#846: Permission to Do Nothing — 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. 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, 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. 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** (1:09)
Welcome to another Meditation with me, Henry Shukman. There are so many ways that meditation can help us. There are tons of different techniques and methods and approaches, and all of them have something to offer us. But at the same time, there is a meditative path that's about doing less, not so much about deploying a method or a technique, as simply about learning to kind of drop everything, to not be doing anything, and to be coming back to an intrinsic, peaceful well-being that we all have as part of our very nature, but we're not very used to tapping into it on the whole. And in this meditation, we're going to be exploring that and seeing if we can get a taste of it, and a taste of the wonder of meditation as a kind of non-doing, or at least as a doing less. So let's come into a comfortable seated position. I invite you to get your hands arranged where they can be very relaxed in the lap or on the thighs. Get your body arranged comfortably. It's fine to be sitting up right in a chair, but if you're not having your spine supported, then try to be balanced so your head is approximately over your seat and ears over shoulders and shoulders over hips. A short poem to bring us in. Let the quiet come. Let the quiet come. Don't do anything. Just let it come. It will flow in by itself. The one tide you've always been waiting for. It's coming. The air has sensed it and gone still. The walls, the floor, the windows, they already know it's just one breath away. Let the quiet come. Be still. Wait. Don't do a thing. So on that note, let's set down a need to do, a need to perform our meditation. On the contrary, we just let meditative awareness come by itself. So I invite you to close your eyes, if you haven't already closed them, or lower the gaze, if you prefer that. And just come into awareness of this moment of being still and of unplugging from the activities of your day. This is a kind of respite, a refuge, a sort of oasis that you can come back to in yourself, in your very own experience, an inner peace that's actually here waiting for all of us. Just by being still and being quiet and letting our whole system power down, letting our whole system go into a kind of idle, a restfulness, an ease, that simply here, when we detach, un-attach from the to-do list, our agenda, our activities, they'll be waiting for us to pick up again, no problem, after this little spell of quiet. So sensing your body, sensing its stillness, and just noticing, is there a kind of quiet that's present? Can you taste the quality of your own awareness?
Can you sense a certain restfulness in your body as it's invited into stillness?
What's it like to grant yourself a little window, a little pocket of time, where you don't have to do anything, where it's actually endorsed to do nothing, to let go of doing just for a little bit? It's an opportunity actually to reset, to restore ourselves, to recharge, because we're doing less. It's also a time when we come back to something a little more fundamental in who we are. A kind of return to something that we've been, that's been an inner, innermost part of our being all along. That's still here, kind of patiently waiting to be recognized.