Shi Heng Yi Audiobooks

Shaolin Spirit: discipline, practice and self-mastery, read by the author

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.6/5 average

236 listener ratings

Who is Shi Heng Yi?

The word Shaolin carries centuries before a single sentence has been spoken, and Shaolin Spirit leans on that inheritance deliberately. The shelves it occupies with us fill in the rest: personal development, spirituality, society and, unusually for the genre, sport and the outdoors.

That last tag is the interesting one. It places Shi Heng Yi’s writing in the space where physical practice and inner discipline are treated as a single subject rather than as neighbouring ones, which is where the Shaolin tradition has always argued they belong. Expect training as philosophy, and philosophy as training.

It is written for the person who suspects that attention, rather than fitness, is the limiting factor, and who is prepared to be told the two are related.

Shi Heng Yi in audiobooks

Shaolin Spirit is read by Shi Heng Yi, and in this field the author’s own voice is close to essential; instructions about breath, posture and attention carry differently when the person giving them has evidently done the work.

The reception has been strong, an average of 4.6 across a couple of hundred logged ratings, which for wellbeing material released this recently reads as a solid endorsement rather than a launch bump. Nine hours is generous enough for the ideas to be practised alongside the listening, a chapter at a time, which is how this sort of material tends to work best anyway.

Begin below, and take it slowly.