into the churning waters of the river and just trusting and keeping one’s head above the water, then getting submerged and coming back up.

[00:29:13] Henry: Yes. Trust seems to be a keyword in there actually, doesn’t it? When things are difficult, we might well lose trust and lose our sense of thing and sense of practice and the grace of that, and then just a little granule of trust will be enough to– perhaps might be enough to bring us back.

[00:29:44] Marc: Well, I wish you much success and learning and transformation both in your upcoming with your next book and this app that you’re in the midst of creating.

[00:29:58] Henry: Ah, thank you very much. I’m very grateful for this time with you, Marc. I’m very awed by your many spectacular projects ongoing and prior and all of them. It’s very impressive, this.

[00:30:14] Marc: Well, no, thank you. I’m very much wondering as I’m looking at what’s next. I’m in the earlier stage of my next. My next book is going to be about working with transitions, change, uncertainty, and transition. It’s still waiting for grace to take hold more of taking you to the next stage, but it’s so interesting. I love all the different stages of book development from the idea and then I love the stage that you’re in where other people are doing the copy editing. What a beautiful thing to have that team of people making it even better.

[00:31:07] Henry: Yes. It can be a lovely process, I must say. Of course, always where there’s challenges, like all great creative projects, I think, but this one has been particular kind of thing for me. Well, I was just going to say that this particular book has been a different ride from any other book I’ve done, actually. Very much came by itself and very much I felt I had to just serve it. When I tried to do stuff to it, it was resistant to it. That came very quickly in a few weeks and then I spent another year trying to write what I thought was the second half of it, which never really got right.

Then, suddenly, I was, “Oh, it doesn’t have a second half. It’s done already.” I needed to, then, do more work on it. It’s been a strange process like that.

[00:32:05] Marc: That’s great. That’s great. Yes. No, interesting. I have to say I imagine you will make many, many discoveries along the way in this app business that you’re creating. One of my favorite business quotes is “Let cash be your king, but let flexibility be your god.” It points to the importance of money, but the greater importance of responsiveness and learning and shifting from what we do in the world of creating things whether it’s a book or a company, or a team. Amazing to see how much we can learn by doing and paying attention.

[00:33:05] Henry: God, I love that. Okay. I’m going to take that to heart. “Let cash be your king, and flexibility be your god.” Lovely.

[00:33:14] Marc: Yes. It still works for me. Henry, I think that I want to– Well, let’s see. I want to read a few lines, actually, from the epilogue of your last book from One Blade of Grass, and then just see if you have any parting words as we wrap, but I’m going to read where you say, so is enlightenment real? I’ve no idea, but experiences where upon space and time disappear and all is revealed as one infinite consciousness. Experiences that leave indelible, beneficent changes in the psyche. These are real. Becoming more filled with love, more concerned for others, real.

Lasting, positive character change, meaning less aversion and anger, less craving and clinging, more ease with arising and passing of things as we live with less domination by self-centeredness, real. I would say grace living the aspiration, living with grace in the midst of a beautiful world, a troubled world, real. It’s all real. Being right here with you across the separated, I suppose by the Atlantic Ocean and who knows what else, but here we are face to face, real.

I want to thank you, and I want to say is there anything you’d like to say or just any offerings before we close for this? I think of this as part 1, but anything you’d like to offer, Henry?

[00:35:07] Henry: Thank you, Marc. Yes. One last thing, it just would be the tweak in the living with grace, I think my aspiration is to live by grace. Just really with that deep trust that allows me to allow. That really allows me to allow. Wow. What that does to the human heart, oh. Somehow to me, it coincides with I happen to have weakened neurology these days because of an accident. It’s been so wonderful to find– In a certain way, I need my head much less than, [chuckles] I think I do and really to just trust the human heart more and then whatever years remain to me to be allowing that heart to be living this life and not my little hard noggin.

It’s just– and to be feeling able to trust that. That alone is a kind of grace to me. I love that, really.

[00:36:17] Marc: Yes. Well, thank you. What a treat to get to spend this time with you and I look forward to more.

[00:36:24] Henry: Thank you so much, Marc. A joy for me. I look forward to more as well.

[00:36:33] Marc: I hope you’ve appreciated today’s episode. To learn more about my work and my new book, Finding Clarity, you can visit marclesser.net. This podcast is offered freely and relies on financial support from listeners like you. Please donate at marclesser.net/donate. Thank you very much.