Original Love

Original Love Plot Summary

Introduction

Imagine sitting alone in a quiet room, your body perfectly still, yet feeling a profound sense of movement within. As your breath deepens, something magical begins to unfold – a sense of spaciousness washes over you, and suddenly, the boundaries between yourself and the world seem to soften. In this moment of stillness, you discover a vast reservoir of love that has always been there, patiently waiting for you to notice it. This experience isn't extraordinary or reserved for spiritual masters – it's available to all of us through the simple yet profound practice of meditation. In our busy lives, we often search for connection and love outside ourselves, believing these precious resources must be earned or found elsewhere. Yet meditation reveals a startling truth: the love we seek is already within us, an inherent quality of our awareness that Henry Shukman calls "original love." Through mindful attention, opening to support, experiencing deep absorption, and ultimately awakening to our true nature, we can tap into this boundless wellspring. This journey isn't just about finding peace – it's about discovering our fundamental connectedness to all things and recognizing that at our core, we are love itself. Whether you're a seasoned meditator or just beginning, this path offers a way to transform your relationship with yourself and the world around you.

Chapter 1: Mindfulness: Coming Home to Ourselves

The trail was steep, winding through dense forest in the mountains of northern New Mexico. I had been hiking for hours, my mind racing with worries about work deadlines and family responsibilities. Suddenly, I realized I hadn't actually seen anything around me for the past mile – I'd been completely lost in thought. I stopped and took a deliberate breath. The scent of pine filled my lungs. The afternoon light filtered through the branches, creating patterns on the forest floor. Birds called to each other in the distance. As I stood there, simply noticing what was already present, a wave of calm washed over me. I hadn't changed my circumstances, just my attention. This moment on the trail illustrates what mindfulness meditation offers – the ability to come home to ourselves in the present moment. Like a person walking slowly along a forest path rather than racing down a highway, mindfulness allows us to experience the rich sensory details of our lives as they unfold. When we meditate, we create space to notice not just our surroundings, but also the internal landscape of thoughts, emotions, and body sensations that make up our experience. We learn to sit with whatever arises – whether pleasant or painful – with kind awareness rather than judgment. Many of us first come to meditation seeking relief from anxiety, stress, or the constant chatter of our minds. What we discover is that simply learning to be present, to notice our experience without trying to change it, can be profoundly healing. When we slow down and pay attention, we often find that the moment itself is enough. The breath moving in and out of the body, the sounds in the room, the feel of our hands resting in our lap – these simple experiences can become sources of wonder when we fully attend to them. As we practice mindfulness, we begin to recognize the patterns that create suffering in our lives. We see how we habitually resist certain experiences and cling to others, how we get caught in stories about the past or future rather than living in the present. The hindrances that arise during meditation – desire, aversion, sleepiness, restlessness, doubt – are the same ones that create difficulty in our daily lives. By meeting them with awareness and compassion on the cushion, we learn to respond more skillfully to them off the cushion as well. Perhaps most importantly, mindfulness teaches us to love ourselves. When we sit in quiet awareness, attending to our experience with kindness, we cultivate a form of self-compassion that many of us have never known. We learn to be with our flaws and wounds, our joys and strengths, with the same accepting presence we might offer a dear friend. This is not a narcissistic self-love, but a fundamental acceptance of our humanity that naturally extends to others as well. As we learn to love ourselves, we become more capable of loving others authentically. Through this first stage of the meditation journey, we develop a loving awareness that transforms our relationship with ourselves and our experience. We discover that coming home to the present moment is not just a technique for stress reduction but the foundation for a life of greater presence, ease, and connection. And as our practice deepens, we begin to sense that there's more support available to us than we ever imagined.

Chapter 2: Support: The Unseen Powers of Connection

During a recent meditation retreat in a remote forest cabin, I found myself utterly lost. I had set out for a short walk before breakfast, confident in my sense of direction. But as morning mist enveloped the woods, familiar landmarks disappeared. After an hour of wandering increasingly anxious paths, I spotted an elderly hiker approaching. "Excuse me," I called out, "I'm trying to find my way back to the meditation center." The man smiled gently. "You're almost there," he said, pointing to a nearly invisible trail I had passed several times. "Just follow that path about fifty yards." As I thanked him and turned to go, he added, "Remember, sometimes we need to be lost before we can truly find our way." Within minutes, I was back at the center, his words echoing in my mind during the morning's meditation. This forest encounter illustrates a profound truth about meditation: while it may seem like a solitary pursuit, we cannot travel the path alone. In our individualistic culture, we often believe that everything is up to us – our careers, relationships, health, and even our spiritual growth. We sit on our cushions day after day, believing that with enough self-discipline, we will break through to deeper states of awareness through our own efforts. But meditation traditions have always recognized that we need support – that "self-power" must be complemented by "other-power." Support comes in many forms. There is the formal guidance we receive from teachers and texts that point the way when we feel lost. There is the community of fellow practitioners who inspire us by their example and normalize the challenges we face. But beyond these visible forms of support lie deeper, more mysterious sources of connection that meditation can help us access. These include the natural world, which has its own wisdom to impart; our ancestral inheritance, the generations of DNA and cultural knowledge that flow through us; and even what some traditions call "unseen powers" – forces beyond our ordinary understanding that nevertheless influence our journey. As we deepen our meditation practice, we begin to recognize how profoundly interconnected we are with all life. The air we breathe, the food we eat, the ground beneath our feet – all are forms of support without which we could not exist for even a moment. Our bodies themselves are not isolated entities but communities of trillions of cells and microorganisms working in harmony. Even our thoughts and emotions are not purely "ours" but arise from a complex interplay of biology, culture, and relationship. When we truly see this web of interconnection, our sense of being alone begins to dissolve. This recognition of support and connection opens the heart in profound ways. We move from the sometimes narrow focus on self-improvement that characterizes early meditation practice to a broader understanding of ourselves as part of something larger. Our practice becomes less about what we can achieve and more about what we can receive – the boundless love and support that have always been available to us. As we open to this support, we find ourselves naturally drawn toward gratitude, humility, and compassion. The journey from mindfulness to support represents a crucial expansion of awareness – from learning to be present with our own experience to recognizing that we are held within a vast web of connection. This shift prepares us for the next stage of the meditation journey, where we begin to taste states of deep absorption that further dissolve the boundaries between self and world.

Chapter 3: Absorption: Falling in Love with the Present

Dawn was breaking over the desert as I settled onto my meditation cushion. After months of consistent practice, something different happened that morning. As I followed my breath, the usual parade of thoughts gradually subsided, and I found myself drawn into a state of deep stillness. The boundary between my body and the space around it began to soften. The rising sun through the window, the distant call of birds, the sensation of breath – all became vivid yet seamless aspects of a single experience. Time seemed to stretch and then disappear entirely. When the bell finally rang to end the session, I was startled to discover that an hour had passed, though it felt like both moments and eternity. I sat there, suffused with a quiet joy that asked for nothing and needed nothing beyond itself. This experience illustrates what meditation traditions call "absorption" or "samadhi" – states of deep concentration where our usual sense of separation begins to dissolve. While mindfulness helps us notice our experience more clearly and support connects us with resources beyond ourselves, absorption represents a profound shift in how we relate to the present moment. Rather than observing experience from a distance, we begin to merge with it, falling in love with the very fabric of awareness itself. Absorption states share much in common with what modern psychology calls "flow" – those magical periods when we become so engrossed in an activity that we lose all sense of time and self. Musicians experience it when they become one with their instrument, athletes when they enter "the zone," artists when they surrender to the creative process. The difference is that in meditation, the activity we're absorbed in is simply being. We discover that presence itself, without any external accomplishment or stimulation, can be utterly fulfilling. As absorption deepens, we may experience a range of pleasant states. There might be waves of physical pleasure, feelings of lightness or expansion, or profound emotional well-being. Colors may seem more vivid, sounds more musical, ordinary objects more beautiful. Some meditators report sensing subtle energies moving through the body or experiencing profound clarity of perception. While these experiences can be captivating, most meditation teachers encourage us not to grasp at them but simply to allow them to unfold naturally. What makes these states so significant is not just their pleasantness but what they reveal about the nature of happiness. In ordinary life, we tend to believe that fulfillment comes from getting what we want or avoiding what we don't want. Absorption shows us another possibility – that deep contentment can arise simply from being fully present, without needing anything to be different than it is. We discover an intrinsic well-being that doesn't depend on external conditions. As we become more familiar with absorption, something remarkable happens: the boundary between formal meditation and daily life begins to soften. We find ourselves spontaneously dropping into states of presence and appreciation throughout the day – while washing dishes, walking down the street, or listening to a friend. The world doesn't change, but our relationship to it does. Ordinary moments become infused with a quiet wonder, and we find ourselves more naturally inclined toward kindness and compassion. Through absorption, we begin to taste what the final stage of meditation promises – a radical awakening to the boundless love that underlies all experience.

Chapter 4: Awakening: When the Self Dissolves

Eugene O'Neill, the great American playwright, once described an experience he had as a young sailor. Standing on the deck of a ship at sunset, gazing out over the Pacific Ocean, he suddenly found himself overcome by an extraordinary shift in perception: "I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!" O'Neill's experience captures the essence of what meditation traditions call "awakening" – moments when our usual sense of being a separate self dissolves, revealing a profound unity with all existence. While mindfulness helps us observe our experience clearly, support connects us with resources beyond ourselves, and absorption allows us to merge with the present moment, awakening represents a radical shift in our understanding of who and what we are. It's not just that we feel connected to everything – we recognize that we have never been separate in the first place. These awakenings can occur spontaneously, as they did for O'Neill, or they may arise after years of dedicated meditation practice. They can be dramatic and life-changing or subtle and quiet. Some people experience them as a collapse of boundaries, where the sense of "inside" and "outside" falls away completely. Others describe them as recognizing an awareness that has always been present but overlooked – the "original face" that Zen speaks of. Still others report them as encounters with a boundless love that pervades all things, what Shukman calls "original love." What makes awakening different from other states is that it's not just another experience – it's a recognition of the nature of all experience. We see that the separate self we've taken ourselves to be is actually more like a story or a process than a fixed entity. We discover that consciousness is not contained within our heads but is the very fabric of reality. And perhaps most importantly, we recognize that love is not something we need to find or create but the fundamental nature of existence itself. Awakening doesn't mean we no longer function as individuals in the world. We still have our personalities, preferences, and human limitations. But we hold these more lightly, with a sense of humor and perspective. We may still experience difficult emotions, but we're less identified with them, less caught in their grip. And our relationship with others transforms as we recognize that the same awareness, the same original love, shines through every being we encounter. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of awakening is how ordinary it feels when it happens. Despite its profound implications, it's often described as a recognition of what has always been true, a coming home to our natural state. As one Zen master put it: "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." The difference is not in what we do but in the understanding from which we do it – an understanding infused with original love that naturally expresses itself as compassion, wisdom, and joy.

Chapter 5: Integration: Bringing Love to Ordinary Life

After years of intensive meditation practice, Rachel, a psychotherapist in her fifties, experienced a profound awakening during a silent retreat. For several days, she moved through the world in a state of luminous clarity, seeing the interconnectedness of all things and feeling a boundless love that seemed to pour through her. But when she returned home to her busy practice, demanding teenage children, and aging parents, she found herself struggling. The insights that had seemed so clear in the protected environment of the retreat center began to fade in the face of daily stresses. During a particularly challenging week, she called her meditation teacher in tears, convinced she had somehow "lost" her awakening. Her teacher listened compassionately and then said, "The real practice isn't finding awakening – it's bringing that love into your ordinary life, one breath, one moment, one interaction at a time." Rachel's experience highlights one of the most important aspects of the meditative journey: integration. While mindfulness helps us become more present, support connects us with resources beyond ourselves, absorption allows us to merge with the present moment, and awakening reveals our fundamental unity with all things, integration is about embodying these insights in our everyday lives. It's where the rubber meets the road – where the boundless love we discover through meditation becomes expressed in the way we live, work, and relate to others. Integration doesn't happen automatically. Many people have powerful experiences in meditation that don't translate into lasting changes in their lives. This is where the Zen tradition's "Ten Oxherding Pictures" – an ancient map of the spiritual journey – offers valuable guidance. In this sequence, finding and taming the ox (symbolic of our true nature) is only the beginning. The real work comes afterward, as we learn to ride the ox home, forget both the ox and ourselves, and finally return to the marketplace with "gift-bestowing hands" – offering the fruits of our realization to everyone we meet. This integration involves bringing awareness and compassion to every aspect of our lives – our relationships, work, creative pursuits, and how we care for our bodies and the earth. It means letting go of the spiritual perfectionism that imagines enlightenment as a state of perpetual bliss, embracing instead what Zen calls "ordinary mind" – a way of being that doesn't separate the sacred from the mundane. The most profound test of our practice isn't how we behave on the meditation cushion but how we respond when we're tired, stressed, or triggered by difficult people and situations. As we integrate meditation into daily life, we discover that awakening isn't a one-time event but an ongoing process of remembering and forgetting, opening and closing. Sometimes we'll feel deeply connected to original love, and other times we'll find ourselves caught in old patterns of reactivity and separation. Rather than seeing these fluctuations as failures, we can view them as opportunities to bring compassion to our humanity and to deepen our practice. Each time we notice we've forgotten and choose to remember, our capacity for presence and love grows stronger. Integration ultimately transforms how we move through the world. We become less driven by fear, grasping, and aversion, more responsive to the needs of the moment. Our actions become less about enhancing our own status or security and more about expressing the love and wisdom that are our true nature. And perhaps most importantly, we discover that there is no separation between the path of awakening and the path of service – that the natural expression of original love is compassion for all beings.

Chapter 6: Practice: Pathways to Original Love

The monastery bell rang at 4:30 a.m., rousing the retreatants from sleep. Maria, a first-time participant, groggily made her way to the meditation hall. As she settled onto her cushion in the predawn darkness, doubt crept in. What was she doing here? How could sitting still for hours possibly help with her anxiety and relationship struggles? The first period of meditation was excruciating – her back ached, her mind raced, and the minutes crawled by. Yet something kept her there. During the walking meditation that followed, the teacher approached and quietly suggested, "Don't try so hard. Just feel your feet touching the earth." Something in those simple words resonated. In the next sitting period, Maria stopped fighting her experience and simply noticed her breath moving, sounds arising and passing. Nothing dramatic happened, but by the end of the retreat, she had glimpsed something precious – moments of natural ease and presence that felt like coming home to herself. Maria's experience illustrates an essential truth about meditation: while the concepts and maps can be inspiring, it's the actual practice – the showing up day after day – that transforms us. The path to original love isn't theoretical; it's experiential. It requires that we develop concrete skills and habits that gradually reshape our relationship with ourselves and the world. The good news is that there are many pathways to this practice, suited to different temperaments and circumstances, all leading to the same destination. For beginners, establishing a consistent daily practice is fundamental. Even five minutes each day creates more transformation than occasional longer sessions. Finding a time that works – whether early morning before the household wakes, during a lunch break, or before bed – helps build the habit. Creating a dedicated space, even just a corner with a cushion or chair, signals to the mind that it's time to shift gears. And starting with simple techniques like following the breath or noticing sounds provides an anchor for attention that can be returned to again and again as the mind wanders. As practice deepens, we can explore more specific approaches aligned with the four stages of the meditation journey. For mindfulness, techniques like body scanning, mindful walking, or noting thoughts and emotions help us develop present-moment awareness. For support, practices like loving-kindness meditation, gratitude reflection, or conscious connection with nature open us to resources beyond ourselves. For absorption, techniques that develop concentration – like focusing on the breath at the nostrils or using visualization – help us experience deeper states of presence. And for awakening, inquiry practices that question our assumptions about self and reality, like Zen koans or self-inquiry, can spark direct insight. The body plays a crucial role in meditation that is often overlooked. Practices like yoga, qigong, or simple stretching help prepare the body for sitting. Attention to posture – finding a position that's both alert and relaxed – creates conditions for awareness to flourish. And using the sensations of the body as meditation objects grounds our practice in direct experience rather than concepts. Far from being an obstacle to overcome, the body becomes a vehicle for awakening. Perhaps most importantly, effective practice requires balance – between effort and ease, structure and spontaneity, discipline and self-compassion. Many beginners struggle because they approach meditation with the same striving mentality they bring to other pursuits. Yet paradoxically, the very qualities we're trying to cultivate – presence, peace, love – emerge most naturally when we let go of trying to make something happen. As the Zen saying goes, "You are already complete; you just don't know it yet." Our practice is simply creating conditions for this completeness, this original love, to reveal itself.

Summary

At its heart, meditation is a journey of coming home to a love that has always been present within and around us. Through the four stages we've explored – mindfulness, support, absorption, and awakening – we gradually peel away the layers of conditioning that have obscured our connection to this original love. We learn to be present with our experience rather than lost in thought, to recognize the web of connection that sustains us, to merge with the beauty of the present moment, and ultimately to awaken to our true nature beyond the separate self. This journey isn't about escaping ordinary life but about discovering the extraordinary within the ordinary – the boundless love that is our birthright. The power of this path lies not in exotic experiences or philosophical concepts but in how it transforms our everyday lives. As we practice, we naturally become more present with our loved ones, more compassionate toward suffering, more responsive to the needs of the moment, and more aligned with our deepest values. The original love we discover through meditation isn't a passive feeling but an active force that expresses itself through how we live, work, and relate to others. Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of this journey is that it's available to everyone – not just monks or spiritual adepts, but parents, teachers, healthcare workers, artists, and business leaders. In a world that often feels divided and fearful, the practice of meditation offers a way to reconnect with the love that unites us all, one breath at a time.

About Author

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Henry Shukman

Henry Shukman (IG: @henryshukman) is an authorized Zen Master in the Sanbo Zen lineage, and is spiritual director emeritus of Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is the co-founder and lead meditation teacher for The Way, a meditation app that provides a modern update to the ancient path of meditation training. He also leads meditation courses and retreats. Henry is an award-winning poet and author, whose memoir One Blade of Grass recounts his own journey through meditation practice. His new book Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening is a manual and map describing the four key zones of meditation practice. Original Love is now available for pre-order, and will be published in early July, 2024.His struggles and traumatic experiences as a youth, combined with a spontaneous awakening experience at 19, and many years of training under several teachers, paved the way for his developing a well-rounded approach to healing and awakening through meditation.(copied from Amazon Web page

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