33: Hiroko Yoda on What Japanese Spirituality Can Teach Us About Happiness

When her mother died, Hiroko Yoda was brought to her knees. What pulled her back was something that had been there all along, the ancient spiritual traditions of her home country, Japan. What followed was a decade-long journey through shrines and temples, sacred mountains, and waterfalls, culminating in her latest book, Eight Million Ways to Happiness.

The title comes from an ancient Japanese idea: that eight million spiritual beings inhabit everything around us. Not as a precise count, but as a way of saying the sacred is everywhere, in everything.

Recorded inside an ancient Shinto shrine deep within the sacred mountains of Kumano, located at the end of a pilgrimage route walked for over a thousand years, Wonderstruck's host Elizabeth Rovere sits down with Hiroko to explore:

✦ How "kami" spirit exists in everything

✦ How the concept of "half-belief, half-disbelief" makes room for mystery without demanding certainty

✦ Why gratitude, not belief, is the core of Japanese spirituality and the seed of happiness

✦ The flexibility of Japanese spirituality and what it offers a world grown rigid in its certainties

✦ The spirituality found in your favourite anime

Through Hiroko's journey, from grief to gratitude, from loss to a world where everything has a spirit, we begin to see that happiness isn't something to be chased or achieved. It's something to be noticed, in the smallest of things, in the spaces we walk past every day without looking.

Chapters: 

00:00:00 Welcome to the Kumano Shrine

00:01:54 Kami: 8 Million Spiritual Beings

00:05:19 Rigid Society, Flexible Spirituality

00:16:32 Walking Through Grief

00:20:35 Gratitude, Not Belief

00:25:07 Half-belief, Half-disbelief

00:27:50 Mysteries of the Waterfall

00:35:52 Itadakimasu: Spirituality in Everyday Words

00:39:03 Meeting Itako, The Blind Shamaness

00:45:15 Masakado: Anger and Love

00:51:15 Anime, Yokai, and Healing

Follow Hiroko: 

Website: https://www.hirokoyoda.com/

Substack: https://blog.hirokoyoda.com/

Book: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/eight-million-ways-to-happiness-9781526672162/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hi_yoda_1

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