A Little Drop of Sweet Surrender (a conversation with Henry Shukman)

in anticipation of his two upcoming Alembic events

Henry Shukman is a meditation teacher, Zen practitioner, and author. His work has become well-known for leading the spiritually curious into the sometimes cryptic world of Zen. In his book One Blade of Grass, he revealed, in intimate and loving detail, how a spontaneous spiritual awakening transformed his life, eventually taking him from a conventional literary career into a path of inner exploration. In his koan course on the Waking Up app, he makes koan training understandable to those who have only been exposed to secularized mindfulness practice. Now, with his book Original Love, he provides a new approach to the meditation curriculum, influenced by his Zen training but taking a different angle. I was delighted to speak with him about his work in anticipation of two events he’s hosting at the Alembic—an evening reading of Original Love, and a weekend workshop/retreat. 

SC: A fair amount of One Blade of Grass is gentle Zen advocacy, saying, these koans, all these Zen practices, they might seem totally inscrutable and almost cartoonish from a modern perspective, but there's clearly some living essence. And now that Zen stuff has been somewhat de-emphasized in favor of a different framework, in Original Love. Why is that?

HS: In COVID I did stuff in my little world. When the center closed in lockdown, around the same time I had a head injury that it's been a long, slow recovery from. And two things resulted from that combination.

One was that I simply could no longer teach the way I had been, which was fairly traditional Zen koan training. I couldn't do that partly because I couldn't be in person with people, partly because my neurology couldn't do face-to-face meetings, whether in person or online for very long. I'd been meeting hundreds of students in person for these short Zen meetings, and then I just couldn't do it.

So I figured, I need a sort of general delivery system that isn't totally dependent on immediate one-to-one interaction. In the process, I realized that I wanted to present a broader spectrum approach that could yield something positive for just about anybody who was a newcomer to meditation or even with decades of experience. I realized that there's actually a lot of people who've been practicing for decades, but haven't really been led to awakening, as I understand it, as Zen understands it, which is a non-dual shift—a shift to seeing through what had been taken to be an absolute fundamental thing, which is my sense of me as a separate entity. So actually, something needed to be said across the spectrum of all meditative possibilities.

As I see it there's basically four main areas of spiritual growth through meditation—mindfulness, support, absorption, and awakening. And it's really cool that three of them are all highly accessible. They're not contingent on unpredictable shifts. They're fairly algorithmically reproducible, and they're vastly beneficial. They just don't happen to be about non-duality.

I don’t think I’m leaving Zen behind, I’m just including some other perspectives.

SC: You say that three out of these four inns on the path, as you called them, are algorithmic. They're trainable. Awakening, it seems to me also, not as much. You can drive at it, sure, make it more likely, but in the end it seems like the balance between effort and grace is mysterious. But is it totally inscrutable? In your years of teaching, in your years of practice, do you feel like you understand the mechanisms of awakening more? 

HS: I feel that that's exactly what I'm exploring. Every path you train in is going to have possibilities and blind spots, or just things that it doesn't attend to as much as another path might. And that's certainly true in the kind of koan Zen that was my primary channel of training for a critical phase of my practice, where the emphasis is on the thunderbolts, or developing more openness to the thunderbolts, perhaps trying to cultivate conditions that make the thunderbolts want to fall this particular way rather than 100 yards over there.

But of course there are other traditions that do focus more on little incremental flashes and glimpses and glimmers, which koan Zen doesn't really serve. It's like: go all in and suffer horribly for years and then be just utterly single-minded and suddenly you'll explode. But actually I'm very curious about other methods, like pointing out and glimpse practices.

I think the primary arena where there can be more systematic approaches to non-dual experience is through the lens of awareness. Really starting to tune into being more aware and then realizing that everything is arising in awareness, including a sense of self. That awareness is a kind of context that nothing supersedes. And that can I think be more amenable to systematic investigation than a koan. A koan thrives on the dropping away of any tactical approach at all, just surrender. That doesn't make it guaranteed to work by any means.

SC: This is completely unrelated, but I'm curious—how did your head injury change your practice? What was that like? 

HS: What happened for me was that my brain was just weaker, but actually in a certain way my heart grew stronger. I started to inhabit my heart more consistently. It wasn't that I hadn't before by any means, it had always been the feeling center, the love center that had been important to me. But it became really dominant and I actually didn't feel that I really lost very much by having my head be less potent.

SC: That is so interesting to me because we share a similarity in our history. Both of us have been obsessed with the idea of literary fame and making our way in the world by cleverly combining words and presenting ourselves as intellects. And so this is something that would’ve been totally terrifying to a younger me, or a younger Henry, right? The possibility that the wordsmithing ability is going to be de-emphasized and you’re going to focus on love for now.

HS: Yeah, I mean I remember at certain points in Zen training, I felt I had to make a choice. If I really surrendered to this wonder, how can I go and teach a meaningful workshop on this poem? Or write this article that the Guardian's waiting for, or something that's going to require me to go into this tightly cognitive mode. 

There was a moment when my ambition just got blown to pieces and I no longer wanted what I had wanted since I was a teenager. I just, the wanting just stopped. And that was a turning point in a way that prior openings of whatever kind had not been. And I think in a way what happened for me at the start of Covid with that accident was just another iteration, another turning of the wheel or whatever of karma and dharma. And I felt I didn't need my brain. Not really. I just go by trust. And my heart, my heart was sort of broken and that made it open. And then because it was open, it was whole. 

SC: What broke your heart? 

HS: Some things I can't talk about. But there was a particular difficulty that a very dear, close person to me went through. I found it very difficult to see somebody suffering that much who I was very close to. And whatever membrane there still was between my heart and everything else seemed to pop. And I sort of believe in heartbreak actually now, as a really important entry for many.

SC: It’s nice that heartbreak's an important door because that's sort of inevitable. 

HS: Exactly, exactly. Right on. Exactly. 

SC: Having seen some of your talks and read your books, your teaching seems to rely a fair amount on your verbal skill and acquaintance with poetry. Did you continue to sound like that when you were in the wake of this head injury? Did you sound completely different?

HS: No, I think that whatever my heart wanted to access, it could access, you know, and definitely poetry was accessible. There was a lot that was in the memory banks enough that it could be drawn on. And somehow the capacity to use metaphors and images and stuff in teaching, that didn't seem to get knocked out. I like using metaphors, symbolism, analogies. What got knocked out then? It's more like what got knocked out was some kind of resistance. To heartache. To love. To heartbreak. To hurt. Because when there's no resistance to heartbreak, it’s actually not a problem. It becomes indistinguishable from just an open heart.

And then I started to see that somehow love was operational, it was intrinsic, it was key, it was crucial to all these different areas of practice. Finding that tiny little micro-shift where it goes from resistance to just a little drop of sweet surrender. Commonly — I might hazard to say absolutely always — there's some little flavor of love. The belovedness that accompanies or catalyzes every little opening, every little shift that all practices hinge on. 

SC: This is interesting because in some teachings I've encountered, there's an attitude that no appearances in consciousness are special. An attitude like that might consider love as just another passing sensation or something orthogonal to meditative insight. And you've come to think of it differently.

HS: Yes, I've come to think of it as a property of original nature. But I think I say early in the book somewhere we're not talking about love as a form of attachment here. More cherishing, appreciation, gratitude, openness, welcome, allowingness, kind of what's revealed when attachments are dropped. 

SC: That’s wonderfully counterintuitive, being that the default way we express love for each other is with at least some sort of practical attachment, a sense of obligation, duty, a role.

HS: Yeah. But imagine, you know, the letting go of the whole cluster, you know, the self that has those valences. All of that is a kind of construction and it can be dropped. And instead there's just this, you know, with or without a capital T. That's where the heart is actually becoming what it really is, which is boundless. 

SC: Not everyone warms to the idea that the heart is a crucial center of practice. Is there a heart practice or a way into heart practice that's your favorite go-to for anyone who might be skeptical or unfamiliar about its value?

HS: Yeah, I would say that the method that I'm most interested in these days is that of releasing, of letting go, allowing, allowing, you know, and welcoming. So we can just put the matter of love, the heart, actually to one side. What would it be like if actually right now nothing actually needs to be different? What happens if we start from letting things be as they are? Not that we don't recognize that there are lots of things in self and relationship and world that we would love to be different. But we start by saying in some way they are the way they are, and we can become aligned with that without letting go of our wish that there be less suffering in the world and less unforced errors by humanity in the world. Can we actually, beginning with ourselves, find a way to just allow this moment to be as it is, starting with ourselves? That allowing is the thing that starts to show itself more richly as a kind of love. 

This interview has been edited for clarity.