a supreme pleasure. It's always a joy to talk with you and you've got a whole bunch of new stuff out. So I'm just dying to dig in with you. Just briefly for the audience, Henry Shookman here has a new book out called Original Love and it's super interesting. And I want to talk about it and also just Henry your teaching in general. before we pressed record, you and I were just starting to already go into talking about teaching. And you were saying that in traditional Zen training, people just get the minimum amount of direction and then you're just kind of left to do it on your own more or less. And you in the meantime, I think something that we see in your teaching and we see in your writing, and you have more of a pedagogical view towards helping people along a little more. That's where we decided to press record. And we kind of touched on that last time, but it's such an interesting topic and especially so different from traditional Zen training.

Yes, I don't know if I'm exactly right in saying this, but my hunch is that in Mahayana Buddhism, it may be a little more common to kind of say, you know, here's the compass heading, and here's a little nudge to push you off from the dock. Now you figure out how to sail, in that direction. Whereas I think Theravada, possibly at least modern iterations of Theravada, Vipassana especially, and of course modern mindfulness teachings generally, are more inclined to do kind of onboard guidance. So as you're trying to sail and you've got this tangle of canvas and rope and a rudder, you don't know how to use an a keel somewhere maybe that isn't quite lodged in place correctly yet, there's somebody saying, hey, let's put the keel in and here's the little eye bolt that locks it in place. And now see if we can just hook the sheet onto the little eye hole. And my terminology is terrible here. At the top of the sail, and we pull on this rope and the sail will go up a little bit. Oh, look, we're going somewhere. You know, I mean, I now think very time -saving and very sort of helpful little of guidance mid -sit can make a lot of difference. Of course for a beginner, but also really for what we might call a novice and even sometimes for a very seasoned practitioner. You know, I guess it would speak for itself for a beginner it can be really hard if we're doing a focused attention practice or a one -pointed practice of staying on the breath or something like that. We all know how very hard it can be. I've had tons of experience over the years, sort of trying to follow the breath. I've gone halfway through that inhale and then I was on a train of thought. I don't even know how long it was. Now I'm off it and I'm back on the breath and I'm off again and now I'm getting frustrated and now I'm disappointed in myself. How do I work with all that? Actually, there are ways, for example, just to get more anchored in the body first. Yeah, but how do I get anchored in the body? Well, here's a little bit of guidance that will help with that. And what happens if I am getting frustrated? We can break that down too, and we can have frustration be part of our meditation experience and so on. But to do that is a lot easier little hits of guidance. And actually, Michael, I'm going to just plug another thing here is that I've launched an app recently with the help of a fantastic small team, which is all lightly guided meditations. And you can sort of dial in how much space you want versus how much guidance you want, basically based on the length of the meditation you choose. But it's a sort of embodiment of the scheme and the pathway that I lay out in the book Original Love in actual guided meditation. But just to circle back to the starting point, of course, guided sitting versus silent sitting, sort of hand -holding versus go figure it out yourself, really. valuable pedagogues. I think they both have their wisdom and sort of blessed benefits for us to discover. But I really think it makes sense to be able to lean on some kind of handholding when we feel we need it.