#848: From Stress to Stillness — Guided Meditation with Zen Master Henry Shukman

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 ten minute or so meditation, which 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. He 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, 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 Shookman. Welcome to this meditation with me, Henry Shookman, on working with stress. Stress is a universal human phenomenon, and, you know, it's terribly widespread today in the way we are conditioned and socialized and the way we lead our lives with a constant pursuit of productivity, etcetera. Many pressures on us all the time. I personally grew up with a lot of stress from a very difficult chronic illness throughout my childhood that was highly stressful. And the moment I started to meditate around the age of 25, it made a massive difference to how I dealt with stress. So I hope to share something of that right now. We might think of stress as a thing that we want to kind of eliminate, and there's a lot of research that meditation can greatly help with that. But it's a counterintuitive way. The way to reduce stress is not to fight it, it's actually to learn to allow it and include it. That is the meditative approach. So let's come into a comfortable seated position and we'll see how this can work. Yeah. Get yourself settled. Find a comfortable position. Close the eyes or lower the gaze with the eyes open if you prefer that. You know, make any micro adjustments of the body that will help you settle in. Just be in a position that feels good to you right now. Let's take a deeper inhale, fill the lungs, and slowly let it out. Let the breath turn and once again fill the lungs, hold it a moment and slowly exhale. And one more time, filling the lungs, holding a moment, and releasing, and letting the breath return to its natural rhythm. So …