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Annelie Geissler
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ORIGINAL LOVE

Rick Hanson Henry Shukman

The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening

The essential meditation guide for the twenty-first century: renowned mindfulness teacher Henry Shukman replaces the concept of original sin with original love, teaching us to tap into the love that shapes our world and can transform who we are.
Renowned mindfulness teacher and Spiritual Director of Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe Henry Shukman presents a groundbreaking new teaching: ORIGINAL LOVE: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening. Here is what you can actually do to ease your troubles and find the highest possible happiness. Shukman's four-step guide leads you along a path of growth and healing of emotions and mind. It's beautifully written - as you'd expect from a poet - taking us on a journey through meditation that will help practitioners of any level. ORIGINAL LOVE recounts inspiring stories of Shukman's and his students' experiences and spiritual breakthroughs with the program and interweaves fascinating information on the science of mind and consciousness. With grounding guided meditations and practical tips, Shukman gently and kindly accompanies us as we develop loving awareness and come to deeper self-understanding. As Henry writes, "Mindfulness is not about the mind; it's about the heart. It's about love." Urgently needed to create peace for ourselves and our times, the Original Love program reduces stress, anxiety, and depression; relaxes mind and body; lessens feelings of worry, regret, anger, and irritation; and improves decision-making and executive functioning. Finding a sense of love is a critical purpose of meditation. Finding your way back to the loving peace that lives at the center of things is unconditional, intrinsic Original Love. Henry Shukman is a poet, author and meditation teacher who has guided thousands of students from around the world in practices for mindfulness and awakening. A Zen Master in the Sanbo Zen lineage and the Spiritual Director at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Henry is the founder of The Way meditation app and the Original Love meditation program, and has taught meditation at Google and Harvard Business School. He has written award-winning and best-selling books of poetry and fiction, taught poetry at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and his poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian and The Times. He has an MA from Cambridge and an MLitt from St Andrews.
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Published 2024-07-09 by Harper One

Comments

A fascinating and beautiful contribution to the world of meditation by an adept in the practice.

Henry is a masterful teacher. His insight, compassion and wisdom combine to provide some of the best meditation teaching out there.

Henry Shukman is one of the wisest and most poetical teachers of dharma we have today. In an increasingly fragmented world, he is unusually good company.

This is one of the rare books destined to inspire new and seasoned meditators alike. Drawing on his own deep experience and years of teaching, Henry Shukman brings a lucid and refreshing cast to the fundamentals of practice, and reveals how the loving we yearn for is always, already here; love is intrinsic to what we are. Please gift yourself with this powerful, poetic, transformative guide to awakening our hearts.

ORIGINAL LOVE is a lively compendium of all you want to learn about meditation, mindfulness, suffering, non-suffering, joy, coming home and being whole. All that is in this book is hard-earned, on the ground, clearly explained. Shukman so much wants to share his understanding that you can feel the excitement and longing right in the center of the still page. This book is a great friend, one who tells the simple obvious truth that is right in front of our face. And on top of all this, Shukman knows how to write, like an angel.

Take a break. Fall in love with your life. Breathe in the rich fragrance of mindfulness as taught by a master Zen teacher who is also a superb poet. For beginning or advanced students of meditation, Henry Shukman will lead you seamlessly into your own original love for life as it is, and you as you are. Extraordinary in its freshness and replete with all kinds of wisdom, this book illuminates waking up naturally, aimlessly, in your own time. Enjoy it.

[Shukman's] writing is gorgeous, funny, fascinating, and audacious.

Henry Shukman has a natural, contagious and enlightened enthusiasm which his fine writing style carries so beautifully to the reader through every page. This is a book for breaking the spell of the 'me', not in the sense of erasing ourselves, but in taking the journey of awakening where we can come out from behind the surface, defended self and appear fully and transparently and even lovingly in this difficult world. A book to carry to some quiet place every day so that you can journey with a companion who has walked a good part of the way before you and who will become a very good friend to you, page by revealing page.

This is a book the world has been waiting for one that speaks clearly and eloquently to the reality of love as the foundational energy of this world. I can't think of a more important project for humankind than all of us finding this love as matter of urgency. I love this book and believe it will help us do just that. Of all the books on meditation that I've read none has so clearly laid out the finding of love as its central project. It's also unusual for a book like this to come from the hand of a poet; it's a beautiful book, but more important, it's one we all need, and we need it now.

This book, like Henry himself, is wise and deep and filled with heartfelt meditation advice and beautiful, powerful stories. You will be very glad that you've read it.