Original Love by Henry Shukman The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening

What's it about?
Original Love (2024) presents a fresh approach to spirituality in the modern world. Replacing the concept of original sin, it offers a practical guide based on four elements – “inns” – of contemplative practice to help people find inner peace and connection.


Henry Shukman, Original Love, The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening What if the person you think you are, the separate self navigating through life's joys and sorrows, is not the whole story? What if beneath the surface of your thoughts, feelings and experiences lies a more fundamental reality, waiting to be discovered? In this lesson, you'll look at a radical type of self-enquiry, guided by the deep wisdom of contemplative traditions. You'll look at common challenges to meditation and how to overcome them.
And finally, you'll learn about the mysterious phenomenon of awakening, or enlightenment, and what it means. The path of meditation isn't about renouncing the world. Rather, it's about loving it. It's about discovering a wellspring of compassion, appreciation and care that changes everything.
Love Beyond Self A radical shift in life is possible. A shift that brings you closer to fundamental truth and new heights of well-being. And the key to this shift? Understanding that our ordinary sense of being a separate self is an illusion, a dream from which we can awaken into a boundless, unconditional love.
What does this mean? It means that, when examined closely, the self we take ourselves to be, the me at the centre of experience, with all of its history, hopes and fear, isn't the full story we thought it was. Like a mirage shimmering over hot pavement, it has a kind of reality, but it lacks the solidity we typically attribute to it. It is conjured into existence as a feeling and a narrative, the story of my life, woven out of memories, imaginings and sensory details. Waking up means seeing through this construction, realising experientially that the separate self is more fabrication than fact. Shedding the self may sound scary, but contrary to expectations, this recognition, this seeing through the illusion, is experienced as profoundly healing and transformative.
Different traditions call this phenomenon by different names. It is known as non-dual awareness, buddhanature, nirvana or even god. But according to the author, the core insight is the same. Beneath the surface appearance of separation lies a more fundamental reality. We are not isolated entities moving through a world that's external to us. Rather, we are inseparable parts of an indivisible whole.
But one thing is critical to understand. This insight isn't an intellectual or conceptual one. It's a shift that must be experienced directly and viscerally. But when we do experience it, the implications are tremendous. It unleashes a love without limits, an original love that's unconditional and imbued with a sense of limitless well-being.
Shelter along the path. How is awakening made possible? Most of all, it is through the practice of meditation, through patient cultivation, we can catch glimpses of the selfless dimension of consciousness and learn to rest in the unconditional love native to it. For the author, this isn't a rarefied pursuit.
It's the birthright of every human being, accessible to anyone willing to devote some time each day to turning inward. Awakening unfolds in stages. Imagine a pilgrim trekking up a mountain valley. It's a long journey, but the route is dotted with inns that shelter and nourish the pilgrim along the way. Four inns, in fact. The first inn is mindfulness, where we learn to bring a kind, non-judgmental attention to our present moment experience.
The second inn is support. While meditation may appear a solitary pursuit, we needn't go it alone. We can receive guidance, encouragement and the companionship of fellow travelers. The third inn is absorption, a state of deep immersion in the moment, akin to the flow athletes and artists experience. In meditation, absorption arises as a profound stillness in which doing falls away, replaced by a rapt sense of intimacy with the sheer fact of being. Finally, the fourth inn is awakening proper, where the illusory sense of self falls away, replaced by a boundless love that embraces all things.
Experientially, we discover our indivisibility from the whole, and with it a wellspring of compassion, joy and equanimity that transforms us. Mindfulness, support, absorption and awakening. Arduous though it can be, the journey through these four inns is ultimately one of homecoming, of reconnecting with our innermost nature. For the rest of this lesson, we'll focus on two inns on the path, the very first, mindfulness and the very last, awakening.
Meditation and the five hindrances. You've probably already heard quite a bit about mindfulness and how it's a potent tool for anchoring yourself in the present moment. You've likely heard about how often we navigate life on autopilot, our attention dominated by a ceaseless stream of thoughts, and that this mental chatter forms an invisible filter that dilutes our experience of the here and now. But by cultivating mindfulness, we reveal the vibrant detail and texture of reality as it unfolds.
When it comes to the countless self-help books and contemporary experts pushing mindfulness and meditation, what's often missing is a recognition of just how difficult it can be. But in fact, the difficulties associated with meditation have been known to Buddhists for thousands of years, along with recommended practices for overcoming them. These challenges are known in Buddhism as the five hindrances, desire, aversion, dullness, restlessness, and doubt. Think of them like a checklist to consult when you're struggling with mindfulness. The first hindrance, desire, is about what you want. It often cloaks itself in fantasies of the future, painting visions of satisfaction just beyond reach.
The second hindrance, aversion, is about what you don't want. It's a recoiling away from what is unpleasant, often seeking escape in distraction or denial. Dullness, hindrance number three, runs across the spectrum from spaciness to tiredness to lethargy. It's the opposite of vitality and zest. Hindrance number four, restlessness, means restlessness driven by worry or guilt. It's about rehashing the past and rehearsing the future in an endless loop.
And doubt, the fifth most insidious hindrance of all, refers to a lack of confidence in the practice or more often in oneself. So these are the five hindrances. They're as old as meditation itself. Next, let's see how to respond to them.
Loving what's in your way. Let's look at how to work with the five hindrances, skillfully and powerfully. First and foremost, our response to the hindrances is to simply observe them. We look for how they appear as sensations in the body.
Desire and aversion can often manifest as contractions or knots of tension in the belly or chest. Dullness can be felt as a heavy, sinking feeling, while restlessness may arise as a fluttery agitation or nervous energy. Doubt may show up as a hollowness or a sense of disconnection. Tune into the sensation and then see if you can soften around it. Simply be with it and allow it to be present. Rather than fighting against or fleeing from these difficult sensations, we can choose to welcome them like an honored guest.
We might silently say to ourselves, hello restlessness, I see you've come to visit again, make yourself at home. Or we could say, I know your presence, desire, you're no stranger here. The skillful approach is to respond with radical acceptance, to offer kindness toward each part of ourselves that makes itself known. It's a way of saying, I see you and I'm here with you. As we cultivate this capacity to be present with discomfort, our relationship to challenge and adversity begins to shift. We discover that we can be with unpleasant experiences without being overwhelmed by them.
This newfound poise and equanimity gradually infiltrates our daily lives. We find ourselves savoring simple pleasures we once rushed past, the warmth of sunlight on our skin, the smell of air. As our hearts become more permeable and transparent, we resonate more deeply with the joys and sorrows of others. And yet we discover a quiet contentment amidst all of it, an unshakable sense of being at home. This is the first fruit of mindfulness practice, a richer, more intimate embrace of mundane life. But there is a second fruit.
Intending to our embodied experience with loving awareness, seeds of self-acceptance and self-compassion begin to germinate. We discover that mindfulness isn't just a mental exercise, but a radical act of befriending all parts of ourselves. By learning to welcome difficult sensations with an open heart, we find the love and peace we've been seeking all along.
What is awakening? We've explored mindfulness and how to work with hindrances in meditation. Let's turn now to awakening, something so profound and elusive that words fail to capture it. While mindfulness is something that can be practiced, awakening is something that happens to us.
As a Zen teacher once said, enlightenment is an accident and practice makes us accident-prone. We can think of awakening in two different ways. First, as an exotic psychological state which creates exceptionally high levels of well-being. Or second, as a direct insight into the fundamental nature of reality itself. But regardless of how we frame it, awakening involves a dramatic change in how the mind perceives. As we've discussed, awakening involves a sense of oneness, a sudden collapse of the distinction between oneself and everything else, moving us to what's known as non-dual experience.
Simultaneously, there is a tremendous outpouring of love, peace and a sense of coming home to one's true nature. As if these changes weren't mysterious enough, the author describes two other aspects to awakening. Emptiness and what is sometimes called blazing forth. Emptiness, despite its potentially misleading name, isn't about nothingness, negativity or lack. Instead, the term points to a kind of exquisite spaciousness or openness from which all things are seen to arise. One Tibetan master described this experience with a striking metaphor.
The bad news is that you have no parachute. The good news is that there is no ground. This vivid image captures the vertigo-inducing nature of emptiness, simultaneously shocking and liberating. The apparent solidity of objects and of the self dissolve, revealing a reality that's more akin to a vast field of potential than a collection of separate substantial entities. This emptiness, however, isn't static. Contemplative traditions speak of it as inherently dynamic and creative, a blazing forth, as Taoism puts it.
This term captures the idea that the fundamental nature of reality is one of ceaseless outpouring, continuously manifesting as the myriad phenomena we experience. Some traditions distinguish between initial awakening experiences and a deeper, more stabilized form of awakening. The latter is described as crossing a threshold from which there is no return. It's as if one has passed through a door, leaving behind the oscillation between so-called enlightened and deluded perspectives. This watershed moment brings a freedom beyond what was previously imaginable. Whether understood as a psychological state or an insight into ultimate reality, awakening represents a fundamental change to one's existence.
Yet this change, the author argues, needn't alienate us from the everyday world. Instead, awakening can deepen our engagement, leading to a more intimate, loving existence. Having met our own needs at the deepest level, what remains is a natural inclination toward helping others, those with whom we find ourselves in communion.
The main takeaway of this lesson to original love by Henry Schucman is that a radical shift in life is possible when we begin awakening to fundamental truths of the mind. Through the practice of meditation, we can catch glimpses of the selfless dimension of consciousness and rest in the unconditional love which is native to it. The journey unfolds in stages, like a pilgrim trekking past four inns – mindfulness, support, absorption and awakening. When practicing meditation, it's helpful to realize that our challenges often take the same forms, known as the five hindrances – desire, aversion, dullness, restlessness and doubt.
Overcoming these hindrances requires observing how they appear as sensations in the body and learning to welcome them with love and equanimity. Awakening, a deep transformation that some practitioners experience, is a radical experience of oneness, love and of coming home to our true nature. Okay, that's it for this lesson. We hope you enjoyed it.
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