Showing results by narrator "Henry Shukman" in All Categories

An increasing number of people today feel disconnected, disengaged, and lonely. Many of us are seeking solace, beginning with ourselves. Original Love is the secular spiritual handbook we need to ease our troubles and find the highest possible happiness. Henry Shukman, spiritual director of Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, provides a way forward based on four paths—Mindfulness, Support, Absorption, and Awakening—that promote growth and healing through meditation for practitioners of any level.

This is the story of how a meditation practice gave Henry Shukman a context for integrating a sudden spiritual awakening into his life and how his depression and anxiety were gradually healed through this practice. In sharing how he grew into a Zen teacher, Shukman demystifies Zen training, casting its profound insights in simple, lucid language. Along the way, One Blade of Grass guides listeners on a journey of their own, into the hidden treasures that contemplative practice can reveal to any of us.

Raised in a rationalist household in Oxford during the spiritual heyday of the '60s and '70s, an unexpected spiritual awakening would prompt a lifelong quest to integrate the experience into his life, leading him eventually to Zen Buddhism. As Shukman gets to grips with meditative practice and struggles with anxiety, depression and the chronic eczema he had had since childhood, he discovers in surprising ways the emotional, spiritual and even physical healing that he has been searching for all along.