Jul 22, 2025
I am excited to share this conversation with Henry Shukman, a Zen master in the Sanbo Zen lineage and spiritual director emeritus at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Henry is the co-founder of The Way meditation app and founder of the Original Love meditation program.
He is the author of the books, Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening and One Blade of Grass: A Zen Memoir, among other award-winning and bestselling books of poetry and fiction.
He has taught meditation at Google and Harvard Business School and taught poetry at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poetry has appeared in the New Yorker and the Guardian and his essays in the New York Times, Outside, and Tricycle. Henry has a master's degree from Cambridge and a master of letters degree from St. Andrews.
As this biographical summary makes obvious, it's not like Henry hasn't been quite "discoverable", as a writer and meditation teacher but I only recently "discovered" him. And once I did, he has had a profound influence on me, as both a teacher and writer. In my conversation with him, I'll talk more about how I discovered him on Sam Harris' Waking Up app and how he became a primary teacher to me—even though we've never met—so stay tuned.
In the conversation we talked about a wide range things, including:
- The "Four Inns on the Path of Awakening", the
subtitle of his book Original Love (that is "Inns", as in lodging,
or in this case, a refuge or shelter on the path of meditation):
Mindfulness, support, absorption, and awakening.
- Meditation as a journey, or path, rather than an
intervention—as Henry said, "a journey of a lifetime."
- Kensho or seeing the timeless, primordial or non-dual
awareness that is the core of our very being.
- The importance of support in your practice,
whether it is a teacher, community, or friend.
- Absorption or flow states in meditation.
- And the "love" Henry refers to as something "endemic to our existence" … A great sense of belonging or union with everything.
… And much more
I know you will enjoy this conversation and Henry's clear, authentic, and gentle teaching style that I suspect will influence you, too, to bring more of Henry's guidance into your Dharma and meditation practice.
The Way meditation app
All books: Amazon author page
https://www.patreon.com/EverydayBuddhism