#789: Ease Into Stillness — Guided Meditation with Zen Master Henry Shukman

Tim Ferriss (0:00)

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show. This episode is a brand new experiment called Meditation Monday. That means in addition to my long-form interviews each week, every Monday, I will be bringing you a short 10-minute or so meditation, which will help you for the rest of the week. Over this four-episode series, you'll develop a Zen toolkit specifically to help you find greater calm, peace, and effectiveness in your daily life. The teacher, Henry Shukman, has been on my podcast twice before. He is one of only a few dozen masters in the world authorized to teach what is called Sanbo Zen. And I have found this particularly interesting and effective, and now he'll be your teacher. I've been using Henry's app, The Way, once, often twice a day for the last few months, and it has lowered my anxiety more than I thought possible. As a listener of the show, you yourself can get 30 free sessions by visiting thewayapp.com/tim. So if you like what you hear in these meditations, which will be valuable in and of themselves, you can get 30 free sessions by going to thewayapp.com/tim.

And for the time being, please enjoy this Meditation Monday with Henry Shukman.

Henry Shukman (1:10)

Welcome to Meditation Monday. It's a joy to be back with you. Thanks for hopping on. So, many of us come to meditation to help us with stress, and rightly so. Meditation is a great vehicle for dialing down our nervous systems, coming back into homeostasis, into more of a balanced state. But I've noticed over 15 years of teaching meditation that it's not uncommon for people to get stressed about meditation. There's good reason for that. In meditation, we're still, we're quiet, and for many of us, we just don't do that in the course of our day. We're busy all the time, engaged in activities. We also don't have distractions. If we're feeling uncomfortable, we can't reach for the phone while we're meditating, or whatever our favorite distractions might be. So it's perfectly natural. But there's even a bigger reason, I think, why people get stressed around it, which is that we commonly think, I did it myself for years, that there's something that I'm supposed to kind of measure up to. There's some way my meditation is supposed to be. And one of the common misconceptions right there is about thinking. Thinking that we're supposed to have no thoughts when we meditate. Basically, it's rubbish. We are developing a different relationship with thoughts, it's true. But our brains naturally secrete thought, as some people put it. So we're not aspiring to have total radio silence within when we meditate, not at all. So in this sit, we're going to deal with and address some of this meditation stress, i.e. stress around meditation itself, particularly when it comes to thinking. So let's come into our comfortable seated position. Get yourself set up, seated in a way that feels good for you. We want to be comfortable. We want to be able to relax. So right now we can close the eyes or lower them if you prefer keeping them open but lowered. Just give yourself a moment to come back to you. This is really about you. It's about you as you are right now. And you know, sometimes we also get inklings that it's about coming back to some sort of deeper sense of myself. Something that in a way has been here all my life. And that I may have journeyed far from. But now, we can start coming back. And it begins with being here just as we are.

So let's again check how much tension we're holding in our jaw, and release the jaw. Imagine there's a little sling right under your chin that your jaw can rest in. And let it rest. Let your arms hang like the sleeves of an old coat. Totally relaxed. See if you can find a certain sense of warmth and softness in the chest. In the hips. And letting legs and feet also be relaxed. At rest. We're really just coming home to ourselves. To this hour life. Just like this. Now, as we're resting and being a bit more present, very commonly, thoughts will come up. And before we know it, we're off on a train of thought. And then we realize, oh, whoa, I've been far away in another time and place thinking, great, we've recognized that that's happened. We congratulate ourselves. We've come back and what we're going to do is just check where we were in our thinking, just enough to be able to file the thinking we were just in, in one of three files, Memories, Plans, Imaginings. So just check what kind of thinking it was, file, in either Memories, Planning or Imagining. Thank the thoughts for showing up and come back. So, as we go, I'll offer a few little prompts. Sitting here in a restful state, present, not needing to do anything, just noticing when thoughts have come up, when we've been carried off by thinking.