428 Henry Shukman: Embracing the Whole Ox — How Suffering, Zen, and Radical Openness Can Transform Your Life

My guest this week is Henry Shukman — poet, novelist, authorised Zen master in the Sanbo Zen lineage, and co-founder of The Way meditation app. His work has moved through boardrooms, retreat centres, and living rooms across the world, helping people find what lies on the other side of their suffering. Henry's path here was anything but direct. A spontaneous awakening experience at nineteen, years of chronic illness, childhood trauma, and family rupture became not obstacles to his spiritual life — but doorways into it. His memoir, One Blade of Grass, recounts that journey with unflinching honesty, and was named a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. His poetry has appeared in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books. But what we really wanted to talk to Henry about in this conversation is something simpler and harder than any of that. What does it mean to stay genuinely open in a world that seems to be doing everything it can to close us down?