#793: How to Calm Your Inner Storm — A Guided Meditation to Tame Restlessness 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 back to Meditation Monday. Many of us, of course, have difficult emotions at times, and meditation might seem to exacerbate them sometimes because we're, as it were, more exposed to them. We haven't got distractions, other things we can turn to. We're just sitting still and doing nothing. So if a difficult emotion comes up, there's kind of no way to hide. Now, in early Buddhism, these kinds of emotions, things like worry, regret, frustration, craving, aversion or dislike, strong dislike, were viewed actually as hindrances to meditation. That they would make us not want to meditate. They'd make it harder to meditate. And I think it's quite a helpful lens to recognize that difficult emotions are a problem, as it were, in meditation, in that they will discourage us from doing it. So fortunately, we have tools for being with difficult emotion. And actually, what they often lead to is a kind of restlessness. Get me out of here, you know, when we're trying to meditate. So I wanna do a sit now that offers a tool for working with restlessness and emotions that might be associated with it. So I hope you find this helpful. Let's come into our seated, comfortable position. And just a footnote, if you wanna recline, you go right ahead. We just wanna be comfortable. That's the main thing. Because when we're comfortable, it's easier to relax. And when we start relaxing, it's easier to be still. And in some ways, it might be that the most powerful agent in meditation is simply being still. That all the lessons and learnings and shifts and transformations that meditation can offer simply come from stillness. So let's give ourselves time to be comfortable, to arrive here, to come into being here, into this space where nothing is asked of us, nothing we need to do. We are really getting to put down the burden of doing, all the responsibilities, the to-do lists, leave them outside the door just for now. This is really a time just for you. So, again, checking that your body is comfortable, a little bit of progressive relaxation, letting your shoulders go, letting them sink and settle, and letting your arms be limp like old ropes. Letting the face soften. Let it just sort of hang like a curtain. No tension in it. Let it go.

Let there be a warmth in the chest, a warmth in the belly, softness in chest, softness in belly. Let your hips go. Let your legs relax and your feet. So in this space of meditation, we're going to explore how we might allow restlessness if it comes up. And I invite you actually to imagine that you are feeling just a little bit of restlessness. It's a familiar feeling for pretty much all of us, I think, that enough of this. I want to go and do something else, or I want to move, or get me out of here. Now, instead of doing what it says, we're going to be still, and we're going to see if we can find it, find the restlessness in your body. What actually is it? Could it be that it's just a kind of energy? Maybe like a little miniature dust devil or something of energy. Somewhere in the torso, maybe the belly, maybe the chest, possibly throat. Can you find some trace of an energy of restlessness within your torso?

Whatever you're finding, or if you're not really finding anything, we're gonna let things be just as they are. We're gonna allow any energy of restlessness, or the absence of it, to be just as it is. What if we don't have to do anything about it? What if we have it in us to just let it be there? Let it be here. No need to change it. Welcome it. Allow it. Let it actually be part of your experience.