Zen: Stop Trying to Quiet Your Mind | Henry Shukman

Kevin Rose (0:00)

It's so funny, I had all my notes for our conversation on my phone that we're actually using to record, so I'm going in blind here. But Henry, it's good to see you.

Henry Shukman (0:09)

Yeah, it's great to see you, Kevin.

Kevin Rose (0:10)

Glad we're doing this again.

Henry Shukman (0:11)

Yeah, and it's nice to do it out here in New Mexico, in the desert.

Kevin Rose (0:15)

Getting ready to head into a week retreat, which starts tonight, which I'm really excited about.

Henry Shukman (0:20)

I'm really excited, actually, myself, that you're doing it. Yeah.

It's really beautiful to see you just stepping in like that. Yeah. I know you've done several before, of course, but just slightly upping the dosage, like a few, a couple more a year, is such a powerful thing to do.

Kevin Rose (0:38)

What do you think is the big benefit in going to, even call it just like a three day, or something that's beyond just a normal average, 10, 20 minutes set per day?

Henry Shukman (0:48)

Yeah, oh my gosh, we just go so much deeper.

It's like the, I think it's really valuable to have, I mean the most valuable thing is the daily consistent practice. That's like a thread running through your life. But when you drop in to a longer retreat, you just go much deeper and it infuses your daily practice. I think, you know, it's not enough just to do long retreats or, you know, semi long retreats, multi day retreats, now and then it's, the value of it is how it boosts what you're doing every day. You see what I mean? It's like, it's not like just lurch from big retreat with nothing in between. No, the value is in infusing what you're doing in your daily life.

Kevin Rose (1:30)

I, there's no good everyday analogy that I can think of that kind of maps to this type of idea of intense thing and then lifts the boat kind of for everyday. Cause if you think about, I've always thought, okay, to me, at least the first two years of practicing Zen was, you know, monkey mind was off the charts.

And so the daily practice was like, I almost considered it my gym workout, is the mental workout for my mind. And that made sense to me because of course, you go to the gym for the first time, you're going to suck, you're going to be in pain. It's not going to be comfortable. And then, you know, months, years go by and all of a sudden you're like, not only does it not hurt anymore, but I look forward to it.

Henry Shukman (2:12)

Right.

Kevin Rose (2:13)

What is the depth of the multi-day? How does it infuse that everyday practice?

Henry Shukman (2:19)

Well, I would say if you use an analogy like this one, that Suzuki Roshi, who wrote, Is There Mine, Beginner's Mind? He used to use, he said, rather than trying to sort of stop or kind of, I don't know, imprison or grab hold of your monkey mind, instead, think of it as a young foal, like a young colt or something in a foal, sealed with its mother, the mare, watching it. And basically, as our practice deepens, you could think of it like this, that the meadow gets larger. In other words, the sort of field of our awareness grows, so we can let monkey minds skip about and do what it's doing, but we're actually staying present. We're not caught by it. We're not so quickly getting captivated by it. It's like that image of the mare is beautiful. It's not trying to stop the little beastie running around. It's just lovingly becoming more aware of it. I think that's just a perfect analogy for what happens in practice. So when we come to a longer, deeper retreat, the paddock, the meadow is getting bigger.

In other words, really, the space of our awareness is growing.

So there's more sort of real estate. So what monkey mind is doing becomes a smaller part of our overall experience.

Kevin Rose (3:54)

I see. And the monkey mind is interesting because when I think of it these days around, I'll be sitting, and of course we all have these days, more often than not, where something will come up, a daily life activity, something that's top of mind for you that is just wants your attention, wants to jump in there and grab you for a second, right?

Henry Shukman (4:16)

Yes.

Kevin Rose (4:18)

If you can take a second and acknowledge it, I don't know that is the correct term. It's more like just let it be.