“We are learning to love, tend and cherish our experience, whatever it may be. This is a beautiful thing to be developing.”
– Henry Shukman
“We are learning to love, tend and cherish our experience, whatever it may be. This is a beautiful thing to be developing.”
– Henry Shukman
Original Love is a new approach to the ancient path of meditation. It is a broad meditation training based primarily on traditional teachings of Zen and Early Buddhism.
Through finding the intrinsic lovingness, energy, peace and joy that are always already within us, even if they sometimes feel hidden, we can grow as more clear-sighted and open-hearted beings. Gradually, and sometimes suddenly, through shared practice, we start to catch glimpses of the “original love” that is always here.
While this program can serve for many as a complete training in itself, it can also serve as an on-ramp for Zen koan training.
We warmly invite you to watch Henry’s video introducing
the four essential “zones” of meditation.
FREE 15-MINUTE GUIDED MEDITATION
We're excited to share a new 15-minute guided meditation on sitting with challenging conditions of the mind and heart that Henry has created.
The early Buddhist tradition identifies several states that tend to make it difficult to meditate. But these can be transformed into opportunities for growth. They can come to nourish our practice.
Discover how to transform challenges in meditation in ways that help to break old patterns. Learn to practice acceptance, welcoming, and self-love, by mindfully tending to disruptive thoughts and emotions. By inviting vulnerability, by letting ourselves be the way we are, and even loving the way we are, we can expand our self-acceptance, our self-understanding, and our capacity for love, peace and wonder.
Henry’s 4-Week Course in June
In the Midst of All Things
By becoming mindful of the full range of sense-experiences going on in any moment, we start to rest into a sense of being held by all experience, then into becoming absorbed in it, and finally dissolving into a selfless space in which all things are present.
Sundays, June 18, 25, July 2, 9
Original Love
One-Year Program, 2023
Original Love
12 guided meditations
On Mindfulness, Self-Love & Awakening
About Henry
Henry is a Zen Master in the Sanbo Zen lineage, and spiritual director of the Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
His struggles as a youth, a spontaneous awakening experience at 19, followed by years of rigorous Zen training and his own deep healing process, all paved the way for Henry to develop Original Love, a well-rounded approach to spirituality and meditation.
Henry is the author of One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, A Zen Memoir.
