#787: How to Be in The Present Moment — Guided Meditation with Zen Master Henry Shukman

0:00Hey folks, Tim here. Before we get started, just a quick heads up. My new card game, Coyote, which I made with the amazing people at Exploding Kittens is now a national bestseller. Things are going completely bananas. It just launched everywhere. Amazon, Walmart, Target, 8 ,000 plus retail locations, anywhere you can buy games. So check it out. See some videos of gameplay at coyote game.com. 300 million social views so far of gameplay. It's kind of mind blowing. It takes just minutes to learn. I guarantee you'll have a lot of laughs. This has been in the works for two years. Please enjoy it. Check it out.

0:34Coyote game.com. Now back to the episode. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss 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 Shookman, has been on my podcast twice before.

1:06He is one of only a few dozen masters in the world authorized to teach what is called Sambo 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 slash 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 slash tim.

1:40And for the time being, please enjoy this Meditation Monday with Henry Shookman. Hello, welcome to Meditation Monday. I'm Henry Shookman. I'm a Zen master, a meditation teacher, a poet, an author. I've been meditating a long time since my mid-twenties, and it's been the most important thread in my life in terms of not just sort of self-care and maintenance and generally being much happier than I might otherwise have been. It's also been a journey of incredible discovery. I think the most crucial, vital, beautiful discovery of a lifetime in a certain sense because it can show us stuff about who and what we really are and what our true relationship with this world actually is.

2:27But the most important initial foundational function of meditation for most of us is going to be just in getting more present, more grounded, more centered, and less stressed. It's a great intervention for nervous system regulation. And the whole modern mindfulness exponential spread of meditation as a practice has been centered around that, stress reduction. And that's great. That's definitely great. And it is what we all need to start with and regularly come back to. But I do want to just note that there is the other side too, that it can be such an extraordinary journey of existential discovery.

3:16In this little series, we're going to be exploring both sides, but we're going to begin again and again with arriving, getting grounded, getting centered, more balanced, more present. and in this first meditation that we're about to go into, I'm going to be basically teaching a way that we can again and again come back to the here and now through getting more aware of our body, of our body sensation and the experience that our body is actually having right now. You know, they say the mind is a time traveler, goes to the past, goes to the future, quite often a lot, but the body doesn't do time travel.

4:10And if we can just get connected with our body again, we come back into the present moment, into right here, right now. and in a slightly unexpected way, when we're really here, present, somehow it always seems to dial down our stress, our suffering. It just takes the edge off it, just to be more immediately present now. And weirdly, that even works when we're in a stressful present. There's something about being present with this body, here and now, that seems to give us more of a sense of peace and safety automatically, even when things are tough. Okay, so let's go into our first meditation.

5:03I'm going to suggest that you get seated comfortably. In this process of coming into our body experience, it's really helpful that you can find your way to a setup with your body, a posture, where you can be comfortable. You know, 99 % of meditation teaching suggests sitting. There's good reasons for that, which I won't go into now. But you can, of course, recline, if that's what you would rather do. But I'm going to assume that most of us are sitting. and if you're sitting with your back being supported, then really relax into that support. If you're sitting like I am with your back unsupported, then it's important to be balanced.

5:55We want the ears over the shoulders, the shoulders over the hips. As we come into body experience, We want to be coming into this comfort in the body that allows the body to relax. Okay, so now I'm going to invite you to either close your eyes or if you prefer you can just lower your gaze. But no need to be looking at anything. If you're lowering your gaze, don't be looking particularly at anything. just kind of switch off the pointer in the eyes, the looker, just let that go. If your eyes are closed, gaze into the kind of gray scale behind the closed eyelids.

6:50Let's just allow ourselves to let go, just briefly, just for this little period of time, of whatever's come before, whatever our cares and concerns are this day, just for now, you can put them on the shelf and just come into the experience of being here quietly, somewhat still,

7:25and not needing to do anything right now. You can actually leave the tasks, the to-do list outside the door just for a moment, just for now. And think of this as a time of coming back to you coming back to something a bit more essential about you and your life.

8:03I'm going to give some pointers now around experience of the body and relaxing the body. Let your jaw relax. Let your jaw actually sink a millimeter or two.

8:23and feel what it's like to let the jaw go.

8:32Many of us carry tension in the jaw, just let it become slack. Now let the throat relax, be soft.

8:53Let your shoulders settle. Let your arms and hands and fingers become limp. Let them go slack like old rope.

9:16Lovely. Now let your chest, your whole ribcage become warm. Let it become like soft wax, warm wax.

9:39Sense the belly now. Let it too become warm and soft.

9:58Yes, sense the seat beneath you. Let your sitting bones, your buttocks just kind of melt down into the seat.

10:16Let upper legs become warm and soft and loose.

10:25Let lower legs also become warm, soft, loose.

10:36Let the ankles and feet relax, let go.

10:49Now can you get a kind of snapshot in your mind of the whole body as you're sitting here? No worries if you can't, that's not needed. but see if you can somehow sense a warmth pervading your whole body.

11:24Can you sense a softness all through your body?

11:38In meditation we never need to do things perfectly, there is no perfection, it's really a practice of imperfectionism. we just experience what we experience. And we let that be enough.

12:06So whatever you're experiencing, can you let that be enough for right now?

12:21Many come to meditation thinking they've got to somehow do it very well or kind of even perform it well. But that's not needed here at all. It's about coming back to you.

12:45You having a chance just to be you.

12:59It's like having a little respite, a little shelter or refuge from the turbulence of our lives and finding that there is a strange kind of shelter that we can find within.

13:29Coming back to a place of ease that's always actually here for us, within.

13:48A place of rest.

13:53You know, our bodies know how to do it. Our nervous systems know how to do it. just takes a little bit of intention and some tools.

14:13Let yourself rest for a moment, kind of in the heart of your own life, your own livingness.

14:51Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, great. And that's it. That's meditation. It's so natural. It's just being still, being quiet, kind of just being ourselves. And it's weird that it seems like sort of a big thing, I'm going to do this thing called meditation. really it's almost like we're not actually doing anything. We're just stopping. We're ceasing from our restless round of doing just for a little bit, just a few minutes. Ten minutes a day is definitely enough, actually, to make a real difference in our lives. So I hope you've enjoyed this and had some taste of stillness and maybe of peace, I'd like to encourage you to try through your days every so often.

15:57You know, you can just kind of hit pause mentally and for 10 seconds, no more, just be still, sense your body, however it's showing up for you right then. Just sense it and carry on with your day. so that's the first tool in the Zen Toolkit for Everyday Life that we're kind of assembling here I'm really honoured to be able to offer these to you thank you very much for joining and I'll see you next Monday for the next session of Meditation Monday