About
Henry Shukman is a poet, author, and meditation teacher affiliated with Insight Meditation Center and Insight Retreat Center. He co-founded The Way, a meditation app. His books include Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening and One Blade of Grass, a Zen memoir. He has also published award-winning fiction and poetry in The New Yorker, Guardian, and other publications. He holds an M.A. from Cambridge and an MLitt from St Andrews. He has taught at Google, Harvard Business School and Medical School, the New York Times, and the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Teaching focus
Shukman's core teaching draws on shikantaza (just sitting), breath-counting, koan introspection. The frame is the Zen tradition of seated meditation and direct pointing, but the language stays plain. Shukman doesn't lecture from height. The talks tend to think alongside whatever's actually present in the room. Recurring themes include zazen, samu, and sangha. None of those get presented as abstract ideas. They're worked into the body, into ethics, into how a practitioner shows up in family life or at work, so that the dharma stops feeling like a separate compartment. There's a steady invitation in the talks to keep practice human-sized. Sit when you can, return when you've drifted, and trust that small consistent attention does more over the years than dramatic breakthroughs. Format-wise, Shukman teaches in online, retreat, and the tone moves easily between guided sittings, dharma talks, and Q&A. Questions tend to get answered the way they were asked, without being reframed into something cleaner. That alone tells you a lot about how the room feels.
Background
Henry Shukman is a poet, author, and meditation teacher affiliated with Insight Meditation Center and Insight Retreat Center. He co-founded The Way, a meditation app. His books include Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening and One Blade of Grass, a Zen memoir. He has also published award-winning fiction and poetry in The New Yorker, Guardian, and other publications. He holds an M.A. from Cambridge and an MLitt from St Andrews. He has taught at Google, Harvard Business School and Medical School, the New York Times, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Henry Shukman is a poet, author, meditation teacher and co-founder of the single-path meditation app The Way. His most recent books are Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening (HarperOne) and the Zen memoir One Blade of Grass. He has taught at Google, the New York Times, Harvard Business School and Medical School, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. He has written several award-winning and bestselling books of fiction and poetry. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Guardian, Times and Sunday Times. He has an M.A. from Cambridge and an MLitt from St Andrews. Shukman teaches across several communities, including Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. That work sits within the Zen tradition of seated meditation and direct pointing, and the recurring concerns of Shukman's teaching, ethical foundation, steady attention, and the slow softening of habitual reactivity, echo the older texts without sounding distant from a 21st-century practitioner's life. What stands out across Shukman's talks isn't a single technique but a steadying tone. Practice is treated as something built slowly, in ordinary life, with care. There's room for the difficulties practitioners actually bring into the room, grief, restlessness, the body's complaints, family obligations, and the encouragement is consistent without being pushy.
Lineage
Shukman teaches within the Zen tradition of seated meditation and direct pointing. Source notes mention training with Insight Meditation Center. Current affiliations include Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. The lineage shows up less in titles than in the way Shukman talks about practice, with steady reference to the older Buddhist vocabulary while keeping the door open for people who've never read a sutra. Whether that framing lands as monastic or lay depends on the specific talk, but the consistent thread is care for the form without letting the form become the point.
What to expect
Sitting with Shukman, you can expect grounded instruction in shikantaza (just sitting), with space to ask questions and bring whatever's actually showing up in your practice. On retreat the structure follows a classical rhythm of sittings, walking practice, and dharma talks, with silence held between sessions. Online sessions tend to keep the same shape, shorter sits, a talk, and time for Q&A, in a format that's accessible from home. The teaching voice is steady. Shukman won't push you past your edge, and there's a clear preference for slow, sustainable practice over breakthrough chasing. Bring a notebook if you like, or don't. Either way, you'll be met where you are.
