#793: How to Calm Your Inner Storm — A Guided Meditation to Tame Restlessness 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. 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 nowhere 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.

2:32that 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 want to 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.

3:25And just a footnote, if you want to recline, you go right ahead. We just want to 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're really getting to put down the burden of doing.

4:49All the responsibilities, the to-do lists, leave them outside the door just for now. This is really a time just for you.

5:07So, again, checking that your body is comfortable and a little bit of progressive relaxation, letting your shoulders go, letting them sink and settle and letting your arms be limp like old rope.

5:29Letting the face soften. Let it just sort of hang like a curtain. No tension in it. Let it go.

5:48Let 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.

6:13So in this space of meditation, we're going to explore how we might allow restlessness if it comes up.

6:31and I invite you actually to imagine that you are feeling just a little bit of restlessness.

6:43It'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?

7:18Could 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?

8:08Whatever you're finding, or if you're not really finding anything, we're going to let Let things be just as they are. We're going to allow any energy of restlessness, all the absence of it, to be just as it is.

8:42What 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.

9:30Rest with it.

9:45If you are tasting restlessness, you can name it in your own mind. Restlessness is present. Say it to yourself.

10:10Restlessness is welcome.

10:16Try saying that to yourself in your own mind.

10:32It may be that you're sensing some other emotion that might be uncomfortable. If so, see if you can find the sensory correlates of it, the actual sensation in probably the chest area or perhaps the belly that associates with it.

11:02and let them be present.

11:12Let your shoulders be soft, let your flanks be soft, let your back be soft.

11:27And let the whole front of your torso, the front, the skin and dermis of your torso, let it also be soft like a kind of drapery, hanging loose. And let the softness in your body allow any discomfort of restlessness or emotion. Let the softness welcome any trace of discomfort.

12:15Let yourself just be with it.

12:25Being still, being quiet. Resting with your own heart, your own emotion center and letting it be.

13:07Yeah, so part of this homecoming, we might say, that meditation can be, is also coming back to our feeling self. It's a beautiful thing, actually, that we feel like many, like all other mammals. We have emotions. They're part of our makeup. And learning to allow them is a real form of growth. Okay, so let's come out of this sit. Bring movement back into the body. You might do an inhale. Then an exhale. Move around any way you feel you'd like to. Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me in this little exploration of a perhaps unexpected kind of tool that will help us with our difficulties and sort of defuse them for our pathway into meditation and along the great journey of meditation.

14:27Thanks so much. See you next week.