Frequently asked questions

Unlike other meditation apps, The Way offers a single, long-term pathway that covers all the key areas of a deep and fulfilling meditation practice in one single program. With The Way, you never have to make a choice, as you journey from Mindfulness into Awakening along a clear, tested, step-by-step sequence of meditation training.

The Way is made up of daily meditation sessions (Sits).

These meditation sessions are clustered into Retreats, each on a different topic. Each Retreat begins with a Talk to introduce the relevant theory, before moving on to the meditation sessions.

Together, the Retreats form Trails, which lead you through all the different parts of the meditative journey.

Try doing one Sit each day. On the occasional day when there is also a Talk, it’s ideal to do both the Talk and the Sit.

We recommend doing the sessions in the curated sequence in which they are laid out. However, we also recognise there may be time constraints in your day, so if you need to, you can skip through a Talk and come back to it later. 

A 10-minute guided sit is certainly sufficient to build up a meditation practice. But if you prefer to sit for longer, we have included an option to listen to the exact same guidance for 20 minutes. 

There is also a self-guided timer, so you can put what you’re learning into practice with additional time sitting, if you want to.

The Way seeks to reconstruct the age-old experience of following a single program of meditation training for the long-term. This model allows a student to grow their practice more consistently, and get deeper into the possibilities of meditation than with a multitude of individual short courses. This way, the meditative path can help bring about shifts and transformations that help us in many areas of life.

Henry Shukman teaches mindfulness and awakening practices to a wide range of students from all traditions and walks of life. Henry is an authorized Zen Master in the Sanbo Zen lineage, and is the Spiritual Director of Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In addition to teaching meditation, Henry is an award-winning author and poet. His struggles and traumatic experiences as a youth, combined with a spontaneous awakening experience at 19, paved the way for Henry to develop a well-rounded approach to meditation. Find out more about Henry.

Yes! Henry holds regular online sessions as part of his Original Love program. Here, you can practice under Henry’s live guidance, join a community of other meditators and ask Henry questions in live Q&A sessions. Find out more about live events with Henry.

Currently the pathway extends out to over 200 consecutive sessions, but we are building it out much further, with an ever-deepening set of teachings.

Our hope is for The Way to be a helpful resource for anyone wanting to explore the deeper side to meditation. To that end, we hope to launch additional features that allow you to benefit from the support of a community, as well as connect with a range of other useful teachings.

1. Mindfulness: the ability to be truly aware of present moment experience, and succumb less frequently to entrapment by thoughts and reactivity.
2. Support: the understanding that you are not a lone agent, but in fact are part of a rich network of causes and effects.
3. Flow: the ability to rest in deep states of absorption and ease, where the sense of self goes quiet.
4. Awakening: the project to truly pierce the illusions we carry around with us and see into the true nature of ourselves and our relationship to the world. All four zones are necessary for a fulfilling meditation practice. Here at The Way, Henry will lead you systematically through them all.

The teaching that Henry guides you with in The Way is a fusion of modern mindfulness, Jhana practice, some Thervada Buddhist approaches and Sanbo Zen, while also informed by the latest neuroscience and cognitive science.

No. The Way has teaching rooted in Zen traditions, but is strictly secular. All teaching is simply an invitation to explore your own direct, first-person experience for yourself.

Mindfulness is the project to ground ourselves in our actual experience in the present, to enable us to live a more calm, centered and observant life. This is the objective of many popular meditation practices taught on apps today.

In contrast, Awakening is an altogether different project, that has been the explicit goal of many ancient wisdom traditions from East Asia. This is the project to see through ‘the illusion of the self’, and to come to understand our true nature, not as separate beings acting upon the world, but as inseparable parts of the world itself. In this project is the potential for great healing, joy and compassion.

Typically, we experience the world through a lens of subject (“I am here in this body”) and object (“that cup of water is over there, about two yards away from me”). This is a dualistic perspective. However, in non-dual states of awareness, our perspective shifts, meaning we no longer observe this distinction as fundamentally true. Instead, there is a single field of consciousness and its contents.

It is very normal to find that some guidance doesn’t resonate, or to feel that we had a ‘bad’ meditation session. Don’t worry, the pathway is designed to revisit topics gradually and methodically. You may find that the next time we touch on the same topic, you will experience it in a different way. And remember, the only bad meditation session is the one you didn’t do.

It’s actually normal for some negative emotions to arise at times during meditation. See if you can follow the guidance and either break down a negative feeling into its component parts, which will make it less intense; or else ground yourself in an external experience such as hearing or body sensation.

If it’s still too intense, feel free to back off and have a break. Go for a short walk, make a cup of tea, watch some TV, or talk to a friend. Then return to the meditation session later, when you’re feeling calmer. Also, bear in mind that some teachings regard meditation as a process of getting to know our “shadows” — parts of our psyches that are less familiar or welcome. Learning to “be with” them can help to loosen our patterns of reactivity and ultimately to release them.

Present moment experience is the type of sense experience we can have when we are fully grounded in the present. Experiences like seeing, hearing and feeling the body.

These are in contrast to other experiences, such as thinking and feeling emotions, that tend to transport us out of the present, and into memories, plans or fantasies in our minds, often with negative connotations. In meditation, we learn to notice both present moment experience, and these other types of experience, to train the mind to be calmer and more present.

Guided meditations are the simplest way to learn and practice new techniques of meditation, which are necessary to explore the foundational and the deeper sides of meditation.

If you are able to, having a free, unsupported and balanced spine is often deemed the most effective posture for meditation. This can be done sitting or kneeling, with chairs or cushions. However, it is by no means strictly necessary, and meditation can also be done sitting with a supported spine or lying down.

Try smaller time increments that are easier to fit into your schedule. Deep, positive changes can build up over time with a short (10 minutes) but daily habit. It’s more effective to meditate for 10 minutes a day than an hour once a week. If you can, try to build a habit by meditating at the same time each day. For example, right after waking up in the morning, or just before you eat lunch.

Yes! The Way is free to download and the first part of the meditation pathway is free, forever.

From your mobile device, tap the Profile icon in the top right-hand corner of your screen. Then go to Subscription. Follow the prompts to be billed via the Apple App Store or Google Play.

The Way is available to anyone who cannot afford the subscription cost. Please visit the Scholarship page on our website to find out more.

For subscriptions via Apple App Store: From your mobile device, tap the Profile icon in the top right-hand corner of your screen. Then go to Subscription. You can cancel your subscription or make other changes there. Note that your subscription will remain active until the end of your billing cycle.

For subscriptions through Google Play Store: Go to your Google Play Store subscription management screen on your phone to make changes. Your subscription will remain active until the end of your billing cycle.

It’s possible you’ve signed up with a different email. Try logging in using another email account and see if that works. If not, please contact support at [email protected] for help.

Every session is available to download for offline use! In order to do so, simply tap the ‘download’ icon in the top-right corner of each session icon, along the pathway. There is no limit to the number you can download.

If you’re enjoying using The Way, we’d appreciate a review. If you find a bug or have other feedback on how we can improve, please contact support at [email protected]

On iOS versions of the app, navigate to the Settings page and click on ‘Mindful Minutes tracking’. This will enable you to connect The Way to Apple Health, and log all minutes spent in meditation.

It is likely that the Android “battery optimization” feature is forcibly turning off the audio of the meditation sessions within The Way app. This is a feature of the Android operating system and not of The Way app. In order to fix this, please go to Settings, then Battery Optimization, and then click “disable” or “don’t optimize” for The Way.