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 animeThrough 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 Shrine00:01:54 Kami: 8 Million Spiritual Beings00:05:19 Rigid Society, Flexible Spirituality00:16:32 Walking Through Grief00:20:35 Gratitude, Not Belief00:25:07 Half-belief, Half-disbelief00:27:50 Mysteries of the Waterfall00:35:52 Itadakimasu: Spirituality in Everyday Words00:39:03 Meeting Itako, The Blind Shamaness00:45:15 Masakado: Anger and Love00:51:15 Anime, Yokai, and HealingFollow 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_1Follow Wonderstruck:Website: https://wonderstruck.orgSubstack: https://newsletter.wonderstruck.org YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wonderstruckpodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/wonderstruckpod/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wonderstruckpodFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/wonderstruckpodApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wonderstruck/id1671879661 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6fS5boWGwYTShddG7SKlVw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.