#791: How to Feel at Peace Amidst High Stress — 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 (1:11)

Welcome back to Meditation Monday with me, Henry Shukman. Thank you for joining. So I've already said that meditation can be an extraordinary journey of discovery. I believe that its deepest purpose is to reveal aspects of who we are and what our true relationship to the world really is, which can kind of blow our minds when we taste them. And of course, meditation is not the only way of finding out that kind of stuff, but it's an incredible way of grounding it into our lives and integrating it into the way we actually live. However, the vast majority of us, myself included, come to meditation, not for those reasons, but to handle stress. We may not even realize we've got stress. We're just kind of miserable. I was in that category in my early to mid-twenties when I started meditating. I was just really unhappy and had a good friend who meditated who was much less unhappy than I was, and I decided to try out what he was doing. And it changed my life. Here's what we're going to do today. The tool we're going to be picking up is around how to handle stress, how to recognize stress and what to do about it through meditation. And essentially the main thing we're going to be working on is recognizing the signatures of stress in our bodies, coming into the body, getting to know it in the body, and just that recognition starts to dial it right down. So, let's come into our comfortable seated position. You can close your eyes or you can lower your gaze. And as always, we're going to start by really arriving. So, kind of catching up with ourselves. You know, here we are with this little space, this little gap in our day, when we get to be still and quiet. And really, it can be a kind of refuge. So just take stock. You know, how are you doing right now? We've all just jumped in from our busy lives outside this space. What are we carrying? What's in our bodies right now? What kind of momentum from the day? We're not seeking to get rid of anything or change anything. We're just starting to recognize what's going on for us. Catching up with ourselves. Now let's give the body a chance to relax, to come into some kind of rest. So, letting your shoulders settle. Letting the seat receive the weight of your body. Letting the floor beneath you receive the weight of your legs. Letting your whole upper body be at rest. So, either balanced or really giving, giving the weight of your upper body to whatever support it has. You get to unwind right now. You get to sort of unbind yourself from the threads of your days, your busy days.

So now, we may not particularly want to think about stress right now, but it's really helpful to, in this space, it's kind of shelter almost of meditation, we can get to know what happens in our bodies when we feel anxious or stressed. You might just think about some minor stressor, like, there's an email you haven't answered yet or a phone call or maybe the tire pressure on your car needs to be checked, just some minor thing. And just feel what happens in your chest or your diaphragm just below the chest, or perhaps in your throat. Is there some sensation that you can notice in your torso that seems to associate, correlate with stress?