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#560: Zen Master Henry Shukman — 20 Minutes of Calm, Plus the Strange and Powerful World of Koans

The Tim Ferriss Show

notes

NOTE

Exploring the Depth of Koans

Koans are expressions of an individual's awakening experience, attempting to convey a non-linguistic understanding using language. They illustrate a sense of self being engulfed by everything, making it challenging for ordinary ways of reality construction to comprehend them. Koans serve as a tool to puncture the membrane of the self and are akin to little explosives, drilling into the wall of self-awareness.

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Zen Master Henry Shukman — 20 Minutes of Calm, Plus the Strange and Powerful World of Koans | Brought to you by GiveWell.org charity research and effective giving, Laird Superfood clean, plant-based creamers, and LinkedIn Jobs recruitment platform with 770M+ users. More on all three below.

Henry Shukman (@mountaincloudzencenter) teaches mindfulness and awakening practices to a wide range of students from all traditions and walks of life. Henry is an appointed teacher in the Sanbo Zen lineage and is the Guiding Teacher of Mountain Cloud Zen Center. He has an MA from Cambridge and an MLitt from St Andrews and has written several award-winning books of poetry and fiction.

Henry’s essays have been published in The New York Times, Outside, and Tricycle, and his poems have been published in The New Republic, The Guardian, The Sunday Times (UK), and London Review of Books. He has taught meditation at Google, Harvard Business School, UBS, Esalen Institute, Colorado College, United World College, and many other venues. He has written of his own journey in his memoir One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir.

Henry has also recently created a new meditation program, Original Love, which aims to provide a broad, inclusive path of growth through meditation.

Please enjoy!

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