I feel like I found a gem when I heard you on Waking up app. Now I’m finishing up the 3rd retreat on your app The Way and hoping I can make it to Mountain Cloud in October for your retreat. 🙏🏻 I agree I feel like you should have so many followers. What a blessing to find you. ❤
Would it also be helpful to say that attention is like the Tao. Relative attention has the two aspects of active (yang) and receptive (ying). The impulse to take action ordinarily carries a mainly unnoticed or unconscious sense of separation. When we act or try to take action to change our experiencing in this way, there can only be the repetition of the pattern of separation. Maybe the action is in larger context yet fundamentally it is still the pattern of separation. The science or knowledge of ecology has taught us that if we take action on "the ecology", if this action is not aligned with the whole, it produces a kind of opposite reaction or opposite effect than we intended. (Gregory Bateson in his book of essays "The Ecology of Mind" made this abundantly clear.) With receptive attention we can let go of what we think we already know and wait in an "actively receptive" manner which is the truer meaning of "patience". Maybe it is allowing the silence of not knowing to further inform us by way of insight from the whole aka universe or "the all and everything". Much can be seen clearer by mining the questions around these two relative aspects of attention. However we do need to get clear about the question/s. The moment of having a question puts us into the receptive space or wonder of 'don't know mind'. Whatever apparent answer it may give, if necessary can be used to ask the next deeper question that can put back into and familiarize us with our innate sense of wonder. It is the sense of wonder that is primary much like the goose that lays the golden eggs. We may need to cease "killing the goose".
sense of separation which can only reproduce the pattern of separation. Asking the question puts us in the wonder of 'don't know mind' as need be and can familiarizes us with our innate sense of wonder.
Henry I'm reading your book Original Love now. In the context of your words here: Quite helpful I find the lines: "notice how you start to sense your body, how you start to sense the surroundings. When we are still we magnetize a greater stillness that is always here; it starts to feed into us, to seep into us; taste a little bit of that greater stillness right now". Would you sometimes touch on how you see this stillness is intimately related to original love. I understand that any description is not the reality and at some point in our setting they need to be let go of. Sometimes I say breath is the movement of love. Maybe what we feel as the breath can be said to be the flux of the One-Whole reality, the movement of Original Love.
He is just so amazing at expressing mindfulness, Zen. 🧘♀️Today I followed the practice entitled Original Love on the WakingUp app ❤ Thank you so much for the guidance
I have primary insomnia. At night I think about Henry's guided meditations: 'Coming into stillness...' and I actually briefly fall asleep. Reframing the moments I'm awake has made such a difference 🧘
The medication on the waking up app on 'Support' is one I listen to on my walks in the morning. There is also one called 'no goal', which I use as a guidence a few times a week. Thank you so much for the work you do 🧘
Again, lovely tidbits of Buddhist wisdom, thank you Henry. I believe you should have a much larger reach for everyone's benefit, but it's getting harder these days to stand out in an ocean of online content. It's especially tough to play the clickbait games with Buddhist content - I don't know, maybe go with "Shukman DESTROYS the ego!"
I've recently been trying to get more clarity on this topic and, at least in my experience of thought, there seem to be more aspects to it than just words and images. For example, when considering mathematical constructs, I often have the feeling that there is a spatial component to it, very similar actually to the way our minds construct the (essentially simulated) perception of 3-dimensional space from a range of sensory inputs that are not 3-dimensional. (Part of what contributes to our visual perception are saccades, those jumpy eye movements that keep changing the 2D content associated with each eye. And yet, in the reconstruction of how all of those individual images add up to a unified space, they are automatically arranged such that they provide evidence to a 3D environment that we perceive, not just as an idea or a loosely held interpretation, but with a sense of immediacy.) As far as I can tell (and distinguish), the way concepts are layed out in my mind feels the same way, spatial, not just visual. Sometimes I can also detect an aspect that has the feel of a force pushing or pulling. E.g. when instantiating the concept of 'yes', it feels to me like I am being pulled towards something, or I am pulling something towards me. With 'no' it feels like the opposite: a repelling force. The 'no' force can also be felt at the edges of definitional boundaries. E.g. if I ask you to think of a triangle, you might imagine one concrete triangle as a placeholder at first. But if you explore the whole range of triangleness, you might notice a repelling force preventing you from opening up the angles too wide. As they get close to 180 degrees, there is a resistance keeping them away from crossing the boundary that would make it not a triangle. I'd be very curious to hear if you can confirm the above. I don't hear many people talking about the phenomenology of thought. It's much more common to single out thought as an aspect of conscious activity that we grow up being conditioned to overindulge in and identify with. As a result of that counter-movement, the felt dimension of thought is often left out of deeper investigation. What gives thoughts the power to move us as much as they do?
Meditation undoing us is a reassuring message Henry. Meditation can sometimes unfortunately be marketed as a cure-all or self-improvement technique. That might lead to surprise or confusion when the undoing process releases long buried grief or trauma. I doubt anyone really enjoys that process, but it seems to me to be a natural part of the package.
That's a colorful analogy, Henry. I appreciate the word choice in many of your dharma talks. Espcially fond of "Original Love" on WakingUp. You ought to write another book someday!
@@ShukmanHenry Sweet. Will it be available on Audible as well? EDIT: it is indeed- just pre-ordered. I remember reading One Blade of Grass while my son was suffering from what would be the worst of his eczema, and thinking- so long as I teach him Zen and send him to the desert he'll be spared a lot of needless suffering. Well luckily his eczema went away on its own, and now incidentally at 6 he has a keen interest in meditation, much to the dismay of his mother "oh great, now there's two of you!"
This is so ppwerful, I love the way how various podcasts are interlinked....Henry's calm, secure aura transcends through the screen to us... he is just amazing....
Would love to hear more about to what extent mindfulness or awakening can help one with physical pain (for example, a chronic condition). I have my own pre-satori impressions and they are encouraging, but I "crave" for spiritual teachers to speak more on this topic of pain, which has become a big challenge in my life.
For the restaurant, what was considered malfunction becomes novelty, merely with a loving change of perspective. Im really glad you shared that. And for the flower story, malfunction is entirely a function of perspective.
