Original Love
The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
"Powerful, poetic, transformative."—Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance\
"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."—Sam Harris
New York Times bestselling author of Waking Up and host of the Making Sense podcast\\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.
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. And it works! Shukman includes inspiring stories from the students of his Original Love program that reveal how it has transformed their lives.
Urgently needed, Original Love helps us create peace for ourselves and our times by
reducing stress, anxiety, and depression;relaxing the mind and body;easing feelings of worry, regret, anger, and irritation;and improving 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 Original Love.
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Meditation is rooted in a boundless "original love" that has inspired all of creation, according to the contemplative if meandering latest from zen teacher Shukman (One Blade of Grass). Guiding readers on a path toward such a love, Shukman outlines four "inns," or resting points, where one can learn the value of mindfulness (through which "we learn to love ourselves... to have compassion for the way we suffer"); support (connecting with others and with the meditative practice itself); absorption (finding fulfillment and total presence in the moment); and awakening (to an "infinite love" that connects the practitioner to the universe). Guided meditations and tips elucidate these concepts and how readers can practice them, as do frequent anecdotes from the author's life. To illustrate absorption, for example, Shukman recalls growing up with severe eczema and learning to access a mental "refuge" within the extreme pain by, paradoxically, letting go of his desire for relief: "I couldn't get there by wanting to... the door opened by itself." While the surfeit of personal examples sometimes takes things off track, Shukman's graceful prose and eye for nuance allows him to build an effective case for cultivating an "ever more breaking heart" that can love and be loved with total openness. Meditation practitioners of all levels will find inspiration in Shukman's wise guidance.
