#850: The Peace That's Always Within You — Guided Meditation by Zen Master Henry Shukman | The Tim Ferriss Show

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.

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 daily, 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 thewayappcom 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 thewayappcom slash Tim.

And for the time being, please enjoy this Meditation Monday with Henry Shookman.

Welcome to this meditation with me, Henry Shookman.

In this little set of meditations so far, we've looked at 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 gonna be exploring an old Zen teaching, which runs like this.

Take the backwards 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 it 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 little 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.

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 a 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, wider field of vision.

It's not some special accomplishment to find this, it's simply always Being with us.

A restful awareness.

Just allow yourself to rest with it.

To be in it.

Just a moment more. highly restorative, very refreshing this awareness can be for us.

Both a state of rest and a condition of awareness. at once.

Almost like there's a different perspective on life here, a different vantage, a broader view.

Somehow a little less bound by time, a little taste of a certain flavor of timelessness might show up.

As if we've just stepped back from the stream of time just for a moment, from the stream of clock time.

Being with ourselves more intimately Yeah, thank you.

So let's gently come out of the meditation.

Let yourself move a little bit, perhaps swaying the upper body, wiggling fingers and toes, opening the eyes, raising the gaze.

Have a deeper inhale.

And exhale and look around you.

And let's, yeah, close this meditation now.

I hope you find this or any of the other meditations a really helpful intervention to deploy at any time in the course of your daily life, at the beginning of the day, at the end of the day or any point in the course of the day.

Thank you very, very much indeed for joining me, and I wish you a very fine rest of your day.

Thank you.

[Meditation Monday: The Zen Art of Taking the Backward Step]-[#850: The Peace That's Always Within You — Guided Meditation by Zen Master Henry Shukman]

📋 Summary

The Zen Art of Taking the Backward Step: Finding Restorative Awareness

The Philosophy of the "Backward Step"

Practicing Body-Wide Rest

Discovering Timelessness and Broader Perspective

Integration into Daily Life

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript