#850: The Peace That's Always Within You — Guided Meditation by 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.
For the time being, please enjoy this Meditation Monday with Henry Shukman.

**Henry Shukman** (1:08)
Welcome to this meditation with me, Henry Shukman. In this little set of meditation so far, we've looked to doing a body scan, we've explored the practice of doing less or even not doing anything at all as a fantastic way to reset the nervous system. We've also explored how to be with stress in a way that we're not kind of opposing it and fighting it, but we're including it. And how helpful that can actually be in bringing us to a more patient and compassionate approach to our own stresses. In this meditation, we're going to be exploring an old Zen teaching, which runs like this. Take the backward step that shines the light inward. What on earth does this really mean? It means finding a way to rest back into the sort of heart of our experience, into the very condition of our own awareness, as it were into the fabric of awareness that underlies all our experience. That's a bit of a mouthful, but I'm going to be guiding us through the use of this little directive from Zen, and I think showing how useful and helpful it can be in the midst of any ordinary life, just taking a moment to disengage, to come back into an intrinsic well-being, a kind of unconditional well-being that the great traditions of meditation such as Zen know is available to us. Okay, let's get into a comfortable seated position. Close your eyes or lower your gaze. Have your hands where feels good for you, could be in the lap, could be on the thighs. Let your arms go completely slack. Let them just kind of dangle like old ropes. And actually let the whole body become floppy. It doesn't matter if you're sitting upright with no support other than the seat. As long as you're somewhat balanced, you can still go floppy. And of course, if you're reclining or your back is supported, it might be easier. Just let everything become like a rag doll. Head, throat, shoulders, arms, hands, floppy. Chest, belly, seat, legs, floppy. So the whole body is kind of doing nothing. Really releasing any need to activate any part of the body. Rest, coming into body-wide rest. Now, it's a hidden secret of rest, actually, that in rest, a different quality of awareness can emerge by itself. It's akin to the deeply creative possibilities of rest. That within rest and restfulness, another flavor of awareness can emerge by itself, where we're simply aware of being here, aware of our surroundings. And we might find that there's a quality of quiet and stillness in the space around us that we might not have noticed.
So Zen says, take the backward step. Just give yourself a little window of time right now when you can disengage. So much of our life, we're kind of forward-facing, engaging with the world before us. That's just fine, but we can have a break from that that can be profoundly restorative. We just take a little micro step backward, disengage from the world, from activities, from your life, just for a moment. And then, recede just a little bit from the world before you. Come back into yourself. And this backward step can, as it were, illuminate a quality of awareness, a peaceful nature in ourselves that's always already here.
A wider sense of peace, of calm, ease, that almost seems to spread through our life when we give ourselves a chance to notice it, simply by disengaging, taking this half step backwards, this little bit of a falling back, receding back into ourselves, into some part of us, some part of our nature that's always been here, as if it's really always been present throughout our lives, somehow almost holding our life experience. A broader awareness, a wider lens, wider aperture, a wider field of vision.